Fun with Fishies

Today, I officially fished successfully in the worst conditions under which I ever have cast a fly. I say "successfully" not because I need to brag (since I am blogging, you already know that) but because I'm sure I have, at various times, cast flies in equivalent or slightly worse conditions without catching anything. But today, with a whitecap wind whipping north over the delta and a heavy current flowing south down the Old River and cold December rain stinging my face, I settled into an effective -- if rather laborious -- rhythm of casting, repositioning, and catching stripers.

A few minutes into this episode, a motorboat sped around the bend and came waking right over to hover 50 feet away from me. I was getting ready to be pissed off at these guys until I saw the sheriff's insignia on the side of the boat. Did you know that the sheriff of Contra Costa county had a boat?

"Just wanted to check and see if you were O. K." They looked more amused than concerned, I thought.

"So far so good!" I yelled back at them over the wind.

Before I was done fishing that spot, two other parties stopped to check on me. That was what the conditions were like.



As fly casters might imagine, it was a comedy. I started by getting up real close to the tules, because I knew that I would be blown back to casting distance by the time I picked up the rod. After stripping in a short cast, I did the old one-hand paddle-crank against the solar plexus (the other hand still holds the rod, of course) to try and edge the boat back up against the wind, and tossed out another cast. All the while, the kayak was rocking in the sort of two-foot rollers that happen when wind and current are running so contrarily. Pints of cold water were washing occasionally into the cockpit. The unleashed paddle either tried to blow away, or dug into the sides of the small waves and tried to knock me over.

The fish were so aggressive that it only took a few of these 100-calorie casts to hook up, and then the real comedy began. Have you ever noticed how high you have to hold the rod to hand-strip in a fish? I sure did today, because the wind took over way before gravity could settle the line back down in the cockpit where I generally try to keep it, and my spare line went flying all over the place. After one fish, I had line looped around my spare paddle, my radio's antennae, the handle of my river knife, the loop on my jacket hood, and of course my left arm and wrist, all at once. This took some time to unravel. If I tried to strip down into the water while fighting a fish, the result wasn't much better -- all the line then went cruising under the boat in the current, from whence I had to haul it back up under the hull in manner that seemed most unprofessional.

So, naturally, I was cursing out loud and thrashing about and having a terrifically great time. Not exactly the same kind of good time people mean when they wish me to "have fun with the fishies" (a direct quote from a friend). I mean, that's not the usual idea of fun with fishies, is it? You're supposed to sit there on a summertime cotton-is-high afternoon and be ever so patient and sip beers if you want to have fun with fishies -- not paddle 20 miles around a swamp island for six hours in the rain and wind, all to enjoy about a half hour of actual fish-catching in ridiculously difficult conditions. Right?

Another friend recently said of Yours Truly that "all he does is catch them fishies" -- more scorn, and just to make sure you get the point, there again is that diminutive "-ies." But no my dear fellow, it ain't all I do. You oughta try getting together all the gear, and carrying it down the levee, and attaching it all to the boat without dropping expensive trinkets in the drink, and you'll see that there is more. You oughta plan a rational circuit based on tide predictions and directions through the channels, and find your route through fog and rain with map and intermittent GPS, and you'll see there's more. For that matter, you should set up tents in storms and dodge bears and portage boats through foot-thick mud and do all the other fun fishie-fish stuff which is all I ever do.

To state the obvious some more, it is the things surrounding fishing that keep me interested in it: mainly, being outdoors in the elements, and meeting certain challenges to the planning brain and the paddling body. I'm glad conditions were so intense on the delta. A bit of a challenge just makes things that much sweeter. That's why I'm planning a couple of expeditionary deals into my upcoming Baja trip -- camping on an offshore island in the Cortez, and then camping a few days up and down some Pacific lagoons -- and I know for sure that it will add a whole lot to the trip. In an important sense, it IS the trip. Yes, I'd be pretty disappointed if there were no fishies. But there will be :).

Good and Glad

I have been lazy about posting (and lazy generally) but that doesn't mean that I haven't been fishing. The autumn striper bite has not passed me by, thanks to alternating weekend trips North and East. Sometimes I have fished with Petaluma-based buddy "Flys4b8," and have got some fish out of his fine motorboat. Of course, the best fish of the bunch got dropped . . . we both saw the tail of this behemoth as he turned on my fly right as I was getting ready to pick it up and roll for another cast, and we both watched in dismay as he ran out all my free line up to a really nasty knot that had gathered at my feet. "Let it go through!" Mike yelled. But I thought I could stop the fish with a 25 pound tippet, and put the heat on it instead. Bad idea. The hook came back broken at the bend.

Once, Mike snuck out without me and a had a great day in one of our choice spots. Not to be completely outdone, I too snuck out to the same spot for a solo kayak trip, and really hammered 'em for about an hour on the incoming tide. I'm not sure anyone will believe me because I lack completely for pictures (camera still drowned from AK at the time), but I landed one beast around 30", boated a half dozen others, and lost one really strong fish when the leader snapped where the 40# butt section was tied to the leadcore line . . . . Actually, there are at least two parties that could corroborate my fish tales: a houseboating party watched me boat the big fish (and, most embarrassingly for me, applauded); and a bait-drowner across on the far bank watched the whole strike (and snapoff) session, with what I have to imagine was some envy at some moments and schadenfreude at others.

Last week I finally got a new digital camera, so today's delta stripers can be documented. None hit the 30 inch mark or double-digit level, but there were so many strikes by nice 4-5 pound fish that I do not complain. On the contrary, I celebrate, raising my cup!


Of coffee, while waiting for the tide to turn. Got a couple of smaller ones on the outgoing, but it wasn't nearly as good as the incoming. All the fish took on the pause, but they grabbed so hard that even a nitwit like me only dropped three or four strikes. I blame the slippery running line on those occasions.

It looks like some weather is coming this week, and who knows if the fishing will get back into this lovely form, with such sweet wind-free warm afternoons, and feeding frenzies in the tidal current, and lovely dusks with fish coming up to slash at topwater plugs. If it does, great! If it doesn't, then I'm even gladder to have got out there today. And I'm already very glad.

Out of the Wild

My resistance to watching Sean Penn's Into the Wild held up almost as long as my initial resistance to seeing The Fellowship of the Ring, and for the same reason: I hate to see a good book insulted by Hollywood. OK, the movie hobbits grew on me with time, but the first time I heard Movie Frodo say, "Oh, Sam, I cawn't do this," I almost gave up. What is it about Hollywood and this "no-can-do" attitude that pretty much amounts to a rule that you must, in any movie, insert that line, verbatim, and fling it in the viewer's face so that there will be no doubt, no matter how stupid the viewing public may be, about the chief complication of the movie. It's this! And I'm serious about "this" -- do a text search of scripts, and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not here blogging to try and outdo David Denby and his critic's complaints, but I will quickly comment that I felt a little bit manipulated by the movie and its grand production values. Penn took what I considered to be Krakauer's minorly mistaken bias in favor of giving McCandless the benefit of many doubts (Was there a suicidal impulse? Should his willful ignorance be contemptible to skilled, cautious outdoorsmen?) and inflated it into a completely skewed, symphonic statement that "this genius kid led a short happy life that was deeper and better than any of the rest of ours, so we should watch this movie with glazed-over cervine eyes and admire the hell out of him." Krakauer's skillful trick was to build a sturdier kind of bridge to McCandless' experience through less extreme examples of half-baked kid adventurers like Everett Reuss and young Krakauer himself. But the movie completely ignored that subtle trick in favor of sensory and romantic totalkrieg.

