January Newsletter
Happy New Year to all of our SMTU members and their families. I hope everyone has a safe and prosperous year filled with family, fun and fishing. I hope all you anglers out there got all the gifts you wanted. The one drawback to any sport is the fact that there are always improved equipment and new gadgets to try.
Hopefully the next big date on your new 2010 calendar is the banquet, February 6th, at the Jonesville Holiday Inn right off I77. It starts at 5:30 and we hope to see everyone there. We moved it this year to allow some of our members in the Surry and Alleghany area a little easier drive to the event. Please remember that this is our only major fund raiser for 2010-2011 and it funds all of our projects which are almost exclusively on a local level. I feel we have many worthwhile projects that our chapter is working on and we would like to expand on these in the up-coming year. Below are the projects we have now and in parentheses are the areas we would like to grow our chapters involvement in.
1) The 6th Annual “Kid’s Fishing Day” is scheduled for April 10th in Wilkesboro and we will be helping the Surry County 4-H Outdoor Day in 2010. (Plans are underway for adding a “Kid’s Fishing Day” in Surry County.
2) Bob Pearson is working on setting up sponsorship of a student at one of the mountain area universities. (We would like to sponsor students at more than one school if funds allow.)
3) We have sponsored several children for the TU Kid’s Fly Fishing Camp and would like to send more. We have had nothing but positive feedback from this camp from the youths we have sent.
4) We now have Trout in the Classroom at East Wilkes Middle School. (We plan on adding a school each year if funds allow.)
Our banquet is very important in raising the necessary funds to cover these projects as well as allowing us to add to our projects which in turn helps to get the word out about conservation. It also helps to maintain our web-site management, update members on meetings, and allows us to provide cook-outs at various events. It is easy to see that our chapter is active and by being active we make good use of the banquet money we raise with the help of our members and community. You can help with this effort by inviting people to attend the banquet or asking local merchants to donate merchandise and prizes.
We look back on 2009 with thankful hearts that we have been allowed to accomplish so much and look forward to 2010 to continue to grow this club. I am so glad that we can take something we all enjoy so much and use it to better our community and reach out to the younger generation. We will continue to grow if everyone pitches in and makes this a priority.
I would also like to thank everyone for the help I have received over the 2009 year. Thanks to Keith who is the on-going banquet chair, Scott for organizing the Smokies trip, Dick for getting us worth while projects, my wife for making my gibberish sound better, Kevin our area NC Wildlife Biologist, the teachers at EWMS (Shelly and Russell) and especially to Bob Pearson for his effort in getting the sponsorship of a college student concentrating their degree in Environmental Science going. This has turned out to be more of a task than one would think.
Happy New Year,
Jeff
Posted by Busta Brown on January 1, 2010.
