Fascination of What's Difficult

Flys4b8 Mike doesn't shock easily, but I think I surprised him by suggesting that, if the steelhead fishing were slow, I might drive on over to a certain not-too-far trout stream for the day.

"What!? You loser! With that kind of attitude, you're going to be a steelhead virgin forever! Buck up and put your game face on, boy! If it were easy to get one, it wouldn't be the premier game fish!"

And so on. If Mike's mouth were a verbal river, it would be rising and coloring!. Egad! To consider taking one day out of a three-day trip to cast flies to some lowly resident rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) instead of the rare, noble migratory steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) . . . unthinkable! Outrageous!

But actually, Mike is comparatively mellow about it. Some of his steelheading brethren are really just tiresome snobs, dour old drudges who spend far too much time weaving around steelhead fishing an elaborate (though dull) mythology or minor religion, whose first commandment is this: steelheading is better because it is more difficult.

Difficulty! What's it worth, compared with the aesthetics of casting a fly line, and the joy of having a pull on the other end? I have long thought that many fly fishers suffer from the Fascination of What's Difficult. Replace that second stanza, and you've got my response to the steelhead mantra:

My curse on fish
That strike once in 200 drifts,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Floating down the river in a guided drift boat.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the valve on the Lewiston Dam and pull out the bolt.

Within the past several years there have been a couple of California steelhead seasons when the numbers of fish migrating into the system went off the charts, and the fishing went off the hook. For a while, any dolt could get a steelhead. I went to the river early in one of those seasons and drifted a canyon section with a buddy in our inflatable boats. We hooked a total of four fish -- which is really good for an early season day of steelheading -- and I think you can guess who unbuttoned and then snapped off, respectively, each of his two fish. How else would I still be talking to you now as a "steelhead virgin?"

So no, this year does not seem to be shaping up as one of those great years, and no, nobody landed a steelhead on our wintry three-day weekend trip. Mike H. got a really nice brown, and Mike W. had a good steelie on the line for a while, and I did worst of all, snapping off one big fish on the first and second days each.


I got to see the first steelhead, and it was a giant. I went home thinking, "how the hell am I supposed to land that blimp on 4x tippet?" The next morning I went out with 3x tippet, got a strike on one of my first drifts, and watched the fish rip across the current going 75 mph until he ripped the tippet as well. I think he got me in a snag, but the Mikes seemed to think I put too much pressure on him. Again, I have to say: "how am I supposed to fight the damn fish -- by tickling it with a feather?" I was left muttering and daydreaming about dragging in striped bass on 25# tippet -- private thoughts that would undoubtedly scandalize any true steelheader.

In happier news, I can report that the fish-to-fun ratio was still positive, despite that dismal catching record. I put on my game face in the end, getting up at first light on perhaps the coldest day of the year and heading out to fish for steelhead. We tramped through a frosty landscape covered with snow and rime and stood in a frigid stream until our extremities barely functioned, for a morning's total of several six-inch smolts and one 11-12 inch brown. The brown ended up being the biggest fish I touched in the whole three days. But so what? This cold, this adversity -- this difficulty! -- this is steelhead fishing!!! As long as a high fever and pneumonia do not develop in the next few days, I'm sure it will be a treasured memory.


General enjoyment was greatly enhanced by a nice cabin with a woodstove and a full-featured kitchen from which gourmet-ish food and drink issued fairly continuously: good cheese, fine wine, Belgian beer, smoked pork ribs, fancy frittatas for breakfast, unagi and takuan, Laphroig scotch whisky, and so on. Without a place to dry off and warm up, we all probably would have died of hypothermia with 7wt rods (with ice in the guides) clutched tightly in our frostbitten hands, becoming true top-tier steelheading sufferers in our last moments. Or maybe, in a minor technicality, steelheaders are permitted unlimited enjoyment whenever they are off the river, I'm not sure.


For a moment dropping all species of attitudes, I have to confess that I got a little bit of the steelhead bug this weekend. Maybe I'll have to go out when river is colored and I can use bigger tippet, or maybe I need to wait for another one of those idiot-proof seasons, but I will keep trying off and on. You'll never see me drinking the real steelhead kool aid; I will keep heaping my plate with low-end grub like chum salmon, triggerfish, and plain-old resident onchorynchus mykiss; but the steelies aren't completely free of my little stinger quite yet. Meanwhile, I apologize to the two fish who are up there shaking my rusting hooks out of their mouths.

My Annoying Friend Rick

Weather forecasts are a fisherman's friend, but they sure can be an annoying one. I can't count how many times I have backed off from a good plan -- an early winter weekend on the Pit River, or a long day with perfect tides on the delta -- only to find that the snow predicted at 2000 ft. never fell, the 20-30 m. p. h. gusts never blew. This gives you a feeling of having been cheated, and not by Nature, which is always fair though often fickle. You feel like you have cheated yourself by listening to fool's forecasts.

However, last week around this time I found myself saying this to my new fishing partner JT: "I hate running from weather reports, but this one is a hurricane report . . . ."

I refer to reports of the ominous reports of Hurricane Rick, who at the time had just been upgraded from Tropical Storm to Hurricane and given his oh-so-scary and menacing name. He was headed, by almost all projections, directly toward the lower part of the Baja peninsula. Of course, I was planning to approach lower Baja that same night from the opposite direction.

I'd already caught some whiffs of Rick from wunderground.com forecasts, and they didn't look good. In an area so dry they usually don't bother making bridges across the rivers, clouds and rain were forecast for mid-week. This alone would have interfered with me and my plans, because I do like driving off on primitive dirt roads and camping primitively on the beach, away from big gringo RVs. Even if I had my 4WD truck instead of a Cabo rental car, this would be bad news.

From Fishin Sabbatical

Plus, along with the rain forecasts, they were forecasting unusually strong winds up to 40 m. p. h. both in the morning and afternoon. I paddle in decent winds like any other really commited sea kayaker, and I do it because you inevitable get caught in them and must be prepared to handle them. But I ain't stupid enough to paddle out when it is already whitecapping at first light. And when those winds are part of a thing called a Hurricane, whatever its name? I think not.

