They should market it as a “waderless wading system”

Now that the Governor’s on the prowl – bent on trimming wasteful government spending, all the service unions are busy pointing fingers at one another trying to deflect attention to the the other guy, and how “them other fellows have been living really high on the Hog, your Frugalness .. “

Fish & Game’s new trout planting system

Fish & Game appears to have caught the Governor’s eye with their 13 million dollar deepwater trout planting system. Naturally the fingerling trout’s chance of survival is aided by a deep water release, versus running the gauntlet of salmon eggs and Cheetos thrown by eager anglers following the hatchery truck.

The governor is fuming, suggesting that planting trout for anglers to dabble with is an inappropriate waste of tax payer dollars, and amounts to an “angler bailout”, akin to greedy Wall Street investment professionals and banks.

When reminded that licensing fees are what pays for the hatchery system and the rainbow trout generated, Governor Brown responded with, “I already took them dollars months ago, they’re mine already, so that’s no longer true.”

A wild trout and a steelhead are the same thing

steelhead trout Research on Oregon’s Hood River steelhead population suggests a bit of good news may be in the offing. Wild trout inhabiting the river are the source of 40% of the genetic makeup of its steelhead brethren, which is neatly offsetting the “watering down” of genetic makeup due to hatchery fish.

The trout and steelhead are the same species, interbreeding between the two being commonplace.

In a field study in Hood River, Ore., researchers used DNA analysis to determine that up to 40 percent of the genes in returning steelhead came from wild rainbow trout, rather than other steelhead. And only 1 percent of the genes came from “residualized” hatchery fish – fish that had stayed in the stream and mated, but not gone to sea as intended by the hatchery program.

– via PhysOrg.com

No mention was made whether additional complications arise from hatchery steelhead and hatchery trout being planted in the same watershed, and whether that would prove an additional source of dilution.

The study reveals a complex picture of wild trout and steelhead intermingling as they reproduce. A steelhead might be produced by the spawning of two steelhead, two wild trout, or a returning steelhead and a trout.

Given the research covers a 15 year span and analysis of 12,000 steelhead, it’s fairly compelling. As scientists still cannot explain why one fish heads for saltwater and another doesn’t, it’s nice to know that as we pull down some of these old irrigation dams that are no longer needed, one or more small tributaries might contain remnants of the original strain trout – and therefore the original strain of steelhead, once thought extinct.

Makes for an unusual management issue. Many scientists are already on record that trout and steelhead are the same fish, and given that its no longer two distinct species how can you persist separate regulations for each? It would seem a canny lawyer could argue a 10 fish limit, 20 in possession held for the larger oceangoing variant as well as those pumped into the water at the Bridge Pool …

Coldstream Outfitters, I buy because Ma says so

The roots of change always seems to start with a couple of old guys whose ardor for fishing overcomes their good sense. It’s a fishing truism that hungry and willing fish make the trek up or downstream half as long, with each new bend or riffle gleefully exploited given the fish are in the mood to eat, and us fishermen always in the mood to feed them.

While I’m acclimated to the local conditions a bit better than Older Bro, the both of us recognize that the Sweet Bird of Youth has long flown away, leaving us portly and out-of-shape anglers, versus the virile and manly form of our earlier misspent youth.

While we wheeze loudly cursing the scorching sands and unstable cobble, husbanding our water supply as best we can while looking for shade, it doesn’t take more than a single trip-gone-bad before we’re resolving to bring more water, less flies, and lighter gear.

coldstreamTraditional vests with their multiple layers of fabric and pockets, whose siren song lures anglers into carrying twice as much as needed,  are a hellish addition to an angler’s heat burden. More so when temperatures enter triple digits, something all too common in my summers.

What’s needed is a reduced flavor, something that will accommodate a couple boxes of flies, a couple spools of tippet, nippers and forceps, a pocket or two on the front for split shot. leaders, or indicators, and the rest left at camp with the packrat SIMM’s vest, with its hoard of extra pockets filled with the forgotten debris of dozens of fishing trips, most of which is carried needlessly.

Learning from our “near death” experiences – made doubly so by the proximity to air conditioning and cold beer, and armed with a couple soiled napkins, we roughed a Brownliner Special design, something  that could be worn in blazing hot weather that wouldn’t interfere with a hydration pack, that would provide basic storage.

Brownliner_Special_Camo

It’s a shorty vest, which have nearly disappeared off the market with the dominance of the traditional length vests. Less material adds less heat and allows me to use the same model Shad fishing without having to dry my vest and all my fly boxes after each trip. More importantly as it doesn’t get wet, I’ve lowered my invasive species absorption rate – and can trundle around different watersheds without having multiple vests drying in the garage.