In any case, seeing Into the Wild certainly did me a big favor by revving up my existential engine and making me think a little bit about where I'm at right now in my own wanderings in the vale of tears -- what have I got out of living beyond the age of 26, instead of dying of thirst in Death Valley, or down a crevice in the Cordillera Blanca? What have years of rambling around in hills, rivers and lakes done for me? Do I still feel anything like what McCandless felt when he was living his last good weeks?



Or, more immediately, how do I feel about coming so far and so quickly from Wild and wondrous Alaskan places, straight out of my six-month sabbatical and straight into corporate work and city scenes?

The shock of such displacement is nothing new to any real outdoorsperson. You'll get Back Shock in a small degree after a long weekend in the hills, and a larger degree after a week-long trip, and to a truly significant degree after you've just finished, for instance, the John Muir Trail. When I finished the JMT at 19, thin as a rail from from dramatic caloric deficit caused by Supertrampish stupidity regarding food caches, I remember coming back to Walnut Creek and thinking,"man, this life of multi-lane traffic and seventeen strip malls and 500 TV channels is so complicated, so unpleasantly more challenging, in its way, than hiking 15 miles 5000 feet up and down rockbound mountains every day." We can only imagine feelings of the Alaskan climber that Krakauer describes in the book (who did not appear in the movie in any form) -- a dude who was climbing for 145 days by himself on the snow and ice of Mt. Hunter, and almost immediately on getting back, got a job washing dishes. After 145 days of solitude, striving, and stark and savage natural beauty. Picture it.

But in my own little way, I have often found the contrast to be exhilirating. I still vividly remember one of the first Sierra backpacking weekends I took way back when I first started living and working in California. During the morning, I drove into the city and did a "requirements" meeting with people from the city government, as a step in developing custom software for them; but then I started the weekend immediately after lunch break and drove straight from the heart of San Francisco, out through the great valley, and deep up into the western Sierra Nevada. By midnight I was reclining against a hunk of granite and picking trout bones out of my teeth, enraptured by the contrast and the richness of a life in which you could design a database application in the morning and be casting an elk hair caddis to wild trout by dusk.



In most cases, the type of contrast created on the way out into wild places is much more joyful than what you get on the way back. A weekend out in the hills is never enough. But if you get to spend enough time out, and have a complete experience such as I had in Alaska this summer, then you come back full of the joy of un-wild living. After making your own coffee every morning for weeks, often under a sodden tarp, with increasingly stale grinds in grudgingly rationed doses, what can be nicer than going to a cafe and having bottomless refills of delicious, fresh-ground city brew? When you've already caught all the silver salmon you can handle, then why not recline and watch the beautiful people stroll by, not casting or paddling or putting up a tent or anything -- indeed, in your civilized, well-earned sloth, probably not moving a single muscle as you sit and watch the world go by? For while, few things are nicer than that.

For a while. As I do my blogging tonight, I'm sitting in my nice new city apartment in San Francisco. After ten years in Beserkely, living in the hills or right on their faulty escarpment, I have made the move to Quake Gotham. And it's fine: I ride the train to work down the peninsula, do my part for the economy, and save away cash for the next big adventures. I drive five minutes down to Islais Creek, and paddle out through the dump fumes and industrial ruins in the same old bay full of stripers and commuter ferries. There's no shortage of good coffee, good food, and beautiful people around the block on 18th street. But a while is a while, and I do think I might go visit my good old Pit next weekend, or the Sierras, or someplace just a little further out, than in.

The Foy of Hooking

My bluse (blog muse) is sending me mixed messages this weekend. It tells me to try and write something serious and reflective, to bring some balance to my vulgar tales of staggering around Alaska, drunk with foy (fishing joy); but it also tells me that I have a responsibility to finish up those tales of foy, especially the promised halibut hangover story.

What is a halibut hangover? For me, it came in two distinct forms:

-- Serious muscular ache in the right arm, shoulder and back, even during the first mile of a 20-mile day, compounded by a deep sense of defeat and emotional exhaustion.

-- A sensation of dead weight that hangs over the side of the kayak for about two hours, thrashing or running occasionally, but mostly just hanging there like a cinderblock.

Leaving a beautiful camp in Aluklik Bay on my second traveling day in Prince William Sound, I decided to drop a jig right at the head of the bay, just to catch a few rockfish and start the day right. I hooked up almost immediately (no surprise), but when I tried to slowly bring the fish up, it slowly turned and went a little deeper, steady taking line (surprise!)

About an hour later I had managed to get back enough line to verify that yes, that heavy weight was caused by a large flat thing that was white on one side and dark on the other. And it was a bit bigger than I had bargained for when I read that the "chicken halibut" in PWS usually ran around 20-30 pounds. My guess was 50-75 pounds, and after 90 minutes of tug-of-war, it was reduced to a dead but quite unmanageable weight. Anyone who has dealt with a halibut knows that you need only reach out and touch the fish to bring it thrashing back to life. So, lacking a sidearm, I resorted to suffocation:




Suffocation clearly wasn't working well, so I went to General Plan B, which in kayak fishing is to get somehow to terra firma and finish the fish fight on your feet. Too often, this is easier said than done. And when you've got slippery seaweedy rocks, and a little bit of chop, and -- most inauspiciously of all -- a large garden of kelp between you and terra firma, then the results are fairly predictable:




Two days later in Jackpot Bay I had another tough failure, which came about as a result of sticking a small ling cod onto a large jig and lowering it about 100 feet. When the line started steadily and heavily going out, I whooped and screamed for foy; but somehow or another during an awkward moment the 40-pound braided line snapped faster than you could say Halibut Hangover #2. It wasn't until my third go that I finally got to put some chicken in my pot:




Foy-loving friends might ask why I only hooked three halibut on a 12-day paddling trip, and there are a few good answers to that. First, I learned pretty quickly that my muscles and joints could only withstand one halibut battle per day and still crank the paddle with adequate force to get me around from pillar to post. Also, it was generally true that any halibut jig was also fair game to rockfish and ling cod between 1 and 6 pounds (I am upset that I never got a big ling, though) and these fish would often take the jig before it even got to the bottom, pre-empting the halibut entirely. And then, finally, just when I thought I had the halibut thing figured out, I started getting into schools of coho salmon that would take flies, which of course takes priority over any kind of spinning-gear projects. That's not to say that I didn't make the most of my halibut interval:




And with that film, I am pretty much out of ways to re-live the foyous moments of my second Alaskan fishing sonata. Sigh. Blank look of existential despair. Incipient infant daydreams of a Christmas carol to Baja . . . possibly an early spring song of sea trout in Patagonia . . . and then perhaps a third sonata to come.

Sockeye Toss

Things change, and change, and change, and change, most especially when you don't want them to. In geologic time, swift rivers like the Alagnak River are changing with bewildering rapidity, switching course and building gravel bars here and destroying sandy banks there . . . . And in Gilomric time, too, the Alagnak is changing very rapidly. Here are the two not unrelated changes I noticed on this, my third trip in four years' time:

The bears seem much more habituated to the presence of people.

There are more people.

I guess I could write complainingly for ten pages about the people, but since it would be boring and self-indulgent, I'll focus on the bear factor. The bears are interesting. That's why Mike took so many pictures and films of them. We saw twice as many bears on this Alagnak float than I saw in two other past floats, and that's part of why I think they are growing more habituated -- they're always there, but when they're afraid of you, you don't see them as much. When they're jaded in regard to two-legged smelly animals in bizarre blow-up boats, they'll even have a snack as you float by:



I'm pretty sure we saw at least one bear on every day of our week-long float, and on some days we must have seen a half dozen of them. One night we heard a giant, heavy splash right outside our respective tents, and Mike called out:

"Did you hear that?"