The storm was basically forecast to keep me on shore for several days or more, gutting my trip. I had a sinking feeling from the start that cancellation would happen, but nonetheless got busy hunting around for information and checking stormpulse.com every ten minutes. Friday was not a restful day. Some people I consulted just said "Go for it," and I was sorely tempted to do so. I thought maybe I could hide out inland in a hotel in Ciudad Constitucion for a couple boring days while the storm passed and then get back to fishing. But other voices, from bulletin boards frequented by expats actually living in Baja, told a different tale:

If you are there and this one, "Rick" comes through there will be no hotel rooms available. People I have talked to who are there now have all reserved rooms for this blessed event already. If this is like Jimena, which I sincerely hope it isn't, there will be no food, water, electricity, no atms, bridges knocked out, etc. It is NOT the place to be during a hurricane or after, for that matter.

So I did cancel. And guess what? By Saturday Rick got promoted to category 5, and they started saying he was the second strongest East Pacific hurricane on record. By Sunday he was already turning away from a path toward landfall on Baja, and by Monday he was demoted several points down, almost to a mere tropical storm. Rick fizzled out. It turned out to be a best-case scenario, in which I could have gone down and lost one day on the water, if that.

Though in reality, I probably would have been having a very unrelaxed time in a camp on Mag Bay, watching the sky and worrying if my cheap rental car was ever going to get back out of there.

From Baja Winter Solstice Fishin Tour

No matter, there is a new plan, and it is good: the spell of condo livin' and panga fishing that was planned for the end of my trip is now at its beginning, and the forecasts look wonderful for the foreseeable future at the tip of Baja. I'm going to hang out and fish with some friends, paddle a new area for new pelagic species, and probably drive off to spend a few days in my little remote fishing heaven down there. Personally, I'm forecasting a flurry of dorado with occasional 40-80 pound gusts of striped marlin and yellowfin tuna. We shall see.

Snake Pits and Hornet's Nests

My last entry described a fairly ideal campsite, and this one is kind of going to describe its opposite. They can't all be perfect, can they? Neil Kelly (of The Baja Catch) commented that he was known to camp "on donkey turds" in order to get near good fishing. That is correct; that is science: there is some kind of complicated algorithm to describe how the interaction of scenic values, fishing prospects, and weekend/vacation time constraints all add up to a guy sleeping in his truck on a gravel levee. Or look at it this way: in The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paul Theroux paddled freely around a south Pacific paradise, grousing and grouching all the way; balancing the equation from the other direction, I camped last night in a construction site and went into reveries about the joyous romantic values of the setting.

Anyone who has spent some time in the delta knows what I am talking about. When you get back into this giant maze of canals, cuts, and flooded islands, you can momentarily feel like you are in a true wilderness. It can be quiet and vast at times. The tules surround you while the currents whispers through the weeds, a heron lifts slowly into the foggy air with its lonely, rasping cry, and then -- and then on the bank you espy the sixteenth abandoned couch of the morning. The seventh refrigerator. The fifth houseboat, burnt and sunk for insurance purposes.


Weekdays are the best times in the delta, as my last visit with flys4b8 Mike demonstrated very clearly. Our plan was to camp Friday night at Russo's Marina ($20 to camp in basically a parking lot, $10 to launch a kayak), and our error was to not call ahead and ask questions. For instance, we should have asked if Russo's was hosting anything like the weigh-in for one of these rich cultural events known as "fishing tournaments." If you have never witnessed one of these events, let me tell you that it is quite an experience. Not only was the usually-deserted campsite full to the gills, but the lights were kept on all night on a general spectacle of drinking, shouting, bragging about fat fish and fast boats, and, most especially, misdirecting and misinforming the competition about fishing spots and methods. It was a true comedy, and we did settle down and try to enjoy it. But no sooner had the human hullabaloo died down than the diesel thunder began, and guys started backing their trailers down to the water from 3:00 a. m. right up to sunrise in order to get an early start on the day. Both the sound and smell of that prevented any real sleep from happening inside a backpacking tent. I feel sure that the winners of these bouts are the guys who fish best on zero sleep, drunk and/or hungover.

Way down away from the concentrated human activity near Russo's, there is an area of the south delta that feels especially forgotten, empty, and pleasant. There's a run-down marina/resort in the area, of course, but get this: they charge THIRTY dollars for a crap campsite on top of the ten for launching. You gotta be kidding. I'll stay in Motel 6 for 37.99 before I go for THAT. And no, I do not pay those ridiculous launch fees. My general way of getting in the water in this area is to launch ever so carefully from the rocky levees enclosing one of the east-west running canals. There's a bit of wake-dodging to be done on weekend mornings, but then boom, you are right on fishable water and in position to hit prime areas both on the outgoing and incoming tides, as long as you time it right and are willing to paddle a few miles to your fishing. I always am!

Most nights in this particular area, you'll see trucks or vans pulled over near a burning campfire, and several guys, girls and kids sitting in camp chairs next those big, long rods people use for catfishing. Somewhere at the bottom of the canal you presume there is some stinky old bait (mackerel is apparently a favorite, even though no mackerel naturally comes within 75 miles of the spot) and on the end of the rod there are usually bells that jingle when you are getting a bite. Some even have little motion-activated lights on them. Among the crowd there are hardcore catfishers that sit there fishin and drinkin right into the wee hours.

That's interesting (and probaby fun) fishing, though it ain't my particular type. But why shouldn't I follow their example and park on the levee all night? You can't do this everywhere in the delta; most of the "ground" is too wet, and on the raised ground and levees there is a sense that you are sure to be hassled or run off the property if you linger all night. By contrast, on this levee it seems to be OK to park and fish all night long. How about if you pull your truck up, put out a chair with a rod next to it, and make like you are catfishing all night when in fact you are inside the camper shell trying to get some rest for the next day's striper fishing?

This basically did work out for me. I'm not saying that it is perfectly restful nor that a few random trucks won't drive by in the wee hours, rousing you with Deliverance-type concerns. But I am saying that it is a practical way to not get gouged for third-rate camping, and I'm also saying that there are recommendable pleasures in it as well. The stars aren't as bright as in the sierras, but there is still an odd sense of the immense sky, ringed as it is by a ground horizon sprinkled with faraway lights. The wind farms on the hills look like weird Christmas tree farms, with red blinking lights going on and off in sychronization. You know that there's a lot of human habitation out there, but it is comfortably far away and the immediate surroundings are very quiet and peaceful. I sat in my camp chair with an abbey beer taking all this in, and even reached that sublime level of night-outness where I spontaneously talk to myself like Nick Adams. I thought about the hotel alternative in Tracy, with all the freeway noise and meth-heads in the next room, and said aloud, "I'm only going back into that hornet's nest if they make me."

