Author Archives: Barbed

Fish and GAME Reschedules Emergency Meeting

The emergency meeting to discuss potential area closures and restrictions on angling has been postponed until this Wednesday, April 15th, at 10AM.

The prior “virtual” meeting was inundated with visitors and participants and swamped the conference capabilities, so it is assumed this new date is more robust and can handle additional folks. The announcement and documentation links follow:

The Commission is rescheduling to April 15, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. the emergency agenda item to consider a regulation that allows the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to suspend, delay, or restrict sport/recreational fishing in specific areas within the state due to public health concerns relating to COVID-19. This regulation would automatically expire May 31, 2020.
The regulation allows for a temporary, adaptive approach to delay or restrict sport fishing based on local government and tribal needs and requests to protect public health and safety from the spread of COVID-19. The regulation itself would not implement any restrictions, but would allow for a tailored approach based on state, federal, tribal and local public health and safety needs and guidance. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has received requests from certain counties, which can be found in the materials at the link below.
We thank the angling community and all our stakeholders in advance for their thoughtful engagement as we work together to help California in this moment.
The relevant documents previously posted for this item are available at http://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=178208&inline.

California Fish and Game to Vote on Possible Closure to Opening Day

California anglers are advised to check the Department of Fish and Game’s website tomorrow, as DFG and their respective Fisheries Commissions  will be meeting  to determine whether there will be partial or general closure of the upcoming trout season.

The issue is straightforward; will the migration of anglers from the Big City to the woods due to the Opening Day of trout season bring the COVID-19 virus from the urban centers into the relative pristine of less populated counties?

Nationwide this issue is being debated by many states. Ohio has ceased selling out of state licenses, Alabama, New York, and Pennsylvania have insisted fishing is fine – so long as distancing is observed, and other states have suggested it prudent to stay indoors and not fish – but have no specific prohibition against the activity.

Some states have declared fishing to be a “non-essential” activity and shut down lodges and guiding as an industry. Any angler considering of an out-of-state angling venue should check on the status of both their ability to get a license and whether lodging, guides, fishing, and facilities will be available.

Hardcore anglers have always been isolationists – so the general public is relatively safe from us congregating in any form, it’s the more social amateur fishermen that the state is concerned about. Opening Day is an excuse for the casual social types to drink to excess, blow daylight through living things, four wheel into prohibited areas, and kill without limit, and all of these social graces likely to spread the COVID-19 pestilence.

If fishing is permitted this year it is prudent to check on the availability of camping – as many of state parks are already closed due to COVID-19, and it’s possible that motels and commercial options will be impacted as well. All of the National Parks are already closed, including Yosemite and Yellowstone, and it’s unclear when they will reopen or whether angling will be affected with additional restrictions.

It’s a drought year, so if you setup a spike camp in the woods, please watch that fire ..

A Good time to book a guide date or buy a fly rod

ClosedWith small businesses on the ropes, what makes you think your fly shop will survive?

Fly fishing is a niche business within the already shrinking group that crave the out-of-doors experience – and are willing to fish for anything.

If we use restaurants as a parallel, fast food and fast-casual chains will survive as they are fluent in the take-out business and can double-down on delivery (GrubHub and the like) to ensure revenue is coming through the doors. The fancier eateries haven’t any skills in the repackaging of their entrees, and their exquisite plating and ambience don’t play well with brown bags and Styrofoam cups. Many of the better quality niche players will vanish, as they don’t have the resources and cannot modify their business processes fast enough to survive.

Dining within the confines of their establishment is several months away. Someone will sound the “all clear” and the public will dash outside causing a few small spikes in infections – which will be nursed by the news channels to make us all run back inside, and we’ll be shut-ins for another couple of months until the next brave fellow ventures out and lives to tell the tale.

Fly shops and fly fishing guides are like those high quality niche restaurants. Most lack the mail order business large enough to keep them afloat, their guides depend on the shop’s ability to book vacationing clients to put food on their table, and with the public a no-show for the next six months, many of these small shops will not survive.

Depending on where you live you might actually have two fishing seasons per year. This is the bifurcation of the fishing year caused by the hot summer months, where the best fishing occurs in Spring and Fall – with summer reduced to a morning and evening bite with doldrums in between.

