On the day after election day I went to my heart doctor over in Dothan for the results of a stress test that I had engineered the week before.

It seems everything was OK, which was better than I had thought it would be. On the way back I am looking downstream at the “hooch” from the 84 bridge, and it looked as though the river was up and almost full. This is good news for the hard-core fishermen and knowing that the competition will be much less than in the spring and summer, I expect some good catches to show up on hook and line and well as in the webbing.

Less competition means that deer season is in and the folks that hunt and fish will be in the woods for a while now, at least until the novelty of chasing that buck begins to wear off. It takes a truly dedicated hunter to start at the beginning of the season and stay with it until the end next January without taking a break and picking up a rod or a pole.

Some can and even fewer do, but come the end of the hunting season we will see these particular folks pulling that boat back to the lake for another good year of fishing.

A week of warm weather has made a few folks want to go back to the lake just as those several days of cool weather sent a more than average number of hunters to the woods. It worked out nice for the hunters as well as for a few of us that ran into the cooking of the good meat and a few sucker sides that really made it all worth while.

Again this week I visited the panhandle area of Florida and saw the signs saying when the hurricane season ends. It is not like the time change. Hurricane season ends the last of this month. The time change as far as most of us were concerned was over due and I wasn’t aware it was going to happen until I got the newspaper.

Almost every hunter has a deer grunt, but did you know that there are several other deer calls on the market besides a deer grunt. A snort wheeze as well as a roar is also out there for you to help entice a good one within range. A few years ago the can burst onto the scene and now every company has one of their own and several different versions. Primos probably has the most well known, at least in our area.

They have the original can, the small can, the big can, the e-can and the long can. If you have all of these, surely one will work. Most of these are available locally and they won’t cost an arm and a leg, at least not above the knee or elbow.

Start planning for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend right now. It is not long off and most of the hunting seasons will be in and legal for you to take game and fowl. Wearing some orange even if you are not deer hunting is a safe thing to do out in the wild, especially over the holidays when so many extra hunters are in the woods. They may not be as careful as you are so take extra care yourself to make up for inexperienced hunters. By being safe you might just get something for Christmas while you can still use it.