Category Archives: Nothing to do with Fishing

Why the trout fairy tale no longer has a happy ending

Global_Warming I’m a sucker for the dim view, given that economics and temperature mixed with apathy and the potential decline in size of the US government adds up to be  the worst scenario, not the neutral agent others envision.

The short version is that a panel of 11 scientists from Colorado State University, Trout Unlimited, the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, have released a study of four trout species that suggests we’ll be losing half of all trout habitat over the next seventy years.

Most of that loss will be attributed to rising temperatures and global warming, and depending on which warming model is chosen – will dictate how much and how fast – and determines whether we care whether girls use saddle hackles or mule dung in their hair …

Congress is adamant the size of government must be reduced, given we owe most of the GDP to those countries still able to buy our debt, and depending on how much we decide to divest, will be eager to prune wasteful dollars funding watchdog agencies and trout planting – areas that hinder industry from creating  millions of jobs, or serve only the privileged few … us fishermen.

Trout Unlimited and every privately funded conservation group added together couldn’t save  a single river, especially so due to the waves of genetically-superior invasives outcompeting historical residents. Carp might be able to survive a couple of decades longer, but standoffish salmonids have no chance whatsoever.

Mostly because you guys balked when AquaBounty insisted they could insert the gene for sharp teeth and claws – which would’ve allowed them to go toe to toe with all those foreign regiments climbing out of the bilge water.

Instead you left their fate to boards of directors filled with well meaning retirees gashing themselves over “how come they let them trout’s die,” whose wailing lent wings to global warming.

health_careThis being the age of Tea Parties, Beauty Queens from Alaska, and indistinguishable political parties, who’ve got no reason to keep industry in check, or slow their exploitation. Well meaning types weakened by foreclosure and the enforced idleness that comes with 24 months of unemployment, are likely to let down their at the lure of lasting and permanent jobs. Most of those will be cleaning the Pristine because BP fracked it, or something equally poisonous.

That’s more than likely the causal agent of most of the habitat loss, only the body scientific is reluctant to confess and endanger additional grants.

Should the globe warm a couple of degrees as science is predicting, that’ll clear both coastline and interior so they can pave and erect great glass edifices proclaiming our victory over Nature; how we booted Bambi from crapping on all that real estate – and gave her a spacious suite at the Zoo as reward …

They’re hurting, these men of a certain age. Losing their livelihood isn’t the only “transition” they’re going through. Dr. Jed Diamond, author of Surviving Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome, calls it a “double whammy.” The first: “a change of life, hormonally based, affecting our psychology and emotions from 40 to 55.” The second: unemployment. “It’s devastating. The extreme reaction is suicide, but before you get there, there’s irritability and anger, fatigue, loss of energy, withdrawal, drinking, more fights with their wives.”

– from Dead Suit Walking, Newsweek Magazine

Newsweek calls our demographic the “Beached White Male” (BWM), suggesting the real casualties of the recession being middle aged college educated white boys. Add in all them guts spilling over waistlines and the Type II Diabetes epidemic that’s about to leave the streets paved in corpses –  and our generation will have destroyed most of the tillable sections of the globe, as well as eliminated any need for (non televised) sports, the out of doors, and John Wayne …

… then paid the price in one spasmodic orgy of cholesterol.

Which I find strangely appropriate, proof that despite all the advances of science we’ve never listened to anything other than our reproductive organs and our gut – settling the whole issue about whether we read it for the pictures or the articles …

One long keening cry punctuated by the ripple of small arms

I keep thinking of the scene from Rocky where he’s ordered to become “greasy fast” by chasing  chickens …

culled_Chickens … and why there’s liable to be enough young girls running around chasing saddle hackle that their caterwauling will rival the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan show …

I tried to book a flight, figuring thirty or forty saddles still made it a paying proposition, and what few that were captured by hand would pale compared the chickens run over, shot, stabbed, or euthanized by wardens, but was elbowed aside by a Girl Scout troop, who promptly commandeered the aircraft …

One if by land, two if by trout stream

As common as stop signs Given the volume of invasive species and how quickly they’re encroaching by both land and sea, at some point you throw up your hands and cease keeping score …

The Little Stinking just started its third dunking in raw herbicide for some 250 known outbreaks of intrusive grass. Its banks still covered with faux bamboo they attempted to eradicate last year, and the sprayed green outlines of the erosion preventing brush CalTrans introduced to protect overpasses that wound up enveloping the native fauna instead.

Reminiscent of some of the disarray shown in some conservation organization’s trout plants, wherein they wad rainbows or browns where Cutthroats and Brookies live … only to Rotenone everything year’s later in an attempt to restore native stocks.

