Category Archives: current events

Are we back to them scrawny Chinese capes?

Plucked Chicken A single sentence sent me gasping in apoplexy, but I’ll save the tantrum until I get another corresponding data point.

I’d suggest you do the same.

Denver’s WestWord News mentions in today’s article on the feather trade, suggests Thomas Whiting of Whiting farms has stopped selling feathers to fly shops …

When demand for his feathers intensified, Whiting initially held off on selling to the fashion world, preferring to save the saddle feathers for his regular clients. But then he discovered that many fly-fishing outlets were buying his feathers at regular prices and then reselling them for crazy sums; those $40 to $80 packages were going for $300 to $500 on eBay, while hair stylists were (and still are) selling feathers at anywhere from $10 to $40 apiece. So Whiting, who had been selling the feathers wholesale for twenty cents each, stopped selling to the fishing stores altogether and began raising prices for the fashionistas.

Non fishermen and certainly non-fly tiers can be easily confused by the reserved words and phrases of our craft, it’s likely the author has taken the quote from poor context.

It’s not surprising that Mr Whiting would want to cut the fly shops out of the loop, especially those that might have been early to the fad, assuring him they were selling to the fly tying public – and were stuffing them onto eBay as quickly as shipments arrived. Most shops vended the capes with the shop account, which would have been obvious to someone browsing feather sales.

Given the economic turmoil, it’s not surprising. In either case let’s hope this was a bit of exaggeration. If Keough Hackle has already sold it’s 2012 harvest, and Whiting removes his roosters from play, you’d better learn to love nymphing  … and quick.

Live by the Sword and so shall ye arteries perish

White bread has also been commonly used as a hook-bait for centuries and is even referenced in the fisherman’s Bible The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton in 1653.

It’s well known that successive generations of anglers have lowered their expectations over the outdoor experience and game fish in general. As our beloved quarry is diminished in both size and numbers, we’ve been forced to ignore those qualities that made them great, and widen the available prey by adding the less genteel and outright untouchable into the game fish ranks.

Magazines that once talked about fish as, “…like a startled silvery gazelle, spinning in midair …” now rarely mention anything other than “wallow” , “snag” or “slugfest.”

With dams as plentiful as instream cobble, our once agile opponent has become some panting porcine slob that comes to heel when we whistle, disgorges its most recent meal into our palm from overexertion, poses for the camera in familiar “Gasping Fatty” cover pose, and must be coaxed back into the water. A far cry from our father’s “silvery greyhound – product of thousands of generations fighting miles of uphill currents.“

Sure it’s our doing. Ensuring the genetics of those lean and muscular fish are no longer viable, via selection for fish small enough to negotiate a live turbine – or fat enough to maintain their place without swimming.

Reducing our beloved sport to releasing some bloated softbody that eats your fly hoping you’ll shove its flaccid ass a bit further upstream, clearing some shallow spot blocking its next meal ..

The Bad News is that in addition to selecting fish whose belly drips through all but clenched fingers, you’ve  imprinted your eating habits on young and impressionable game fish, whose biopsies suggest that Type II Diabetes in fresh and salt water fish roughly mirrors the human populations nearby.

… your midday meal being such a nutritional wasteland that it’s a toss up whether your lunch provides the bare necessities to keep you alive – or whether your wife packed it with every intention of killing you dead.

If you had any sense, the thought should give them jaws pause. If the fish shouldn’t eat it there’s little doubt that you’re destined for a fiber-less haymaker delivered to the knotted remnants of your colon.

Hard to believe that in a couple hundred short years, we’ve destroyed most of the known fisheries, and corrupted even the bait used to tame all that Wilderness.

Can you flippinbelieveit ?, Palin says “Dig Dig Dig” on Pebble

With 24000 pages of email from the Sarah Palin regime just released to the public, I figured none of our guys would wade into all that puffery to glean how the Pebble mine fared, as that’s asking way too much of us action-oriented types … palinmail

Meanwhile the press is focused on the next extra-tasty history rewrite, or something scandalous. The Pebble Mine hardly garners a shrug given the possibility of secret love children sequestered away by shadowy housekeepers, paid with hush money. Given the torrid state of affairs of our politicos, little wonder the issues take a back seat to gossip.

There’s about five pages of email on Pebble and plenty of side-bar banter about similar projects as Miss Dimwit holds court with her closest aides.

Keough’s 2012 harvest is mostly committed, no word yet from Whiting

It’s a simple question really. Given that Grizzly hackle is critical to most western dry flies, bass bugs, saltwater streamers, and most minnow imitations, just how long can you last on your current stockpile?

