Fly fishermen have no business arguing the merits of food

Shat from the pipe with a flatulent sound I’m going to be the unpopular voice suggesting we’re discussing symptoms rather than problems. I’ll be the idiot insisting we’re in a place we shouldn’t be, that we’re arguing elitist snobbery when all the fellow in the white lab coat wants to do is feed the world cheaply.

They’ll tell you it’s all about Frankensalmon, but it’s not.

Frankensalmon exists because we ate all the brood stock, paved over the wild fish’s spawning riffle, pulled the gravel out of the streambed to make concrete skyscrapers and to vanish Jimmy Hoffa.

Where was all that righteous indignation when you kept fish you gave the neighbor, or fed your family, or when you flushed that anti-freeze into the sewer under cover of darkness, or when you passed that old lady in the slow lane with a curse and a throaty bellow from those shiny twin exhaust pipes…

That’s when you should have thought of the purity part, the Mother Nature thing, or the Big Picture even …

But you didn’t really … you handed twenty bucks to some other guy hoping he’d conserve the fish on your behalf. You hoped that your twenty matched with a couple hundred thousand others made a difference, something larger, and well intentioned. Naturally it freed you of any obligation to conserve, and the only limit to your fervor the number of vacation days you could beg from an employer.

A couple of decades later you discovered all those twenties had really accomplished very little, as the opposition had so many more of them – and the ear of the legislature to boot.

… and it sure didn’t slow you down any. Just the mention that some of those fish were running had you out crunching gravel, hoping you’d get extra lucky, perhaps you’d even get to keep one.

And while the scientists announced there were no new fish stocks entering the supply chain, and that the world’s oceans were at their zenith of production, with less fish to fight over for the coming decades – you assumed all those warnings applied to the other guy, never you.

Australia announced it was protecting its Bluefin Tuna population from the rest of the world, because the other developed countries couldn’t agree to reduce their catch. The French confessed the existing quotas meant spit, as they were intent on killing any tuna in the Mediterranean; each was worth $40,000 – and even more next year due to their being extincted so quickly.

Ninety-eight percent of the tuna in the Mediterranean has been killed already, and with the fish increasing in value, all those boats will be chasing them North or East, to whichever part of the planet that can support more.

Perhaps you’re aware of the incessant plunder, maybe you even sent another twenty to some fellow who yells into a megaphone at the fellow shotgunning tuna. Freed of that obligation and knowing you’d done the fish a solid, you probably took the spouse out for sushi.

You and your family ate as much as you liked whenever you liked, so did your dad and his family, and while you assumed fish would never run out, it always seemed to be a bit worse than the last trip, until the degree of change was undeniable.

With the Israeli’s shooting up Palestinian fishing boats, the North Koreans impounded a Chinese fishing fleet and some South Korean fishermen, the Somali’s turn to piracy just because they couldn’t compete with those shiny trawlers that vacuumed their coastline, and China seizing Vietnamese fishermen in disputed waters, fish stocks and the old resentments are starting to warm things up a bit.

… or in case you hadn’t noticed, the population of the world continues to grow unchecked, and while we’ve enjoyed a couple hundred years of rich living, demonstrated by our expanding waistlines and type II diabetes, the underdeveloped countries will be wanting their share of Nintendo, Playboy, and salmon fillets shortly.

… and with all the debt we’ve amassed getting here, our government won’t object much. Even if we’ve finally developed the fiscal sensibilities to slowly extricate ourselves from the entire mortgage-induced fiasco, we’ll still need a decade or so of offshore largesse to make a significant dent in the principal owed.

We’d prefer a solution that doesn’t involve lowering the world’s population quickly via emptying most of the silos in South Dakota at the whim of an Alaska governor who thinks the result “winnable.” To that end a couple thousand lab coated wunderkind labor to feed the world, knowing their governments can’t or won’t cooperate, using technology that some avaricious company will try to patent, and will hopefully grow scads of nutritious protein using the RNA of kitty litter mixed with the DNA of some aquatic cockroach.