Four or five months means the Spring season will have us hip deep in face masks and irate housewives, intent on keeping us indoors. This may actually be a blessing considering anglers have issues with social distancing on the best holes already, and if we were suddenly required to maintain a proper distance, all hell would break loose …

At best that means you might be able to sneak in some fishing this Fall, so you might consider the following (if you haven’t lost your job already):

  • This year, DONT buy your tackle from Amazon, even if it is cheaper.
  • Book a guide date with your favorite destination shop, for a Fall venue
  • The profit margin on rods largely sucks, so you might want to buy a reel and line and a handful of flies too  …

A lot of us will lose our jobs and find new employment when things are more normal. Until then we’ll be more concerned with mortgage payments and food on the table versus luxury items like new tackle or a guided fishing trip, but this too will pass  …

It will be doubly important for us to support the small shops in our neighborhood, the restaurants and vendors that make our Main Street unique –and our fly shops and those quality destination shops that will be suffer so horribly without clients.

I don’t care if it’s a dollar more at my local retailer, it’s time to ensure those precious local resources don’t get lost to the few larger retailers with the resources to weather an economic downturn.

Buy local … it’s time to give Bezos the extended digit.

Use that COVID-19 induced idleness to prep for trout Season

Shelterinplace300It’s likely your supervisor sent you home with an ill defined “work from home” edict that was hurriedly dumped in his lap from corporate.  For most  of us that amounts to “checking your email” coupled with online meetings as our only obligation.

With trout season a short month away, and your boss hoping you won’t show for the next couple of weeks, what’s a home bound self-reliant angler to do with all that extra time?

Shelter in place, hopefully.

As cataclysms of this magnitude are never foreseen and rarely welcome, one thing is certain,  sitting at home mesmerized by the plummeting value of your 401K is neither pleasant nor entertaining – and while a bit of idleness may be welcome, this is hardly what you had in mind for an ersatz holiday.

As “shelter in place” comes with numerous restrictions our normal angling time wasting pursuits of womanizing and drinking are off limits. Not because we’ve lost interest or suffered a sudden moral imperative … they involve people and are therefore ill advised.

Rather than fixating on the Stock Market or chewing fingernails over the prospects of future employment, focus on all those tackle related housekeeping chores you gleefully ignore each Winter, and get your vest and its contents ready for any opportunities that show them selves over the next couple of months.

Even if the COVID-19 virus is short-lived the economic effects will take awhile to work themselves through the world’s economy. It’ s likely numerous disruptions associated with all that supply-chain upheaval may keep you at home for the Trout Season Opener, so it’s an opportune moment to focus on some of the small pleasures that remain – instead of all the horrid news streaming at you from every device.

THINGS TO DO WHILE UNDER HOUSE-ARREST

Check all backing knots and retie them

Most of us haven’t caught anything bigger than fifteen inches in the last couple of seasons and the last time your backing knot saw daylight was the day you tied it. You’ve been promising to check all your terminal tackle for the last decade and always “shine” the responsibility, now that you’re enjoying some enforced idleness why don’t you peel that floating line off of your reel, test the backing, retie the knot, and reel it through a damp cloth with a dab of silicon gel.

The result will be about six additional feet with every cast, which may be enough to reach that enormous trout that surfaced in midstream …

Unbox all of your flies and touch up the hook points

It’s prudent to pull all of your flies out and check for rust, moth damage, and dull hooks, and while you’re at it, inventory the lot. COVID-19 is likely to disrupt the fly tying centers; India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia – and may cause some fly patterns to be in short supply. Now may be the time to inventory and assess what’s missing, so toss all those that are rusting badly, and sharpen what remains.

While you’re at it, pinch all their barbs, as you’ll lose a few when the entire point cracks off –and can replace them now before the rest of us realize we’re light on #16 Adams.

Read that book you bought and wanted to read

Over the last couple of decades fly fishing has dwindled to a few time-tested techniques and a couple of new ways to cast. Exacting imitation has given way to attractors, and many of the tools and techniques we’ve enjoyed for the last hundred years lie dormant – while we “high stick” or spey-everything.

Chances are you’ve got a couple of books tucked away that may reacquaint you with Flymphs, wet flies, the Leisenring Lift, or any number of hoary and ancient techniques that still work wonderfully. “Mini-jigs” and articulated awesomeness are just fine – and so are many of the simple things that don’t involve Tungsten or 11 foot rods.

Learn how to tie flies

I learned to tie flies from books – which is a fate I would not wish on and enemy. With Youtube resources and Internet-ready big screen TV’s, learning how to tie flies is easier than ever.

Fly tying is the next best option to fishing, but it’s akin to buying a house if you get overly enamored. Chicken feathers cost considerably more than a 20 piece Kentucky Colonel, so you’re trading up for the skills but the price for all that dry fly dander can be truly breathtaking.

