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Good times, memories and great fishing

By CHRIS SIERS ~ sports@t-g.com
Posted 6/1/22

You can give a man a fish and he eats for the day. If you teach a man to fish, he disappears in the woods of West Virginia for a weekend and disconnects from reality for a few days. My favorite …

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Good times, memories and great fishing

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You can give a man a fish and he eats for the day.
If you teach a man to fish, he disappears in the woods of West Virginia for a weekend and disconnects from reality for a few days.
My favorite weekend of the year is one I’ll never miss — Memorial Day fishing trip.
Beginning way back in 2003, my grandpa, cousin and family friends started what would become one of the greatest guy weekends one can have.
We make the trip to Moorefield, W. Va., which sits nestled in a valley in the Appalachian Mountains.
It’s also home to the South Branch of the Potomac River.
What started as a simple trip with six of us has turned into an annual trip that nearly 15 guys go on—and none of us miss it.
We’ve been doing this trip for 19 years and while the catching isn’t always great, the fishing is absolutely spectacular.
The area of the river we float is just above one of the most gorgeous stretches of river I’ve ever laid eyes on.
There’s an area called “the Trough,” which looks like a giant feed trough cut out of the mountains.
It’s absolutely spectacular to just relax and disconnect.
There’s something about the first time you get a view of that valley on the trip—it’s refreshing for the soul.
In several recent years, we’ve not been able to actually get on the river for a full trip’s worth of floating because weather had made the water too high or muddy to fish.
This year, we got three days on the water and each day was fantastic.
Eleven of us made the trip this year and from the breakfasts shared at McDonalds (a daily tradition before putting on the water) to finding one of the local eateries in town to have dinner at after a day of floating.
This year, the fishing was pretty good all three days we got to float, even though we took a scare on Friday with rains and a muddy uptick in the river.
But, all turned well and three fantastic days were had on the water.
One of my grandpa’s favorite things about this trip is the camaraderie, with guys sitting around, being guys and swapping stories of yesteryear.
That’s arguably the bigger point that nearly 15 of us make this trip each and every year.
But for me, maybe something a little bit more than the camaraderie is the memories made each and every year.
The 2022 chapter in the book of our trip was pretty spectacular.
Chris Siers is sports editor of the Times-Gazette. Email him at sports@t-g.com.