… some warm water cockroach, so the result isn’t immediately obsolesced by climate change…

 … and us fly fishermen puff up our chest and exclaim, How goddamn dare they …

On a world wide scale we’ve probably killed eighty percent of the historic salmon runs, and modified the remaining twenty percent into a mongrelized mixture of hatchery interbred with whatever we added from a bucket in 1880, plus whatever we found there all natural like …

… so we’re down to a half dozen widows and orphans and we’ve yet to show any remorse whatsoever. None of us are prepared to give up the cabin in the pines, the V-6’s or V-12’s that delivered us there, or stem the flow of ibuprofen and estrogen that weeps from our leach field and into the fishery.

… and to a man we’re hoping someone else will lower their carbon footprint so we can consume their share secretly.

It’s not about Frankenfish, it’s about feeding the entire bloody planet.

Now Trout Unlimited is going to take its miniscule little budget which was given to them to rebuild fish stocks and recover despoiled streams, and instead will spend all those dollar bills litigating the FDA into groping “Lumpy Frank’s” privates a second time – just to ensure all that fish-like equipment is still where it’s supposed to be.

… and if it’s considered to be an entirely different species it won’t matter at all. We’ll kill and eat the last of the Salmon, then see if we can entice the Lumpster to eat flies – hoping those algae pellets put a bit of life into his flaccid arse …

I’d guess that Trout Unlimited, like many well meaning conservation organizations, is tired of reclaiming creeks only to watch the press of our feet return them to semi-spoiled within the decade. The problem has and always will be people –  not salmon genes – or what a pure salmon should look like …

There’s too many of us, and the irritating thing is we’re growing unabated on both borrowed money and time.

If you’re indignant that we’d cross a Salmon with a licorice stick – yielding something as unsightly as a lumpy salmonid, wait until later when we dispose of all the non essentials like eyes, fins, and lips, and just grow a large amorphous ball of protein, which is carved each morning into irregular shaped filets to give the illusion it once lived in water.

Think how aghast we’ll be if we realized the Omega-3 “slab” on our plate was never sentient, instead making a great flatulent sound as it leaped out of the nozzle and into the brightly colored styrofoam tray below.

Rather you should practice your lust for litigation by peeling the bun back on a Fillet O’ Fish, which is another well documented mongrel, whose pedigree is almost entirely suspect.

Sea Lice get a small reprieve

Farmed fish counter The farmed fish industry may have gotten a bit of a reprieve from all the heat associated with the Frankenfish, apparently UC Davis researchers claim that while farmed fish are responsible for much of the sea lice the fish must navigate through – there’s less evidence  those self-same lice are responsible for the collapse of the Pink Salmon population of Western Canada.

Those runs have climbed and dropped precipitously in the past, again without explanation. UC Davis scientists continue to shrug about what happened, but the farmed fish induced lice theory gets scrapped.

The new study is the first to analyze 20 years of fish production data and 10 years of sea-lice counts from every salmon farm in the Broughton Archipelago and compare them against 60 years of population counts of adult pink salmon.

The study concludes that farm fish are indeed the main source of sea lice on the area’s juvenile wild pink salmon, but it found no statistical correlation between lice levels on the farms and the lifetime survival of wild pink salmon populations.

– via PhysOrg.com

The nature of science is a bit unpredictable, so I would wait for corroboration from other sources before speaking definitively on the subject.

What is finite and well defined is how few wild fish are in my supermarket. Instead of a nice fillet that I can inspect I have meat hidden in gaily colored opaque bags announcing themselves as fresh Halibut, Salmon, and Cod – each torn from the icy bosom of untouched Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, yearning to join me at dinner …

… it’s too much like a blind date, and I can’t bring myself to buy any.

As most fellows aren’t the cook and bottle-washer and blind to the trends of supermarket aisles, unable to tell the whether the object is a mango or a dog turd … 95% of all fish* (includes squid, scallops, shrimp, and fish-like substance) for sale are farmed.

Occasionally they’ll have a salmon head or fillet in a transparent wrapper, but almost all of the indigenous white fleshed fish are now opaque wrapped – so you won’t see the acne scars, footprints, or notice it’s still moving … kinda …

Doctors insist anything living in water is nutritious and an important source of Omega-3 oils, but I’ll opt to be cautious and get my oil downstream of that leaking lawnmower in the Bridge Pool, which should be surrogate enough …

That cast looks less like a lateral and more like a downstream drift

It’s not likely to be in your stocking but some lucky fellow may soon be the owner. One mile of the west bank of the fabled Itchen River in England, featuring stocked brown trout.