Practice casting and rid yourself of that tailing loop

Most of us practice casting while fishing, instead of warming up those skills prior to the season Opener. As fly casting is both hazardous to those behind you as well as yourself, now is the time to work out those kinks in the safety of your backyard, rather than waist deep in your favorite trout stream. Considering how much time is spent unsnarling the knots caused by tailing loops and the flies lost by an ill-timed forward cast, it pays to practice prior to your first trip afield – rather than repeating all that unspeakable horror when armed with a sharp hook.

I’m sure you’ll opt for “none of the above” but at the minimum, start exercising those leg muscles so you’ve got options once you’re waist deep in the current. The distance you’re able to travel from the parked car will determine the population density of your competitors and who’ll will have to cough to clear a spot in the pool …

Classic Bamboo GETS New life as Chinese imitate Tapers

tonkinWhile the Trump administration’s negotiators fence with their counterparts in the Chinese delegation, the issues under discussion may be closer to home than we suspect. Intellectual property and copyright infringement are hot topics as American companies protest copycat products flooding markets and brands suffer accordingly. Fly fishing’s high priced rod market  may be the latest victim in the trade war as a similar blitz of products may be aimed at the classic bamboo fly rod market …

The fishing industry has seen cheap imitations before and they’ve made little headway against our classic rod smiths, but this time may be different, as they’re copying all the classic tapers from the Grand Masters of bamboo, and are pushing them onto eBay at a fraction of traditional costs.

On the one hand, if the tapers are identical to the hoary and ancient bamboo master of antiquity, this gives us the opportunity to cast and fish something potentially quite special, and as the finished product is only $150 per set of dual-tip bamboo blanks, makes the experiment really affordable.

On the other hand, knowing the avaricious nature of many of those wishing to exploit an already high priced market for classic fly rods, we’re likely to see these show in the restoration market, given how easy it would be to pass a newer blank of a classic rod, “… refinished Payne, it’s a steal at any price!” – and only the experts in bamboo construction able to identify which is the contemporary milled blank, and which is the bonafide article.

Currently eBay is hosting bamboo blanks for Thomas & Thomas 7’6” 2/3wt,  H.L. Leonard (Taper 804) 8’ 4wt,Phillipson Pacemaker 8’ 3” , F.E. Thomas 7’ 6”, H.L. Leonard (Baby Catskill) 7’ 2/3 wt, P. Young (Parabolic) 8’ 5wt, Orvis Midge 7’ 6” 3/4 wt, and Orvis Superfine  6’ 6” 5/6wt, Payne (Taper 97) 7’ 4wt, Garrison (Taper 206) 7’6” 4wt, Winston 8052 8’ 5wt, Heddon Black Beauty (#17) 9’ 5/6wt, and many more tapers and makers including Hardy and Powell.

Each set of bamboo blanks range from $95 to about $150, so cost is negligible compared to contemporary pricing, and only the product itself remains unknown. With friendly feedback so easy to manufacture it’s prudent to eyeball what’s offered, yet purchasing the blanks without confirming construction, tapers, and quality, makes this purchase fraught with risk.

There’s not a lot of detail on the seller other than their location  (China) and past sales, and from their feedback log it appears the blanks have only been selling for about one year. Prior feedback mentions feathers, boas, and a sprinkling of wooden items, so the tie to the fly fishing industry remains, but with a different suite of products.

While the geography is friendly to the notion these are Tonkin cane, the pictures offered aren’t of high enough quality to confirm any of the claims of the seller. so caveat emptor remains the watchword.

Classic rod collectors would be wise to study up on which glues and finishes are consistent with old rods – and what methods exist to detect animal glues from modern epoxy, as any recently restored classic will resemble the Chinese imitation in all but hollowing and construction … all of which are hidden in the final fit and finish.

Feeding the Peasants

imageAs I paused to wipe the mud from my eye, I remembered all those glossy fly fishing spreads depicting the Test and Itchen, their manicured banks, and the stream keepers who trimmed weed beds and mowed pathways to the wading pools – in full tweed.

What the magazines failed to show was those same stalwarts having to endure his Lordship’s boorish house guests, or worse, rented “beats” to the nouveau rich so that they might make sport of ceremony, proper field attire, and insist on clubbing the life out of anything brought to hand.

My home water is the opposite of all that chaste decadence, and its roman-nosed “peasants” are as needful and hungry as Salmonids, only they lack the social graces of mingling in deep water, preferring to pounce from ambush rather than a frontal assault.

