Category Archives: current events

Reader’s Digest feels the sting of a war on two fronts

The print media continues to struggle in the face of the combined onslaught of economy and Internet. We get mighty few clues on how the fishing press is faring as so few are publicly traded.

With Reader’s Digest filing Chapter 11, swapping debt for equity with its lenders, and numerous newspapers opting for digital only, it’s plain the effect is significant.

Even so, Reader’s Digest, the iconic monthly magazine founded in 1922 as a collection of condensed articles from other publications, has been searching for a new niche as the Internet upends the magazine industry’s traditional business models.

… and for each magazine shuttering its doors we have an electronic startup of the likes of This is Fly, Fish Can’t Read, or Catch – which by comparison enjoy miniscule costs and produce equal or better quality.

If I was a collector I’d be disappointed in the slow but steady transition from print to digital, but as each site archives their past issues for ready access I find it much easier to find the article I wanted to reread – or the pattern I wanted to tie – and they’re not cluttering my tying bench or causing domestic issues when I discover my dog eared trove tossed in the trash.

They won’t always be free – the coming revolt with the “per click” revenue model will be short and violent. Until then they’re best consumed hunkered in your cubicle with a soggy sandwich chaser.

Tags: Fish Can’t Read, This is Fly, Catch, Reader’s Digest, ezine, Chapter 11, debt for equity swap, Web 2.0, online angling magazines, per click revenue, redirected eyeballs

Nuke them from orbit, Willy-boy!

I’ve always been jealous of the really good social issues, having some neo-Jesus like Bono or Sting whispering in the President’s ear is guaranteed to fast track aid to the starving millions in [insert_name_here].

Us fishermen have endured the conspicuous lack of Tier 1 entertainment talent advancing our issues with heads of state, or immortalizing us in the lyrics of a tune that’ll haunt us from tinny elevator speakers – whose instrumentals follow us down the vegetable aisle.

It’s why we can’t get our agenda past the wooden-faced secretary – and we’re carted out screaming before the network news arrives.

All that’s changed now.

Fresh from saving the entire human race, and specifically saving the planet courtesy of a stymied fish god, we’ve got the porcine William Shatner chatting up prime ministers to save the last six or eight Pacific salmon.

Kirk and Salmon

Eat your heart out hunters, all you can muster is Ted Nugent…

Mr. Shatner has petitioned the Canadian government to remove all the salmon farms that native fish must pass in their return to fresh water, otherwise he’ll ignore the Prime Directive and lay a three second phaser burst on Calgary, or possibly most of Quebec …

Tags: William Shatner, Captain James T. Kirk, Canadian salmon farms, pacific salmon, celebrity influence, fishing celebrities, tier one pandering, wild salmon, phasers, Bono, Sting, vegetable aisle, elevator music

Fraser River sockeye run is missing

Anyone seen 9 million missing Sockeye salmon?

It seems that 90% of the Fraser River’s sockeye have vanished in a single season, with locals completely mystified as to the cause.

Salmon farms and their sea lice infestations are among the explanations – but no one suspected an issue until the meager return.

Alexandra Morton, who several years ago correctly predicted a collapse of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago because of sea lice infestations, in March warned the same thing could happen to Fraser sockeye.

If true, then farming operations will take on the aspect of the Exxon Valdez, sinister – responsible for an ecological disaster of enormous magnitude.

It’s much too soon to point fingers, but an international summit is being called with the US and Canadian governments to hash out issues and identify potential causes (if any).

Tags:Fraser River, salmon farms, sockeye salmon, Exxon Valdez, sea lice infestation, US and Canada summit,

Dam tested Mother Nature approved

battered_trout I’d guess they’re made hardier than anticipated but I still cringe if the drop is more than a couple feet.

Researchers in boats radioed a fish’s condition back to Sharp: "Minor hemorrhage on one eye and minor bulge on one eye."

Tossing 2000 trout down a 463 foot spillway yields a 70% survival rate according to researchers – but I’d still get a stern lecture from the fellow fishing next to me were I to badly juggle a release.

Unfortunately the next 2000 victims will be sent through the turbines. Some fellow standing smartly in a boat full of white lab coats blowing taps..

Tags: Army Corp of Engineers, Willamette Valley, Crash test trout, mortality, dam turbines

Singlebarbed and Rupert Murdoch, fishing in rarified waters

$The fractional cent courtesy of inflation$ Singlebarbed’s war on inflation naturally extends only to other’s profits. Like Rupert Murdoch, who announced the NewsCorp empire will charge for all online content, we were eager to jump on the bandwagon and fleece our readership with great verve …

While the debate rages as to whether the halcyon days of the Internet are over, mainstream media’s dogged insistence on receiving money for web content may spill over into everything but porn (which already charges). We considered similar actions – but as none of you have ever asked, “a penny for your thoughts” – we assume our average post is worth less than a penny…

… and as Paypal doesn’t charge in fractional cents, you’re all safe – we’ve abandoned our hopes of graduate school punctuation courtesy of Harvard and your shallow pockets.

Tags: Rupert Murdoch, fractional cents, online content, porn, mainstream media, NewsCorp, Paypal, Harvard

Infrastructure bailout pits fish against all comers

Alternative energy is anything other than fossil fuel and with the administration determined to promote the agenda, “Green” may be as perilous to fish as cracking hydrocarbons …

The ability of the nation’s aging hydroelectric dams to produce energy free of the curse of greenhouse gas emissions and Middle Eastern politics has suddenly made them financially attractive — thanks to the new economics of climate change. Armed with the possibility of powerful new cap-and-trade financial bonuses, the National Hydropower Assn. has set a goal of doubling the nation’s hydropower capacity by 2025.