Itchen

The trout season runs from early April until early October each year. The main salmon run is predominantly June/July and then a later run of fish in September. Sea trout also tend to run at these times of the year. Hitherto the beat has been classified by PSFFA as an upstream dry fly water but later in the season upstream nymphing is also permitted. Over recent years there has been an outstanding mayfly hatch and this has often extended through until mid or late June.

500 fish stocked per year, of which only half are caught and presumed killed, and only a single angler fishing about two-thirds of the available fishing days.

The catch log since 2006

It’s plain that European private fisheries are managed for a different experience than those in the US. Our planted private water (ala Donny Beaver style) feature planting large sized fish in quantity, and dues paying sporting gentlemen discuss over a toddy, whether that sloppy fat six pound pellet eating monster was a natural or planted fish.

Hard to imagine some well heeled colonist paying in excess of $400,000 in order to catch two fish per day, in the hopes of landing a 20” fish as a seasonal record.

Although originally constructed in the late 17th century to carry chalk, aggregates, coal and timber, between Winchester and ultimately Southampton port, there remains no right to navigate along the Beat.

… and with this stretch of the river man-made as well, whose antiquity is half again as old as the continental United States, we’ll not quibble much about its authenticity.

Us colonials are horribly spoiled with so much public water, most of which is managed to the angler landing a limit or more, compliments of our respective departments of Fish & Game, and what they imagine we like most.

The Fisheries4Sale.com website lists quite a few easements for sale, with many of the most expensive being coarse fisheries; man-made ponds and stillwater impoundments featuring our pal the common carp.

All descriptions, dimensions, areas, reference to condition and if necessary permissions for use and occupation and their details are given in good faith and believed to be correct.  Any intending purchaser/s should not rely on them as statements or representations of fact but must satisfy themselves by inspection or otherwise as to the correctness of each of them.

Which I’ll assume to be an open invitation to bring along a nine foot fast action graphite to assist me in measuring all those undercut banks, shaded by the local willows …

… all measurements will be done upstream, of course.

Now we’ll see what you’re made of Madoff

BernardMadof_AndSonsfFinish200 I’m not inclined to be gentle.

Perhaps it’s the degree of the crime that makes me so callous and unforgiving – maybe it’s simple jealousy that he was born with a silver spoon and I wasn’t, in either case I’ll not shed a single tear for another rich prick that eats rope.

In a twisted sort of way, Bernie Madoff and his crime defined us as a generation; greedy, insensitive, and with a sense of entitlement far in excess of our true value.

Friend Bernie Madoff has just started paying for his crime – now that son Mark has been found dead and swinging from the chandelier.

… guilt or innocence is largely immaterial, the fact that Poppa Madoff didn’t clear the entire matter up, kept his sons in a perpetual stew of doubt and censure, and after two years of ever present dark cloud, son Mark opted out.

Our interest in this entire sordid affair is due to Mark Madoff being the President and part-owner of the Abel Reel company.

If meat has feelings, can you return it if it begins sobbing

Feel the butcher's sharp knife It’s apparent that AFTMA is content stonewalling the issue, but as all those emotional fully urbanized types begin to join ranks, will we recognize the peril before we’re all swept off the streets and put to forced labor?

It’s quite plain fishing is headed for one of those perfect storms like hunting, bowling, pets, sweaters, or anything involving a handful of something that resists mightily.

Declining fish, declining fishermen, bigger appetites, more bird watchers, and the hoards of new emotions we’re discovering in our dinner – are all pushing us to the point where we’ll have to remarket our sport or suffer societal censure and wholesale excommunication.

Our angling publications delight in displaying decapitation, boats awash in blood and offal, tales of masculinity and suffering, domination of prey and their harsh environs, and copious mention of how much we prize our stocks of dead animals as they enable us to kill so much more.

I’d propose wordsmithing our current standard into something that looks like we’re no longer the interloper, the harbinger of Death. We can retain the content and message for the like minded, yet remake fishing articles into, “… how fish love tissue massage, and where’s the best place to spend a weekend massaging them.”

In short, us sporting types may have to go the “secret society” route.