So many self inflicted wounds and botched attempts at eradication that you can’t help but wonder, “… if you persist on doing this why am I supposed to drop everything and express outrage over something else that’s entered the country unbidden? …”

The herbicide sprayed around the creek to control plants is done so with no regard for water quality, and the green silhouettes of invasives left on the ground by overspray is testimony to what’ll be on the large sign telling me  – were I pregnant I shouldn’t even be walking below the high water mark, let alone eat something from there.

It’s tough to imagine not doing anything about all of this, but as each government appointed czar tells me they’ve declared war on something smaller than me, I have to ask, “…is this to be a stand up fight or another bud hunt?”

Given the War on Drugs has been going for a couple of decades, and the effects are noticeable in most California neighborhoods. Before we had to walk to the street corner to score reefer – now the vendor is mid block, and a subsidiary of Wal-Mart.

… and with global warming in full swing and the Pristine slowly baking in slightly higher temperatures year after year, it really is no surprise that the Jewel of California, Lake Tahoe – issued yet another horrific finding, how they’ve discovered Smallmouth Bass in the lake.

That on the heels of finding almost everything else swimming in the slowly clouding SOB, including largemouth bass, invasive mussels, and Jimmy Hoffa.

Despite the Republican candidates insistence on clamping down on illegal aliens, I’m thinking most of the federal funding that’s aiding states in combating foreign biologics will be drying up soon. Victim of the trillions of dollars in cuts we’ll mandate as part of a balanced budget amendment or something similar.

Oddly enough a piece of me is beginning to think that may not be such a bad idea. We called ourselves “Native Sons” if we can trace our roots to the Revolutionary War, which at last count was only four or five generations from our current coddled flavor …

We may want to rethink all this costly suppression and just admit that anything we can’t eat to extinction is granted native status, making us and our declining environment all the hardier. All we’ll have to do is come to grips with Lahontan trout having ate all the Coelacanth, and what a shame that was.

We were always fighting symptoms rather than the problem anyways. The lack of a mid-Atlantic or mid-Pacific ballast purge ensures everything can get here quickly and with no ill effects, and with airline travel and pressurized cabins absent a placental barrier, it’s only a matter of time before each continent enjoys the same complement of “native” flora and fauna, thanks to the efficiency of the jet engine.

I may have to darken them a shade or three

The Hawtness Hisself

After I kicked my faithful fifty-something gal-friend to the curb, I knew I needed some image work to make me marketable on the eSexualPredator sites.

It’s part of that larger health kick wherein sixty is the new fifty-seven …

… and change.

I’ve got the last great stash of foot long Grizzly hackles in captivity, and figured now that you lads have cashed yours in for a new rod or boat, I’ll leverage them hoping they’ll add a hint of vulnerable-fetching to my more traditional stern and taciturn.

The UPS man was mostly speechless. I could tell he was smitten given his propensity to stammer … which I’ll consider success of a sort …

Hopefully it’ll involve a loincloth and a dull Buck knife

It’s increasingly important for us torturers of living creatures to live up to the collective Metrosexual expectation at work, given that we freely admit to sleeping on the ground, and consider bathing optional.

We’re like the city kid that bought his first four wheel drive vehicle, way down deep he knows it needs a deep mud puddle to gain legitimacy.

And while both Congress and our beloved President are lecturing us on the benefits of compromise, suggesting both Executive and Legislative branches could use a leavening of us compromise-prone sporting types, who dearly love those grandiose boasts at the water cooler, yet compromise so the Missus can share the same tent …

Kinda clean with a smoky edge

… when our real motive is to claim we rubbed ourselves down with greasy pork belly before chasing all them ravenous Grizzlies away from our trembling and fearful family.

It was them or me, so I kissed my wife goodbye then rubbed the bar on my nether regions and ran hell for leather at the biggest one, the one drooling the mostest …

As the only thing better than stretching the truth … is a complete outdoors falsehood involving loincloths, ravenous predators bigger than us, and a dull Buck knife.

Risk public ridicule and earn a hat in the doing

The Singlebarbed Grease Magnet

At one point both of them were black. The one on the left is what I’ve been wearing the last couple of years; fragrant with stale human, pomade, and insect repellant – the one on the right is clean, sterile, and looking for a home …

Them as has commented plenty are to be admired, given their penchant to lead chin first into the public space with wit, insults, and factual detail that corrects me when I get hasty or sloppy.

Ed Stephens, John Peipon, Jim Batsel, JP2, and Peter Vroedeweij – drop me a note with a mailing address, you’ve all earned a new brim.

… and yes, in polite company I’ll wear a clean one, maybe …

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It makes us the more efficient predator

While the continuing saga of the Asian carp has done wonders for guided bow fishing, the rest of us unfortunates have largely been shut out of this orgy of sanctioned killing  …

The Good News is that all that is about to change now that ballistics experts have invented “Super Cavitating” rifle ammo which allows hunters to fire into the water, hunt underwater, or fire onto the bank from underwater, rendering it all child’s play save for the Kentucky Windage component of optical diffraction.

