The February Meeting was called to order at 7:35 pm, at the Northwest Connecticut Sportsmen's Association in Colebrook by Pres. Ken Ludwig. There were 10 attendees.
The Secretary's Report was given by Secretary Bob Hart. The report was accepted as read.
The Treasurer's Report was given by Secretary Bob Hart, as our treasurer was not present. The treasurer's report was accepted as read.
Vice President Mike Kuzma discussed potential new locations for our Monthly Meetings (a four-month project he's been working on). These include
- Litchfield Community Center ($50 per meeting)
- Litchfield Fire House ($50 per meeting)
- Camp Goshen ($50 per meeting)
- Litchfield American Legion (FREE)
- East Litchfield Fire House ($50 per meeting)
A committee was set up to review the above locations for suitability. This committee consists of Ken Ludwig, Bob Hart, and Dick Heffernon. The committee was set to visit the American Legion first, because it takes a long time for our chapter to raise $50, and paying $50 a meeting just doesn't make sense right now. The American Legion in Litchfield is on Hwy 202, directly across from the Litchfield Community Center. A visit to the Am. Legion was scheduled for Wednesday, February 2nd, They have a large open room on the second floor that can accommodate 150 people, but it's currently booked on Tuesday evenings, so we looked at a section of the first-floor bar area. This may work for us depending on how much noise there is that might disturb our meeting. The location manager assured us that Tuesday evenings were not as busy as Wednesday evenings, so as a result, we booked the Amer. Legion for our March 1st meeting as a trial. The location of the Legion is 400 Bantam Rd. (Route 202), in Litchfield. If you're familiar with Litchfield, it's about a block north of the State Police Barracks, and Litchfield Ford, and directly across the street from the Litchfield Community Center.
Ken reviewed the Ausable (NY) fishing trip to the Hungry Trout Lodge in the Adirondacks, scheduled June 2nd-5th. As of February 1st, seven people had signed up, The Pomaraug-Naugatuck and Mianus Chapters were notified of this trip as was the Connecticut Fly Fisher's Assoc. Four more reservations were made in the last week, which makes only a few spots left. Remember, the trip costs only $350 per person (subsidized by NWCTU) for the three nights and four days, which includes two breakfasts and two dinners. Details on this trip may be found here.
Ken bought up the dates of this year's Fly Casting Class. The class consists of six consecutive Thursday evenings (6:00 pm - 7:30 pm). Each student receives an email one week before the first class (April 7th) giving driving directions. All students must be pre-registered by March 31st in order to attend the class. Details on the class may be found here.
Ken discussed the ongoing costs of our website presence as well as its popularity. Our website currently logs just over 300 visitors per day because of all the additional features not found on most Trout Unlimited Chapter Websites. Our website is currently hosted on a shared server, but the tools we use to measure resources (Google Site Kit and Visitor Traffic Real-time Statistics Pro) that the current server that we share resources with is too consumed by the other sites we share with, so we will be moving to our own server. This change will cost us a great deal more ($1400) than we pay now for hosting, but we'll be able to host our own videos and podcasts, and our website will be much faster loading especially for those with slower connect speeds like 4G and 5G phones, as well as slower wireless connections. The cost increases associated with the website will be funded by the fishing-related pages on the website. An annual fee of $36 per year or $5 per month will be charged for access to those pages, currently over (100 pages). Those choosing to contribute to the website in the form of membership will be sent a monthly newsletter announcing added articles and features on the website. The five-dollar plan was set up for those not sure if they want to pay $36 a year ($3 per month). The folks who sign-up for the $5 per month plan can easily cancel at any time and subscribe to the annual plan if they decide to do so.
If you're unfamiliar with our website, it's full of hatch charts, fishing maps, tactics, and accommodations for New York state, Pennsylvania, and New England states. Visit the main page of our website with the green button on the bottom of this newsletter and scroll down to the PDF document in the box. At the bottom of the box, you'll see this little bar:
The arrows on the left side allow you to move from page to page, while the - and + allow you to change the size of the text. You can download the document to your device (phone, tablet, or computer) using the down-arrow in the box on the right and the last box allows you to blow up the document to full size and read it online. This document gives a full list of the current offering of the website (those 100 pages of up-to-date hatch charts (none of which is older than three years), About those hatch charts, you probably know that our current chapter president fishes a lot. He fishes and keeps a journal of each place he fishes, the weather and water conditions and which flies work and which don't, and the tactics he's used to catch fish. You can get all of that information in your subscription on NWCTU.com. The improved speed of the website will be quite noticeable, especially since we'll be able to have our own videos stored on our own server and each part of the server used to host our website will be used only on our website. That cost will cost us about $1400 more per year (about 103 annual subscriptions).
We held a drawing for our Chapter Raffle that we're currently running in place of our Annual Fundraising Banquet (Game Dinner) that has been canceled for the past couple of years due to Covid. We raffled off an Orvis Helios 3F 9ft 4-weight 4piece fly rod, matched with the Orvis Mirage III 4-6wt reel, loaded with Scientific Angler Backing and Amplitude Infinity Fly Line, as well as a deluxe travel case - a great package valued at $1995. The winning ticket for the raffle was drawn at the meeting and Jim Fedorich won. Congratulations, Jim!
We held a raffle of 16 size 16 and 14 dry and wet flies in a C&F fly box with a threader, donated and tied by Ken Ludwig, as well as a Limestone Troutclub branded pocket knife in a sheath, donated by Joe Cieslowski. This was won by Janice Moran.
We also held a fly swap. When coming to a meeting, take the ugliest fly out of your vest and bring it to the meeting - you can get rid of it by putting it into the fly swap, and you never know what other monstrosity you'll get.
The meeting adjourned at 8:40 pm.
Our next monthly meeting will be held on Tuesday, March 1st, 2022 at 7:30 pm, at the Litchfield American Legion at 400 Bantam Road, in Litchfield. This will be our first meeting at this new location and we will be meeting downstairs (the door is on the left side of the building) in the bar area. If you drink, do so responsibly. Please bring a mask. We hope to see you there and get your feedback on the venue. |