Category Archives: fishing

How heroic would the pose be if he knew it was dinner?

Grip and Grin, hunter-gatherer style It’s the “Great Unmentionable” the tacit understanding between sporting gentlemen that masks the awful truth, you don’t like the slimy, wriggly, bastards – and would never consider them table fare.

Watching a documentary on the human brain the other night, and it recounts the tale of a fellow that survived 89 days at sea, how he ate his way to good health (from near starvation) on a diet of raw fish liver and eyeballs.

“The liver’s were like dessert.”

I’m stuffing my gut with dinner while hanging on every word, knowing that tales of starvation always go better with a hearty meal, and the thought comes unbidden that this is where we went wrong.

This is why the fly fishing zealots  clash horribly with the gentile participants, why Donny Beaver covets our water, and why the mainstream media panders to the Starbuck and Croissant crowd.

We need to eat our prey, maybe stomp life out of it midcurrent, with horrified tourists shielding the eyes of their children. We need to resurrect the “Bloodsport” label.

The only thing keeping this from being the best fish I’ve ever had,” he said, “is that I didn’t catch it.”

I eat fish – lots of them, it helps build my immunity to Mercury, lowers my IQ, and by all medical accounts, will proof me against heart disease, halitosis, and unsightly blemishes. It was the reason we went fishing as kids, to get out – to catch fish and eat them.

This urbane bloodless sport portrayed in contemporary fly fishing literature was never the intent, and when your Dad taught you – he never intended you to remain aloof and fish only dry flies, he was passing on the Hunter-Gatherer ethic – when you too had a family, you could provide…

In recent memory the only reference to fish as food, was from Buster Wants to Fish, wherein the most egregious of all crimes was committed – the posting of a recipe..  Fly fishing journalism, old and new – and only one stalwart willing to break with tradition.

Unconventional to be sure, but the release of endorphins that result from sheathing your Buck knife in the vitals of some hapless salmonid – may prevent you from seeking the same rush from the office, compliments of Mr. Kalashnikov, and his stamped metal wonder…

This type of stuff still sounds like an awful good time to me.

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I would have loved to see a "Grip and Grin" of that Purple sucker

Now TC has me doing it I’m reminded of some of the unexpected fish I’ve landed after seeing this bit on a wildlife biologist that caught a fish he’d stocked nearly 25 years earlier.

Surprised is a better word, like the 12″ trout I caught out of Hat Creek that had three flies stuck in his face. To add insult to injury, two of them were the same size and pattern – a Copper John variation. It was six bucks worth of trout if you’re counting, and nice of him to tell me what pattern was completely irresistible.

I hooked a fish on another outing that gave up much too quickly, after landing it I found the reason, an Osprey had hit him sometime back and it was missing a silver dollar size chunk of flesh below the dorsal fin. It was healed over, but the spine was visible. Trout may be vulnerable to pollutants but they can still take a licking.

My best work was the fish I landed without a hook, starting with “the impossible lie” – one of those casts you dream of making, you know it’ll cost $20 worth of flies to attempt. Fifteen dollars later I made the cast and a fish ate it. With half the line downstream in a belly, there was no way I could set the hook. Somehow I managed,  and when I got the fish close I saw what happened, the fish had rose over the leader and my slow strike caused the fly to catch the leader on the other side – a neat lasso that slid into the gill plate and stayed as long as  the fish stayed below me.

But the all time favorite was something witnessed during El Nino. My buddies and I were fishing for rock fish in the San Francisco Bay. The fellow next to us hooked a fish and reeled it in – we saw him lift it out of the water by the hook snell. He turned to us and says, “Weird, it’s a purple Stingray thing..” then collapsed as if poleaxed.

We pull him out of the water, and he’s able to stutter, “E-e-electrified.”

We never did figure out what he’d caught, but we weren’t about to grip anything we hadn’t eaten before, especially Purple..

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They dubbed the fish "Saddam’s Bass"

Most of the fishing award ceremonies I’ve seen have the lucky angler dancing around the “what’s the secret” portion of his coronation. Fishermen are a closed mouthed lot, and those that do it for money are pretty tight lipped – as the color of their bait may mean a couple extra zero’s in their income.

Honesty? We’re not prepared for that – so when the winning fellow strides to the podium and announces, “A rattletrap tipped with Pizza Crust?” … it’s time to pay homage.

Soldiers often were creative with bait, Combs said. Whole bagels. Sausage. Breakfast burritos from MRE rations. Dates. The local stone-baked flatbread. Some regular fishermen prefer Froot Loops.

The first Baghdad fishing tournament was filmed for posterity by Reel Time Productions, whose staff took 300 sets of donated tackle to host the event in one of Saddam’s private lakes.

