08-21-2025, 05:32 PM
(08-21-2025, 04:36 PM)SkunkedAgain Wrote: Hey Pat, I hadn't heard about Coot... Unfortunately I lost contact with him when he moved to Washington or Oregon or where ever that was.. and we didn't hear from him on the forum any longer... That's too bad, I enjoyed the conversations we had and appreciated his help when I first started chasing the whitefish at Bear Lake during the spawn... Guess I'm not very good with keeping in touch with folks outside of the forum.. Thgnks for that news... Later Jeff
PS... Guess you haven't heard anything about Gary, forget his handle, but know he wasn't in the best health last time I heard from him...
He taught me the fine arts or down riggers and a really nice guy... Hope he's still doing okay...
Ralph (Coot) did move up to Washington to help his daughter build and run her business. He came back to Utah a couple of years ago, but had sold off his boat and all his fishing gear. But he got back into some fishing in Utah, although not like before. His wife has been ailing for several years and it was a surprise that he died before she did. What she told someone who told me was that he was just out in the front yard and slumped to the ground.
Coot was a hoot. He had a fine mind was well educated and prided himself on being ultra-organized. One of my fave memories of him was on the first trip I joined him in his boat to fish for whitefish in Bear Lake. I got to his garage by O dark thirty and he had the boat hooked up and ready to go. Then he took me for a tour around the boat and in the car...showing me his detailed checklist. And the checklist included another checklist for launching, with a detailed step by step to be sure he didn't leave out anything or fail to properly hook everything up for hitting the water.
The rest of the story? With the boat already backed up to the water, for me to finish backing him in to launch, Ralph was searching frantically in the car...for the checklist. Then he remembered he had left it on his workbench at home.
I used to keep a long list of the BFT members...by given name and by user names. It was a looooooong list. But in the last few years it has been decimated. A lot of members just quit dropping in. But a lot have also made "horizontal exits".