Category Archives: current events

Fly fishing upstaged by real guides and real guns

puttheroddown1 I warned you often enough, instead you listened to those lesser prophets who insisted girls would adore you for staring at their anatomy, now they think fisherman are all creeps, and have chosen hunting instead.

Legions of taut and bronzed, out of work, single-parent, womenfolk tasked with raising both flavors of offspring, newly interested in the out-of-doors and wilderness adventure, and can vote – and because of a couple out of control fishing websites – and your instinctive leer, they’re lost to us forever …

I’m not so sure I buy into the rationale for the sudden trend as published, with the economy teetering on the brink most parents will insist that food on the table pales in comparison to all else, especially where children are concerned, and a shotgun and a couple cases of ammo might be a better investment then gold, given how much easier it is to train in weapons, purchase some, and than take someone else’s doubloons at gunpoint …

Hunting implies dusty trucks, battered coolers, sharp knives, and guts; a oneness with your surroundings that only death and the controlled napalm that an aging GM heater can provide.

“Ma’am, I’m pretty sure you were low and away on that last shot, I believe you vaporized both his nuts. Rather than chase that high-pitched keening Wildebeest, who’s in obvious pain – and liable to be really pissed into those brambles – why don’t you and I retire to the truck for some hot coffee, while he bleeds to death in them bushes?”

Meanwhile you’re urging her to wade a bit deeper into cold water – and if she’s really patient and attentive she’ll get to remove a barbed hook from her icy and slimy quarry, while imbedding it into her wrist when it leaps to freedom …

With the main event being a guide lunch that someone stepped on, whose condiments are ageless, and meat unidentifiable …

All fly fishing can really offer in comparison is some sweaty handshake with a well intentioned,  “if you catch it you’d better let it go” admonition – which doesn’t put much food on the table, and a “OoO, wash your shoes as they might track nasty into the creek “ – which is what she told her kids, but they didn’t listen.

Both are suited to a nasal, high-pitched delivery which can be hampered by the intentness of our stare at Miss Bronzed & Heaving’s upper torso, who is pretty tired of our admiration, and would love punctuating our fantasy by ratcheting a live round into her newly oiled sidearm.

… which warms nicely when fired repeatedly …

I’ll finally get to know whether Great Blue Heron tastes like Chicken or not

Guy_Fawkes It was painful watching the Republican debates the other night, what with each candidate insisting they’d remove any regulations that slowed job growth. It appears our rivers and estuaries will be drilled like a root canal, most migratory species extincted, and a steady runoff of industrial waste and toxins into whatever you fish most …

… and all them students clapping merrily as if they’d heard profound for the first time …

Democrats aren’t any smarter and it’s liable to be a tough couple of decades if the pursuit of jobs and deregulation meets the Son of Global Warming.

While us fishermen mill about in disarray, given all our hard-fought environmental protections suddenly under scrutiny, and most of our conservationist bodies still fighting over felt soles and “who stepped in what” we might have to form our own clandestine “Occupy The Esopus” movement – with what remains of angling’s lunatic fringe …

Which aren’t as plentiful as they once were. Caring for the fish was overtaken by “caring more about your rakish figure in outdoor duds” – how the thousand dollar fly rod and the Cafe Mocha neutered most of our real outdoorsy types, them that lacked a full set of teeth or most of their frontal lobe – and thought like fish do. The rest of us didn’t help as we gave them the cold shoulder thinking they gave the rest of us a bad name.

“Old Timey Conservation” meant if you found 12 sticks of dynamite on the creekbed we might’ve drawn short straw for which dam to make porous, or showed some real ingenuity by making the casting club pond manager decide to lengthen the club’s ponds (with a bit of Fourth of July pyrotechnics) to accommodate a Spey class…

… but to merely give it back to the law, that’s a waste.

The damn environmental element isn’t mad enough yet to understand that what you tracked onto the kitchen linoleum with your contagion-bearing felt soles could soon be the least of your environmental worries.

Here’s hoping you all listened closely.

Is good dental hygiene incompatible with dry fly fishing?

No flossing As Oregon evolves their fishing regulations to make salmon snagging less profitable, the unattended consequence could be shortening the fishing day, denying dry fly fishermen that last hour of twilight awesomeness.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is about to launch a public process aimed at revising state fishing regulations, something the agency does every four years. And ways to curtail flossing and other snagging techniques will dominate the discussion.