As Thoreux wrote in Fresh Air Fiends, "My ideal in travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cites are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent." A levee in the delta ain't exactly the bush, and I didn't exactly dare to pitch my tent there, but you see what I mean. I was perched just on the fringe of the snake pit, the hornet's nest.

And yes the fishing was pretty good. Still no stripers of size for me, but I got a decent one on topwater Friday night, and then had a really good run of 2-4 pounders Saturday morning on the incoming tide. I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I have started a new career of camoflage levee camping. I hope to refine this practice as the striper season heats up through November. For I did spy some nice flat areas right near where the train tracks go through, and trains only make an enormous racket five or six times during the night . . . looks promising!

Slowpacking the South Sierras

Now twenty years after I hiked down the John Muir Trail, I am proud and/or ashamed to say that I am still using the same backpack. It is a Gregory Shasta that I bought because the Backpacking Moses -- Colin Fletcher, author of the backpacking bible "The Compleat Walker" -- used a Gregory Cassin and considered it state of the art, and also because when I tried it on, it fit. Bless the thing, it has survived a mileage total that may now reach in the two thousands after all my huffing around Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Nepal, and the Japan Alps. One tough pack!

Meanwhile, dramatic technological and social changes during that time have rendered both my pack and my self most obsolete. During that time, not just "ultralight" but also "fastpacking" have forced their way into any compleat notion of walking as a sport. "Wha was that -- 'fastpacking?'" It passed me right by, in a blink of the eye. My personal experience of it goes something like this: one minute I was watching my friend Scott pass out in a camper van, empty bourbon bottle and creel of live eels knocked over by the campfire, and then the next minute someone was telling me that Scott had finished the entire Appalachian Trail in six weeks -- and was trying it a SECOND TIME. Fast, indeed!

"A wise man climbs mount Fuji," the Japanese say, "once."

Not to boast, but I did climb it, once. John Muir trail, once. But about the sierra lakes I have fished multiple times -- best we not go there. I'm not going to give out any names of my secret spots, anyway. I won't even mention the lake at the end of my Tahoe-to-Yosemite hike where I was quickly deprived of my last flies by big snap-offs, and which, after a few days restocking down in San Francisco, I drove back out and hiked back up 20+ miles to reach again and have a second whirl at. Nor will I mention that I have been back there five or six more times since, with a friend, and a (now ex) girlfriend, and giddily alone. Oh, how closely I will guard the secret of having witnessed the spawning run one July, and taken the measure of xxx or so trout of xx inches or more milling in foot-deep creek water!

Over the recent labor day weekend I took five days of serious slowpacking time in the south sierras, and it was sublime. Bucking personal trends, I hiked in to a completely new area, fished completely new lakes and streams, and had a catch-a-thon to remember. Friday's hike may have been hell on wheels for my feet, back, and head (OK, I admit it, I did slowpack a bottle of Allagash Curieux three miles into my Thursday night camp) but when I was eating sweet orange brook trout flesh for dinner under the stars late Friday night, I cannot say I was feeling much pain.

The next day I did a 10+ mile day hike that saw me fishing three different bodies of water and having more and more fabulous fishing all the way up. Though a committed slowpacker, I am nonetheless a weight nazi who only packs essentials, and I guess this time around I decided that a 22 oz. bottle of bourbon cask-aged Belgian-style ale was essential, while a small (but dense!) digital camera was not. If I had known how beautiful the lakes and the fish would be, I might have reconsidered that. The brookies were in full fall mating colors, and the goldens I caught were so colorful -- and large, for their kind -- that I almost wept at the effect of their blazing red smears on spotted, irridescent golden backgrounds.

I fear this may be one of the lamest moves in blogging history, but here are some pictures I have poached of someone else's trip report to the same area (curse him for posting the place names! I shall not; and these image file names have been changed to protect the innocent). This is a lake where I sight-fished for brookies with a big hopper pattern that they just couldn't resist:


And in this lake a little further up, I got lots of goldens like this, and several that were bigger and even more colorful (probably because they were males, with larger, kyped heads and lots of red in the sides):


In fact, I sight-fished repeatedly for a golden trout that might have gone 16 inches or more, and who really acted like a wise old bastard; meaning, he refused six different patterns that I threw at him, from the hopper to a size 20 pheasant tail. Which is not to say that his smaller cohorts didn't come crashing in after a nymph as soon as it hit the water, or move 20 feet in a hurry after hearing the hopper splat down on the surface. We are talking Very Fun Fishing.

And also, far more than I ever appreciated it back in my epic-hikin' days, Fun Walking and Fun Camping. Other humans were mercifully few, and trees and stars were practically infinite. The moon was big too, at midnightlighting up my orange tarp like some kind of psychedlic cocoon (which in a way, I suppose it is). You can't beat the air nor the quality of the light, especially in mid-morning, which is the time I am usually sipping coffee, laying back and gazing around as I slowpackingly put off the business of the day.

The year is slipping away slowly and the nights were very cold, but I still think there may be one more weekend trip left in this oustanding 2009 slowpacking season . . .

Cameras and Alaska

Don't mix. Every year I seem to take, and destroy, an increasingly less waterproof camera. It was endless rain on Prince William Sound that did it last year. This year I had insanely dry weather -- just one rain day and fourteen dry, sunny ones -- but a firm wag of an angry trout's tail waterlogged my camera for good. This is the culprit:


The rest of the few decent pictures are on Picasaweb. I'll tell the rest of the tale with uploaded films, which of course only come from the first seven days of the trip. I didn't get any stills of the magnificent mountains on Grosvenor Lake nor a fat trout with a mouse pattern hanging off his lip; nor did I get any footage of chillin' at Fure's cabin nor prying a tenacious pike off my thumb and forefinger with a metal fork. I'd have taken em if I could! But I did get this stuff:



Outstanding weather.



Fun Fishin.



And again,




And again,




And again.




And again, and again, and again, until I'm no longer able to get out there anymore.

Now, to get out to the store and buy my next digital victim . . . .