“It is also internationally recognised that we must quantify not only the biological cost but also the emotional cost of animals used for production of food and fibre.

It’s plain that the farm lobby is way ahead of us on this. Over the next couple of decades we’ll be regaled with tales of the perfect Tri-tip, and how playing Lady Gaga in the barn just as you relieve the bloated bovine of its ethereal self (blow daylight through the brain pan), lowers the cholesterol level of red meat by half.

It’s important the animal not suffer, the farmer on the other hand had better like female soloists.

All those force-fed geese and milk fed veal are vanishing out of sight, replaced by Grandma with fresh-baked cookies and animals that claim they rent the grass.

“With increased public concern about the welfare of animals, and consumers seeking ‘animal welfare-friendly’ products, Australia’s livestock industries are focused on improving farming practices to meet changing expectations.”

Our problem is not considering PETA had pals, and while we focused intently on all the invasive species, watershed, and property rights issues, only to turn around and find how many more of them there were than us.

Then again, they could be stymied trying to identify which of the barnyard animals is more equal than others. Cows being the practical jokers that they are, pointing out the hiding place of Tom Turkey didn’t smooth relations much come Thanksgiving.

To make matters worse we distribute their naked pictures on the Internet

smart_fish In the 80’s us lay scientists were full of ourselves. We’d embraced the fact that trout ate bugs, that Latin made us sound really intelligent, and the more syllables and body parts we could string together made us irresistible in a social setting.

We were “trout geeks” and we ignored pocket protectors in favor of the stomach pump.

We scoffed at the antiquated non-scientific notion of the Europeans, who insisted that any trout hooked on flies had to be killed, as it would never take the artificial fly again.

We knew better.

Our imitations would hook the same fish many times, we just had to imitate more real insect parts with each hookup. We thought ourselves  invincible, Latin and Mayflies had made us so…

While our theories may have been sound it may have only been coincidence and the hatchery system that allowed us to think Catch & Release was the most appropriate method of disposing of a noble yet vanquished prey, eating them had become tantamount to serving beef brisket in Calcutta, and was out of the question.

As trout chow is shoveled into the hatchery pen and those precious pellets filter down through the water column the Bold & Brave fish, gluttons all – are rewarded for their aggression with the lion’s share of the chow.

The shy and introverted fish hang about the periphery admiring the fat, sleek aggressive fish, wishing the gal’s looked at them thusly …

When vacuumed up and shat into the neighboring brook, the fat, sleek, and aggressive fish wound up slurping the gaily colored Marshmallow Salmon Egg, leaving the creek populated with mostly the shy introverts.

Shy fish were cautious and ate selectively, and fishermen did not fare well against this wily prey, insisting the creek lacked enough fish to return, and going elsewhere for more sleek fat, stupid fish.

“But it are not always the bold and aggressive fish who are most successful. When we marked trout individually and released them back in the wild, it were shy trout who grew most rapidly.”

– via PhysOrg.com

Which suggests the angler that wishes to fish over smart, large fish releases his prey, and those that measure their enjoyment by constant action should kill everything, paying special attention to mashing life out of anything big.

Both theories being sound, and unlike us our European brethren just like brisk action over size ..

… and we’ll be hearing more from our friends in PETA shortly, now that we knowingly stuff a sharp hook through their face and distribute naked pictures of our shy and introverted prey on the Internet.

Can fresh water flows alone explain the decline in anglers

Too much placid upbringingTwenty years of data is pretty compelling evidence that  streams are akin to the mortgage crisis, we fiddle and tinker with obstructions and flows attempting to guarantee everyone living on their banks isn’t washed away in a flood, when Darwinism may be the better course for landowner and watershed.

In studying 3000 watersheds in the US, and thousands of jetties, abutments, dams, rip-rapped banks, and countless ways we’ve invented to make flows more moderate, we’ve managed to change nearly 90% of the major watercourses in the US.

Hooray for us as terra-forming locusts …

The down-side is that in taming the flow of any river, we’ve also begun to modify both the invertebrates and fish that live there. Naturally, all those modern palaces we erect near the bank must be preserved like tombs of the Great Pharaohs, and in so doing we erect countless structures to avert floods, erosion, and normal channel movement. All this secondary construction is successful in turning the wild current into something less so, which genetically selects for fish and invertebrates that survive best in slow current and lakes.

