I’m calling it the first in what I hope to be a long stream of tasty tidbits, given CalTrout has announced in their Streamkeeper’s Log that both Hat Creek and Fall River will be the recipients of some overdue ecosystem love …

Given that I lived, fished, and guided the area for a couple of decades, I can attest to what a unique and challenging fishery it used to be – how there’s no parallel for it this side of a bevy of well known Montana spring creeks, and perhaps this time we’ve learnt our lesson and are prepared to treat the creek with a bit of proper reverence …

Having spent a couple of undistinguished seasons as the CalTrout Streamkeeper for Hat Creek, with most my time pointing wardens at poachers, watching both disappear in a cloud of dust, and educating innocent folks that failed to read the forty-seven signs suggesting bait was not allowed on a “Single Barbless Artificial Only” resource, I figure a couple of cents worth of advice has been earned … just for old times sake.

While the managed trophy stretch of Hat Creek is three miles long, in its historical flavor – only a mile consistently holds fish.

Sediment blown into the creek from the Baum-Hat Canal sidewall blowout delivered a watershed killing load of sediment from which the creek was never able to recover. The Carbon Bridge flat water (pictured above) and similar slow moving stretches had their life-giving weed beds inundated with a sediment load that stifled all the bug life, removed all fish cover, and the population of large fish vanished.

Hat Creek is regulated by the flows from Powerhouse #2 – and  cannot rid itself nor scour the stream bottom clean as its water level never varies. Some of the work they’re doing on the Colorado River might be worth noting – how they’re intentionally scheduling deluges from the dam to free the streambed of accumulated sediment.  Opening the dam valve and releasing water down Hat Creek’s ancestral streambed might be assisted by the spillway just above the Powerhouse, but the far bank has already eroded with emergency releases and would need to be covered with concrete or something resistant to an extreme surge of water.

Cover the far side with a protective membrane, then divert the creek through that emergency spillway that bypasses the Powerhouse and let that uncontrolled jet of water work some magic.

With fish holding in only a single mile, you’ll be doing the same with anglers, parking, and foot traffic. Once the magazines are blaring your successes to the masses touting your success with both fish and habitat, you’ll have hideous erosion issues. Muskrat burrows undermine most of upstream banks – and all those arriving anglers will be equipped with sticky rubber soles with hiking cleats – and those cleats are considerably more destructive than flat bottomed felt, and they’ll rip that soft bank out by the ton as they scramble into and out of the Powerhouse #2 Riffle.

We tore out a hundred feet of that bank using flat felt soles – cleated rubber is likely to be many times that …

The boulders and rip-rap you’ve put at the parking areas and the Powerhouse riffle is a great first step, but so long as the anglers concentrate only in a narrow area, rather than the full three miles of creek you’re offering, you need to plan for the worst possible case of foot traffic and nothing less.

Perhaps you’d consider a ban on wading anglers?

That’s a bold move.

It may be time for such drastic thinking, given that a competent caster should be able to do quite well on the open grassy plains that dominate the water above the 299 bridge.

In this day and age of wader-borne nasty, why not point at invasive species and let them shoulder the outcry and blame for wading restrictions? We’ve been primed by conservation organizations and vendors alike harping on how our collective unclean is destoying the world’s best fisheries. Copy the SIMM’s model,  claim how much you’re thinking of the future – yet you’re solving plenty of now in the process.

Just saying is all, it’s worthy of some thought.

Clearing the upper half of trapped sediment can be matched only by making the stretch between the 299 Bridge Park and the Britton Weir hold fish. You tossed a couple handfuls of pebbles into the creek years ago – and that was simply not enough. The rocks weren’t big enough to make fish linger past the six inch mark – and while it was a good idea, the ROI never materialized.

You’ve got the better part of a mile of monotone current, twelve to thirty-six inches deep without any cover or underwater features outside of bank shade. Why not down some of those dead trees that litter the area – and drag them into the creek?

Most of the forest below the 299 bridge was crisped in a forest fire a couple years ago, and while the pine was logged, the owners left all the trash wood still standing, that dead timber is likely free for the taking – and you wouldn’t have to drag it more than a hundred yards.

Decay is supposed to be as good a remedy as anything, and thirty to fifty thick pine trees trunks should anchor a lot of fish – as well as add places for your waderless anglers to fish from. Add another big crop of large rocks to trap additional debris and induce some scouring water flows and perhaps you can turn that nondescript featureless cobble bottom into something more conducive to stimulating fish life …

… more importantly you have the ability to spread all those magazine reading anglers out over the full creek, which lessens the severity of all those feet climbing out of one parking lot.

And let’s not poo-poo the “magazine effect” – as articles claiming huge selective fish were available to match wits with is what drew those  pilgrims that never set foot outside of the Powerhouse #2 riffle.

Despite their success and sophistication at taming a 12” fish that was still stunned from being caught by the guy next to them, it was the lure of “hard” that drew them – even though they lost their taste for difficult when bested by all those truly selective fatties lolling in the flat water below.

And the hardest lesson of all, that which you failed to learn last time, is that you will never be done – and you’ll never finish this project. Stream restoration is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and you can’t blow all your cash making a brilliant showpiece – the envy of the entire state – then assume you never have to spend a dime on it again.

You will never be finished. Each success will bring more anglers that will destroy banks, fish, litter parking lots with water bottles, and crap in overflowing toilets. You will have to fund treatments commensurate with the angling pressures and perform more surgeries knowing that each of your successes has yielded some failure in your earlier planning.

There’ll be a ton of folks making a goodly living at your expense, why not insist that guides shoulder some of that fiscal burden – perhaps charging them for the right to take clients to exploit all that hard work?