July 11, National Alaskan Mouse Day

There's a new holiday on my calendar: July 11, National Alaskan Mouse Day.

What, why? I'll tell you why.

Two nights ago I woke up at five p. m., had my first IPA fully consumed by 7:30 p. m., and got out on the Brooks River at 8:00 or so. I was accompanied by my new friend Dan Cole who is a session guitarist, an adventurer in inflatable boats, and a mad fly-fishing fanatic. Basically a younger me, but with talent. It's important that he was there to bear witness, since my camera was drowned by the splashing of a 31-inch lake rainbow.

Tied on the end of my 12# tippet was a Moorish Mouse. I didn't know it at the time, but this pattern is a favorite of Troy Letherman, editor of Fish Alaska magazine and one of the few editors alive who ever published anything I wrote. But don't hold that against him; he's right about the pattern.

I had vowed earlier in the day, after a morning session that included obscene numbers of beautiful rainbows taken on leeches, buggers, and stimmies, to fish only and exclusively with a mouse. We had already seen the damage a large bow could do to a foam tarantula, tearing it into pieces after a savage grab. It is held in legend that they will do the same to a mouse pattern, and I wanted to try it. I fully expected to switch back to a leech after my patience running out.

My patience did not run out. In fact, the overriding emotional response, at least for the first few fish, was giddy, giggly, girly hilarity. I felt, "wait -- is this really happening? Are 18-24 inch rainbows actually following this ridiculous ball of deer hair and foam as it wakes away from the bank, nipping at it once or twice, and then gulping it completely down? And then jumping and running like any rainbow caught on any dry -- which as some of us know, is one of the more spectacular items in the list of Why We Fish?"

And oh yes, it was happening. About ten fine fish that way, in the course of a glorious hour. At one point Dan heard some more splashing from my direction and called out, "Are you still using that mouse?"

"Actually, I only EVER use mice anymore" was the giddy response.

Dan had a living camera, but of course had left it back in camp. He did that so regularly during our fishing sessions that I think he must agree with me when I say that cameras are nice so that you can share your experiences, but are also nasty because they kind of water your experiences down. I had pure, unphotographed, intoxicating mousing. And I know that when Dan is back to civilation and computers, he will corroborate my story. Considering his Alaska gusto, I'd be surprised if we don't end up mousing together again someday.

We went back out after couple more 11:30 beers and some pleasant flirting with Laney and Linda (you can, and we did, fish until 1:30 or so) and guess what: no action on the mouse at all. Dan got a few with streamers, proving they were there; and I got zippo with the mouse, proving that all good things must end.

But now I know it can happen, and now I know what it feels like. If you want to try and bring a special, symphonic finale to a fishing, kayaking, and Brooks-camping trip that has already been basically an extended ecstasy, then having a Mouse Day is the only way.

Trust me.

1!

I don't know if I was planning some kind of grand finale or superpost when the Katmai countdown reached 1 . . . but I do know now that it ain't gonna happen. I'm too exhausted. After last night's wine insomnia, I went in to work and really got hammered: there are five thousand little tasks I need to do to clean up after myself and tie off the loose ends, and I got about three thousand of them done today. At a cost. In energy.

Do believe I'll sleep tonight! And I'm expecting happy dreams of cold, trouty water. Maybe I'll even have one of those nifty dreams where you're flying through the air like some happy, high-soaring osprey, searching the water below . . .


In seventeen days or so, I hope to be blogging on again with some photos and tales from ground level. Hasta luego amigos!!

2 . . .

I'll come clean and attribute the attributed quote in my last blog to John Krakaeur -- I stole it from his book Into the Wild, which has a nifty quotation or two at the beginning of every chapter and lots of good references throughout. There are great tidbits from Thoreau and John Muir and all the other tree-hugging romanticist adventurers.

And were they also -- here's the word from a quotation that resonated in my mind -- monomaniacs? Considering my seven straight days of blogging about my two-week vacation, and also considering all the time and energy I have spent preparing for the trip and dreaming about it and planning for it, this unfamiliar word certainly hit with a sudden recognition. I think it's true: I have a minor problem with monomania. Were Thoreau and Muir nature monomaniacs? That would probably be unfair to say. But I'm free to say it about myself: I am a monomaniac.

This has occurred to me before, specifically in reference to fishing. Sometimes, I am fairly quaking with urges to fish that can only be quelled by actually going fishing. This effect is particularly pronounced just prior to any new or exciting fishing outing. It also gets exaggerated when the fishing seems finite, as when dusk is getting ready to fall on a very good caddis hatch, or when the peak of a good tidal current is starting to pass, or, most definitely, when I am thousands of miles away from home fishing for fish that you can't find at home (and by "at home," I mean within a 5-6 hour driving radius that covers the Sierra Nevada and the waters East and West of Redding, plus down as far as the Owens River).

Proof of Monomania is that I have made three previous visits to Brooks Camp, each of them four days or more, and I have never, ever, gone on the very popular bus trip out to the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. This time around, I may well do so. The ghost of Flakkarin the Wanderer is still wandering around my mind, stirring up fascination with volcanic landscapes. But no sooner do I say and imagine that than I feel something inside tugging at my mind's sleeve, saying "but dude, that could take a whole day away from being near the Brooks River. You might not even get a single sockeye on the line that day!" And yeah, honestly, something about that just seems wrong. When else am I going to have thousands of salmon swimming front of me, with hungry two-foot rainbows trailing? It's a fair question to ask when I'll be near a new volcanic landscape, too, and that might have worked wonders on me ten years or so ago when my monomania was mountains, not wetlands . . . .

Strangely enough, back in those days I had one or two epiphanies about that particular monomania, specifically when reading John Muir. He was alive to the whole picture: the storms, the hundred types of trees and plants, even the Douglas squirrels, all in addition to a sharp and intense awareness of the mountains themselves. I have a terrific book full of pictures of plants he pressed and saved from his travels through California and Alaska. I was reading the Alaska chapter this morning and marvelling at how open and alive that man's mind must have been. And meanwhile, he was an insane romantic, for whom the landscape was alive with meaning. About a glacier, he said, "the mills of God grind slowly. But they grind exceedingly fine."

What I generally think about glacial flour in the water is, "how are the fish ever going to see my fly?????"

