It’s one of those moments where you look at your buddy and wonder what hideous crime was committed in a past life that you’re deserved this fate …
… and when the day’s events are totaled, who’s telling the neighbor the fate of his borrowed landing net, and is this totaled in your “caught” fish or no?
Tags: Sea lion, salmon, mooching, epic denial
Now that the prototype has dried out I can claim that it runs in the family. Idiocy mostly, but occasionally us Singlebarbed menfolk come out of the kitchen clutching some napkin-based idea that’s been done seventeen times before yet lacks military epaulets or bondage belt buckles popularized by the late King of Pop.
My steady whining about “too damn hot” is only drowned out by Igneous Rock’s louder lament of the same issue. He has to transition from San Francisco’s steady 65° to my summertime 105° within a 45 minute drive. Despite my living here for the last decade, the combination of humidity near the water and the forced march through the Scorching Sands of Death – has the both of us looking for something better.
… cooler, actually.
I pried the “concept” vest out of his hands as soon as I laid eyes on it. I claimed “eminent domain” as the waters nearby were all mine, he countered with “blood-rite-of-Firstborn”, but I rattled a boxful of experimental flies he hadn’t seen and won temporary custody.
This is merely a concept to test construction and fabrics, but the lack of fabric sets it apart from traditional fare and diminishes the heat burden significantly. Especially the back – where the large rear pocket on a vest means a double layer of fabric – complimented by the hydration pack to make a third layer of stifling warmth.
A lot of our fishing is single-purpose. All that’s needed is a couple boxes of flies, a couple spools of tippet, and a set of nippers. Shad comes to mind – hot temperatures, wading up to your navel and only one box of flies needed. Ditto for Carp and most Bass fishing.
The complexity of fishing technology is not always in our best interest. Many products are spat out like computer software, where vendors try to find some whiz-bang gadget that sets the 2010 model apart from the 2009 version, hoping you buy both. I own one and am quite pleased with it, yet have no need for half the pockets and during shad season the bottom four inches are underwater.
All the super-secret components of the next prototype are absent so older brother doesn’t mind revealing what may become a hot-weather-shorty vest. I figure I can trade flies for a neck-level cell phone pocket – I’m always on a short tether during fire season and carry one on my local trips. It’ll double as an iPod harness for the younger crowd, many of whom prefer to drown out the tinkle of the brook with the sounds of molten metal.
… and no, the lower pocket “camouflage” pattern is entirely my doing – compliments of a tunneling muskrat and opaque water. It’ll cost me some flies when Older Bro sees his “Mona Lisa” defaced, but we’ve determined it drains quickly enough – under duress.
If I could turn it into a set of “Miami Vice” shoulder holsters it’d set the Florida flats afire …
Tinkering with these products are usually a fusion of what you do for a living with what you do for a hobby. It’s that “outside the box” thinking that births the revolutionary idea versus the evolutionary. If only a couple of the ideas planned for this harness work out – the boys at SIMM’s are going to kick themselves …
Tags: shorty wading vest, Igneous Rock, iPod, hydration pack, hot weather vest, muskrat, SIMM’s
Two years ago I introduced you to the Fillet O’ Fish sandwich – the Hoki, or Whipfish. The New York Times is reporting that this model sustainable fishery has suddenly become unsustainable compliments of McDonald’s, Long John Silver, and modern fast food.
This is one of those rare moments where anglers can take the Moral High ground – as everyone knows despite our lust to catch fish, most of us would rather have a hamburger.
My theory is you can bread and deep fry a car tire and it’ll make a suitable replacement given the volume of Tartar-saucelike-substance added. As the Hoki lives a half mile down with a lifespan of nearly 100 years – the next great whitemeat has to be Jellyfish..
… no worries, they’ll give it a catchy name.
Tags: McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish sandwich, Hoki, Whipfish, Moral High Ground, Long John Silver
Goodwill has tugged on your heartstrings long enough, and this Christmas I’m turning a deaf ear to the Salvation Army’s brass bell, as we’ve got members of the Angling Brotherhood who are in worse shape.
It’s the perfect storm; upside down on the mortgage so they can’t move out of the area and victimized horribly by selfishly ill people intent on making all their local fish hermorphadites and cross dressers.