In short, you erected that fabulous log palace because you adored the big brown trout out front, but because you put a house where it doesn’t belong, your kids (if they don’t strike your name from all pillars and monuments) will be fishing over large Bluegill.

So let it be written, so let it be done.

… and because I’ve got a yen for both science and the absurd, perhaps we might extrapolate this latest theory as a larger metaphor for civilization as a whole.

With thousands of niggling little constructs that parents and society use to keep us in line, ensuring our environment is absent those savage peaks and valleys, have they really been quietly selecting for fat, diabetic, and urbane as the traits for the modern enlightened Man, ensuring there’s fewer of us sporting-aggressor types so’s we’ll never get within a zipcode of the Big Red Button and the Bomb?

Yes. Wow.

Us fellows that delight in the out-of-doors having outlived our usefulness. Hunter-gatherer skills shed for the ability to double park, more drawers in the bathroom for his makeup, and cooking is correctly guessing the number of seconds to wave a frozen unmentionable so all four corners of the box are warm.

Now you can empty the bucket into the sewer proudly, knowing you’ve stunted less fish

Dyeing materials organically The fun part is you can make every bit as much mess, and your sudden interest in walnut shells won’t be attributable to your fly tying obsession.

She’ll think you’re being “extra good” because of the pending holidays, and your sudden desire to crack all those walnuts are merely foreplay for the fruitcake.

By my count there’s at least 30 colors hidden in your cupboard and the plants that make up your backyard, and if you can make a gallon of tea without wearing it – you’re on your way to handling all your color needs in a toxin free, mostly organic environment.

… which will not get you out of the doghouse should you steal her pots or dribble their contents on her linoleum, but as you don’t need heat and can dump the contents at your curb, you shouldn’t find yourself in the kitchen at all.

The book is called “Wild Color” and is a cleverly done manual on dyeing fibers (both organic and inorganic) with natural materials; leaves, stems, seeds, flowers, and crushed fiber from household items and decorative plants.

This book was a very quick read, and informative. This is not some dogged treatise on proper Ph and dye bath temperatures as much as it is a first book on the subject, striking a nice light balance of material directly on topic, and some of the history of garments and their coloration, some of the odd sources of colors, and how geography played a defining role in both common and exotic coloration.

Organic dyes are a combination of stain (brute force color) and “teas” enhanced with the proper mordant. Mordants are fixatives, dilute solutions of copper, aluminum, and iron, that assist the natural color to affix itself to animal fiber or cloth.

Mordants are made simply by adding white vinegar and water in equal measure and throwing a couple copper plumbing fixtures into the liquid for a week. Ditto for iron solutions or aluminum. This gives you the hobbyist, the ability to make all the items you need from their source, and not having to pay for anything other than the plant or food.

… better yet, flush with this new “green-ness” you can wait until your neighbor’s asleep and then pillage his Eucalyptus.

Half the book is devoted to the plants that provide the color, and the range of colors each plant is capable of given the mordant used. Dandelions used with copper mordant yields a medium olive, but with an acidic mordant may yield yellow.

It should be no surprise that anything you scuffed on a pant’s leg in your youth has potential as a colorizing agent. All that’s needed is for you to be a bit more surgical in your application.

Organic dyes are not capable of dyeing everything. The intensity of the bath may actually stain some materials that cannot be dyed, but considering our ancestors made use of animal hides and leathers, as well as woven fabrics like cotton and wool – all of which were successfully dyed in many colors, it’s safe to assume you should be able to get both pastel shades and many combinations that will result in much darker colors.

Given that dead and dried plants are desired to brew colors, I would think a visit to a nursery might yield a lot of free exotic plants that have dried past their prime, or simply died while on the vendor’s premise. This book will give you the names to ask for and a nice picture of the plant while living – everything needed to assist your collecting.

I’ve dabbled in natural dyes for some time, but only those whose materials are common to my locale (or to the neighbors backyard). All those neat piles of plant debris at the curb have yielded quite a few finds that I’ve used to make earthy tones of brown and olive, and it can be a lot of fun to devote a gallon jug in the garage to steeping a mixture of bat’s wing, and eyelash of newt …

… knowing the poor SOB next to me has none of them big stoneflies that smell like licorice …

An engaging read, especially the introduction outlining the earliest sources of purples, why they were so hard to find, and why the Celt’s of the British Isles were so fond of blue. Guaranteed to make you never look at an onion skin in quite the same way again.

