Lessons from a week at Strawberry

[PACMEN]

We were up at Strawberry last week from Monday to Saturday. We fished a lot of different areas and got the grandkids into a lot of fish. There are a lot of small cutts and bows that love the same rigs that the kokes do and we were constantly taking them off. It was fun for the kids as they were never bored but they didn't like having to release all of the slot cutts. We did manage to get a good number of kokes on certain days. We also learned some lessons along the way. The first lesson we learned was that even if you pay for the campground they charge $10 per day extra to launch your boat. None of the other places we have gone do this. If they are hauling in that much for launching boats they need to improve the ramps and make them much bigger to handle the crowds. One lesson we wish we could have taught the big cabin cruiser owners is that they shouldn't launch their monsters and leave them sitting on the small loading docks blocking the boat ramp. On Saturday there were two of the monsters just sitting there blocking the launch area during the busiest launch time. We also learned that if you go through the Narrows don't expect people to obey the proximity laws. For the week we were there only four boats obeyed the rule in the Narrows. Most just flew by at full throttle. We also learned that the kokes know when it is Saturday. My son in law could only come up for Saturday and we were out bright and early in the area where we caught the most during the week but we only caught cutts and bows. We also saw some fun stuff, we saw a couple of bucks swimming across the narrows, we also got startled when a twin engine jet came out of the Narrows flying very low and when he came into the Renegade bay he went into rocket ship mode with full throttle and climbed nearly straight up. One morning we went to launch and two older guys were trying like crazy to get their boat off their trailer, they were giving it a lot of throttle and kept backing it up deeper but still couldn't get the boat off the trailer. We launched and could hear a guy trying to help them out, he kept saying "it's still connected". He repeated it multiple times until finally the truck driver went out and disconnected the boat from the trailer. 
All in all a very fun week with decent weather and many willing fish.

Fun to see the deer swimming across. We've seen it any number of times.  One time we had a doe and fawn swim across.
When we see em swimming I usually stay 50 to 100 feet away and stay by them.  I attempt to act a bit as a crossing guard.  They are not as easily seen as a boat and as close as some idiots get to us fishermen I figure some would not respect the deer.