We’ll call it Sarah Palin’s California suburbs

Put Rabbit back on the menu

As Sarah Palin has just been booted off The Learning Channel, and has confessed to gunning down anything that walks, crawls, or swims – and especially if it walked, crawled, or swam over our borders illegally, you may want to entertain the notion of a charismatic appointed to the inevitable Czarina of Invasive Diets position.

Relying on state and federal government intervention is a waste of time, and private funding for environmental issues has always been unreliable. What’s really needed is a couple of trendy eateries, coupled with an anemic New Age apostle proclaiming invasive Jihad, and all those Vegans will be dining on Rock Snot & Chickpeas, or Quinoa Snot, content in the knowledge they did what fishermen can’t -save a couple continents and thousands of sentient species from extermination.

“When human beings decide that something tastes good, we can take them down pretty quickly,” he said. Our taste for passenger pigeon wiped that species out, he said. What if we developed a similar taste for starlings? “

– via The New York Times

It’s plain that an unwanted plant or animal from another continent or planet, has only a single natural enemy, and that’s us. Those that make a good facsimile to a hamburger, or a tasty condiment on same are simply doomed, the rest we’ll get around to after the tasty stuff has all been vanished.

Like the “Victory Garden” of generations past, we only need to give the issue an attractive enough wrapper so that we’re fighting each other over who’s more so than the rest of the neighborhood, who thought of it first, and who’s not carrying their weight …

… and if science was something other than a bunch of aloof eggheads, they could remind us of the unusual reservoir of age-defying Omega-3’s contained in a single Zebra Mussel.

The New York Times suggests a diet based on purely invasives would make the practitioner an “invasivore”  – and has gathered an article on the like minded; everything from an “Invasive Diet” plan, to broadening scope to anything that shows up unwanted, including the neighbor’s cat.

Most of the stuff we stalk and eat already has serving suggestions, “no more than one meal per month, less if you’re pregnant.” I can’t imagine a steady diet of Purina can add anything worse to that mix.

It was a test of my loyalties

Mile39_Dawn

This was the scene from Mile 33 this morning, you were still showering and cursing the fact you had to go to work.

I was too, but being on vacation means I’m vacationing from the paying job, and still required to slave away on those that don’t pay.

… neatly describing the fly fishing industry in its entirety.

Part of my New Year’s resolve meant my forthcoming vacation could be spent on trimming my pear shaped frame back into something recognizable. The combination of foreswearing tobacco and holiday excess had allowed me to become soft and weak, and when looking down I could no longer see toes, or any other important anatomical feature.

It was Mile 36 that put me in a quandary, those invisible toes in proximity to discarded sharp objects. The beauty of “smart” technology allows me to quickly check whether the contents are uppers or downers, and whether I should stab the gluteus or merely lick the damn thing.

copaxoneAs I bent down to gather them up for proper disposal, a passing motorist smacked a mourning dove which rolled to a stop at my feet.

Too damn much coincidence for my tastes, so I glance skyward and mention to no one in particular, “Old Man, this is most certainly a test of some sort, and I’m not falling for it.”

Bravado mostly, I knew the bird would be there tomorrow, most likely with a lot less livestock than its current fresh flavor.

Copaxone is a drug for those that suffer from MS. Why they felt it necessary to share is beyond my comprehension, yet quite popular in both creek and roadbed.

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How to get top price for unwanted fly tackle on eBay

It’s certain to alter my eBay experience and while the bricks and mortar side of the tackle business will likely retaliate with skimpy dressed sandwich-board waving nubiles, Grandma and the local constabulary will make short shrift of a vendor that succumbs to temptation.

She claims her earlier sales were cancelled due to a violation of eBay’s sales policy, and now that she’s read the fine print she’s back on the Internet with even more to sell …

That's $33 per lure

… which, given her immaculate feedback rating is liable to drive squinch-faced Meg Whitman into a tirade of four letter words unparalleled in today’s modern boardroom.

I’ll tip the hat to the innate display of creativity. Next time I’ve got some broken 10-speed or extra lawn furniture I’ll be sure to frame them nicely between Miss June 2001’s … er … obvious talents.

Like everything else on the Internet, if it looks soft and smells sweet, it’s a pipedream obscuring some unshaven truck driver from Des Moines.

Lord help us all if she’s got rods to sell … you be sure to alert me.