Now, the frustrated angler can simply yank hogleg and blow hell out of large wild fish with single and barbless, fully jacketed projectiles that will retain its cladding and ensure lead from large caliber projectiles is not released into the watershed.

We’ll be treated to guided carp hunts featuring jet boats and quad-fifties, where success is measured solely by expended ammo, not limited by some arbitrary or capricious fish & game ruling.

Like Dim Sum, we count the discarded ammo cans and then add in a tip.

 

“The ammo becomes a true extension of the hunter’s desire to kill in any environment,” says US Army ballistics expert, Madison Aveenu. “It offers a more fluid transmission of energy from wet to dry. The eye sees the shot it wants to make and is translated to the ammo by the gun instantaneously.”

The real question is the fat content of raw crude

fish-sticks It would be easier if fishermen actually liked eating fish, but most of you simply enjoy torturing them and put them back instead.

By doing so, the Federal government would like you to know you’re adding to the trade deficit, depriving the US of thousands of domestic jobs, as well as propagating the notion you’re a complete prick.

That’s because they mine your Facebook page and know you scored an exotic and imported Fillet O’ Fish on your return to civilization. Ignoring domestic fish flesh in favor of adding to the nearly insurmountable debt burden your children must assume …

… yes, the very same children that flipped you off when you inquired would any of them trade joystick for some mountain air that weekend …

The Obama administration is fast tracking approvals on our domestic waters for fish farming so we lower imports of those flaccid fillets in favor of growing our own – in the heady soup of nitrogenous fertilizers and female hormones that pour out of our coastal waterways.

Michael Rubino, who heads NOAA’s aquaculture program, said expanding the area where fish farming is allowed will boost production, create new jobs and help ease concerns that some imported seafood may be tainted with industrial wastes.

* snicker

Naturally it’s the Gulf of Mexico that’s the initial recipient. Converting all those idle oil platforms and out of work fishermen into pellet shoveling fish ranches, repopulating those empty miles of taint with genetically engineered freaks capable of reproduction without cell division …

Pump a couple gallons of crude off the bottom, scratch match, and Gortons can bring the refrigerator ship alongside and pack hell out of fish sticks – breaded or unleaded … whichever they’ve contracted for …

… and we can watch them help themselves to our tax dollars when the oxygen-deprived dead zone shifts their way and wipes out the fish, the sea lice, and anything else wet …

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.

Then again they may be confused about their reason for being

Dear Large Outdoor Clothier,

Neon Persimmon Pink Gentlemen, I received the  shirt you’d asked me to review just before Memorial Day weekend.

Normally I would have considered the timing perfect, as that three day holiday is when all of us take to the woods intent on sport.

I would have subjected your clothing to an exhaustive battery of tests, wearing it overly long (ignoring the grimaces of my companions)and ensuring my commentary was both learned and factual.

Unfortunately, I cannot bring myself to remove it from its sterile wrapper, much less wear the damn thing.

This is not clothing suitable for the outdoors, this is the type of shirt you wear if you want to have sex in the cramped stall of a public restroom with a fellow angler.

I’m unsure what you call the color internally, but I would ask you how am I supposed to blend into my surroundings should I stalk a large brown trout feeding in the shallows?

Was I fortunate enough to have a pod of wary Bonefish within casting range, how am I to deliver the fly when my clothing is eye-watering, capable of searing a fish retina with prolonged exposure – and cannot help but make everything within a hundred yards flee without hesitation?

I consented to this arrangement as you made my last fishing vest. It lasted 25 years, and was a testament to your long history of quality outdoors garments. It was so well put together your stitching made me – and it – nearly invincible.

Those memories made me stray from my core competencies and entertain the idea that a shirt of similar construction and durability could become essential equipment in the woods, and I was qualified to judge both its fit and function.

Instead I receive a shirt suitable to flag the Coast Guard should I become shipwrecked on a deserted island, or making me a fashion plate should I wish to clink glasses with Bernie Madoff on the fantail of his yacht …

… with all his new boyfriends, and me blushing fetchingly.

An outdoor clothing company has the responsibility to make quality clothing to assist the hunter or angler, and should not insist that the cut of the garment or its color work at cross purposes to its owner.

If it does, it’s confused about its reason for being.

I figure it was the work of those merry pranksters in your marketing department – who read my column on occasion. Figuring they owed me one for all them “lifestyle” digs, and good sports all, they insisted you send me one in the heart-stopping “unsalable” color.

It was a great gag, especially as it was at my expense.

Full Disclosure: I’m returning the garment to its maker unreviewed, unopened, and at my earliest convenience, never to stray into riskier territory than a green Pendleton …