… which my brother would as soon change, given his preference for us owning three or four each, just to be safe …

With nothing in the back of the vest save a neck level D-ring, you can wear a hydration pack with comfort.

G10 Front View

Work requires me to wear a cell phone on certain weekends, so I had him add a cell pocket on the shoulder (removable) that will accommodate most models of smart phone. High on the shoulder means a better survivability rate for non-waterproof cameras and phones.

Mine has survived three such dunkings without damaging the phone – as most mishaps aren’t full submergence.

G10 Back View

Cinched tight with the front snapped together you should be able to do away with your wading belt altogether, given the vest has your belt built into it.

Extra spool pockets lower the chest-area bulk by locating them on the belt versus a front pocket.

Shad fishing often requires two or three sinking shooting heads of different density on different spools, adding additional bulk to the front pockets and increasing water drag on a traditional length vest. The G10 keeps them out of the water and dry.

I was relieved when I got my prototype, now that Older Bro had something to trade for the fistfuls of flies I donate each trip, I assumed I’d be able to return the favor by light-fingering some extra spools pockets. Ma unfortunately rose to his defense, “… he did all that sewing, so you fork over some cash to your Bro …”

Full Disclosure: Despite being kin to the vendor, Ma insisted I pay the fly stealing SOB full retail, blood being thicker than water stops short of entitling me to a discount apparently ..

It pains me to admit that my brother’s handiwork was most appreciated this last summer. The creek might have had low fish populations, and the Shad coincided with heavy releases from the dam, but I was able to cut quite the figure as I pirouetted through the humidity and heat of the brown water.

Handmade in the US of A, and every stitch sewn by a retard Renaissance man …

Where we pay a little homage to the cockroach of the Skies

At times I think even PETA hates starlings, universally reviled – it seems even little old ladies consider them cockroaches of the sky …

When I lived in the woods the local rice farmers would pay for your ammo, sending great groups of killers onto the paddies to blow hell out of yellow-hooded and redwing blackbirds. I tried desperately to come up with fly patterns that would allow for an orderly disposal of so many carcasses and failed miserably…

… something about black makes it an absolute must-have – but like licorice, you “must-have” in small doses …

Having re-upped the half dozen skins I keep around, and flush with small, soft black hackle – I’m reminded of all the other uses it was put to back in the day…

Starling_Skins

Strangely enough outside of using it for black hackle on all forms of sinking flies, mostly I used it as Poor Man’s Jungle Cock …

Starling_Feather

Most of the hackle feathers on the back and shoulders have a nicely defined yellow tip. Grab a pair of them and slide one down about a quarter inch …

starling_cocque A bit of wax or vinyl head cement (flexible) is all that’s needed to transform a tawdry little bird into something a rich kid that likes flutes is willing to steal for …

… knowing where he’s headed we’ll observe a brief moment of solemn knowing his fly tying is bound to suffer in the face of the sudden demand for his flautist skills …

The Faces of Genius: Reduced Bomber

This was a reduction of a Upper Sacramento classic, Ted Fay’s Black Bomber. Plenty can be said of Ted Fay flies, most would say “really heavy.” They weren’t graceful or slender, and I dreaded a big order as it was the only fly I had to tie holding my nose. Not that the flies were bad, they just required so much lead they were unstable.

You could spin the brown or black chenille body around the hook with ease.

Gary Warren was a longtime resident of Burney, California, and knew both Joe Kimsey and Ted Fay. In between guiding Hat Creek and Fall River, he’d fish the Upper Sacramento and adapted the fly to Hat Creek and the Pit River by removing the grizzly wings and the second and third layer of lead wire.

Thankfully, you could now throw the fly without fear of concussion or outright amputation.

He kept the “Bomber” moniker, but I altered the name to distinguish the original and its adaptation.

Gary Warren's Reduced Bomber

Grizzly hackle tail, tied short. Brown or Black chenille for the body, and three turns of undersized grizzly saddle at the head. Gary preferred ring eyed hooks – as shown above.

In looking at all these flies there’s little question that simplicity rules. They sit in your fly box all alone until you’ve tried all the sexy stuff, and when you finally succumb and lash it to your leader, you remember all the superlatives your buddy used when he handed them to you.

I was farmed to be Wild would be more precise

seafood2 Now that the US seafood industry is again flexing its marketing muscle, having been stung with the backlash of Frankenfish, you’ve got to wonder how Madison Avenue will wring wholesome and organic from the vision of a muscular misshapen fish bumping into the sides of a plastic kiddy pool.

