Well here it is the night before the opening day of firearm deer season in Michigan.  Mikey and I arrived this afternoon at camp with a new and refreshed spirit of things to come.  All the familiar faces are here along with the same stories being told as last year. 

     We all like to drift back to last year and discuss the success stories along with the excuses of failures.  Then there are those of us who just sit back and laugh at the lies that are being told.  All of this goes on around the fire pit that has a nice roar and glow to it.  The smell of campfire smoke permeates the air as the lies grow taller and longer.

     After getting our fill of the usual deer camp lore, Mikey and I head to the bunkroom and grab our fly rods to try our hand at tricking a few nice rainbows in the pond out back.  We spend a half hour or so trying to persuade the cautious fish to bit our offerings.  These lunkers today are staying close to the bottom, there is no fooling them today.  At least we got a little arm exercise casting at them. 

     We thought we might have to resort to spending more time catching the fish, since the two ladies who come up each year to cook for us hadn’t showed up yet.  They were now over two hours late and all of us began to worry.  Not that we couldn’t cook for ourselves, but they were bringing all the groceries up for camp!  This could be a bad start to the 2008 deer camp!

     Just as we began to fire up the charcoal pit to scrounge up something to eat, the ladies showed up, there was a bunch of happy hunters eager to help them unload the food.  We can all rest easy now that we have food and know that we are going to be fed.  Now we can start to worry about opening morning!  Hopefully I will have good news to report tomorrow.  Good luck to everyone that is out hunting this weekend.  Remember that it is about the experience not whether we bag game or not, but that always makes the experience more memorable.