"Yep. It sounds like bear fishin'"

"Yep. It does."

On this particular night, near the confluence of the Kukaklek and Nonvianuk branches of the river, we had camped not at all far from a little lagoon that was literally swarming with circling sockeye salmon in shallow water. So we figured any bear would be more interested in that excellent food than in our stuff, and we went back to sleep. On the whole, this is the truth of it: when there are fish around, bears don't give a damn about you or your food. My other Mikeish fishing friend refers to a salmon-filled river as an "open refrigerator," and he doesn't even bother with bear cans or bear-resistant containers. Personally, I won't go THAT far, and this next picture explains why:


What that is, is a rather poor picture of a kevlar-constructed, bear-resistant bag called an "Ursack." Park rangers and other unbelievers have been known to be skeptical about the Ursack's ability to keep out bears. And I too have generally used the Ursack for overflow food and for storing trash -- certainly, I never put the plastic flask of whisky in the Ursack.

But do you see the tooth marks? I might not have noticed them either, but on one morning of our trip, in my pre-caffeine stupor, I spent several minutes trying to untie the Ursack from its place on a large branch, when it finally dawned on me that no, there was no way in hell that I could have tied a knot that tight. It had been pulled tight by some critter trying to pull it off the branch, and judging by the tooth marks, and the tightness of the knot, I doubt we're talking about a possum or a fox. We're talking about an Ursus Arctos Horribilus. Needless to say, I now have a lot more faith in my Ursack. And I'll feel less guilty when I "fake" using a bear can to go backpacking by showing the can to rangers at the trailhead, and then leaving it in the truck.

I think this bear may well be the culprit. He hung around that camp for a while, and he looked like the kind of adolescent rebel to be trying to steal food from the smelly two-legged things.:



We saw not a few bears at that two-day rest stop in "The Braids" -- a long series of shallow, braided river channels where sockeye salmon are easy pickin's for both two and four-legged omnivores. Gladly, most of the bears were about as interested in us as this mama bear and her barely visible cub following:






Mike took these videos (I'm going to post one of my own bear videos below), and I'm glad to say that he got as habituated to the bears as they were to us. However, at the beginning of the trip, my long-time fishin pal Mikey was somewhat skittish around the Hairy Ones. And thus, I introduce the long-promised, but rather brief, story of the Sockeye Toss . . . it's like this: Mike is pretty excited about landing his first ever salmon on a fly, and he is understandably fascinated by the terrific strength and wild fight of the sockeyes that are streaming into the river. After a few Snap-offs, he does indeed fair-hook and land a really nice fresh one:


A fish that fresh is excellent eating, and it seemed right that the omnivorous two-legged Mike should bless his first sockeye by devouring a good part of it. We tied it onto the back of the raft and rowed down a half mile or so until we found a good flat cooking spot with good visibility up and down the river. Of course, you pick a spot with visibility so that you can see an impending four-legged visit before it happens. And guess what: no sooner had I started to set up the stove, and no sooner had Mike started the risky process of riverside fishmongery, than we got our visit.

"Hey! There's a bear downstream," Mike said.

"What's he doing?" I said. In times past, all Alagnak bears had spotted me, and run away.

"He's looking at me. "

Now, for a guy holding a fish, having a bear see you, and look at you, and perhaps watch you, is not good news.

"If he gets too close Mike, you need to throw that fish out into the current as far as you can get it."

"Oh shit -- he's running!" Mike called out.

I stood up in a hurry and asked which way the bear was running (I couldn't see it from where I was), but the Toss had already happened -- I heard a nice splash and saw a nice silvery lunch go floating down the river.

"Aw," Mike said a moment later, "I think he was running away."

The next hour's evidence, based mostly on uninterrupted consumption of peanut butter and crackers, strongly supported the notion that the bear was actually running away from us, and not toward our lunch spot. But what do we know? If the fish hadn't been tossed, the bear might have been all over us, hounding us for fresh sockeye. Surely, they're capable of that. So we did the right thing. But we did not get to eat fish for lunch, and both of us had to admit to being disappointed.

But so what -- later that same evening we snacked heartily on a dinner salmon. The main thing is getting your protein, and not having to pay for it with a mauling. When the bears are really habituated and really hungry and aggressive, as they can be on, for instance, the Brooks River, then you need to watch yourself. Fishing in a river like that is to do a constant slow dance of avoidance with a constant stream of fishing bears. Here's a video from the Brooks that I took a week or so before starting down the Alagnak with Mike. I was a bit disappointed that the bear didn't rush at the fish in a direction directly at me, which he had done before I took the camera out:




But I still like the clip as it is. And with every encounter, close medium or long, I like bears more. I ain't no Timothy Treadwell, but I'd really miss the bears if they suddenly were to disappear from Alaska. They're a very big part of why I enjoy being up there. A big, hairy, somewhat slightly scary part of it.

On the Water

I'm happy to say that Mike sent me a CD of his photos. I'm going to have rewrite my draft of "Sockeye Toss." Look for that, and a few other stories, coming soon.

For now, I briefly present two float-plane pictures to effectively bookend the Alagnak (or Branch River) portion of the trip. First, a picture of a guy who is really, really eager to GET on the water:



And then, a picture of a guy who has just BEEN on the water:

Branch River Banya

I love planning trips. If you're going to eschew the aid of guides and other manservants, you're going to need to do some planning. You may as well enjoy it. And the better you plan, the safer you'll be; yeah, I kayak alone, which some people consider insane, but I do it with maps and charts, with scads of prepared waypoints, with pages of information gleaned from multiple sources, with EPIRBS, flares and paddle floats, and so on . . . .

Surely that is a tune I've played many times before, so let's go on to the twist in the plot: Kayak Sonata #2 included several episodes of real, honest, spontaneity. I took my exquisitely tailored plans, and disregarded them, more than once. Yipee! For instance, refer to this list of lawbreaking:

Planned: Start out from Brooks Camp early on 7/1
Actual: Hear bad weather report after two-beer dinner, and head out at 7:00 p.m. on 6/30

Planned: Camp two nights at Idavain Creek before moving on to portage to Colville Lake, Grosvenor Narrows, and beyond.
Actual: Get to beautiful camp at 1:30 a. m. in the morning on 7/1 and stay there NINE WHOLE DAYS

That's right, I found a lovely camp and pretty much made it my home for the entire Naknek Lake portion of the trip. Partly the severe winds kept me pinned in, but partly I just didn't want to move. On the third morning I set out for the portage, and struggled through some serious wind to get across the lake. I took a good look at the portage, saw a long, muddy, strenuous ordeal of questionable value, and immediately started back. Oh was I happy to see my happy home after that 21 mile day. But laziness wasn't my only reason. This video, taken on my first fishing sortie from that camp, explains one important factor in my decision-making:




I was pretty excited about that fish, but I'm afraid it didn't last too long . . . because I almost immediately found myself compelled to get overly excited about another fish:




Over the course of nine days, using that chartreuse kwikfish, and 20 and 30 foot diving planers, and large striper flies, I found a dozen or so reasons to stay around that were roughly 30 inches in length. If you're used to getting excited about 15 inch trout, that's a pretty convincing length. The poundage was probably in double digits. So yeah, I hung around. Every once in a while I would get a real surprise by catching a fish shorter than two feet long, and also I got a few of these funny lookin (but quite tasty) fellows:




The one night that I spent away from my Trout Heaven, I spent in Pike Heaven. Fish, after fish, after fish . . . maybe you'd like to see some bigger ones, but a three-foot pike is a handful no matter how you hook it:




90% of about 90 pike came to flies (bunny leeches and clousers), but every now and then I took a break and tossed out a spinner, like on this beautiful morning:



The second attack of spontaneity wasn't all my fault; I have to thank my rafting partner Mike, and a great guy named Matt. On the sixth day of the Alagnak River trip, Mike and I were pleasantly picking off chum after chum on a nice sandy run in the lower river when a motorboat came chugging by upriver.