Twenty bucks contribution per angler would generate enough to staff that parking lot washroom with a sommelier or washroom attendant – or buy a hell of a lot of fry …

… or fund a tank full of Rotenone, a vacuum cleaner, and a couple of chain saws that’ll be the cheap underpinnings of something truly great.

You had it right the first time, unfortunately you didn’t consider the destructive power and uncaring sensibilities of us anglers – who didn’t even have the courtesy to offer the Old Gal a towel once we were done.

I remember Pop would hustle home from work, reach for that big 12 foot surf rod and Penn Senator whose level wind required an educated thumb, and ignoring me and older bro’s entreaties, as we weren’t old enough to come, he’d vanish in the Jeep to return carrying two huge fish that represented a week’s fine dining.

… or so Ma and him thought, me and Older Bro still preferred chicken over seafood, given Mother Nature made chickens empty and big stripers full of gawd-awful smelling guts and scales that we had to shovel out of the sink and dispose of quickly.

San Francisco had quite the Striper culture I was to find out later, once I was chasing them myself. I might have been resentful at not being allowed to go as a young lad, but I understood later. Striper fishing on the West Coast being dangerous as hell, involving multiple treble hooks on foot long plugs, adrenalin filled anglers tied to rocks or perched on slippery algae forty foot above an ocean that offered a scant 30 minutes before you died of its chill. Swells between four and twenty feet, and an undertow that forced you into a constant backpedal as it took the sand from under your feet in the blink of an eye.

There’d be a whole phalanx of cars parked above Ocean Beach, each fellow sharpening his hooks or retying his knots while scanning the water from the Cliff House to Pacifica looking for the clouds of birds that signaled stripers pinning clouds of Anchovy to the beach …

There was nothing gentle about the sport, as even a minor misstep meant something barked, smashed, or bleeding.

While all those memories were reawakened by Pete McDonald’s elegant prose in “The Blitz” (Tosh Brown photography), it portrays our East Coast brethren as having a much easier time of it; shallow beaches, gentle swells and being able to stand in the water while casting.

… all of which is completely foreign to my experiences.

I’ve been a fan of Pete’s Fishing Jones blog for many years. He possesses a light, engaging, humorous style that is both self depreciating and completely infectious, and I was counting on getting a generous dose of his wit in this work.

Alas, his text is forced to play second fiddle to the photos which dominate almost all the pages, and while the photography is quite good, with the occasional spectacular, the grip-grin pictures can be tedious.

Each of the notable areas of Eastern Striperdom is treated with a short piece about the surroundings, a sprinkling of prose on the community of anglers, and a plug for one or more local guides. It’s an engaging adventure book, not intended to be a resource on Stripers and Bluefish, nor is it intended to devote reams to fly patterns and technique, rather it’s a deft narration of a year long adventure snapped in pictures.

There’s enough flies imbedded in center consoles, fly books, fish’s mouths, and hook keepers to make a pretty good reference work, and based on the samples; big, white, flashy and chartreuse, dominate most of the preferred offerings.

As a west coaster and not indigenous to the area, I was unawares of the perils facing the East Coast fishery in the Eighties, and the success story that was their resurgence a decade later. Outside of a paragraph here or there in an old book, I’d run across Lou Tabory, sand eels or lances, and knew that our West Coast fish were imported from the East via milk jug and train.  What surprised me about this book was reading of the favorable surf conditions and just how big a fly fishing following existed in these eastern byways and resort towns – and how commanding was the distribution of fish, all the way from Maine to Virginia.

An Albie liked my fly, but one of the whipping coils of clearing line caught on the edge of my wristwatch. The fish left in a hurry trailing half of a fly line – half Chuck’s fly line if you’re keeping score.

“Goddamnit!” yelled Chuck.

“It caught on my watch.”

“I know, that’s why I said ‘goddamnit.”

I tried to cover my watch with my rain jacket.

“Take that off, Son,” said Laughridge. “The only times you need to know on Harkers are sunrise and sunset.”

As we idled around for the next opportunity, I heard whistling from the helm and recognized a tune from the Wizard of Oz being performed at my expense.

I would not be a just a nothing

My head full of stuffin,

My heart all full of pain,

I would dance and be merry,

Life would be a ding-a-derry,

If I only had a brain.

Pete hints at a striper subculture commanding a following of obsessed and dedicated anglers that are only a Gierach book away from being celebrated by the rest of us. Naturally it was these dropped tidbits that I wanted to know more about – as tales of suffering and deprivation are always more gripping then us working stiffs plying our craft on weekends.

Perhaps in the sequel, and at the cost of some photos …

I’d be interested in the old pre-80’s slant, and how this new breed of angler fit in with that hoary old crowd – as guys like Joe Brooks and his ilk appear to have been involved during a similar heyday.

I’d suggest that the narrative is much too clean to be real however – throwing lead-core and weighted bucktails on 3/0 hooks in the constant inshore breeze of the beach, has to result in a good deal of maimed flesh. Nowhere in this narrative is a hint that the line is capable of filleting human flesh or that burying the barb of a large stainless steel hook in the soft flesh of an ass cheek presents an angler with but two choices … run for the car and the tender mercies of Emergency – or continue fishing as it’s that goddamn good …

This book is a fast read due to the preponderance of photography. I found it terribly interesting and terribly short of subject matter, given that so much turf is covered and the book’s reliance upon photography to assist the narrative is simply not deep enough. I found it enjoyable – yet it had me wanting to know a lot more of the people and sport, as well as its history.

Full Disclosure: I purchased the book at full retail ($49.95) from Departure Publishing. 216 Pages, 315 Photographs, 43 of which are guys holding stripers.