Five Things I Don't Pay For

1. Bobbers. I have purchased bobbers exactly once in the last five years, although I use them pretty regularly. If you keep your eyes sharp around public fishing areas you will see that they are all over the place. Why pay for them?

I actually pick up all sorts of tackle this way. When I'm walking around a public fishing lake I'll stop at spots that look heavily fished. Not to fish there but to look for dropped hooks, lures and sinkers. I figure that I'm helping myself and the ecosystem at the same time. All of that lead and hooks can't be good for the wildlife. I usually pick up discarded line at the same time. Rusty hooks go in the trash along with old line but I find a lot of very usable stuff as well. When in a canoe I will paddle close to obvious snags in the water near the same types of spots and pull anywhere from $5- $50 worth of snagged lures out of tree branches.

2. Tree stands. I know that in some parts of the country you cannot legally hunt deer with a rifle from the ground. And in other places the land is flat and houses are everywhere and it isn't considered safe to shoot unless you are in a tree stand. Personally, I don't care for the things. My home state of Virginia does not require their use and my home county of Albemarle is also reasonable enough to allow me to hunt from the ground in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains.

I get bored sitting up there, I can't move around enough, they are expensive (you can drop $500 easily on stand, ladder, harness and rope in order to hunt only one spot), and falls from tree stands are the leading cause of deer hunting accidents. Hunting from the ground is free and I've had a lot of success with it. Hunting magazines usually seem focused on tree stand tactics and you'd think from many of those magazines and TV shows that there is no other way to do it. I suppose that the bigger ad money is in tree stands.

3. A pickup truck. Don't get me wrong; I could really use a truck. I've owned one before. But nothing like that is in the budget any time soon. Yet hunting out of a 2 door coupe hasn't held me back one bit. I butcher the big stuff on site and pack out the meat in cooler on wheels. The cooler full of meat fits easily in my back seat. If you can't afford to buy an extra vehicle you don't need to let that stop you from taking up deer hunting. Drop $32 on a wheeled cooler and you're all set.

4. A Tom-Tom or similar GPS device. People are getting to where they don't even know how to read a regular map any more. I don't want to be one of them. I've driven all around the country this past year while working on Eating Aliens, racking up somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand miles. All of it with regular old paper maps from AAA or road-side welcome centers.

5. Fish and meat at the grocery store. For obvious reasons.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. I realize that this picture has nothing to do with anything in the actual blog entry. Ok, I didn't pay for the spider or mushrooms either. How's that for topical?]