One guy who very clearly was a monomaniac was Timothy Treadwell, star of Grizzly Man. The only question is whether he obsessed on the bears, or on his grand image of himself as the savior of bears. I do think that man was real good and crazy. Yet I do have some understanding of (I think) and respect for what he was up to out there on the Katmai coast. In fact, one quote that comes to my mind in regard to Timothy Treadwell is taken from a piece of great fiction, Naipaul's A Bend in the River:

A death like that makes us question everything. But we are men; regardless of the deaths around us we continue to be flesh and blood and mind, and we cannot stay with that questioning mood for long. When the mood went away I felt -- what deep down, as a live-loving man, I had never doubted -- that he had passed his time better than most of us.

I'm going nuts with my quoting today, aren't I? But the only way to climb is to stand on the shoulders of the giants. Naipaul was a great giant, as the first line of that novel (I can't resist another) proves: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." Good God I wish I could write like that.

However, the other quote I'd give in reference to Treadwell is far less romantic. It is the passage spoken by Herzog in the soundtrack where he basically says this: while Treadwell looked at the bears and saw kindred spirits, Herzog looked into their beady eyes and saw absolutely nothing except a wild creature with a half-bored interest in food. After watching hundreds of bears around Katmai, I agree with Herzog. And yet, that wildness, that blank and complete lack of kindred or caring between my human thoughts and feelings and the motivations that move the bear, or move the trout, or move the trees in the wind -- that is enough for me. I think I can build a powerful edifice of romantic and transcendental thinking/feeling on that alone.

Maybe I too am decieved. I'll make some inquiries and get back to you. Meanwhile, just two days separate me from departure to the place that stirs up all this monomania in the first place. Getting close!!!!!

3 . . .

There are two sides to every story, and both should be told. I have been writing about backcountry camping in Alaska as though it were all sweetness and light. It is not.

On the Alaska peninsula, it rains a lot. It rains in a way some Californians can probably not imagine: steadily, relentlessly, and daily. Once, on the Tikchik and Nuyakuk rivers, I had 12 straight days that were mostly rainy. When it wasn't pouring, it was steadily raining. And when you got a good break, it was still drizzling. I was just lucky that the sun came out on the last couple of days so that I could dry out all my stuff -- otherwise my sodden gear would have been so heavy it would have prevented the bush plane from taking off.

In Katmai, where fairly windy low-pressure systems blow in regularly, this is a more likely scenario: I'm laying down in my tent, nice and tired and ready for some rest, and a steady rain is falling. However, both the rain and wind get a little more intense, and now the trees are swinging around (and howling a bit) and letting big blasts of rain intermittently down on my tent's tarp. Have you sat in a tent and heard that abrupt, rattling sound, my friends? It is not conducive to peaceful sleeping.

"BRAAAPP!!!!" (Pause, wind howls). "BRAAAAAAAAPPPP!!!!" (More howling).


Tent discomforts in Alaska are legendary. If you get up in the middle of the night needing to relieve your bladder, you don't just saunter out in your birthday suit and let it rip. If it's raining, you are talking about getting soaked. Unless there's a real good wind, you're talking about getting twenty to a hundred mosquito bites before your bladder empties. If there IS a good wind, you'll be chilled and possibly shivering before you get back in the tent door. So, inevitably, you have to put on clammy rain gear, or your shell layer, and don't forget about pasting some bug dope onto your hands and face, because god knows they will get you in those places.

You do get used to it, but that does not mean it isn't annoying.

Mornings can be tough. My idea of heaven is waking up to already-brewed coffee, being handed to me in a mug, preferably in bed, most preferably of all, by a congenial member of the fairer sex. Obviously, this is not part of the plan in Alaska. And it's worse than you think: I not only have to get dressed, and put on boots, and heat water, and all that predictable shit -- I also have to carefully and slowly approach my food cache, which will be located a decent distance from the tent, calling out softly to let any possible bears know that I am coming. I have to look over my shoulder during the vulnerable moments in which the top of the bear can (and/or kevlar bear sack) is open, and then haul all the morning's eatables, plus the stove and fuel can that also live in the food cache (along with anything else smelly, like handkerchiefs, toothpaste, and pans) another 100 yards or so away from the food cache just in order to get STARTED with the water-boiling and oatmeal-stirring tasks that I wish to god someone else were doing for me while I slept.

On the other hand, it is about the only way I wake up properly without caffeine already in my veins. And when the caffeine starts to flow, it doesn't matter much if there's rain or sun -- I'll start getting very very excited about a day ahead that holds big fish or a paddling challenge or new territory to explore.



That's just a few of the annoyances I'm going to be living with next week, and it feels good to talk about them. They just remind me of the rest of the picture, and they sure as hell aren't going to stop me from heading up there in three days now . . . .

4 and Out the Door . . .

Alright, enough about the Banquet Phase of my trip. As nice as that is, I wouldn't be going to all the trouble and expense of flying all the way up there if it weren't for the Out There Phase -- the part where I take a folding kayak and put double digits of miles between me and Brooks Camp and claim a big chunk of that incredible Katmai country all for myself.


My first planned camp will be a place where I spent over a week last year and saw only one other boat the whole time, and that from a good distance. It is a very long paddling day away from Brooks, but motorboats could make the trip easily under good conditions. Fortunately, they rarely do so. My day-tripping out of that camp ranged from 5 to 10 miles out, and all that water was mine all mine. Hard to ask for more than that.

Of course, I was sharing the area with various non-humans. Every morning I saw new bear tracks on the beach, but I eventually concluded that the local grizzly was a) very shy and b) mainly a vegetarian. I conclude the first because my food cache, tent, and dining areas were never visited or interfered with in the least way, even though they lay a short walk from the beach. I conclude the second because near the tracks you would find large piles of stuff that looked like green sauerkraut -- shredded "cow parsnip" or some other grizzly salad favorite. One day I found a half-shredded salmon on the beach, and threw it way out into the water in a mild panic. I don't want that delicious-smelling shit on my beach! Later, a bald eagle (that I had been seeing regularly in the area) flew over the beach several times, frowning (or so I imagined). The fish belonged to him.