In even shorter supply are those wanting to tend to public lands to ensure all those “peasant” fish are as pampered and pedigreed as their silvery cousins, and why my sanity is in question.

Trimming weed beds being a noble pursuit, but it won’t cleanse the sin of all the fish kilt in your youth prior to your conversion to catch and release. Only helping fish or improving the watershed can erase that stain. I consider it payment on the Karmic Debt incurred by your super-consumer self – by ensuring what few fish that survived your youth are now bloated and obese ..

It was the rumor of a dwindling watering hole that was home to a massive frog population that set events in motion. Frog being an essential protein to my fish, and the notion that several hundred pounds of that delicacy was liable to expire with the receding water galvanized us into activity.

frog640

I figured the game warden would frown on the proceedings, simply because Fish & Wildlife are devoted to the “high dollar” piscatorial fisheries and lack the funds or the desire to assist “peasant” fish. Their rationale would likely involve anything moving from one pond to another may introduce something unwanted – despite both being man-made and neither being connected to any waterway, and they’d let the entire lot expire out of their scientific version of Political Correctness.

With only a couple of long handled nets we were able to retrieve several thousand frogs and pack them away for relocation. In addition to the frogs, the act of scraping the bottom of the pond also yielded thousands of trapped dragon fly nymphs, water striders, pond beetles, and water boatmen, all suitable table fare for the bass that would be beneficiaries.

dragonfly640

I’m sure the egrets and herons were much disappointed on their return, but both birds enjoy a following of marsh organizations intent on promoting their well being – and can afford to lose the occasional battle for groceries. I didn’t feel any remorse in removing most of their trapped food supply.

After transporting all that protein to permanent water, I had the pleasure of releasing handfuls of squirming wildlife into every nook and cranny that lined the bank. Once freed, most burrowed into grass, wood piles, plant debris, and anything else that would shield them from predation. I was careful to spread them over the backwaters of a 15 acre impoundment – rather than empty the cooler into the deep end and watch the ensuing festivities.

Knowing that I’ve added many unwanted pounds to the native fish is liable to make me restless all Winter. Naturally I’ll have to exercise those fish thoroughly next Spring – via popper and handful of Gink.

I think I can live with the guilt until then – but am running low on Olive Deer hair …

Cancel that Alaskan Fishing trip while you can

reefmadnessNow there’s more reason to “Go West, Young Man” – given as how Oregon, Colorado, and California are soon to upstage Alaska, New Zealand, and Argentina as the last bastions of pure angling body count …

While each has its own unique allure, all are “blue” states, home to free thinkers, liberals, men of letters and science, but more importantly – legal Weed.

In an effort to breed Tuna that Tastes Good, scientists have determined that stress-free fish tastes better than those forced to watch their brethren dismembered during processing. Those “fight or flight” endorphins released just prior to death turning grey and tasteless farmed salmon into grey, bitter, and plank-like salmon, which by all accounts – being even worse.

As the Filet of Fish and therefore the culinary health of all America is at stake, scientists have been redoubling their efforts at reducing stress in farmed fish by introducing cannabis extract to the water supply prior to harvest …

… and while it is too early to determine if cannabis in the water was better than issuing blindfolds, it did make the fish eat like a sumbitch.

Well, it did something. Although the fish didn’t appear to be any healthier or happier after the study concluded, the researchers noted that their metabolisms had increased, so they ate and digested food more quickly – a case of the fish munchies, you could say.

-via the Sac Bee 10.24.17

Given how most of California is being reseeded with medicinal hemp, all a canny angler has to do is stuff a couple of wader bags full of his neighbor’s unwanted chaff, stake the bag into the headwaters of his favorite creek, and bask in the benefits of “Trout Tea” and its ability to unlock the watershed – turning even the wiliest fish into a frenzied eating machine.

Hell, it’ll take years for the wardens figure it out, and even then we can blame it on the Sinaloa Cartel, or whatever the latest ill Donald Trump is peddling us to fear …

Before pulling up stakes and selling the homestead, there was a conspicuous lack of infomation on the effects of cannabis extract and the local mosquito population – and while they are wired a bit differently, it could be they never recovered the journals (or the bodies) of the scientists tasked with that bit of errata.

Welcome to Singlebarbed

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Welcome to Singlebarbed. Whose words are you reading?

(SNIP) (HACK) (CUT) (SLASH)

Humor is King, which is why you shouldn’t take me too seriously, unless of course I’m writing on a topic that suggests you should, and it’s possible you won’t know the difference. Sometimes it’s not easy to be you.

Sit back, relax, enjoy — and comment your ass off.

Singlebarbed.