"How's it goin' guys! Hey! You should stop at my place and spend the night under a roof tonight! Got a sauna and everything! Just downstream on your right!!"

I hope Matt can forgive me for initially thinking that he must have been some kind of lunatic. But as the drizzle intensified, and the lack of campsites downriver started looking gloomier and gloomier, Mike and I decided to stop and see about the madman's sauna. Referring to Mike's riverside reading material, I called it an instance of "On the Roadish Spontaneity." And without a doubt, it was one of the best nights of the trip. Proving it's a small world, we immediately established that Matt was a direct relative to my friend Ben's wife, and the rooms we were going to sleep in were once part of a lodge where both Ben and Matt had guided real (unlike us bums) fishing clients.

For no charge, Matt set us up with all kinds of hospitality in the form of breakfast and whisky and motorized chinook fishing; but for me, the highlight had to be the banya -- a sort of backwoods sauna common in the history of Alaskan bush-travel. Picture a small shack heated by a large barrel woodstove with huge pots of heated water on top of it and a generous ladle for spooning hot river water over yourself . . . picture spooning water onto the rocks on top of the stove, and soaking up a big hit of superwarmed steam, after which you sit back and stare out the little window onto the midnight sunset tundra with an unbeatable physical, mental and moral sense of well being. If I ever try heroin in my old age (and yes, I am planning that for about age 70, when there's not much left to lose), I will measure it up against the sweet euphoria of a Branch River Banya.

Silver and Salt

Though it seems a lifetime ago now, I did indeed spend all of July in Alaska, with some bookending by both June and August, and I am logging on now to record that is was Bliss. I long ago blew it on true Eternal Recurrence, but how about a somewhat less ambitious Annual Eternal Recurrence? By which I mean, you can take from your life one instance of each month of the year, January through December, and assemble a hand-picked 12 months to re-live, eternally. I now have my July.

All of my own pictures are on Picasaweb, and I await some Alagnak pictures from my first mate Mike. Mike, if you are reading this, I hereby threaten you with the Sockeye Toss story -- the longer it takes you to send me some photos, the more I will embellish that story at your expense! Be forewarned!

What I'll do here, in the scanty hours I can steal from NEW JOB (the job plus a wedding and a visit with the nuclear family have kept me ever so busy since I got back) is upload a video or two to help me describe parts of the trip. And what better place to start than at the end? My lovely Kayak Sonata #2 concluded with a lovely third movement on Prince William Sound, a trip whose scenic values and excellent fishing fairly blew my mind. I mean, I have caught a decent number of cohos, those most strikey and acrobatic of the Pacific salmon; but what are you gonna do if you paddle under a crowd of diving seagulls, paddling through visible slicks of half-chewed herring, and start hooking up at all depths, on all lures and flies, on nearly every cast?

You're gonna take a lot of films! In this first one, I am punch drunk on catching them on flies. I used a goofy method where I chucked out a heavy integrated sinking line and then furiously paddled backwards, letting out the whole line up to the backing while the tip sank; then, still with the backward momentum going, I dropped the paddle and started stripping in the line as quick as I could. They say your fly needs to be going fast to interest the cohos . . . but actually, several times I had a fish on as soon as I picked up the rod, suggesting that they were snapping it on the drop. Anyway:




In fresh water, coho generally make really lovely, vertical, all-the-way-out jumps. My PWS cohos thrashed a lot on the surface, but rarely made the classic aerials I was expecting. Here's an exception to that rule:




Splashing fish and unending drizzle eventually crippled my camera to where I could still take pictures, but couldn't use the controls to view them afterward. I didn't mind, though; it seemed a miracle that the camera and I weren't, at some point, by some halibut or salmon, completely up-ended and doused. Here's a case where I hooked a nice fish, got him close to the boat and decided to film him, and then watched him take a second wind and run like crazy straight to my stern:




Right around the point you can see in this last film was my little beach camp where I spent two blissful evenings, including a full rest day. There was a little more coho activity on the four-mile crossing of Port Nellie Juan and in Culross Passage, but it never got quite that hot and heavy again. Which, in the end, was probably a very good thing for my beaten wrists, arms and shoulders. Every one of those silvers was a struggle, a joy, and a treasure.

Good Country

If you've read a lot of Hemingway, you 're probably familiar with his sense of "Good Country." His short story "The Last Good Country" pretty much spells it out: humanity has spoiled and fucked up much good country, chiefly by crowding it, and only limited bits of the good stuff are left. Fortunately, some of what's left is right here in California. It's a cruel fact that a Berkeley person has to drive a few hours to get there, polluting the air and contributing noisily to the desecration of bad country on the way, but in these hard times we do what we gotta do -- the main thing is that I need to get there, and once I do, the carbon footprint goes down and the vibram footprint, up.

The Sierra Nevada is inarguably good country: clean white granite, big pines, wild animals, beautiful trout, lots of sun. It is where my fly fishing passion was born from embryonic backpacking fishing, and for that reason alone it is a very special place for me. Back in the day, I hiked many a mile in those fine hills, catching little non-native but wild brookies and bows and either frying them or toasting them over pine coals to add to my meager protein rations. One day it dawned on me that fly casting was giving me significantly more bliss than hucking out spinners, and an addiction was born . . . or did a fisher start coming of age? Since then I have largely come down to earth and spent far more time on canyon rivers than highland lakes. These thoughts remind me that I am very much what my English friend Matthew would call a "prat," a reader and a quoter of Wordsworth:

    I cannot paint
 What then I was. The sounding cataract
 Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me
 An appetite; a feeling and a love,                         
 That had no need of a remoter charm,
 By thought supplied, nor any interest
 Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
 And all its aching joys are now no more,
 And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
 Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
 Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
 Abundant recompence. 

But yes, coming further down to earth prose, this blog entry is meant to describe a trip to the East Sierras. In order, I went to: the Bridgeport Area, the Truckee Area, Feather River Country, and Glenn County. There are fish and/or boating experiences connected with all of these way stations, and hot springs connected with most of them. My trip was an experience in Good Country Bliss, and I'll try to give some illustrating details below. I surely do, and always have, agreed with Hemingway when he says that "it's easier to keep well in good country."

The area around Bridgeport is my gold standard of what the East Sierras should be. Mammoth and Truckee are too polluted by skiing and condo crowds. Lone Pine and Independence, too close to Los Angeles. But Bridgeport is fine pinyon pine country with a great hot spring, a blue-ribbon trout stream, and plenty of BLM space where you can camp out and nobody can a) try to run you off or b) charge you fourteen dollars for a crappy campground toilet that you really don't need unless you have brought a girlfriend who needs it. A girlfriend who camps is a good thing, but a camp like this one is abundant recompense:


That lovely spot is a five minute drive from the upper East Walker, where I caught a few small browns on nymphs and dries and enjoyed doing so to a completely unreasonable degree. The next day I paddled a half dozen miles on Bridgeport reservoir with my eyes fixed on that view of the escarpment, which, incidentally, is also the view from the hot springs that I visited twice. You'd think you'd died and gone to heaven, and if you share my kind of beliefs, you basically did!

Next stop was the East Carson, which I have been wanting to float for quite a while. I was right to think that it would be beautiful. Even without the hot springs it would be a joyous class II run through the lovely country that transitions from high sierra to high desert. But imagine pulling up to this spot and having it all to yourself, all through a starry night and crisp gorgeous morning:



I soaked in there until I was almost too stoned to walk the 25 yards back to my tent. Nice! The trout were all small, and looked like planters. Did I particularly care? Hell no.