Like all the other industry trade groups, the seafood industry is searching for a catchy slogan like, “the other extruded white meat-like substance,” or something that encourages Mom to pause and spend some of her diminished family food budget.

Most of the slogans posted in my watersheds suggest for either fresh or salt, the slogan should be, “one meal a week, less if you’re pregnant.” That’s a marketing downer, and consultants would suggest something upbeat in the face of  industry-wide chaos, with third world nations impounding each other’s fishing fleets, and dispossessed Somalian fishermen trading up from tuna to oil tankers, and chemical waste leaching into the environment, I’m not so sure that our pal Frankenfish isn’t a natural spokesman for this new normal.

Baseball players suck up steroids and claim otherwise, politicians tap dance in airport washrooms, and fly tiers attempt to steal the last Bird of Paradise, and with all of our heroes gone, why not opt for some scarred stem cell orphan, whose likeness can be accented deftly with, ” I was born to be Wild.”

“Farmed to be Wild” might be more appropriate, but it beats crap out of a cartoon tuna.

(Most of the members of Steppenwolf should be in managed care by now, and shouldn’t put up much of a row …)

The Faces of Genius: Chartreuse Unknown

As much as we’d like it to warn us, great flies have no aura about them when removed from the vise, no halo to clue its creator to cease embellishment, as his creation will be the bane of local gamefish for the next couple of decades.

We’ve taken it for granted we can spot fishy potential and great colors, most of us have fly boxes bulging with imitation bug parts, gooey soft textures, and colors dripping with authenticity.

The fact we carry so many is clue that we really can’t tell what a fish thinks, likes, or eats.

To remind me that I know nothing of fish vision, let alone what stimulates taste, I would add special flies to my driver’s side sun visor. Flies that caught 20” fish and those whose consistent greatness had earned them a place in what would become a testimonial to what large wary fish preferred …

… and why gooey textures, feelers, and bug parts didn’t appear in any of the really successful flies, most of which didn’t even look buggy to my eye.

chartreuse_unknown

Chartreuse floss body overwrapped with fine copper wire, no particular pattern – just lay on forty turns until about half the chartreuse has been covered. Two turns of dark partridge hackle and a grizzly tail completes this unknown work.

… no eyeballs, no individual legs, and a primary color that you’d be hard pressed to find in Mother Nature…

No name that I can remember, given to me by a client that swore by it, and after my lip curled uncontrollably, I let him try it just so he’d stop fidgeting with his flies and start fishing all my better ideas.

… fortunately we didn’t need any of my flies.

Tied in sizes from #10 – #14, he mentioned how he’d assumed the fish ate it as a green caddis.

As I’ve recently unearthed the box of flies I removed from that visor, I figured to share some of the nameless patterns you’ll never see in any fly shop, just to give those that are struggling with invention a glimpse of pure death – and how little refinement and entomology is really needed.

We got brown bugs, they got brown bugs … which is why old flies persist

Fiddling with classics Every fly fisherman has their moment. A big fish lounging in the shallows and a favorable breeze leaves the fly just where you want, floating idly down to the ravenous white maw below. Some are unfortunate enough to get a head-bob, or flare of fins upwards, some even see greatness coming up through the water column on an intercept, only to be thwarted by some imaginary hair out of place, or the unseen pull of drag.

Fly tiers have their moment too. Despite beginner vise and too-thick thread, poorly lighted kitchen table and recalcitrant grizzly hackle, somehow perfection comes of adversity. Proportions correct, body graceful and tapered, no glue obscuring the eye – and if wasn’t for the yellow saddle hackle tail, which substituted for brown, it might be the best fly you’ve ever tied.

Naturally you rushed to show Sensei, the relative or friend that got you into this cash-hemorrhaging hobby, whose wise council is sought on all major purchases and fly related topics, and rather than being appreciative, he becomes irate and indignant.

“That’s not an Adam’s, an ADAM’s does not have a yellow tail, an Adam’s has on occasion an all-brown tail, sometimes a mixed grizzly and brown tail, but never … and I mean NEVER … does a fly as noble and historic as an ADAM’s sport a goddamn yellow tail.”

( … fly then tossed onto table top like the Unclean thing.)

For the burgeoning fly tier it’s a crushing experience, no one noticed it was technically perfect, a fact ignored in the great upwelling of indignity resulting from experimenting with a time honored classic. No pause in the backlash oratory to claim innocence, the yellow used only because you lacked brown hackle long enough …

The sting of that experience destined to stifle creativity for years …

As odd as it sounds, it may be one of the common questions asked by a fledgling tier, “… when is it OK to invent your own flies?”

