Hello From Minnesota

Just had my account activated and thus have the ability to post. I'll give you some quick tidbits about myself.

I'm a 52 year old business owner, married, with two boys, aged 13 and 10. (Hey, it took me a while to find the right woman, so I got a late start on the parenting gig.)

I was saved at age 13 and baptized about 5 months later. I was kind of rebellious in my college aged days, but God never left me.

My grandfather was a Lutheran pastor in Iowa and Minnesota. My kids attend an excellent WELS Lutheran school. We attend an IFB church which just started up last April, there is about 50-60 regular attendees. I've attended all kinds of evangelical churches, from small to mega sized, and been exposed to various worship styles. You could say that I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I figure my first order of business is to reconcile the arguments involving election vs. free will, then tackle the Bible translation debates, contemporary vs. trad music, then leave this board, my work here finished. :laugh:

--Alan

 

I do. That's usually the main target when fishing. If we can't find them or they're not biting we will settle for crappies. I like to catch Northern Pike also. They put up a good fight and if you know how to fillet them they are good eating. I'm not a big bass fisherman.

 

Next to muskies I'd say walleyes are the hardest fish to catch here in Minnesota. However, I once went on a guided fishing launch on Lake Mille Lacs, a giant lake in the center of the state. There were about 20 people on the boat. It went out about an hour and a half from shore, parked in 38 feet of water (38 feet!) and for the next 2 hours someone was catching 6 - 10 lb. walleyes about once every 3 or 4 minutes. People were laughing and yelling "fish on!" as the boat operators went around unhooking fish, quickly measuring them and releasing them. (They have a slot limit on the lake for walleye, I think it was 16" - 19", meaning you could only keep walleye in that size range. No one was catching them that small.) It was the craziest fishing trip I've ever been on. I caught seven walleye, the largest was 29 inches. They told me that was about 9 lbs.

Those 1 lb. perch are real good eating. I think the daily limit is 20 (used to be 100) whereas you can only keep 6 walleye. I can't taste the difference between them either. After a while of catching no walleyes, a foot-long perch looks pretty good. Whenever I catch a decent sized perch my mind envisions it already in a frying pan.

We've got bluegills up here, up the wazoo that is. It's tough to find good sized ones. Their population overruns a lot of lakes. They're very tasty when you can get good sized ones.