Next stop was a social call at the Tahoe home of my friend's new excellent in-laws. They are great people who throw a great party, and I felt lucky to go from perfect solitude to perfect company so suddenly. On the way there, I stopped quickly at the Truckee and ticked off a small rainbow there, just so I could say I did (just as I am now doing). At the house on Donner Lake, my friend's 9 year old son was fishing from the dock when I arrived -- a sadly barren water, I'm afraid -- and kept fishing it uncomplainingly for three or four hours straight without catching a thing! This is rare among kids. He deserves to go catch something next time, and I'll do my utmost in the future to put him on some stripers or shad or some real fish that actually bites.

After hot springing a bit more at Sierraville, I moved on to the North Fork of the Feather to fish two very different sections of this new water: the very upper canyon near Almanor Lake, and then further down along the 70. In the upper water, I did an afternoon slog down through blackberries and poison oak that made even the worst part of Pit 4 look like a cakewalk . . . and then I must confess that I was a little disappointed to find this little Sierra-ish stream full of Sierra-ish six inchers:



Later that night, I camped further down the canyon and had some far more delightful fishing for little bows on dries. My camp was a sweet flat spot surrounded by giant oaks, and I slept way into the morning by the sweet sound of the river. The next day, I figured I would only stop on the lower river if I saw some water that was just too tasty to pass up; and lo! there was just such a stretch of water down the 70, a bit of green run-and-pool hydrology that I couldn't resist experimenting with. Here is the most successful of a half dozen or so samples:


That is one fish who appears to be in NO danger of starving to death.

After six nights out, I was starting to run out of steam and think of home, so I almost "wussed out" on a plan to meet my fishing friend Mike and his brother at Rd. 48. My shoulder was aching a little; I was tired; I've caught probably 1000 shad already this sabbatical season, and so on, wuss, wuss, wuss . . . oh boy am I glad I decided to stay and fish after all. We took his boat up to the secret spot and hit 'em solidly, even while the waders on the lower gravel bar were saying that the run was nearly finished. Fishing with Mike is always good fun, and his brother is cut from the same mold -- he really enjoys catching fish and is quite free from any of the pretensions and bad attitudes that stick to some fly fishers. Plus, I must add, I hooked and landed the biggest shad I have ever caught in my life. When Mike and Greg get back from the Shasta country, I hope he will send me the pictures. We actually put it on a boga grip to see how heavy it was, but it dropped out almost immediately, and in the subsequent melee (Mike is understandably unfond of getting much shad slime on his boat) we forgot to check the numbers. I think it may have been a six or seven pounder. Ah, but it most certainly was a beautiful fish to end the season with . . . .

Those two guys continued with the boat on up to the Fall River to see about the hexagenia mayfly hatch. I tell you, it took all my energy to prevent myself from tagging along. Maybe I should have gone. But I didn't, and my shoulder has recovered, and I am quite busy herding all my expensive equipment into a state of readiness for five weeks in Alaska, coming up June 26. This may be the last fishing blog before then, but I certainly hope there will be some tales to tell in the aftermath. But indeed, part of my yearning for the East Sierras was to get out to sunny, simple, Good Country for a while before committing myself to five weeks of paddling and fishing in what really is the Best Country -- but is also a Rainy Country, a Cold Country, a Never-Quite-Completely-Relax-Because-Grizzlies-Are-Everywhere-Country. Nonetheless, I love that Good Country as well as the Sierras or the Shasta area or the fine sliver of country around the gravel bar at Rd. 48. I hope I sound grateful about all being alive to experience all this Good Country, because I most definitely Am.

Osprey Season

The fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high, and it is a happy time for all things that fish. Osprey have been very active in the evening hours on the Sacramento shad waters, and that makes good sense: during the day the shad stay deep, but when the sunlight is off the water, they start creeping up the water column until they are right on top, making rippling circles on the surface. The osprey must love to see this. And, as this little film suggest, humans love the shad fishing too:




I always turn the camera on ten minutes too late, and this is no exception. Mike's previous shad fought very hard, and at the most comical moment the taut line pulled overhead and knocked off his hat! We had a blast fishing for them from the boat. It's a much more stable casting platform than a kayak, obviously. But I had to notice two things: a) we had mechanical problems (not usually a kayak factor) with the fuel line and then the motor hinges, which got a bit bent when we slammed into a log snag at 30 mph; and b), it wasn't really easier on my back and shoulders as I expected. I ended up pulling the whole boat up the anchor line several times, and heaving up a heavy anchor with four feet of chain on it, and yanking the boat around on its bowline at landing and launch time -- all hard work! It will be cake to go back to an inflatable kayak, physically.

This reminds me of the most spectacular osprey sighting: early in the morning on the gravel bar, we saw a big osprey halfway submerged in the water and fighting hard with its wings to lift a BIG fish out of the water. A shad? A striper? It was too far away to tell even with binoculars. There was a lot of spectacular splashing before the osprey finally gave up and flew away.

Not long before going up on this shad trip I got into a lengthy discussion with some guys about how hard shad fight, or don't fight. I think a shad can kick a trout's ass any day, but my cohorts did not agree. Maybe it has been a while since they had a shad double up a 7wt and make a leadcore line hum a low C in the Sacramento current. In any event, we finished the argument with a nod to my religion of "Both/And," which I went ahead and expressed in ritual by adding on a couple of days on the Pit River to give the trout their chances. And the river was fishing fine. I got a 16 inch trout on literally my first cast, and though this is not a particularly notable fish in a river that can (and did) kick out significantly larger trout, I took a photo of him anyway:


These dear unemployed days I do very little other than fish, and when I'm here at home, that means paddling the sea kayak for stripers. I have grown quite accustomed to treating these outings as kayak workouts, and have started going to Point Bonita and other pretty places in preference to the usual scenic striper spots like San Quentin or the Brickyard. Yesterday morning on the bay, I caught a quick glimpse of that great symbol of fishing hope, the osprey, soaring high above the tall gravel piles and cranes. And lo! I finally got a couple of strikes. One fish was unlucky enough to be 19 inches, which means he was big enough to be legal, but small enough to eat without too much mercury terror. He went into "ceviche con mercurio" a few hours after leaving the water, and I want to thank him with all my heart -- he was delicious!

You don't even want to hear how much shad roe I have been eating. Roe on Thursday, striper ceviche on Friday . . . if there were a way to turn a human into an osprey by eating enough of your own fresh-caught fish, I would make it my life's mission. Though I'm not sure it would make that much difference, at the moment.

Roe, Row, Roe

To exhaust the recreational possibilities of Yolo county:

1) Roe on Monday night.
2) Row Tuesday morning.
3) Roe again Tuesday night.

This is my recommended three-step plan for enjoying the early part of a self-unemployed week in early May. Not having actually done any work for three months, I will indulge myself in a little bit of the good old tech-writer style. Lots of step procedures! Keep it brief! Write in chunks!

Anyway, by "roe," I mean, of course, catching lots of shad at Verona and picking out a few egg-fat females for keepers. By "row," I mean filling up the middle of the day (when shad usually don't bite well) with a pleasant run down Cache Creek.

I kept one fish the first night and then three more Tuesday. Amazingly, one turned out to just be a big male, perhaps a beer drinker. Should have thrown him back into the mix.


You can only grill and pickle so much shad meat, but as for the roe, you can't have too much. This early in the season, you generally get really dense, high-quality orange-colored roe. Later on, you'll get roe sacs that are more purplish and not as burstingly full of delicious eggs. That's why I'll do most of my shad murder in this first part of May, and then later on just keep one at a time to make up the odd plate with bacon or black butter and fresh tarragon.


