Long Time Gone

I haven't posted in quite a while. My schedule since March 28th has been ridiculously packed with testing, retesting, classes, patient encounters, board studying, and finally the Step 1 of the medical licensing boards. Since I last posted, our little family has moved back to Upstate New York and bade a fond farewell to Maine. I did get a chance to catch a couple of the famous Maine brook trout on a very small stream (before the big floods of this spring) and I'm also happy to say I was able to do some successful striper fishing on the estuaries and river mouths of the coast of Southern Maine.

Dominic, our son, is doing very well. He's even got a few teeth sprouting up, which he is not happy about. His days now consist of visiting his grandparents, eating oatmeal and vegetable mush, and playing with his toys. We went for a swing in the hammock the other day and he was quite taken with it.

I took Step 1 on June 12th. Up until then, I was doing some very hardcore studying, putting in 12 to 14 hour days every day of the week to prepare. Looking back on the difficulty of the test, I really don't think I got much out of those study sessions. I did not feel very good about it after leaving the exam. The really crappy part of the deal is that we won't find out until late September/early October what our scores were. So for now, I'm just trying to forget about it.
And to facilitate forgetting about it, I've been doing some serious fishing - and it's been fantastic up here. We're having mild, sunny days, and cool nights, which makes for great fishing weather. The water is still ice cold, and I'm hoping it can stay that way into mid-summer. (Last year it was in the mid-70's by July - lethal temps for trout). I was able to bump into some solid caddis hatches over the past 2 nights on one of my favorite rivers, and the fishing was just phenomenal. I sure was glad for all of the Elk Hair Caddis I tied last winter. And I was also very pleased to see that my flies could stand up to being beaten up by more than a dozen fish before they had to be retired.
Tonight I may or may not fish - I'm going up to my in-laws for dinner. If I do fish, it will be on a small out-of-the-way creek which I'm sure will not see the Friday night crowds that can be found on the more popular streams. One of the best things about having the summer off is weekday nights fishing without worrying about fighting crowds.