Every fly fisherman knows that last hour (actually that last couple of hours) after sunset is the best part of the angling day, when diminished light triggers the evening hatch, makes the angler less glaring as a predator, and shrinks 4X to the diameter of 6X, or so the fish think …

At issue is “flossing” a salmon; swinging a weight and hook through salmon holding water hoping to thread the leader through an open mouth and slamming the hook home on the outside of the jaw – rather than in the arse, stomach, or fin like traditional snagging.

That goes the same for flossers using monofilament, lead and hooks or the fly-fishing flossers stripping a fly line over the gums of open-mouthed salmon.

– via the Mail Tribune.com

Fish hooked in the inside of the mouth would be the legal caught, all other fish must be returned to the water.

Shortening the fishing day is one of many options being discussed at present, if successful it’ll require us visiting anglers to be doubly mindful of the time of day – given they resent us Californio’s for retiring there in the first place, for our importing high real estate prices and consumptive cultural rituals to our heretofore sleepy Northern neighbor.

Where we get all solemn and lay it on overly thick for the non-fisherman

Fishing being a more painful variant of masochism, whose practitioners lust for big fish knowing they’re accompanied by hardship; cold rain, poisonous snakes, blisters, and other trappings of kink, yet are still at a loss to explain its attraction to normal folks.

While traveling last week, I did have time to inhale a small salad while enjoying the banks of the mighty Eel River. In between bites I noticed a bit of motion in the water and am rendered vengeful and solemn by the sight of 200 large salmon milling in a circle only feet away …

Nothing like a fish that appears to be six inches wide at the back to give a fellow real trouble swallowing lettuce …

Eel River at Weott, California

My accomplice was oblivious to the spectacle as he was negotiating  three inches of rare roast beef and a monstrous hard roll, while giggling at my self-inflicted dietary choice. Suddenly one of the larger fish comes cleans out of the water and dampens us both …

“Dude, that was a salmon.”

I nodded the affirmative as he noticed all the other fish leisurely rolling in contentment, finning their way over to give me the finger, then swimming a lazy circle to repeat the insult.

He exclaimed, “ I can run us back to Fortuna and you can buy a rod and reel, and we could be back in an hour…”

I shook my head, “No, fishing is a karmic-Zen-Masochistic thing – and while I don’t expect a non-fisherman to understand; the reason the fish are here is because I lack my fishing gear. In physical terms, both fish and fishing tackle are positively charged ions – and can never occupy the same space – nor get close enough to one another to cause harm – as their natural state repels the other.

If I had brought the gear we’d be standing in a torrential downpour with a flat tire, fishless – or that prominent badge on your truck would cause Weott’s version of “Jimmy Olsen Cub Reporter” to stop and immortalize us for the six o’clock news and the both of us holding big dripping fish and a pink slip …

Driving to Fortuna is for godless amateurs – who’ve not fished enough to learn this truism …”

At this point he’s looking at me fixedly, jaw open and roast beef visible, “OMFG, that’s some serious hokey horseshit,” he says.

I’d tried to explain it and failed. Now I was content to wave as the fish swam past knowing it as a quasi-religious truth recognizable only by those that believe. Not the old-timey religious types – more like those that are fool enough to stand in cold water and have done so enough times to recognize this immutable Law of Nature.

We aren’t as svelte as all that – nor is this Colorado

As soon as I mentioned the waves of famished fish eagerly casting themselves in the path of anything Olive, I knew I’d overstepped the boundaries of both physics or logic and brought unwanted voodoo magic into the mix.

Fishing being a simple exercise in Chaos theory most days, but if you promise anyone anything about the day in advance of the reality, you’ve hexed yourself completely, and Einstein and all his theories no longer matter.

And we fall for this ritual time and time again, simply because most of the retelling is done Monday at work – and any sharp pain as the pin is passed through the doll is assumed to be lunchtime gas or that second donut …

… so we delight in stretching truth or predicting how well we’d do if we all skipped work – and the curse wears off by the subsequent weekend, with us none the wiser to all that dark evil we’ve conjured.