A 14lb carp proved the winning fish, but based on the smiles – it wasn’t the only winner.

For the soldiers in Iraq, fishing is “a chance to get out in the air and sit around the lake, and at that point, they could have been anywhere in the world,” Combs said. “They could have been in Ohio fishing on the banks of the river. It’s just a little bit of normalcy for them in a place that is anything but normal.”

It’s nice to see the fellows get a little break from the mayhem.

Some pictures speak for themselves

I’m not sure the chokehold will subdue this beastIt’s not fly fishing but the message is timeless, this is what Ma meant when she said, ” your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

Sturgeon versus kayak, and it looks like there’s a disagreement on “who sits where.” One of the fellows from work sent this to me, the angler survived – this picture was snapped from a boat that came to his rescue.

I can only imagine the wake the kayak threw off while the fish towed it around the Delta.

Just when you thought it was safe to stick your toe in the water

Think again.

This isn’t one of those silly hijackers requiring you to dance around with a bottle of 409 hoping the neighbors don’t notice, this sure ain’t something you can point a finger at and bemoan it’s presence – no, this is something much better, with big sharp teeth that abducts terriers and small children.

“Frankenfish”, aka, the “Giant Snakehead” is forty seven times more deadly than a McDonald’s Big Mac, and can consume an adult human in a week or so … depending on its mood.

Toothy little morsel, photogenic too

The species easily adapts to any freshwater habitat, including ponds, lakes, reservoirs, swamps, streams and drains. Eggs are laid in a sunken nest of vegetation near the shore, and the young are fiercely guarded by the parents. Full grown specimens can cause severe injury to humans who might inadvertently step near the nest. Juveniles are striped brown and black, and travel in large shoals.

The IGFA record is a 39″ specimen weighing nearly 21 pounds. If it liked your submerged buttock, you’d sure know about it quickly.

Some poor fellow landed one in the River Witham in Britain, and the natural concern is they may have achieved a foothold on a new continent. No additional sightings have been confirmed, but a lot of ecologists are gnawing on their fingernails as a result.

Be very afraid, the Snakehead can breathe air and walks on land..

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmU7etSYYqI&feature=related[/youtube]

On a morbid personal note, (and because TC expects it) it’s about time we had a good stand up fight instead of a “bug hunt” – us or them, Baby. It may prove our finest hour.

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Tracking the wily Queen of Waters – or is she merely a Pig with Fins?

Melt my reel and I'll call you Noble Nothing like a rainy weekend to catch up on all those tasks held in abeyance. The lack of fish available since the creek was blown out in early January, reminded me of my need to learn more of the lifecycle of the common carp.

It’s a big mystery, one day the creek has them available, a couple weeks later there aren’t any. I guessed food source or spawning migration, but didn’t know enough about either to be certain of the answer.

The Hideous Jabbering Head of Izaak Walton has been on sabbatical of late, so I was forced to go to his original tome.

The Carp is the Queen of Rivers: a stately, good and very subtle fish. The Carp, if he have water-room and good feed, will grow to a very great bigness and length; I have heard, to be much above a yard long.

He is a very subtle fish, and hard to be caught. If you will fish for a Carp, you must put on a very large measure of patience, especially to fish for a River-Carp.

The food angle is doubtful as I could only find them in a single pool despite searching for them over nearly eight miles of creek. The weeds remained after the fish left, so best guess is a spawning migration.

They’re eating machines,” says Win Taylor, a fisheries biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. He’s talking about the grass carp. In the summer of 2002, 21,000 of the vegetarian fish were turned loose in Lake James. By that time, hydrilla had claimed 500 acres of the lake; but since the carp’s arrival, there’s been little sign of the territorial weed. In certain circles, the grass carp’s savage eating habits have earned it the nickname “H-Bomb.

The only puzzle remaining is which direction they came from; the creek runs 40 miles north and ends at the dam face of Clear Lake, I assume they can’t get past the dam. South of me is a similar morass that may only connect to the Sacramento River in wet years.

A study in South Carolina with radio tagged fish suggests the average yearly movement of Grass Carp is around 9 miles, the maximum observed was 27 miles. The fish I caught weren’t overachievers and the statistics suggest I walk another mile and I should find them. Normally I would pack additional water and an extra sandwich, but there’s nothing like an election year to remind me statistics are often an overly optimistic guess…

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You can’t sell your house, but if you could, here’s 20 locations for a buyer’s market

The SubPrime mess affects everyone, likely he's defaulted already If retirement is less than a decade away, you may want to start mulling some options. For you, Field and Stream listed the “Top 20 Best Fishing Towns in America” – most are chosen by gamefish, but that’ll be a fair rebuttal to “Top 20 Retirement Towns Chosen By the Missus, Because Her Ma Lives There.”