At another camp across the lake, on another year, my luck was less good that way. Not once, but twice, my tranquil midday mealtimes got interrupted by a GANG of bears. Seriously, a gang: it was a large sow with three cubs that must have been two-years old or more, because they were almost as big as her. I dined, as always, in a strategic spot that had a line of vision far up and far down the shoreline where they travel. I can still remember seeing the first bear come around the corner, which made me mildly concerned. Then the mama appeared behind it, and I became significantly more concerned. When the two remaining kids came romping into view, I was already tossing the rest of my couscous into the lake and getting ready to hustle stove, pots and all back to the food cache.

My camp was way back into the trees from the shoreline (another strategic requirement) and after sitting there for twenty highly unrelaxed minutes clutching both my bear mace cans, I made a big circle back around so that I could examine the shoreline from the direction the bears had appeared. It felt very strange and exhilirating to be moving slowly and quietly through the brush and waist-high grasses, every minute expecting to see a big old bear. It felt like some kind of exciting ambuscade. And what did I find? Nothing but a slightly chewed crotch in the wet suit that I had left drying by shore.

Later, I almost walked right into those same bears while they were quietly browsing in the bushes. They looked like four big cows, and they looked at me in a bored, languid way without pausing in their meal of leaves or berries or whatever it was. The same night, a sizeable moose walked across the lagoon right in front of me, spooking my trout and grayling, but otherwise just being cool. Chillin. The wildlife was used to me, and I to it.



Even when there aren't a bunch of other mammals around, I tend to have a fine time in camp all by myself. Fishing, eating and sipping coffee and scotch, doing camp chores or just laying around under the tarp reading and writing -- there is plenty to entertain me, and I enjoy it immensely (just like Greg Brown, a kindred spirit, in the link from my last post). The other night someone mentioned that 10 days alone would really be some intense "soul-searching." But it occurred to me that self-conscious soul-searching is what I do when I'm around people; when I'm out in the Good Country, I just plain relax and start paying attention to my senses. And what I generally find is sweetness, wonder, and a deep, near-ecstatic sense of well-being.

Why the hell else would you go to all that trouble?

This tendency to really enjoy solitude this way does not seem to me to be particularly common. Many folks seem to think it is fairly crazy, and indeed I have spent some time (and money) pondering the degree to which it might be so. What I have concluded is better stated by experts:

Avoidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioral disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. (Anthony Storr, Solitude, a Return to the Self)

It can be taken too far, surely. But normal living -- the kind I have pretty much been doing with my city life and my full-time job ever since I came back last August from my last Alaskan travels -- takes the opposite too far. I'm not being crazy or antisocial. I'm just trying to create some balance, that's all.


So off I go to rebalance the machinery of my existence in the world, in four more days . . .

5 . . .

Last night in the middle of a conversation about everyone's favorite topic, my buddy threw in this comment: "for Gillie, sex is actually fishing." I wonder if he says such things to try and psychologically eliminate me from the competition, which is of course useless. I may do a lot of catch and release, but that don't mean I ain't fishing . . . . Anyway, I hastened to correct him: the two activities exist on parallel courses, and do not necessarily replace one another. It's a Both-And situation, not an Either-Or.

I do not like Either-Ors.

Wieirdly enough, one of the best dates I had all last year was at Brooks Camp. Yes, this says something about the intensity of my social life here at home. But it is also a compliment to Sophia, who was one HECK of a cute and outgoing Chinese girl from Seattle. Brooks Camp is a social scene, and Sophia was a big player in it, palling around with the cool young folk who work there and also befriending some of the approachable other tourists, like myself. Sophia had the thing wired -- she knew everyone's name, and she knew which night the cool bar guy was working, the one who would pour free beers and mix very strong drinks. So she and I got mildly drunk one night and hiked off to sit on a log and enjoy a magical midnight dusk together.

Obviously, hanging out at Brooks Camp is not the wilderness portion of my trip. I think of it as the banquet portion: breakfast buffet, endless coffee refills around a big fireplace, and all the sockeye and trout you can fish for. The catch is that you are surrounded by people at the food buffet, and surrounded by bears at the fish buffet. Alaskan locals sometimes disdainfully call Brooks "Camp Hey Bear" because all the tourists, many of them flown in just for a day trip, constantly call out that phrase as the park rangers instruct. Nobody wants a run-in, and as far as I know, there never has been one.

But still, the scene is a fairly crazy one. I find it a miracle that all those bears and all those people can coexist in such a small space. The rangers and their training helps. An electric fence around the campground helps. Elevated trails with railings and gates help. And for me, it helps a whole lot that most of the tourists never go off those trails, and I am generally free and alone when I wade into the marshy ground around "The Oxbow" -- a super prime fishing spot where I back off and make a large circle around each bear that wants to fish in the same spot as me. It helps, again, that the bears are very itinerant fishers, and the move constantly from spot to spot, letting me fish in between. With so many fish around, the bears tolerate each other at much closer distances than they normally would (and so they also tolerate the people, to whom they are highly "habituated"). I feel the same way: with all those fish, and all those bears, I just relax and go with the flow for a few days.

It helps a great deal to know that after a few days I'll paddle away and be the only naked ape in a territory the size of Alameda county.

This year I'm going to try and sleep during the day, like the more bashful bears, and fish and be active during the dim light of the night. Ideally, I'll wake up around the cocktail hour, eat a big buffet dinner, and then fish until breakfast, at which point I will retreat to my tent and hibernate. This may put a crimp in my Brooks social life, so we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll give up that plan and just hang. I have met and talked with a lot of interesting people around the fireplace there, and not just Sophia. I remember an older lady who was a dignified member of the safari set (read, very wealthy) but was also extremely friendly and a great conversationalist. Also there was a really smart middle-age guy who, oddly enough, really did turn out to be a rocket scientist in his day job. I told him about using my mp3 player to listen to a book-on-tape
of Thus Spake Zarathustra whenever the water was calm enough to paddle safely that way, and he understood: "My God, that must be a rapture!"

Bach and Meshuggah are also rapturous to listen to while paddling, I add.

Another thing that may eat into my Brooks time is a plan to try and get my kayak and gear up the rough road to Brooks Lake and try those waters as well as Naknek Lake's. The river is the thing that has diverted me from such efforts in the past. Maybe it will again. But I just loaded up some helpful waypoints for Brooks Lake, and I just bet there are some fatties swimming around in those vicinities . . . but crap, there are still several long-ass days to kill before I can even start trying to find out. Now that I have blogged my -5 blog, I may have to drive up and fish the shad for the last time in 2009. That, or have some great sex.

