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 . . . .