We’ve reported on the early findings with great regularity; how wastewater treatment plants are unable to keep pace with the hormone burden, and how the steroids, aspirins, and mood stimulators, are pouring into our precious creeks and canals in increasing amounts.
West Virginia is the most medicated state in the continental US, followed closely by Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky and Missouri.
“The growth in prescription drug use,” says Barlow, is driven in part by “chronic diseases that are largely preventable and are linked to lifestyle and physical activity.”
OK, call it a shared responsibility – West Virginia and most of the South eat irresponsibly and don’t fish more than a couple car lengths from the parking lot, but emasculating their quarry may be partly to blame.
And their health problems don’t end there. Twelve percent of the population has diabetes, nearly 4% more than the average rate. Worse yet, almost 70% of West Virginians are obese or overweight, more than one-quarter smoke and 30% report having poor mental health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ignoring the above’s health concious bias, it means 70% of West Virginian’s are ardent anglers – and the other 30% are guides – whose only quarry is semi-female fish with morbidly low blood pressure. It guarantees declining licensing revenue, the shuttering of their hatcheries and a crisis that should make us all donate.
With all the abandoned exercise equipment rusting in my watershed I’m thinking West Virginia wouldn’t mind a few of my invasives if it meant restoring masculinity to their gamefish.
All we need is a little compassion – and some donated gym gear.
Tags: estrogen, wastewater treatment, West Virginia, angling brotherhood, fishing, Goodwill, obesity, cross dressing
Scientists claim the below fossil to be that of a rare mayfly.
I think they spent a couple hundred grand of their parent’s hard earned cash on beer drinking and frat parties – more, if they have a Ph.D.
Mayfly, my ass – anyone above the age of six knows that’s a stone fly.
Science. We serve it up so you can hate it all over again.
Tags: fossil insect, mayfly, stonefly, entomology
The Good News is that Sacramento Pikeminnow can reach upwards of 31 pounds, the Bad News is that they don’t taste like Salmon.
Records released by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service reveal that the salmon counts taken at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam are down to one fourth their averages for this time of year. As of July 25th, 596 Chinook salmon had crossed the dam, while the average for years past was 1,916.
However an alarming fact has also been revealed, the Sacramento Pike Minnow, the Chinook’s main predator, has crossed the dam in record numbers, 905 this year compared to an average of 713.
For us coarse fishers it appears the meek will inherit, once all the gleaming fancy fish have been pounded out of existence. That’ll elevate what is left to gamefish status – and the guides will be plying the same holes for the wily “Golden Salmon.”
… and the Pikeminnow’s mortal foe, the Striped Bass is being litigated against by the southern California water districts; their assertion is the Striper is an invasive species and the root cause of Salmon decline.
Once the lawsuit does away with the Stripers and the balance of the Delta is diverted to SoCal compliments of the Governator, we’ll have some odiferous foamy little trickle that San Rafael and Walnut Creek can fight over as to who gets to drink it.
It is singular that despite all the vitriol and law enforcement, despite the millions being spent on habitat restoration, bag limits, gear restrictions, catch and release rhetoric, despite all those countless hardworking folks devoted to the Salmon (including us) – that the Pikeminnow with nothing to protect it are thriving and on the increase …
… and if they tasted like a Twinkie, they too would be extinct.
Tags: Sacramento Pikeminnow, Chinook Salmon, Striped Bass, Governator, coarse fishing, Twinkie, Red Bluff Diversion Dam, water politics, meek shall inherit
I was acting on a tip. A friend of a friend had heard I was chasing inferior mouths in grimy drainage ditches and had marked a large “X” denoting an unknown ditch overflowing with fish.
I always take these with a grain of salt, as folks that use regular tackle can fish a much greater range of water than I can. It was close by, so I risked the pre-dawn bumper-tag with loaded tomato trucks while sliding precariously in their wake.
It’s the height of the tomato harvest, and the cool of darkness allows workers a respite from the 100° daytime temperatures. Harvesters clank away in the fields scraping the tomato plants out of the ground, where their sorted and the undesirables are mashed underfoot. A steady stream of trucks rumble out of the fields spilling tomatoes on every curve, causing the entire county to smell of blood; a cloying mixture of rotting fruit with a hint of the ketchup twang.
