Cool thread! I succeeded in my goal of catching fish every month of the year. I did a couple of dedicated fishing trips, and I also took advantage of any non-fishing trips by squeezing in a little fishing on the side.
January - Went to New Orleans with my girlfriend so she could attend a work conference. Spent all day on a pier in Grand Isle, LA. Eight hours with bait in the water and I managed just one fish! It was a decent sheepshead, and at least it posed really well for a photo.
February - Fished during a snowstorm at a power plant cooling lake near my house. Even though the air temperature was below freezing, the water stayed around 80 degrees. Caught my first blue catfish. I was geared up for much larger fish, so this 26" one came in without a fight.
March - My girlfriend was still living in Wisconsin, so we made a weekend trip to Green Bay to ice fish for lake whitefish. We compromised between doing it on our own and hiring a guide by renting an unguided ice shack that was already set up in a good whitefish spot. It was a nice way to fish an unfamiliar location.
April - I fished quite a bit in big rivers this month in Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. I made a point to learn as much as I could about smallmouth buffalo, and I managed to catch quite a few at several locations.
May - At the end of the month I took a week long road trip from Illinois to Oklahoma to attend the North American Native Fishes Association convention. Along the way I caught the last Lepomis genus sunfish I needed, a bantam sunfish. This is actually a pretty big one.
June - On the last day of the Oklahoma road trip, I caught another species that I've wanted for a long time, an Ozark bass. It's a close relative of the rock bass.
July - We had an incredibly wet June in Illinois, so 90% of my fishing spots were blown out. One of the only spots I could continue to fish was the same place I caught the smallmouth buffalo in April. I caught a very difficult species there on one of my visits, a river carpsucker. They're not a rare fish, they just have really tiny mouths and are good at spitting out the hook as soon as they feel it. I got lucky.
August - While taking a Nature Conservancy writer fishing in northern Illinois, I caught a surprise goldeye. It was supposed to be a gar fishing trip, but we didn't see one the entire weekend. Later in the month I caught my 300th species while on a microfishing trip to Kentucky.
September - I finally tried fishing the Chain of Rocks, a natural feature on the Mississippi River near St. Louis. Below the rocks is supposed to be great for shovelnose sturgeon, and sure enough my buddy and I caught 5 of them in about 4 hours of fishing.
October - At this point my girlfriend had moved out to Escondido, so I came out to visit her. Originally we planned to just mess around with a little bit of pier fishing, but the crazy tuna bite changed our mind. We rented a boat with a friend from the area and had an awesome day pelagic fishing between Newport Beach and Catalina Island.
November - Wasn't sure what else to do, so I made a return trip to the Chain of Rocks to see if the shovelnose sturgeon would still be biting and see what else showed up. Fishing was way slower, and the only catch of the day was this PR freshwater drum. We made fish soup with the camp stove and ate it right there on the shore.
December - This is an easy one! Hands down the fish of the month was the 43" wingspan bat ray that Tom and the rest of the crew helped me catch here in San Diego. I'm still grinning ear to ear about this one!