Travel Writer makes like Colorado only more squeamish Naturally, I mention to TravelWriter how me and his Dog, which is no longer his Dog as it ignores him completely, have been faring and how he might want to hone his skills on some aggressively eating fish – and I have to listen to how much better the guides were as they rowed him through most of Colorado, versus the fart bar and lukewarm bottled water I’m serving on my stinky little creek …

And if that’s not enough he adds insult to injury by snapping my profile – which suggests the 26 pounds of lard I’ve removed from my frame through Herculean husbanding of calories, would be best served by another 26 pounds of lard yet to go …

Neither lean nor svelte, just overhang

Note my ever-present shadow, rooted to my side in case I need to be defended against hamburgers, whose recent discovery that not every home insists on dry kibble, where weekends can be woodsy adventure versus shackled to the garage, and in better homes Taco Bell is served on fine china even …

… and while fishing was off compared to the last couple of outings, we still got bit regular, just not regular enough to make the occasion memorable enough to brag come Monday morning.

Outside of swarms of small Pikeminnow on #20 dries, whose unwelcome hex will have been voided by my next visit to the creek.

While much has been made about all the fish we released, it’s what we kept that makes all this exercise worth while.

Fat of the Land

Me and Dogbert played along until our fellow angler turned his back and we made off with a goodly assortment of plunder. Walnuts, pears, persimmons, and fresh chard lend precious vitamins to any meal, especially the greasy, leaden variety I’d promised to preserve canine loyalties.

Nothing else has phased us fly fishermen, hence “legal” isn’t an option

flo_grizz The firm that I knew as “The Scourge of Grizzly Hackle”, Fine Featherheads – has apparently ignored PETA’s repeated “cease and desist” warnings about false advertising, and has drawn a law suit as its reward.

At issue was the Featherhead claim that Whiting Farms treats its roosters “ethically” rather than gleefully tearing great handfuls of  feathers out by the roots while stomping life out of the rooster. Whiting denies the denial claiming it provides spacious individual quarters for the birds who are gassed when harvested.

If memory serves someone tried that with humans a half century ago – and it was frowned on then too … “Ethical” now being in the eye of the beholder – and not so much the victim …

Us fishermen have never garnered the wrath of PETA, as we’ve always been dismissed as insensitive brutes – with nothing to be gained via class action or any other form of legal recourse.

Besides, one of those lissome young feather models probably leaned over to a compatriot and whispered the PETA negotiator couldn’t possibly understand that feathers were a fashion must have – as she was skinny and pale and wearing Earth shoes. The lawyer overheard, and threw the book at Feather-Momma and her clutch of wood nymphs.

The Rise of eMAN, and decline of Nature worship

digital_man Healthy living is browsing a web page that mentions, “eating whole foods” – and as I finish ingesting a whole box of donuts, I can snicker, “I do that.”

Unfortunately the United States ongoing love affair with processed white flour, fast food, and the Internet has overcome the miracles of science, and for the first time since we’ve recorded history – the current generation (35-45 year olds) has less life expectancy than we do.

Which is a pity, because now it’s going to take so many more of them to pay for my golden years …

The downfall of Modern Man began in the mid-1800’s where advances in milling technologies allowed us all to afford processed white flour versus the coarse, nutrient laded, peasant stuff we had been eating, and our fate was sealed with Henry Ford’s automobile and its attendant technical marvels, the lack of walking and exercise, and the drive thru eatery…

I’ve always been a bit on  the skeptical side of most of the angling surveys that claim we’ve increased the number of anglers – only because most of those “victories” had us increasing less than the margin for error (typically around 5%).

We may be seeing evidence of a fundamental shift away from people’s appreciation of nature (biophilia, Wilson, 1984) to ‘videophilia,’ which we here define as ‘‘the new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media.’’

Those last lean years since late 2007, could be explained by more folks looking to fishing to eat free (because license sales have been down year after year), versus any real return or appreciation of the out of doors.

Yet today we are seeing a fundamental shift away from nature-based outdoor recreation. What is replacing outdoor recreation in people’s lives? A recent study of U.S. national park visitation yielded some surprising results. It found that four variables explained 97.5% of the decline in visits to national parks. These were: time spent on the Internet, time spent playing video games, time spent watching movies, and oil prices.

– via Minnesota Dept of Natural Resources

After 50 years of steady increase, per capita visits to US national parks have declined since 1988. This decline, coincident with the rise in electronic entertainment media, may represent a shift in recreation choices with broader implications for the value placed on biodiversity conservation and environmentally responsible behavior.

– via Is the Love of Nature in the US becoming the love of electronic media?

Industry pundits cling to small changes in demographics that refute the above, but I’d suggest the larger picture is the crest of a natural bubble in outdoors participation, and both us fishermen and the larger conservation-ecology movement is headed for increasingly lean times.