Doubling the nation’s hydropower can be garnered at least three ways; more dams, more energy eked from existing dams, and more energy squeezed from existing flows.

It’ll be up to the engineers to determine whether any of the three can be done with less impacts to fish.

Across the country, there are about 82,600 dams, but only about 3% of them are used to generate electricity. Hydropower produces about 6% of the nation’s electricity, and nearly 75% of all renewable electric power.

Retrofitting dams used for other purposes are the low hanging fruit, and if fish ladders/passages come with the retrofit that could be a boon.

My area is rife with small dams used for flood control and irrigation water, all block passage to migratory fish – destroying the steelhead and the California salmon runs. I’d be willing to roll the dice on a refit that added the possibility of restoring fish to old haunts.

Tags: dam removal, hydropower, California salmon, electricity, fossil fuel, alternative energy, green energy, fish

Happy Anglers and the Prozac Hatch

Antidepressant use doubling in a single decade? That should make happy anglers considering Estrogen, Progesterone, and anti-depressants are among the many chemicals making it through the wastewater treatment process and spilling into your favorite creek.

The rise in antidepressant prescriptions also is seen despite a series of public health warnings on use of antidepressant drugs beginning in 2003 after clinical trials showed they increased the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children and teens.

Which neatly accounts for the steady increase in hooked fish while lighting a cigar, or fish that slam my dry fly as it screams across the pool throwing a goodly wake ..

Then again, I’m morose at the office and much happier when fishing – suggesting that evaporation might have me inhaling my fair share…

With 10% of the US population on prescription anti-depressants, it also explains why so many poor drivers exist – whose index finger thrust from the window salutes us remaining 90%

Tags:antidepressant use, rise in prescriptive antidepressants, estrogen, progesterone, prozac, happy trout, wastewater treatment, evaporation

John Henry of the Drift boat, snap up the talent when you can

I’m not sure why some outfitter doesn’t call the kids parents and offer a full scholarship for the rights to his adult years. Driving a toy truck for two hours down a British Columbia river makes this lad the next leviathan of the outfitting kingdom – or John Henry at the very least…

Driving a truck into the river is recreational sport for half my northern counties, getting it to float, well – that’s the hard part.

Tags: outfitter, john henry, drift boat, British Columbia

Trout: stabbed and smacked by insensitive brutes, whose life they save later?

You spend most of your life chasing them and if successful you gleefully thump them into oblivion, unless your girlfriend is looking – in which case you search vainly for something semi-sanitary to smack them with and failing that you let them go …

Pinup material … and year’s later you’re sitting on the side of the bed wearing an antiseptic paper gown – both cheeks exposed (and chilling rapidly), modesty hanging on a strained overhand knot. The doctor pages through your chart, making noises that sound like you screwed up, and turns to you suggesting, “you’ve less than six months to live unless your medical insurer covers the Trout Cure…”

Who’s blushing now?

Three decades of aquatic study convinced Bailey, 68, that trout are cheaper to raise and care for than rodents, and have inherently lower cancer rates, which lessens the margin for error in studies, Bailey said.

Initially I thought about joining PETA so I could have hordes of screaming protesters behind me as I shouldered past the thin blue line of campus security, enroute to “liberating” the brood stock. Once Trout Unlimited or CalTrout gets wind of this “egregious abuse of science” – we’d don Orvis Balaclava’s and hoist aquariums full of lumpy fish into darkened pickups.

Figure that most of these carcinogen riddled noble animals would be toed into the brush if caught, but one out of six would have mind boggling genetics and obscene tumors to make it nearly 14″ and weighing 78 pounds or more …

… why mess with Triploids when Old Lumpy would give his all for one last taste of a Light Cahill?

It certainly solves California’s reluctance to plant foreign Rainbows to interbreed with native fish, what with the life expectancy of a liberated laboratory rainbow measured in a couple weeks …

They spend their short lives in fear and their reward is a horse-sized needle thrust into a delicate area – rendering flesh inedible, and saving countless unappreciative anglers from death.

Mice must have a powerful lobby.

Tags: Trout in cancer research, OSU cancer research, trout tumor, PETA, Orvis Balaclava, fly fishing humor, trout fishing, CalTrout, Trout Unlimited, Light Cahill

It’s certainly not a sign of a new Bull market

With so few publicly traded companies containing an angling footprint, and with fishermen a closed mouth lot its always been a struggle to get a feel for the angling economy …

.. but it appears there’s legs to the subsistence fishing notion, as angling bellwether Cabela’s (CAB) posted a fairly robust 6% increase in same store sales yesterday.

As the American consumer has awakened to the New Frugal, retail sales have suffered commensurately – with luxury items and large ticket purchases literally dropping off a cliff.

“As we look ahead into the third quarter, we are even more encouraged by the favorable trends in our retail and direct segments and our ability to tightly manage costs,” Millner said. “For the full year, we now expect total revenue growth and comparable store sales to increase at a low single digit percentage rate as compared to our previous forecast for total revenue growth and comparable store sales to be approximately flat.

This corroborates the survey suggesting an 11% increase in fishing license sales over the first quarter 2009. The prevailing theory is a worsening economy has families vacationing closer to home – with outdoor use replacing the more exotic venues.

… that’s a lot more kids wrinkling their nose at the plate containing a recent conquest.

Tags: Cabela’s quarterly report, subsistence fishing increase, license sales, fishing,