… or are you waiting for the saddles to breach the $500 per barrier on eBay, before unloading while the market’s hot …

While I’ve chided you many times in the past about, “seeing a good deal and jumping on it with both feet,” this is liable to be the first such shortage felt by this latest generation of fly tiers – where the idea of hoarding and stockpiles get mulled over while you survey what storage remains in the man cave …

Hair tinsel, 410 degrees melt point = polyester, same as ours

Us older tiers can remember when Belding-Cortescelli phased out Nymo thread, and how we bought every spool we could scrounge in advance of that dark moment.

It appears we’ll be left with the more expensive neck hackles, which may or may not be a suitable substitute, and we’ll still get plenty of Chinese saddles (6” – 7”) in Chinchilla (currently $70 for 18 feet strung), but it’s looking like the genetic saddles will be MIA for a goodly spell, much longer than first anticipated.

Hana Johnson, president of Hair Flairs, a Florida company that distributes feathers and other beauty products to salons in the United States and Canada, said she has sold a million feathers so far this year. That compares to 3,000 in 2010.

“We’ve been spinning our little feather wheels like hamsters since day one,” she said.

Hair Flairs has already bought the bulk of feathers that will be produced in 2012 by Bill Keough at Keough Hackles in southwest Michigan.

– via Reuters.com

There’s about 20-50 articles on this phenomenon going to print daily, worldwide. I scan them all to dig out new developments. Every facet is being debated, from the euthanizing of chickens, the squeals of new owner’s delight, the finger wagging of us fly fishing types, and the sudden interest on ramping production of those vendors torn between profits and angry phone calls from more traditional customers.

Practitioners are on record adoring their flexibility and temporary nature, they can buy multiple colors to match multiple outfits, can add and remove them at will, so they can mix, match, and amass collections, and the chicken farmers and fly shops adore them for it.

Suggesting everyone but us is happy, the fad has legs, and we’ll have to make do with less. I would expect most fly shops will soon be taking a back seat to better funded salon merchandisers like Hair Flairs, especially if they’re buying an entire year’s output at a go.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed that Keough or Whiting doesn’t sell the farm and retire outright.

Save Bristol Bay so we can keep picking on little guys

smallfish I suppose the good news is that none of us has cracked under the pressure and sent pictures of The Family Jewels to some anonymous campus sweetheart, but that’s coming.

Looking down, I think I’ll be safe enough, given that I haven’t seen mine in a couple of decades, but the rest of you concern me.

With societal censure clinging to us outdoorsy types like a dark cloud, issues like Catch & Release, invasive species, trespass, the despoiling of the watershed with our two and four wheeled gas guzzlers, planted versus wild, and the delight we show in blowing daylight through the arse end of anything exhaling CO2, have painted a bright target on our backs.

Now all them fellows we teased in school roam the halls of science and are determined to blame us for undoing millions of years of genetic selection, how all the small fish is our doing.

After studying data going back to 1943, Kendall has discovered that the average length of a (Bristol Bay) sockeye salmon is now 14 millimeters (0.25”) shorter than it used to be. She also discovered that the number of sockeye that spent two, instead of the normal three years, out at sea before coming upstream to lay their eggs, had increased by 16%, suggesting Mother Nature was trying to make up for losses incurred due to fishing.

– via PhysOrg.com

While nets and the size of their mesh is doing the bulk of the selection, our squeezing the life out of the big fish so we can show Ma, thumping the SOB as its bigger then most, or bouncing Fatty off the rocks while the guide gets pictures 62 through 74, has to play some small part.

What took thousands or even millions of years of evolution to accomplish, has been undone in just a couple of centuries of human fishing practices.

Just a reminder that you guys suck.

It couldn’t have been me, all I ever catch is dinks …

Which would be quicker if you ever lived up to them promises

fly_casting I remember peering through the bushes intently, awestruck at the grace them old duffers displayed while sawing their line back and forth in a double haul, back and forth seemingly without effort, leader never tangling, and I wondered whether I would ever be skilled enough to do likewise …

… and whether I would ever lose my fear of them same mean old SOB’s when it came to critiquing my casts, and like church, would I ever be accepted as a member of the congregation, able to walk erect versus hiding in bushes fearful some old cuss would claim I was afflicted with limp everything.

I remember thinking it must take forever to learn such skill. Now I find out “forever” is cheap – only about $79,000 worth …

Former garda and keen angler James Moynihan, whose fly fishing arm was seriously hurt in a scuffle with late night revellers, has been awarded damages of just over €43,000 in the High Court.

– via the Irish Examiner

The math is actually pretty fair. Figuring a minimum wage of $10 an hour (it being a labor of love therefore you can be paid a pittance) that would be a monetary settlement of 7900 hours, or 329 days.