Oh boy don't I love that weird tasty stuff! I contemplated giving a couple of sacs to the neighbor, but then decided to be a greedy glutton and eat it all myself, three sacs to a plate. Too often, shad roe is wasted on normal people, who don't appreciate what a fine thing they are eating. It is best to have some idea of how many hundreds of thousands of fish you are taking out of the ecosystem -- it just seems ethically correct to consider that factor. However, in four years of shadding I have not noticed any dropoff in the impressively large swarms of migrating fish that could be attributed to my uninhibited lunch habits.

Speaking of swarms, they were conspicuously absent on Cache Creek Tuesday. Any weekend day from now until August you'll see hundreds of kids in rented/outfitted boats on the river, and around the river, and hiding out in the cracks and caves of the canyon smoking pot so that they can stupidly capsize and cover the creek with extra obstacles. And yet, I have learned to appreciate them, because they are willing to pick up a hitch-hiking middle-aged man and shuttle him and his large duffel up to the best starting point at Bear Creek. On Tuesday morning, I stood on the shoulder of a nearly-deserted rout 16 with my duffel and paddle for 90 minutes, sporting this sign:

Bear Creek (5 miles up)
$$$ for gas!!!

until I felt like such a thwarted idiot that I took my truck and went actively looking for help with a shuttle. First stop, Mexican field laborer: he can't do it, even for 20 bucks, without permission from "el patron." Second stop: cute girl mowing lawns in bare feet is happy to shuttle me, but only after another hour or so of landscaping work. Third stop: Caroline at the campground will shuttle me in her truck, yippee! Her truck is very big, and 20 bucks may actually just cover the gas.

Appendix note on plumbing the recreational possibilities of Cache Creek on your own: take a lock and a bike and do a bike shuttle!

Fishing Alone with Li Po

Even though I don't have any interesting fishing news or stories, I'm feeling pressured to put pen to paper just so that I don't forget how to do it. My "idea" for this entry was to riff on a fishing anecdote I had heard somewhere about Chuang Tzu, or Li Po, or some famous Chinese Taoist -- I can't remember exactly what name was associated with the story. My previous employer Google, usually so helpful with such things, hasn't turned up a clear reference to the story. For example, this search result just ain't the one . . . the story I'm thinking of was basically this:

Chuang Tzu/Li Po/Eric the Blogger was commonly observed fishing in the river near the village, but nobody ever saw him catch anything. One day, a villager stopped to ask him, "what are you using for bait?" The unsuccessful fisherman smiled broadly and lifted a bare hook out of the water to show the villager.

We could spin up plenty of interpretive thinking about this story, and if you would like to offer your thoughts as blog comments, please do. Personally, I have a mental block which prevents me from thinking anything other than, "why didn't the guy try digging in the riverbank for some worms?"

However, I will note that my recent efforts at striper fishing would have been equally successful if I had been trolling a spent ballpen instead of an x-rap plug. I've been getting nothing. I have gone out several afternoons/evenings, and every time I seem to have brought serious wind with me. I launch in a breeze, and five minutes later it ramps up to a gale. In a way this is fine, since I like very much to make sure I can handle windy conditions and wind waves as a matter of practicing for future situations that might arise in wilderness kayaking. But by now I'm tired of it. Paddling against wind is more of a strength workout than an endurance one, and I'm more in need of the latter. So, when I saw another small craft advisory posted for 1:00 p. m. onward for today, I decided to pass on the Li Po trolling.

If I really want to catch a striper (and there's some ambivalence about whether I really want fish, or good kayak workouts), what I need to do is pretty obvious: start getting up in the morning, and get on the water before the local winds get to cruising speed. Easily said, harder for me to do. I tend to stay up late, lazing around watching taped soccer matches and drinking beer and wine. This past weekend at a friend's three-day wedding party took the drinking factor to a new level. So I have more or less decided to bribe myself, and not have a single beer or glass of wine until I catch a fish. I suppose this could be a shad or a striper or a trout, but it has to be hooked and fought and brought to hand to really count.

Oddly, the most interesting result to arise from my fishing-anecdote searching ends up being a Li Po poem:

DRINKING ALONE WITH THE MOON

From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me --
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring....
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
...Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.

In a funny way, this lovely little allegory of the moon and shadow remind me very much of the thoughts and sensations that I enjoy -- that I seek, really -- when I go on my solo fishing trips. Did I run across this poem portentously? Is it telling me that indeed, I should get drunk less and fish more? I think I will interpret it in just that way until I can bring home a few sacs of shad roe, which go oh so well with a crisp lager or a light citrusy Belgian-style white . . . .

Up to Baja for a Little While

Heaven, if it exists, must be a very far way away from the world we live in. That conviction is a big part of why I end up driving and flying and paddling and floating way far away into places far from home. Doing so takes money and effort and time and often a very high tolerance of annoyance, pain, and boredom, but if you end up with a few moments -- sometimes even hours -- of the bliss of heaven on earth, then it all seems worth it.

One thing I learned in my recent trip to Baja is that heavenly angels can assume the shape of large schools of corvina that fly in with the tide and strike readily on flies, one after the other after the other, one angel to bless each cast. I caught a few of these fine fish my last time down to Baja, but this time they were really IN. I knew things were going to be good when I reeled up the first one to the kayak, and about a half dozen other 4-5 pounders were swirling and darting around it as though they wanted to get in on the action. It's a wonder that I didn't end up with a double!

Got them on "Wruckers," small clousers tied by my kayak fishing friend Jim Wruck:


And also on bigger whistler-type flies tied by my friend Ben Taylor:


Here too is a video from corvina heaven -- note the music of the breakers in the background (the breakers in heaven mostly break behind sheltering sand dunes, and do not end up smashing your foldable kayak like certain waves of the world):




I should add that there are some demons, too. I lost both of Ben's whistlers to savage, drag-running strikes that ended in cut lines. Demons have teeth (grouper do, and especially pargo do) and there are few fish swimming in these waters that do not have spines sticking out somewhere and even nasty paper-cut scales. After a few days of handling fish and paddles and other salty, wet stuff, my hands were red-speckled with irritating rash. I lotioned them up while on land, but the only way to really stop the pain was to rub them in nice salty water until they hurt so much that you didn't notice it any more. Then I could go ahead and grab the paddle and get back to fishing.

I'd have more pictures for you, but I screwed up and left my camera battery charger home. Pictures were thus precious resources, and I did a bad job of deciding when to use them. On my best day out, I landed two big pargo in the ten pound range, and a couple of grouper in the same category, but I didn't get photos. At the time, some set-net fishers were anchored nearby watching my every move, and for some reason I was shy about taking pictures. They called out in disgust when I released all these fish, and I figured, "OK, I'll show these guys and bring over a big-ass 20 pound grouper for them."

But therein lies a sad tale. My grouper/pargo limit is about ten pounds, and the reason is that they strike like large trucks, and drive immediately for cover. I lost a LOT of lures, fished with wire leaders, in scenarios like this: OK, here I am, trolling along close by the mangroves in 15 feet of water, and starting perhaps to daydream a bit, when WHAMMO!!! The rod is bent down double and is yanked back so hard that the handle is wrapped tight in the deck rigging, to the point where I can barely pull it loose . . . and by the time I get my hand on the reel and turn the kayak away from the mangroves, the line is pointed deep into the mangroves, and only makes occasional pulses . . . the fish is somewhere down there, deeply tangled up, and after a few minutes of futile pulling I give up or the line snaps. Crap.

