Go While It’s Good

If you’re as anal and compulsive as I am about scheduling, you probably have some big trips planned for the long term future. I don’t mean the deposits-paid-written-in-ink kind of plan, but rather a general expectation of something to come.

As in: “When the kids all graduate, we’ll go on an African safari.”

Or: “In five more years I’ll treat myself to a trout-by-helicopter adventure in Patagonia.”

I have more goals than I can possibly fulfill, but I’m going to try like hell to achieve as many as I can. I think it’s healthy. So long as you don’t discount being present in your day-to-day life, these goals allow you to celebrate milestones and the long horizon gives you time for planning and $aving.

At the same time, you need to be ready to change those plans, no matter how dear you hold them to your heart. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that the best laid plans aren’t worth much anymore.

Even when the virus is wiped out or substantially diminished, environmental or political forces can still wreak havoc on those plans. For example, if years ago you’d intended to travel to the interior of Venezuela for payara, that eventually became a non-starter. Or if five years ago you’d put Lake Okeechobee on your bucket list for 2021, seeing some of the recent tournament results might lead you to turn your focus elsewhere.

On the flip side, sometimes it pays to move your dreams FORWARD. I’m not saying that you should mortgage your house and sell grandma’s jewelry to do it, but if you infer from reputable sources that a place is peaking, it can make sense to pull the trigger.

I know this from experience. I fished the legendary Bassmaster Elite Series event on Falcon in 2008. It was so good that on Day One the tournament director told competitors not to weigh any fish clearly under 10 pounds for the big fish award. During practice with Jeff Kriet, he had to make a phone call, so he set me down on a school of 2- and 3-pounders and let me catch dozens of them, noting that they’d be worthless during competition. After that event, I made an effort to go back every year and it seemed to get a little bit worse each time. By 2012, it seemed every boat was doodling little 4-inch worms. I was so glad that I had been during the heyday, but that time was over. [Note: I continue to monitor the fishing at Falcon through Facebook accounts of Matt Reed and others, and it appears that it has rebounded somewhat. I’m due for a trip sometime in the near future.]

Learning from that lesson, I’d always been curious about ice fishing and had heard about the big stocked brown trout in Lake Michigan. In fact, the IGFA world record had been caught right in Milwaukee Harbor. Those trout were non-reproducing, and when we heard that the state was ending or severely reducing the trout stocking plans going forward, we made plans to be there as soon as the ice was thick enough and we had a free weekend. But for the catalyst of that news, we likely would not have done it that soon, if at all. [Note, for 2020, 2021 and 2022, the state of Wisconsin increased stocking numbers to 450,000 fish annually.]

The point is, if you have reason to believe that a particular opportunity may go away, or at least decrease substantially in quality, screw your plan – get there while the getting is good. If it’s great and it doesn’t get worse you can always go again.

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Note: We published this just as the Omicron strain of COVID became known and travel between the US and several countries in Southern Africa was effectively shut down. It reminded us that just a touch over five years earlier we’d enjoyed an incredible three week trip through South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. If we’d waited until this year, it might not have happened, or been so easy to coordinate. At the time, I recall thinking that I should wait until I was retired to go there, that three weeks was simply too much time to take off from work. Now the decision to go seems prescient. Obviously we hope travel gets back to normal, but it may never be “like it was,” so go when you can.