The average angler fishes nine times yearly, but spending most of his time arguing with kids, erecting tents, deploying stoves and camp gear, inflating mattresses and answering,  “No, we ain’t there yet!”

Figuring seven of the outings are the garden variety two day weekend, and two are the rarified three day “Total Woodsy Immersion” that makes 20 days per year of fishing.

Each weekend contains two such days, so that’s 20 days per year of fishing, suggesting that 329 / 20 = 16 years of fishing to learn how to cast effortlessly.

Quicker if you ever lived up to them offseason promises …

A Sloppy coarse farmed fish gets the Glamour label

meryl-streepTaking all that DNA sequencing out of the crime lab and aiming it at your meat counter suggests that nearly 25% of prepared fish in meat counters are mislabeled. Steaks and fillets often lack scales fins or identifying features which allows a cheap freshwater catfish to substitute for a higher end cod.

… and earning perhaps the greatest nickname ever, our lowly farmed tilapia gets its due ..

Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role.

Naturally the FDA will make every attempt to crack down on the practice.

… when it suits them.

The end of the unwilling outdoor blood donation

Under the counter sales to them as can reproduce As most of you already know, mosquitoes ferret us out due to the CO2 we exhale. Ditto for anything else that sucks blood, and why entomologists lay dry ice on a white blanket and run for their lives …

Now researchers claim they can render us completely invisible to the hosts of blood sucking insects by giving us a repellant that will cause complete sensory overload to all the creepy crawly things that are determined to make the out-of-doors experience miserable and demeaning.

… to the gals mostly, us real woodsmen delight in bleeding profusely, and show our scars at the least provocation …

The good news is that it’s “1000 times more powerful than DEET.” Which was removed from shelves due to its propensity to lower your kid’s IQ and cause numerous birth defects. A thousand times more powerful suggests that probability may be inching towards certainty, which may make sales to those under 65 illegal.

… not to worry, fly shops will sell little crack vials to them as able to reproduce, for six or seven times the normal markup … Or I will, in the parking lot … for even more.

Sure I offered to help … myself

If they’d only let me know I’d have been happy to help. Now that all the rain swollen creeks around my place are starting to recede, it’s revealing all the navigationally challenged animals that climbed out of the murky Sacramento and attempted to ascend my beloved Brownline …

brownline_monster

They intercepted this rare Green Sturgeon just shy of the mouth of the Little Stinking, and when I asked could I borrow it, they got all huffy and short tempered. The idea of six foot of prehistoric prey attempting to melt aluminum being irresistible to me…

There were quite a few salmon, striped bass, and sturgeon stranded in the Yolo Bypass upstream of me, the above scene was Fish & Game attempting a rescue – given that once the water dried up, everything would perish.

Maybe next year I’ll wade down there and fling a Ghost Shrimp on a 6/0 treble, just to see what breaks first.

The Olive Loaf, in traditional full dress

Full Dress Pimento Loaf It’s the singularities surrounding fishing that builds the really juicy legends and keeps us humble, all at the same time. All we can ever agree on is nothing is a given, nothing works consistently, and as soon as we claim something to be true, some rival convert claims it’s a falsehood.

Our experiences a long chain of singularities wrapped in accident, swaddled in chance, never to happen again.

Prevailing theory about what fish see, what they perceive tasty, mixed with a leavening of what we think we’d eat were we a fish – has armored countless bookshelves with massive tomes, all with a shelf life of a century or less, wherein they’re promptly discarded for the real – real, which naturally costs twicet as much.

Of all these mass shifts in thought, the traditional married wing salmon fly has to be the most gaudy and eye-opening of all these feints at understanding stream biology. Even non-fishermen can recognize the intricacies and labor needed to craft the flies, and the many jungles pillaged to construct just a handful.

It’s likely that all that painful rigor extended the “noble salmon-butterfly” ideology far past its supply lines – given that terrestrial biology and Darwinism were dancing close behind sherry and cigars, whose mustached practitioners “harrumphed” their way through this and other topics of their day.

While Blue Chatterer and Macaw had their proponents, it’s a given different camps would evolve to argue the merits of round tinsel versus the tawdry French oval, and good English iron versus that unwieldy Irish O’Shaughnessy …

… while downstairs in the kitchen, legend was brewing …

“AooOW,” Me Da is going to get us all pinched, see yourself what he’s holding…”

“Hush, daughter, my supper is what done this fine salmon in. I was only thinking a bit of herring might tempt a roach or barbel, and I wakes up to this feast flopping at me feet.”

“AooOW,” ‘Tis what’s meant, when Hisself upstairs finds out it weren’t a Green Highlander what done it, we’ll all be off to the Hulks …”