I tried letting up on the drag so that I could theoretically have an easier time pulling the rod out of the rigging; but then fish just ran against the drag into their mangroves and holes. Cranking down on the drag again would only cause the rod to twist around at strike time and get stuck in the rigging, which made life very hard for me. Once, I yanked so hard and frantically to get the rod out, that I ended up switching off the anti-reverse. The crazy-spooling result was so ridiculous that I had to laugh. I think a big fat pargo was down there somewhere doing the same.

So in the end I was stuck with this kind of thing -- no trophies, but quite a bit better than a glob of seaweed on the hook:


One of the compensations of heaven is that the food is pretty good. It might be better yet if you could get someone else to cook it and serve it, but that's not how it works. I ate fish once a day, never consuming anything more than two or three hours old, and this was the menu for the first several days:

Fish tacos with corvina
Grouper fillet sauteed with olive oil and lemon pepper
Whole pompano grilled over mesquite coals
Snook fillets in garlic butter
Ceviche de Sierra
Fish tacos with spotted bay bass

And of course, I wasted a few shots photographing my food:




Fish that escaped being kept, bled and cooked include: barracuda, lizardfish, hogfish, and scores of beautiful little roosterfish that caught straight from the beach in front of my camp. In fact, I was able sit and sip coffee until I saw one of the rippling roosterfish boils coming within range, and then grab the rod and jog down to the beach and hook up one of these little gems:


Small but extremely scrappy, and I don't see right now how I'm going to avoid going down again sometime closer to peak rooster season.

#1 unpleasant surprise of the trip: not getting a single yellowtail. I unbuttoned one fish that must have been a yellowtail, and then solidly hooked another one right in Puerto Escondido. The fish headed out, burning the drag on its way toward moored sailboats, and I showed my yellowtail rookie-ness by cranking down on the drag until the hooks popped out, straightened. I thought that the drag must be too loose, because jeez, that fish is NOT slowing down . . . but actually the drag was tight enough, and this is just how yellowtail fight. On one day I paddled six miles out to a deep seamount near Isla San Marcos to try for them, and though I saw sea lions and dolphins and finback whales, I did not see a yellowtail. The only thing I actually hooked on that long paddle was a sort of a bad joke:




#1 pleasant surprise of the trip: snook. The first one I got seemed like a pleasant accident (they are very, very tasty as well as fine, attractive fighting fish) but then I realized that when the water was really cold on the incoming tide, the grouper and pargo would shut off and then the snook had a chance at grabbing your lure. On one of my last days of the trip, when I was killing fish to bring back in the cooler, the water turned extremely cold and the grouper and pargo fishing was quite awful:


Yes, it can be tough down there in Baja. Sometimes the wind blows, and sand finds its way into everything. You can watch out carefully for scorpions and stinging jellyfish, and then get a nasty surprise by scratching sensitive chafed areas after cutting up serrano peppers for your ceviche -- owww! Without a hose of fresh rinse water, you and your equipment don't get coated with salt -- you get ENCRUSTED with it. But like I said, in then end it comes up looking like a project well worth the effort.

San Juan All the Way

It was too perfect: at the very end of 155 miles of paddling, finally arriving at San Juan de Nicaragua, I get out of the kayak and walk up to the riverside hotel, dripping and muddy and wearing a ridiculous spray skirt, and join right in with a Mexican song that I happen to know playing on the radio:

Tambien mi dijo un arriero
Que no hay que llegar primero
Pero hay que saber llegar

Which translates roughly to

Also a mule-driver told me
That you don´t have to arrive first,
But you have to know how to arrive

But of course, if I´m going to talk about that trip I should start at the start not at the end -- if going down a big slow river doesn´t merit a chronological narrative, what does?

Day 1: San Carlos to Boca de Sabalos

Trip-start exhiliaration. I am floating in more ways than one as I leave the muddy beach and cruise past town in the mellow dawn. For one, it is simply great to get out of San Carlos. The glow lasts all the way down to a known holding spot called Santa Fe, where I pause to troll a few passes for tarpon. None are showing, and none are biting. After I leave Santa Fe a headwind comes up that will be my constant midday-afternoon adversary. I settle into the hammer-and-anvil feeling that you get when the current is pushing you one way and the wind another. Not that there was enough current to please me on this 32 mile day, four miles of which were spent in more bootless trolling near Boca de Sabalos. I am good and tired of paddling by then, but to not troll that same spot where I hooked up last year, a spot which has mythical status in my teensy little world -- impossible!



Day 2: Boca de Sabalos to Boca de Bartola

Two solid days of trolling at Sabalos (not counted here as travelling days) are planned into my intinerary, with the idea that I could catch a tarpon, get that out of the way, and then paddle the rest of the river in peace and euphoria. It is not to be. I do not get a single strike in 20 miles or so of trolling time. And friends, even Shadbourne Gilmore can get worn out on trolling without a little bit of reinforcement. Resultingly, I am glad to get going downriver, where I splash through the rapids at El Castillo and have a nice river shrimp lunch while watching the turists see the sights I already saw last year (I think El Castillo is pretty heavily overrated, but I am a guy whose ruins cherry was popped at 19 by Macchu Picchu). When I get bored paddling, I enjoy watching the big spaces between the afternoon thunderheads, which is like looking through an airplane window but with fresh air.



Day 3: Boca de Bartola to Boca de San Carlos

More delightfully unexpected rapids push me halfway to San Carlos, and keep me clipping along until the wind comes up. I´m told there is a hotel in this Costa Rican town, but when I check it out, I am looking at the equivalent of the worst dark, depressing, poopy-smelling fleabag room where I used to sleep in earlier days as a trekking dirtbag. No problem, I am prepared with a hammock and tarp, and I head downstream looking for two appropriate trees that are A) not completely choked with vines and jungle flora and B) decently removed from the sandbar habitats of crocodiles, which have started to appear regularly.



The only spots that satisfy the criteria are on the ranchlands of the Costa Rican side, so it is there that I stop and set up. Camping out on my own is very, very delightful after being pampered at the Hotel Sabalos and Refugio Bartola, and I love the feeling of reclining in the clear grassy riverbank with a bit of rum, and watching the full moon rise over the impenetrable wall of jungle on the Nicaraguan side of the river. The background sound of birds and monkeys is thick and riotous in the early part of the night, and then when it clears out a bit closer to midnight I hear one particularly beautiful bird call that is like a plaintive descending scale. Pretty enchanting in the moonlight, and probably the peak moment of my river trip.



Day 4: San Carlos to Sarapiqui

My next stop is also in Costa Rica, only this time it will be in the lap of luxury at Cabinas de la Trinidad. The place is run by a meticulous old Tica who must have been quite a beauty in her time. Like at Hotel Sabalos, I am the only guest (there was one other couple at Bartola) and I get royal treatment with complimentary REAL coffee for a change, instead of the instant stuff that Nicaraguans always use. Having watched spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys from the kayak as they flew around in the canopy, I finally spot my first howler monkeys here at the hotel, probably because they are habituated to humans. You hear them all the time, morning and night on the river, but they are very hard to spot. When I´m on my way out the next day, they do something that infuriates me: they climb into the branches over my launch spot and start pissing and crapping all over the area! Intentionally, I feel sure! I probably should laugh, but I know it´s going to be a long day and I´m anxious to get going. For a few monkey turds that float on the surface, big fat carp-like fish rise up and take like trout take grasshoppers. Idea: brown balsa popper, plain without feathers, the Monkey Turd.



