With ice glazing the streets and an afternoon indoors ahead of the holiday stretch thanks to a rainy mix of early-winter weather, I had time in my mind to review all the great experiences and events on the water in the past year. Swiping through the photos on my phone, I smiled as the seasons rolled back in reverse and I paused on perhaps the biggest memory of the summer, as the year-end recollection began.

There, despite the digital date reading mid-August below the photo, my godson stood smiling in the cold, wrapped in a sweatshirt and long pants, hoisting up his monstrous sturgeon landed from the rippled post-frontal waters in front of our family cabin. While I could recall the event vividly, including the missile-launch jump the five-foot fish made at the outset of the battle, the shared video adjacent to the photo allowed me to relive nearly every instant of the five-minute fight, which seemed more like 50 at the time. The speakers on my smartphone shook as the fish coasted over the rim of the net, and we yelled in unison with the successful landing. In that moment, I recalled the release of all the tension built in my mind around fears of me botching the landing of this important fish. There’s something to be said for thinking positive when setting out to do something big, especially for someone else in the outdoors.

The same could be said for a quarry much smaller than sturgeon, and that was the search for a tiger trout, a hybrid species recently stocked into some smaller waters around the region. My boys and I trolled spoons along the developing weedlines in late spring in a nearby reservoir where the fish had been placed, in hopes that one of us would add the unique trout to our life list, or maybe all three of us. After a few of the feisty rainbows that went in with them for the year, a light bouncing began on my youngest boy’s rod, and he began reeling it in. While there were a number of other species in the water that could take down the small spoon fluttering by — smallies, crappies, bluegills and more — as the trout neared the boat and the black rubber of the fish-friendly landing net, I shouted “it’s a tiger.” With a couple quick photos, the eight-inch trout was back in the water, and my son — who held a cutthroat trout over me on his life list since he started fishing — had yet another salmonid to smile about this season, and it was well timed.

That’s because just a couple of weeks before that, during set-up time for the on-the-water portion of the fly tying and lure making course I instruct in the spring, I was working out the kinks in a new fly line and setting the rod up for the students to use for our afternoon at a local stocked pond. Tying those fish-catching patterns that would work for the resident bluegills and bigger trout that had just been added to the water, I flipped a woolly bugger out just past the cattails over a small gravel point and let it sink a bit as I reversed a backlash of green plastic in the small reel and rearranged the line in a more orderly fashion. As I tightened things up, I raised the rod tip and twitched it. With a bump, it bent down to a point 15 feet away and the rod doubled over with the weight of a nice fish. After the close quarters battle, I scooped it up with my free hand and turned it to see the orange-red gills of my first cutthroat trout before snapping a photo and setting it loose. It was the same pond where my youngest had landed his and brought a fun series of family memories full circle.

These photos and the accompanying stories, along with other highlights from the previous yea, stitched together a season of new fish, big accomplishments and awesome times spent with family and friends on the water. More importantly, they provided a base for what’s next and an opportunity to set goals of all kinds, whether semi-serious or just for fun, on the lakes and rivers and in the 12 months to come … in our outdoors.