It would be safe to say that most fly fishermen learn to cast and fish before learning to tie flies. Those two disciplines will give the angler experience in the forces destined to tear flies apart, and give an appreciation for some of the attributes flies require, like an eye clear of  hair, glue, or foreign substance.

Knowing why each component of the fly exists and the qualities it lends to making the pattern successful would be beneficial, as would the ability to secure the component correctly, ensuring some knowledge of stressors and points of fragility may be necessary as well.

As learning to tie flies is a study in substitution, considering the thousands of colors and materials we’ll accumulate, the last element would be some expertise in the materials themselves, so you can substitute freely, or tinker with patterns and evolve them into your style of fishing more effectively.

Which hair floats, which synthetics are tough and resist tearing, which feathers are stiff and resilient and can be used for tails. Expertise at this level comes from a lifetime of fishing and tying, and as knowledge grows so will the degree of tinkering.

… with only the sting of our first accidental foray to haunt us.

After many years of blind adherence to pattern books and featured flies in magazines, what actually makes a great fly is still unknown. There’s no visible qualities that distinguish an experimental from a time-honored classic, nothing to denote why an Elk Hair Caddis is found in every fly shop when something similar isn’t.

What’s surprising is that nationwide adoption has no real criteria other than good marketing and commercial availability. Which is why eastern dry flies continue to dominate every shop’s dry fly selection, even if the original insects don’t exist on the West coast, or the western variety is of different color.

How fast those classic fly bins empty is a function of perceived beauty, or perceived buggy-ness, and has little to do with local bugs and its real world efficacy.

We got brown bugs, they got brown bugs … which is why old flies persist.

Thankfully fish are stupid, which is why cigarette butts are struck as often as Female Cahill’s tied with the yellow egg sacs, and fish eat flies twice the size of those hatching, which keeps us aging starlets in the game.

In short, a new tier should start experimenting once he’s learned how to mechanically build a fly, and should feel free to start fresh or alter classic flies regardless of their history and legacy.

… and the opinions of their buddies, who’ll feel entitled to free flies for life anyways.

Fly tying is already hard enough with plenty willing to heap scorn on your best efforts. Too many tiers remain constrained and dormant assuming that a classic pattern will catch more fish than a wild idea spawned by a curl of colorful floss and a dash of whimsy.

Make millions leveraging the power of the Internet

It’s a familiar story, late night infomercial hawks guaranteed millions using system of made-for-you websites that will make merchandise fly off shelves and change your life forever.

What you get is some search engine optimized website with a web crawler that searches the entire Internet for pages that contain keywords, like “trout” or “dry fly” – and when you get a match you harvest the page and put it on your site, sometimes even claiming you authored it.

Now with hundreds of pages of “free” content you start selling stuff …

… like Coachmen Motor homes …

More than one exists?

… actually you’re skimming existing sales from other sites and eBay, but harvesting all that goody without any real intelligence or discrimination yielded 13 pages of dry flies, etched cocktail glasses, tweed ties, and enough drink coasters to tile a couple of bathrooms.

… and the occasional motorhome.

As this “guaranteed” system probably allows you to call the Help Desk to guide you through depositing dump trucks full of money, you might ask them to refine the search criteria to at least get content of similar genre.

Tough when your website of guaranteed riches stumbles onto someone else’s reserved word.

Franken-fly … and he’s got little tiny studs in his neck

The Wastewater Stone, the Squalid Most of you recognize that noble profile, that harbinger of clean water, the stonefly, hisself …

What you don’t know is this stonefly came out of my soiled little creek, the product of “kitchen table” genetic engineering.

Grab some adult females from the Pristine, squeeze the arse end into a vial, mix with a proprietary blend of fertilizer and toilet water and toss into your favorite dirty little creek. The law of averages suggests an unknown chemical cocktail will gestate a half dozen mutations, and if none eat you, it’s viable as brood stock.

As everyone is hopping on the Skwala bandwagon, naming every darkish, smallish stonefly found in wintertime a  “Skwala” – I’m calling mine a “Skwalid”, to distinguish it’s taste for brown water and the hearty genes necessary to tolerate agricultural waste.

In France and Italy it’s vineyards or olives. Generations of careful grafting and documented lineage, with each successive planting a bit closer to perfection.

Me, I’m in it for the money.

I can make a fortune selling Skwalids to homeowners underwater on their mortgages, looking for that something extra to sweeten that horrific drop in value.

Throw a fistful of Skwalids into whichever toxic rivulet drains your subdivision, and if a prospective buyer shows any hesitancy you can thrust a dripping specimen into his palm, pointing out your home is a shrine to eco-friendly, and how you wouldn’t blink at washing your dishes in the local wastewater.

Stoneflies? Well they’re proof positive …