Your flies didn’t participate in all that holiday food, but they can stand a bit of reducing just the same

With a bit of sun poking through the weather, I’m reminded that fish exist and I’ve got holes aplenty in my fly box from last season. This time it’s the flymphs that took a beating – and it being the self pronounced Second Coming of the Attractors, I’m restocking not the dull and drab – but all the colorful patterns I hid from prying eyes while telling the crowd it was something I’d made from ocher sock yarn …

… which reminded me further of the hellish time I had learning how to reduce a dressing down to just enough to be ate consistently, but not smothering the pattern with too much material.

Starling & Green

The lower left fly is tied with an intact Starling hackle, while the rest of the flies are tied with one side of the feather removed. Four or five strands of starling will give plenty of motion, more just dampens the wiggle as a neighboring strand blocks movement.

prepped_starling_feather

Starling feathers being under two inches long and quite fragile, you’ll need to prepare the feather by removing all the gray fibers off both sides of the stem, before carefully removing all of the right side fibers (if wrapping clockwise, left side if counter-clock) and tying in the feather where the hackle is to be wound.

 

winding_starling

As we only have one side fibered, two turns is just enough to apply a single turn of hackle, perhaps five to seven strands.

The reduced dressings look simple, but often have subtleties that reveal themselves when you’ve got a handful of gossamer and are only partway through a mighty oath.

Both body and head use a bit more fancy threadwork than meets the eye. The bobbin is spun so the thread ties flat like a floss rather than round like thread. Us old guys set store by this quality in the Nymo days of the 70’s, and it still works with 6/0 and 8/0 threads that are not unifilament style. Simply let the bobbin dangle and it will spin flat to remove all twist you’ve added via previous turns. Once it stops spinning the thread will lay flat like floss, until you add more torque by wrapping. Flat thread has less bulk than round thread, so it spreads itself onto the hook like a film versus a tightly wound single strand of material.

It’s a nice effect, the body is uncommon smooth and the head is small and dainty.

Starling & Green

This is a Redditch scale #12 heavy wire hook. That would be a #14 in today’s longer shank hooks. The heavy wire adds enough weight to drag the reduced dressing down to fish in mid column – great for emerging bugs and pre-hatch feeding.

Christianity to blame for housing collapse?

farside It appears the real cause of the housing downturn may not have been all them paper derivatives no one understood, rather it  was all them Christians selling their homes and possessions knowing the fabled “End of Days” is nearly upon us.

Which in part explains the surge in emigration from those south of the border, they know all them nitwit Christians will be having some serious sales come April, and the Mayan calendar says they’ve got until September 2012 to enjoy those abandoned homes and the Norte Americano lifestyle, Holmes …

… after which the world cracks open and most of us will enjoy global warming, personally.

For the 37% of the US looking at everyone else as if they were nuts, largely the agnostics and atheists, it means to hell with the limit, and don’t limit your kill; right or wrong – no one’s watching.

… and if you’re only now worried about what Saint Peter is going to say, you’re fooked already. Skip purchasing the license entirely, what with only four weekends before the Big Cleansing, a couple more demerits aren’t going to hurt you much.

On the chance you’re sniggering about all this, perhaps you’ll explain the linkage between Brett Favre retiring and why 5000 red winged Blackbirds fell from the heavens. They claim it was a midair collision, but that was to buy time to get the President to Cheyenne Mountain …

2010: More uncertainty punctuated by one of the largest ecological disasters of the petroleum age.

Technicolor_YawnThere’s no candy left, or at least none without fingerprints, and you sucked down the Egg Nog without thought to waistline or ill effects.

You didn’t get the Sage switch rod you were hoping for, nor does it look like it’ll be in your future any time soon.

For most of us, 2010 appeared to be the culmination of all  maladies started in 2008. It’s still early to give an “all clear” that we’re out of the fiscal morass of the last couple of years, but that combined with one of the wettest years in memory, resulted in damn little fishing and a great deal more handwringing for all of us.

The Wall Street crowd was tiptoeing quietly hoping no one would notice now that the public’s wrath has moved from bonuses to fat civil servants and pension benefits as the root of the entire debacle. For the first time in decades lawyers weren’t the butt of insensitive jokes, what with Big Business and political partisanship ensuring nothing was done quickly other than worse decisions, and the legal community careful to stay out of the camera lens so the bankers, state workers, and hedge fund managers could dance alone…

On paper 2011 seems like more of the same. Predictions for a wetter than average Winter could make the fishing this year poor for us fishermen but a welcome respite for the fish. It may be unwelcome news today as it’ll make a lot of fish untouchable for most of the year, but should pay large returns in the future due to water enough to ensure successful spawn, yet limit our access and less fishing pressure.