Day 5: Sarapiqui to San Juan de Nicaragua

Like day 3, the current helps me through about ten miles of the morning, and then deserts me completely. The very last leg of the trip comes after a confluence where 80 or 90% of the river goes down the Rio Colorado into Chile, while I´m left with a very shallow, slow 10% for twenty miles. Also, the notion of the Indio-Maiz jungle reserve seems to break down here, and there are people sitting in front of their little farm shacks along the way, mutely gawking at the gringo as though he were a two-headed space alien. After years of being an outsider in Japan and elsewhere, this still annoys me. But the day has treats in store. Eventually, I begin to hear the breakers of the Caribbean coming over the freshened air, and they crescendo into a very cool moment of beaching the kayak and climbing over a sand dune to see the whooooole enchilada spread out before me. Like I told some guys, to see the wide open sea after a week on a jungle river was quite ¨emocionante.¨




San Juan de Nicaragua itself is, among dreary, filthy, impoverished sites of human habitation, truly the holiest of holies. Its location has been moved a few times, and its name changed twice already, and if it was ever worse than now, I don´t want to imagine it. The Nicaraguan socialists seem to have sensed the need for intervention, and have poured money into projects that all are brazenly announced with big placards placed in front of the sites, signs which go so far as to announce the amount of money invested: ¨Nicaragua Avanza! Proyecto para Agua Potable. Costo: $2,600,000.¨ ¨Nicaragua Avanza! Proyecto para Sitio Turistico. Costo: $190,000.¨ Yet, you notice that power is only on for three hours every day, and the piped water is so unreliable that the locals hoard it in plastic barrels, and especially that the Tourist site, a big concrete monstrosity labeled ¨Brisas del Mar Bar and Grill¨ has no bar and no food and contains only one rather addled looking fellow who spends the entire day listening to a radio held up to his ear.

You´re going to think I´m making this up, but, while my head was dancing with maxims of trade liberalism, I actually MET a group of government functionaries. Or whatever you call them. They came to town in their own private motorboat, and stood out much as gringos do -- they were well dressed, well fed, and goofy. I watched as they took a bunch of pictures on the dock, including a set shot where the subject jumped up in the air and was photographed with waving hands. Eh? I ran into them in the better of the town´s two restaurants and asked where they were from. They´re from Nicaragua! They are a group of lawyers and engineers tasked with deciding how the national funds will be spent. They are touring the area, assessing sites. As I listen, I realize that these are the very guys that make me lean toward economic liberality. I always ask, ¨who are you going to trust to make all the decisions on what to produce, and how much of it, and where investment should be concentrated -- in some bunch of humanly error-prone government goobers like the Soviet trade ministry, who fucked up not just their own massive country but much of Europe, too?¨ And here were the goobers, joking around and having a fine time in San Juan de Nicaragua. Their sense of fun was infectious and I couldn't not like them. At one point I almost got offended, thinking that the chief lawyer was mocking gringo-accented Spanish; but no, he explained, that was how the crazy Costa Ricans talk! I´m sure they had some good laughs at my expense as soon as I left. And I do hope they build the airport they were talking about, as it may be the only way I ever get back to San Juan.

At any rate, it was a trip. I´m very glad I made it. I wish I´d got a tarpon, but what the hell. I don´t wish it bad enough to spend a few more days trolling, and so I have arranged to be heading home from Ortegatown this very afternoon. I´ve barely left the hotel room, where I have feasted well on Champions League highlights and movies. I´ll get the pictures up ASAP.

Viva Nicaragua! and California. No hay que llegar primero, pero hay que saber llegar.

Fice and Rish

Remember this dialogue in The Old Man and the Sea?

"What do you have to eat?" the boy asked.
"A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?"
"No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?"
"No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold."

If you have read the book (and if you haven´t, do) then you know that that there isn´t really any yellow fish with rice. The old man is salado, and hasn´t caught a thing for 85 days. Yet it is comfort enough for the two impoverished fishermen to regularly perform this lovely ritual of pretending that the fish and rice exist, until it is so meaningful and suggestive as to be nearly symbolic.

Fish and rice-ism has been a part of my fishing imagination for many years, since long before I myself became an old man. I read the book, and I thought I got the meaning. During my years in Japan, the significance of F&R grew deeper for two unrelated reasons. First, the obvious reason, is that Japanese love to serve a simple meal of a whole or split salt-broiled fish and a bowl of white rice, with perhaps a few insignificant pickles on the side. From the start, this struck me as lovely and pure like Santiago´s fish, except of course it was real -- rich, oily delicious, and edifying. And then one day, to humor my girlfriend of the time, I went to a Picasso museum in Hakone that displays numbers of the artist´s handmade, hand-painted plates. And next to almost every plate, there was a photo of the hearty old fellow sitting with a smile of deep satisfaction in front of a plate with a fish skeleton on it, picked clean. Picasso got it, just like Papa.



One of the great delights of this past week in the Solentiname islands has been eating my fish whole, usually within a couple of hours of reeling them up to the kayak. The fishing was pretty good, so I ate pretty good. I threw back at least one rainbow bass that might have gone five or six pounds, and a few of three or four, but the first two and a half pound fish of the day was invariably a goner. I threw in a few pairs of crisp-fried mojarras for variety (or the cook Telma did, after I handed them over) and feasted more or less like an extremely lucky old man.


Fish and rice is healthy, and I think I am already feeling and seeing the benefits of it in my physical well-being. Aside from a bit of pickled chile and some fried bananas and steamed chayote, all I ate was large helpings of fish and small helpings of rice, which in these parts they measure out carefully in a cup and then mold it onto your plate. Breakfast was rice and beans and eggs -- perfect fuel for a dozen-mile day of paddling. I worked up to an 18 mile circumnavigation of Isla Mancarron and had a lovely little adventure out of it.


Though probaby my biggest adventure happened just yesterday, when I was forced to wade-fish while my boat dried out for packing. I waded and floated with my PFD out to a little submerged reed island and promptly caught a 2-3 pounder for dinner. I hung this poor sucker off a flagpost sticking up out of the rockpile (which is there to help boats to locate the shoal) and proceeded to keep casting, catching a few odd fish and a few times diving in after my rockbound lure. On one of these lure rescues, I noticed an odd triangular thing apparently floating nearby. What the heck is that? And then the triangle opened up, and chewed a few times, and I realied that one of the local freshwater crocs was swallowing down a fish not a hundred feet from where I was standing! Yikes. I´d seen these guys a couple times from the kayak and got slightly freaked out, but in this case I was truly concerned. If you wanted to goad an old lizard into a fight, then hanging up a dead fish and standing around up to your waist in the water would probably work well. But of course I wade-floated back to shore safely with all my feet and fingers, so that I can now type the tale here.

While paddling around Mancarron I made a strange catch: a cleverly submerged, illegal set net. the locals tell me that these are really harming the quality of the hook-and-line fishing, and I considered cutting it up with my river knife. But at the time, I had this odd feeling that someone was watching me from the trees onshore . . . so instead of destroying some old Santiago´s net, I went ahead and checked the length of it for any fish, of which there were none, live nor dead. But all this got me thinking about a great aid project for the area: a serious scientific survey of the fish populations, with a report recommending regulatory practices. People will say, probably rightly, that poor hungry islanders will not let regulations get in their way, and that the money to enforce them will never appear. But Never is a very long time, and anyway such a report would be at least as useful as the abandoned recycling plant created by one agency, or the ongoing groundwater well project by ACRA. If I can find a way to promote this idea, it could be a good use of my lovely months of unemployment, which are now a mere two weeks old and going great.



Not that paddling and fishing are bad uses of time. I haven´t cast a line today, but tomorrow I start down the San Juan with a big tarpon rig on the deck. Mmm, sabalo chorizo and rice . . . whether real or imagined, I go to find it soon!