I believe I will go fishing. :)

6 . . . and Warming Up

My eyes opened themselves around six a. m. on the sixth day I need to kill before going up to Katmai, and I was instantly thankful for that. Yesterday there were 30-40 knot afternoon winds and a gale warning on the bay, and I feel sure that today there will at least be a small craft advisory, probably starting at 1:00 and lasting through midnight.

(Stops to check).

There is!

So, if you want to take a bay paddle, you'd best get started early; and if you want to go up around to Aquatic Park or Crissy Field because you are bored with crossings to Alameda, you'll do best to get going before the forecasted 3.7 knot incoming current starts to peak around 9:00 or so. That is, unless you really, really relish paddling against current (which, to be honest, I do not).

My paddling trip is a vacation, and I expect to have a whole lot of fun, and relaxation, and great times. At the same time, I know from experience that paddling a kayak around places like Prince William Sound or Naknek Lake is no game. The water is all very cold, and the weather is occasionally very ugly, and generally, after you paddle into the wilderness, there is nobody at all around to help. So, in preparation for a trip like this, I do my homework with GPS and maps, buy and get familiar with all the necessary gear for safe camping and travel, and -- like this morning and many days recently -- I get out and make sure that me and my foldable boat are in good paddling shape:



A few weeks ago I took a morning paddle from Crissy Field out to Pt. Bonita. I didn't pay proper attention to the marine and tide forecasts, and so I got what I deserved: the ocean swell was coming in big from a direction that ran it all the way up to Points Bonita and Diablo, creating really wierd reflected "clapotis" waves a full half-mile out from shore; at the same time, a really strong ebb current of 5+ knots was gushing out the gate, creating mean spilling waves as it ran right against the west wind. I ended up doing a little dance of trying to stay as far as I could out of that current without going too far into the chaotic clapotis zone, and it took all my attention and energy to make forward progress (on the home run) while staying upright. Often, a steep swell wanted to surf me, and in happier conditions I would want to surf it. Not that day.

That was some good practice.

The real sea kayaking holy grail, to my mind, is to travel the actual ocean coast of Katmai and further down the Alaska peninsula, ducking into bays to camp but otherwise braving big open sea swells and super-fickle weather. I'm not there yet, and I know it. But wouldn't it be cool?

I once had a good friend give me a wee bit of shit about "commitment." At the time he was needling me about refusing to wait in a line for food, but I understand the larger context: I'm not married, I don't own a house, and I am not "committed" to the usual committed way of life you find among folks. But since that day, it has occurred to me a few times that there are other kinds of commitment that I am pretty good at. He should have been there, and felt what I felt, when I was setting off in to a box canyon with class III rapids on the Kukaklek branch in a 10-foot inflatable boat carrying all my possessions, 50 miles away from anything even remotely resembling help. Once you're in the canyon, you are committed in a unique and powerful way. In a similar vein, I got deeply committed last year at Katmai by paddling 15 miles ahead of a bad weather forecast, knowing that I need to get out early if I was going to get out at all -- and that, once out, I wasn't going to be getting back until the storm had blown itself out. Isn't that commitment? It felt like it.

At any rate, trips like this give me something to focus on and commit to, and they definitely get me motivated to crank up my paddling game. That can't be all bad. In fact, sitting around on an early Saturday morning in Aquatic Park watching cute joggers and drinking thermos coffee after a five mile counter-current paddle is a decidedly good thing.



And this kind of goodness is just a small harbinger of good, good things to come, when I paddle away from all cuties (carrying coffee though, of course) and focus on the beauties of big fish, open wilderness, and real freedom and adventure.

Putting it in those hyperbolic terms just makes me more impatient. A dinner party and a keg of Blue Heron pale ale are going to help me forget about it tonight, for a while. And then the countdown will continue!

Katmai Countdown 7 . . .

A week from now I will herding onto a plane bound from SFO to Anchorage. I'll wait until the last possible minute to board, and will probably end up shuffling through the corridor-on-wheels and bumping into grumpy people in their seats and having to hunt around for a place to put my carry-on, which will be extremely heavy with a bunch of gear like reels and batteries and a PLB that I tried to keep out of my checked bags, which will require an overweight fee anyway.

Like Paul Theroux said, travel largely consists of the boredom of WAITING. It is what I am doing right now, filling this evening with future-forward blogging and the reverie it runs on.

I'm actually going to spend next Friday in an overpriced hotel in Anchorage. ALL hotels in Anchorage are overpriced, but most especially the one where I stayed a few years ago -- the one where a drunk was stumbling through the lobby in a blood-spattered shirt when I was checking in, and where a very agitated, shrieking prostitute was being forcibly ejected when I went back to complain that my room door would not lock. That was a real winner. I learned later from some locals that the Carr's supermarket right next to that hotel is referred to generally as "Scary Carr's," and it is considered Ground Zero of Anchorage's worst neighborhood.

For a few dollars more, I hope to get a decent night's sleep next Friday, or at least an interval where I can stretch out and not be crammed into an airline seat. In younger days I would "sleep" in the airport and catch the first plane out to King Salmon. Now, I figure a) day-trippers get priority on Katmai Air to Brooks, so me and my 150 pounds of gear and food (pre-shipped and waiting) will probably not get out until the afternoon anyway, b) I'm 42 years old, for Christ's sake. After I get there around 11:00, I can use the time to walk down the store in King Salmon and order up a bag of deep-fried chicken gizzards. Those go well with a breakfast beer, and where else are you going to dependably find them?

This morning I read some choice quotes about Anchorage in John McPhee's "Coming Into the Country:"

Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.

"You can taste the greed in the air."

A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. It is condensed, instant Albequerque.

When I explain it to Bay Area people, I say it is like Concord squared, or several Walnut Creeks that seem to have spilled off the Chugach mountains.