Resolutions being a dime a dozen, and with little interest in holy oaths that lack real resolve, I’ll make no great plans for fishing, and be content with finding some rarified topic and learning it, trying some new cast and mastering it, and to hell with slimmer, nicer, more social, or heightened awareness of personal hygiene.

That I’ll leave to those that have inadequate water and too much money, which at last count was paltry few …

Welcome to 2011, emerge a better fisherman.

We’ll just do away with fishing licenses altogether, as it will be easier to spot poachers

bribeIllinois and California are headed for some out-of-the-box thinking, as both states wrestle with a shortfall representing nearly one quarter of their annual budget.

As we’ve seen before, both Parks and Recreation and Fish & Game never make the list of sacred cows and are forced to suffer the death of a thousand paper cuts. “Make do with less” will be the standard refrain from the Governor’s Office, as raising taxes is deplorable to both parties, as is mixing sanity in with frugality.

Instead, I’d suggest these agencies follow the Russian model of conservation, where anything is possible so long as the kickback is commensurate with the tonnage …

In connection with cash payments made by four Japanese fisheries to Russian border guards to fish walleye pollack in Russia’s exclusive economic zone, executives of other fisheries have told The Yomiuri Shimbun they also have given cash to Russians to fish saury, salmon and trout in Russian waters.

-via Daily Yomiuri Online

After a decade of less cash and even fewer wardens, I propose we allow Fish & Game to sell favors to vacationers and us sporting types so they can generate revenue stream free of the Governor’s grabby mitts.

When the warden pounces on your eight year old from out of the bushes and reads him his rights, you can either have the kid hauled away to hard labor, or make bond by wadding a couple twenties in the warden’s breast pocket. For an extra twenty you can do this just to make sport of the kid, considering he hasn’t listened to you in a fortnight.

Now wardens can craft and recraft the rules as needed to generate additional cash. They can do so with funds earmarked for each watershed, just changes the regulations midseason and watch the coffers swell with donations. Nothing like being all smug knowing it’s single and barbless, and the warden reminding you as of this year it needs to be eyeless as well.

Just to add a little incentive we’ll cut the warden in for 20% of his net take, and funnel the proceeds from the reality show back to the department as well.

They take Mastercard, midstream even.

Different medium yet same avaricious compulsion

Onion skins, how to score them in quantity It all started with five years spent on graveyard shift. Sleeping during the day and working all night appealed to me in some odd fashion, mostly I attributed my ease at being the only fellow in 48 floors of offices was all the time spent afield, as the quintessential antisocial fisherman.

My co-workers never saw my savage coupling with the leftovers from the office party, didn’t have to watch the thin veneer of civilization stripped away as I stalked loose change in the return mechanism of candy machines that dotted the employee lounge.

A note on my desk and half empty plates left in the fridge was my only interaction with the rest of the planet.

With my metabolism completely corrupted by the odd schedule, I resumed working days with little outward issues. I had to remember to bathe again, and observe the societal pleasantries associated with co-workers that were confirmed humanoid; a nod, a wave, an occasional smile.

… but I never was able to sleep past 0600 ever again. Which is why it’s my habit to buy my groceries on Sunday, while the rest of the planet sleeps blissfully.

… and while the medium has changed, natural materials capable of staining holy hell out of pants and fingers, fur and feather alike – I find myself schmoozing the stock clerk at Raley’s the way I would fly shop staff …

… because I’m staring at that monstrous bin of white onions, with the doubly monstrous bin of red onions as its neighbor, and my voice gets all silky and friendly like, “You guys ever empty that onion bin and sweep out all the husks?” says I, all caring and neighborly.

The problem with natural materials is there’s nobody to ask what’s enough, or how many dye baths will crushed walnuts shells make before I should toss them.

Instead, as I’m the only paying customer in the store at that hour, I look left – look right, and then dig out all the white onion skins while the clerk is busy restocking the orange juice or granola bars.

All the while I’m expecting the firm grip on the shoulder, and the command to ten finger the potatoes, so I can be featured on the front page of the paper all pasty and pale in the hot white light of the overhead fluorescents.