Evolution of Man

The Boomers before me emigrated to the Haight-Ashbury to form their perfect Utopia. When Heroin and capitalistic warmongering industry got the better of most, they fled into the woods and joined communes, wore Earth shoes, and grew dope.

Decades later when British Petroleum wants to drill clean through to China, they emerged from banks, brokerage houses, and the defense industry and voted Nature-first, leaving BP to gnash teeth and buy more lobbyists.

But when they’re gone, and we’re gone, who’ll make up that massive bloc of eco-votes to to ensure what little that’s unspoiled remains so?

While I suck up the Internet and all manner of porn with great gusto, I know my days are numbered, only because I can balance all that stolen music and free movies with fishing. Mostly because the Internet didn’t exist during my formative years and the only reliable porn was when the bachelor next door moved out and us kids unearthed tattered Playboy’s while dumpster diving.

All this was driven home as I fiddled with the lawn mower this weekend. I was pondering the larger picture – how we were the beneficiaries of generations that loved the woods, and how that may not always be the case, and out from the neighbors house comes their 27 year old son …

… he’s got the world completely tuned out; earphones on that link to his iPhone, and is texting away blissfully as he strides down the driveway. Just as both thumbs engage with the screen his feet become entangled in a couple of turns of garden hose, and he face plants with great force …

Broken glasses, he’s wiping blood from his nose while inspecting his phone for damage, then readjusts his ear buds for maximum acoustic effect and gets in his car to speed away.

Still texting … as now he’s got something really profound to tweet.

Naturally, I’m in awe. First at the desire to cocoon from any external stimulus, and despite the “not looking , can’t hear”, focus on fingers and completed text and the bloody ending … the knowledge that this is what’s speeding toward me in the opposite lane, suggests it’s not an indifference to the outdoors issue – so much as pure Darwinism.

There’s going to be a lot less of them, and they’ll be oblivious to why. Perhaps they should stay indoors, it’s so much safer for homo-sapien-digitalis.

Invasive Chuckle of the Month – Clean Boil then Butter

All those hours spent reading articles on clean, dry, and  inspect, which elevated our readiness to the angling equivalent of Seal Team Six – to defend ourselves from any hidden environmental menace, may have positioned us to be the only group able to appreciate the enormity of the latest invasion-du-jour – and act on it with all possible haste.

Them_orUSThere comes a time when duty overrides creature comforts and you wave farewell, as you respond to a higher responsibility, knowing that only the selfless actions of those like yourself can save the planet.

It appears that the warming currents of the Pacific Ocean have finally reached critical mass, allowing millions of succulent Alaskan King Crab to invade Antarctica.

Knowing that “Clean, Dry, and Inspect is no longer pertinent, rather it’s been replaced with “Clean, Boil, and Butter” – and considering Antarctica is largely No Man’s Land, it means there’s no limit to what you can eat – nor any sovereign military to prevent you from mailing the rest home …

… music to the ears of us budding Type II Diabetics.

Father of the Modern Trout Bum

troutbum It’s probably the only time we’ve seen friend Chandler earnest and straight-faced as he plays Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, to angling author (and Underground Fave) John Gierach.

Like him or love him, Mr. Gierach is the most quotable soundbyte in fly fishing, more importantly he can do so without drawing the ire of countless readers, even on worthy and contentious subjects:

Q: How do you think you fit into a more extreme fly fishing media landscape?

I’m suspicious of this trend towards making fly fishing an extreme sport. For example, on this book tour, I’m constantly asked “what do you think about the fly fishing film tour?”

I appreciate the adventure and the fishing they’re showing and technically it’s awesome stuff, but that’s just not the sport I recognize. Maybe I’m a little more invested in this pastoral stuff.

Q: That’s interesting. The video guys are trying make a living by going fishing and selling the experience, so in one sense, they’re the new Gierachs, the new trout bums — they’re your children.

I… I guess I can accept that. They’re into a counter-culture head — they live outside the mainstream.

And while I say I don’t recognize the sport, I do recognize those guys. Those are bohemian guys who don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about what they’re doing — they’re doing it for love, and I certainly recognize and understand that.

And those guys will grow up.

I don’t think I’ve seen the differences put any better, we like the young crowd – they’re like us, only the idea they might be us is so upsetting – for both parties ..

It’s a great interview, full of starch and gruff appreciation – which is made all the more endearing by Old Guys with the bit between their teeth.