I finally found it – technically it was a slough, one of many that feeds the lower Sacramento river, the progeny of countless tomato fields and rice paddies, a toxic plume too deep to wade – and too opaque for flies.
Each body of water, clean or dirty, has its individual style or flair – and despite all the hideous things I’ve stepped in or waded through, this place turned me squeamish.
It’s not the color of the water or the odor therein, I had to face a personal Demon, a special form of Kryptonite that sends me screaming back to the car – something rabid dogs, an angry landowner, or bloodthirsty gangbangers could never do.
Big Man-eating Spiders, thousands of them….
As big around as a half-dollar, and every break in the foliage had 10 or fifteen of them idling in the breeze waiting for some sweaty fisherman to take a face full of creepy crawlies and expire in terror.
My unique flavor of mild arachnophobia is typified by tolerance … until I see the eight-legged SOB, and then his arse is lipstick. The surrounding countryside and my house may belong to “Sir Charles” at night, but come daybreak he’d better dig a deep hole…
It’s an uneasy truce, “don’t see, don’t mash.”
Fortunately all the migrant field hands were at distance, because even though I backed away slowly, the involuntary shudders transformed my normally masculine stride into something a runway model would envy.
Spoken to no one in particular, (A couple of octaves higher than normal) “Nope, no fish there, not worth stringing the rod, Nope.”
(… cue the squealing tires and spray of gravel …)
I had once heard that Japanese anglers have a custom of entering the water on the sight of a spider’s web – as it means no one has fished there recently…
… which neatly accounts for the skeletons I saw.
Tags: arachnophobia, spiders, personal demon, fly fishing, slough, lower Sacramento River, tomato, Sir Charles, Kryptonite
For all the promise of the Internet and the billions spent on ecommerce, I still got jilted at the alter…
There’s only a half dozen phrases in the English language that should never be uttered – most involve women and drinking, but despite all efforts to the contrary I got one of them yesterday:
“Your waders are on back-order.”
Getting a boot full of body temperature toxic slime is a professional risk if you wander amid vegetables and stagnant creeks. The rest of you must endure the unwelcome icy chill of the Pristine, which is nearly as bad, but lacks the flesh eating bacteria of the Central Valley. A slide down the bank followed by an unwelcome trickle at the knee or calf is typically shrugged off as fate.
Any gum-chewing teenybopper clerk should know that waders are always a last minute purchase and should never be back-ordered. We swore we’d replace them after the last trip – and blew that task off as the next outing was inconceivably distant; now we’ve got 24 hours before our next adventure and need replacements yesterday, dammit.
… now we’re staring “bare-assed” in the face and it’s all his fault.
My fault really, another reason I should’ve sprung for the Simm’s Headwaters Pants versus the Hodgman Wadewell II – despite their cost, the fellow at the shop would’ve been a little sympathetic …
Foul oaths, fist pounding rage and generous dollop of thumb-sucking in the fetal position. Eventually you find the four ounce tube of Aqua seal and “toothpaste slurry” every seam and surface abrasion.
Out comes the spackle knife and you cover everything else for good measure – hoping it’ll dry by morning. All the while you know it’s not going to do any good – other than to reduce the interior diameter to the point you have to roll them on like lace stockings.
… which can be titillating to be sure, but damp thigh-highs aren’t as comfortable as a couple of well drinks would make them appear ..
Tags: Aqua seal, leaking waders, toothpaste, toxic slime, backorder, ecommerce, Simm’s Headwater pants, Hodgeman Wadewell II, Internet
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
Few items are as indispensable to fishermen as duct tape, but it too may have succumbed to advanced helical technology and high modulus with the debut of Rescue Tape.
• Incredible 700 PSI Tensile Strength!
• Insulates 8,000 Volts per layer!
• Withstands 500° F Degrees of heat!
• Remains flexible to -85° F! (-60° C)
Wader Repair will never be the same, with its ability to insulate me from lightning, climate change, and the hoary Northern sub-zero temperatures, my only complaint is it doesn’t taste like red licorice.
… hell, I can even tie flies with it.
Application is child’s play, merely wrap your soggy tuna sandwich in six or seven feet of Rescue Tape, and if you break a rod, spring a leak, or need a quick tourniquet, discard the sandwich and take a half dozen quick wraps around the offending limb …
tags: wader repair, rescue tape, radiator hose, fishing, sandwich