Onion_Skin

The above shows how the plant pages are organized. The material has a brief discussion outlining which parts of the plant contain the coloring agent, and whether they are best used dried or fresh. For each of the materials the bars of reference colors (at left) describe what you will get when used with the different types of mordants (alkaline, acid, aluminum, copper, or iron).

As with any colorizing agent some experimentation is necessary. Some of these colors are susceptible to fading in direct sunlight, as they lack all the chemical finery of traditional aniline dyes, and are often much less concentrated than a couple of heaping teaspoons of a powderized dye.

Earth tones aren’t so bad as regards fading, but anything solid colored, and especially red, should have a chunk nailed to a fence post for a week or two to see if the finished product is stable.

Cost of this tome is $15.35 from Amazon.com, and it may yield something useful to those that wish to avoid caustic chemicals and toxins.

Full Disclosure: I bought this book from Amazon.com for the above price

Mine lips shall not touch the Unclean Thing

Goddamn Tobacco Habit It’s the end of week eight and the monitor no longer looks edible …

After two months of fiery temper, fits of questionable writing (which is really my norm), and short pieces that leave you scratching your head about what I really meant, I figure a confessional is in order …

(sob) (sniffle) … I ain’t had a goddamn cigar in all that time …

… which plays Billy Hell with my prose, attention span, and sense of humor.

The Telly is rife with ads featuring smiling ex-tobacco junkies living blissful lives with adoring children and a trophy wife. I gaze about me at the bags of dead animals and sinkfull of stained dye pots, and it all looks so compelling and easy …

Slap a patch on your shoulder and be restored to your old self, instantly.

They don’t mention the parts where the kids and spouse flee for their lives amid a hail of gunfire – opting for Grandma’s house until they hear the tell-tale snap of a empty cylinder, how nothing in the icebox is safe – or that you’d chip a tooth on frozen sherbet as it was the only tobacco surrogate within reach when gripped by a late night oral frenzy.

Nor do they mention the Dentist taking the blood pressure cuff off you exclaiming, “No need to fix that cavity, you’re already dead.”

As the noxious weed is many things to many people, it appears that like Poppa – it plays a key role in crystalizing thought. Part of that delicate balance of hormones and endorphins that was critical to humor, turned a droll line of prose into something more, and stimulated the brain cells to find something worth sharing from nothing.

Week eight. Somewhere about the New Year I’ll be restored to my old self.

The Royal Foie Gras with Cheese, the official burger of Theodore Gordon

supreme_fois_gras Now that the World’s collective microscope is off our convexness we can get back to eating all that grease-imbued unhealthy.

No more sermons from “green” zealots admonishing us how unhealthy our kids have become, and no high pitched, pallid scientist illuminating the damage done to the Ozone layer by herds of  Big Mac’s as they graze  peacefully.

Instead we can point fingers at French fast food, which has debuted the Foie Gras Burger, containing acres of duck fat and types of cholesterol that vaporizes arteries on contact, with science gasping for the words to aadequately describe the peril.

As diseased goose liver shares a bit of “snooty” culinary reputation in addition to being a Widowmaker,  the fly fishing community will greet the dripping SOB with open arms, and declare it the Official Burger of Theodore Gordon.

It’s obvious them Eurotrash weren’t content with the “Royal with Cheese” and felt it necessary to one-up us on the societal diabetes scale by adding even more lard.

… and they’re welcome to it. It’ll be percussive Darwinism as us newly svelte American tourists will be side-stepping the disenfranchised Islamic fundamentalists as they rush the cafe entrance with a vest full of nitrates, wherein the slow and fat will eat the blast.

Hamburgers being synonymous with American culture, and with copious references to their care and usage in exported media, we can only hope that  “look at the big ass on Brunhilda”, doesn’t get attributed to Pulp Fiction.

Naturally the Trout Underground will recant their hasty decision to go with a mere chili dog and Cole slaw as their mascot, and it’ll be the subject of much tension on the Drake boards as to proper condiments appropriate for this gelatinous monstrosity.