Last month left us with the South getting rain and this month has been no different.

The winter rains have finally started to come as we would expect them to during these cooler months. I should probably change that to these cold months as the weather we have had recently has been cooler than cold. The rains have given us a rise in the water levels in southwest Georgia, and it will be something that we will need going into the spring and especially the summer months.

On the second day of this month, I drove down to Destin to attend a fishing and turkey hunting show and enjoy some good seafood. When I crossed the river at Chattahoochee, the little island just above the bridge was as big as I have seen it in a long time. Us not having enough water at the right time causes this.

I shouldn’t have worried any at all about the lack of rain because I was going to the beach. I told my wife I would breathe the clean salt air and my sinus problem would be cured for a while. A couple of hours after I arrived on Wednesday afternoon, the rains started and was it cold. All the moisture and a northern wind hurt this old boy. I just went to the closest place I could get something to eat that night. It was an IHOP, not seafood.

The next night I did the same thing hoping because it hadn’t killed me on the first trip, that the second trip would do as good. It did, and Friday night when I finally got back to Bainbridge, it was still raining. Saturday night I did eat seafood, but it was here in town.

You know wet, cold, salt air doesn’t help my sinus in any way, and staying wet and in the rain gave me a cold, which might just as well be the flu because it makes me feel so bad. But the show was a good one, and I saw folks that I have not seen in a long time.

My friend, Tim Hunter, is the sales rep for the Lew’s products. It consists of just rods and reels, but he said that they had a telescopic pole in the works that will come later in the year. It will not be called a Lew’s Breambuster as that name is owned by someone else at this time.

The rods feel good, but one needs to use them for a little bit to judge what they will do. I think they will do fine and the reels will be as good as the older ones were that we fished with in the past. A great family of rods, reels and telescopic poles. And on the poles, the man said they were going to get them as close as possible to the original.

The Garcia folks have done a good job with their introduction of the Revo reels. I think they are as good or maybe even better than the original ones that we have fished since the middle of the last century.

Over the years, they have produced a number of rods. This year they have come with a fantastic rod called the Veritas. I saw casting rods from 6 1/2 feet to 7 1/2 feet and spinning rods from 6 1/2 feet to 7 feet in several different actions. With a name like Veritas, it can be pronounced several different ways and knowing that and not wanting to be wrong, most of the people referred to it as the Garcia White Rod or that white rod from Garcia. It does have a good feel, and I look forward to trying one out under southwest Georgia conditions.

I saw some new lures from the Live Target, Koppers bunch that looked pretty good. They have lures that look like bass, bream, shiners and shad. This year, they brought out a hollow frog that looks good and sold great at this show. They will be in the stores before frog time gets here, so get ready.

Skeet Reese is one of the top names in the professional bass fishing world and he has a line of rods and reels made by Eagle Claw available all over the world. This season they will have available a youth model sized down to youngster size with a spincast reel and shorter rod. Any kid that follows the bass fishing circle or has a father that does will have to have one of these outfits. It is in the mid to upper 20s.