Forget about selling your home now, six or seven years from now the banks will be considering lending money again, and you’ll be positioned to pounce.

California just barely squeaked in – the Little Stinking has not yet made the “must do” list for the Jet Setter crowd, so the Trout Underground is the beneficiary with Redding, CA at number 19. Having lived in Redding for five years I can agree with their assessment of the fishing, everything else was a damn lie…

The beauty of this part of the country is that you can be up in the cool mountains, or down in the warm valley within minutes. The seasons are mild, and the overall town atmosphere, while maintaining some California-tourism flair, is ultimately quite genuine.

They failed to mention that Redding is the last warm part of the Central Valley, with temperatures reaching 110 – 117 each summer. When your feet leave tracks in asphalt – it’s hot.

So’s the fishing.

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A long line release would be prudent but you’d miss the Big Payday

Big payday for a fisherman We keep hearing how the most dangerous occupation is Alaskan crab fisherman, I browse a lot of fishing news  and I’m starting to wonder about that statistic.

English trawlers have pulled in two WWII torpedoes recently, a third recovered in Australia, and yesterday the fourth was trawled up off of the Spanish coast. The “pucker factor” associated with the sight of that unstable ordinance has to qualify as an Extreme sport somewhere…

The “Mother of All Ordinance” was recovered by a Spanish fisherman, Francisco Simo Orts, a name never uttered in dry fly circles, but worthy of inclusion into someone’s angling hall of fame.

January 17th, 1966 – a mid air collision between a B-52 and KC-130 refueling tanker drops four H-Bombs onto the Spanish fishing village of Palomares. Recovery of the three on dry land proceeds swimmingly, but the fourth falls into the ocean.

The bomb that landed in the sea went missing for 80 days and became the object of an intensive search by the United States, which was afraid the Soviets might try to recover it.

A local fisherman, Francisco Simo Orts, had seen it hit the water and was enlisted to help the U.S. Navy establish the basis for its search operation. When the bomb was finally found, Simo Orts turned up in New York with an attorney, demanding the salvage award he claimed was due him in accordance with maritime law.

The U.S. secretary of defense said the bomb was worth $2 billion. Simo Orts asked for $20 million, or 1 percent of the bomb’s value, again in accordance with the custom of maritime law. The Air Force eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Instinct suggests Senor Ort’s fishing was recreational after collecting on the reward.

It’s a source of amusement for me, aside from the threat of thermonuclear devastation, if the nuke had been found by a bird watcher it’s likely they would have returned it for free. Like Senor Orts, someone drops a nuke in my favorite riffle – I’m likely to take it personal.

…and here I am worried about whether my lead split shot will screw up the environment…

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If you want me to pat you on the Arse, then the suffering had better be commensurate

It’s like hiring someone else to do your fighting for youI like the idea, but it smacks of a “gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” ecological balance. It’s nice that these issues are slowly being acknowledged, but passing the burden to someone else isn’t deprivation, it’s just making the minimum payment on a credit card.

I’m not an ecology zealot, I still have to drive somewhere to fish and I don’t  blink at the consequences, but if I did, the suffering must be immediate to be rewarded.

The way I see it, there are no points scored for extincting a couple dozen species then feeling bad about it, you don’t wait until they’re all gone to change, if you’re sincere about the issue you have to endure hardship, as anything else is lip service.

So, to offset the effect of the fishing tournament on global warming, its promoters are buying carbon mitigation credits. Previously, after calculating the carbon footprint of the annual Gator-Seminole football game, NWF sponsored the planting of 158 acres of trees that will take 10 years to offset that one game’s carbon output.

On a humorous note, I wonder whether them scientists calculated for the obligatory “jawbone” session post-contest. If you’ve endured a group of anglers reciting feats of prowess, you’ll realize there’s more carbon released in the parking lot than the entire sailfish fleet at full throttle.

Maybe that’s the penance we’re seeking, the immediate carbon payback needed to cleanse ourselves of guilt, us fishermen have to tell the truth – the planet depends on it.

Goddamn scary thought…

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Sometimes it’s more than a new license required, spend a moment to check

He ain't smiling, and that's a bad sign Just a gentle reminder to review your angling regulations, as assumption can get you sidewise with the authorities. It’s customary for January 1st to be the introduction of new angling regulations, and many states have made changes that are small, but noteworthy.

In California, new “punchcard” rules are in affect that require anglers to report on all abalone, steelhead, lobster, and in the Klamath watershed, salmon that are caught and kept. Abalone must be tagged with the appropriate documentation when in possession, and anglers are required to carry the “punchcard” at all times.

Tags are required for a second rod in inland waterways, excluding single barbless, artificial only water.

It’ll only take a minute to get acquainted with new rules, most wildlife agencies have their new changes on the home page.

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