If I play my cards correctly it’ll be me and the bums fighting over dried daisies in the dumpster, but only after I convince the checkout lady that her first impression of me as a vile creep, was a bit wide of the mark …

No parallel in nature for a 4mm shiny gold bead, and none of the important aquatic food groups are so equipped.

Ernie_Schweibert I was convinced the story behind bead headed flies and their speedy domination of the sport was due to fly tiers who dreaded completing that gracefully tapered head, that final step which revealed their skill set even to the casual observer.

Weight has always been problematic for fly fishing. The letter of the law allows you to add as much lead as possible so long as it’s covered up, the rest of us especially those without ethics or refined breeding add a big shiny goober-esque bead – elegant in getting the fly down to where fish are, reducing all the discarded split shot us fishermen have been salting the watershed with for the last decade.

We feel bad about the lead / waterfowl thing, but only because of all that wasted flank and oily duck’s arse we can no longer live without. They’ve expired via heavy metal inhalation … accidental versus the double barreled kinetic flavor we had in mind.

Instead the bead phenomenon is considerably larger than all that. The  real story is our adoption of the literal and scientific elements of fly fishing being complete. We’ve garnered all the fish killing properties of higher learning, entomology and Latin, and are assured there is no stone left unturned, only a return to the gaily colored attractor flies of yesteryear may provide us with additional challenges.

Ignoring all the mean spirited and literal dialog discussed by the forum crowds; whether a beaded fly is in-fact a fly versus a weighted lure, and the passions that conversation awakens, what we can all agree upon is there is no parallel in nature for a 4mm shiny gold bead, and none of the important aquatic food groups are so equipped.

Certainly it assists sinking the fly quickly, but it also adds the same tinsel flash as the traditional wet flies of the 30’s thru 50’s. Ray Bergman and his cohort may have pitched a horrible scene at the prospect of fishing all that weight, but he was fishing over a couple hundred percent more trout (ditto for wilderness) and probably didn’t need to resort to such gimmickry, as there were ample fish in the shallow water.

Fundamental shifts in angling perception tend to hang around for decades. “Matching the Hatch” dominated the last 40 years, attractors before that, and the trends before those are largely lost to us, but “nobility and butterflies” remain, along with the occasional hoary text and odd references to “yellow flye” whose legendary hatches turned the sky of both Tigress and Euphrates, “as darke as nyght.”

Only dry fly fishing remains reasonably intact, the physics of floating a fish hook being unchanged despite iPad’s and Internet, and the drab colors of emerging insects being the sole constant on any aquatic menu.

Gone are the smallish and somber flies of steelhead fishing; the stonefly nymphs and egg imitations abandoned for big water-moving attractors whose garish purples and strung ostrich herl hackles have redefined the pursuit of migratory fisheries.

Coarse fishing and its rise to prominence may have had a small role in this, but it’s more likely that natural had worn itself thin due to age and numerous shortcomings. Big beaded colorful flies seduces all the common warm water species, and even the uncommon ones we encountered in urban settings, giving us twice the reason to add a boxful to our vest. Inevitably we found the box while searching for a solution for fussy trout, and despite our fearful glance skyward, no lightning bolt spat from the Heavens as proof that a vengeful Schweibert had been awakened from a dusty grave.

The physical gear followed close on the heels of our new appreciation for color. Puce rods feature Day-Glo backing, shiny gold reels, and anglers boldly announcing their presence with authority, with liberal application light refracting gadgets  and Miami Vice pastels to assist us in blending into the surrounding underbrush and its shadows.

Our fly tying materials underwent similar change. Opalescent being the dominant new material of the last decade, showing itself in dubbing, tinsel, and sheet – all of which were eagerly incorporated into contemporary patterns of both fresh and salt. “Sparkles” are in, and both packaged dubbing and artificial hair vie to outshine each other with gaudy light refractive qualities, often as their only real attribute.

Us fly fishermen typically fixate on a prophet to attribute our 180 degree about face of conventional wisdom, some new Oracle of angling that we can toast at speaking engagements, delights in upending all we’ve held sacred, and commands those heady comps of the swank remote lodge cartel.

Schweibert had his 15 minutes, as did LaFontaine and sparkle yarn, now it’s the rebirth of the attractor – forged in the steely cauldron of the former Eastern Bloc, and returned to prominence with long rods, rainbow hued Czech nymphs, and the two fly cast, proving that which is ancient  can be expensive again …