I'll sleep there, and wander over to the convenience store to pick up a couple of butane lighters, brightly colored so that I'll have a harder time losing them in camp (yes, I do also take along storm matches for emergencies like lost butane lighters). The flight out to King Salmon doesn't do security, which is strangely comforting to people who want to carry lighters, stove fuel, bear mace. It leaves at the civilized hour of 9:30, and if I can't manage to sleep in long enough there is a Denny's nearby (I know the 'hood round ANC quite well by now) where I can gorge on a greasy American breakfast and start feeling like I'm on vacation. Before night falls on Saturday I'll be needing those calories, because there is no way I'm going to resist a long fishing session into the wee hours, dodging bears and yanking against furious ten and fifteen-pound sockeyes and trout amplified by 50 pounds of current . . .

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That is tomorrow's blog.

Beavered Again

"Skunked." It means that the fishing stinks, or your technique stinks, or the water quality stinks . . . something stinks like a skunk does. Fishing is so much more fragrant when it is accompanied by catching.

Several hours into a strikeless shad-n-striper outing yesterday, Flys4b8 Mike and his brother Greg and I were out in the Trout Hound working a big, deep current seam on the Sacramento. "Fish" were beeping and darting on the sonar fish finder, but by then we were completely inured to that unending stream of false positives. We fished deep, medium, and surface; small, medium and large; flies, plugs and jigs; and we weren't hooking Jack Shit. Out of a bored corner of my eye I spotted an odd shape floating slowly toward us in the current.

"What the hell is that?"

It was a roundish, blown-up looking shape about the size of a pillow, and it had a sort of waterline where it was pale white below and a sickish pink shade on top. It had a longish, rudder-like thing sticking out one end, and a strange pair of curved things -- yes, they were teeth -- sticking up on the other end.

"Jesus, that thing used to be a BEAVER!"

The stench of it hit us just about then, and we motored firmly away. No sooner had we caught our breath than an excellent new piece of fishing terminology was coined. For us three, the term "skunk" just won't cut it anymore, because we know what it REALLY smells like to go to the confluence of the Feather and the Sacramento and fish all afternoon and evening perfectly catchinglessly.

Fishing without catching! It's like surfing without waves, sailing without wind, working without pay, or, worst of all . . . well, never mind. This is getting depressing. I've been beavering since I went to the Pit a few weeks ago, and I'm well tired of it. It must be a luck thing, really. After camping fishlessly on the gravel bar I came over to Cache Creek to have a look with my own eyes because I just didn't believe the guage data on Dreamflows -- how could it be running 26cfs when it was 600 this time last year? But it was running so low, pathetically dry and dribbling. Kayaking without flow? The Great Spirit Beaver decreed it would be so.

I told people that I would eat my hat if I wasn't eating shad roe Sunday morning, and so I went ahead and prepared this photo just in case they call me on it:


Sometimes this is just the way she goes, and there's no remedy but to wait for her to change direction; to wait for some things (like the Sacramento) to come down and other things (like the creeks) to come up, and then try to seize your chance again. I guess if I have to wait, then doing it here on the bank of the swimmin hole, chilling down and blogging after a sweaty-ass bike ride up to the 20 and back ain't the worst way to wait. When they're ready, I'm here waiting.

The Master's Lucky Day

On the whole, my fishin blog is as self-referencing, self-congratulating, and self-centered as any blog in the business -- but I'm trying to change. I vow now that at least half this post will be about someone else's good fortune, and the other half will be about my bad. Because we all know that success or failure in fishing is just dumb luck, right?

The Bay Area Migration Master has been mentioned before in these pages. To the degree that anyone can predict where the striped bass are at any point in time, to the extent that most or all of the fish are actually in a synchronized migration, Jim's guesses are generally way above average. Some people say that in Spring, the fish will be moving up into the spawning rivers, and that you won't find them in the bay or delta. This is not 100% right. In winter, the mass of the fish are supposed to be in the delta, but you might go out in the muddy cold waters of the bay in February and hook the biggest old Moe you ever saw, so that's not strictly true either.

I think Jim scores high because he generally does not generalize so broadly. He uses his knowledge of specific areas of the bay or delta, checks water quality and wind forecasts, and then lends an ear to any reports that might come along. For instance, we had been thinking about paddling on the delta this Saturday, when a text message came to Jim's phone:

"There are no fish in the delta."

Since this paradoxically plain and cryptic message came from a trusted source who fished the dawn patrol that day, we decided to pay heed. Most people who fish the delta probably know that particularly fishless feeling that smells like skunk and feels like a bad case of lockjaw. Sometimes the delta will deal you an awful hand.

So we went to another of Jim's favorite spots on the bay, and guess what -- Snap On!!! Jim stuck a small one within five minutes. When this happens, you troll with much greater optimism. He hit another one and it was two to zero (but who's counting?) until I managed a decent one on a hair-raiser jig. Encouraged by this, I tied some feathers on the end of the fat line and gave that a go, while Jim extended his lead:



I think it was already four to one when I got a really good strike, with the rod dipping way down. I turned around and saw a really large splash about ten feet out from the beach before -- Snap Off! -- my line went slack. Just my luck, the rusty old treble hook on the end of my plug came back with only two points left. (Note: replacing hooks after salting them down daily in Baja may even be better at improving your luck than wearing lucky hats).

Jim didn't see me hook either of these fish, and I wonder if he thought I was making things up. Conversely, I was right on hand when he hooked the fish of the day. There's a big difference between a 20 inch and a 24 inch striper -- two plus pounds, according to this source. You could also tell the difference by the way this one dragged Jim into the beach:


With all this, Jim's first day out in a while was a damn good one. Very lucky! And I was glad for him. However, when he decided he'd had his fill after a few hours, I still wanted to stay and keep looking for my own luck. I waved him goodbye as he headed back to the beach, and since the wind was starting to lay down, I got out the fat line again. Just maybe some fly flinging could get me attached to a fine two foot fish, I was thinking . . .

Whipping out some line on my very first cast, I heard a little "plunk" next to the boat, and looked down to see the detached spool of my fly reel sinking rapidly into the drink. A desperate left-hand grab almost capsized me, but did not come up with the spool. It was on the bottom of 7 feet of pea-green water, and my line started to billow in the current. Oh my. I felt dumb as a frozen hake doing it, but there was no remedy other than to just pull my end of the line up into the cockpit and hope to a) recover all the line and then haul up the spool by the spool knot, or b) have it hit a tangle in the backing or something, and come up a bit sooner. The latter, though, would require luck. So forget it.

Has anyone else ever hauled 100 feet of nylon backing with their bare hands? It is an idiot's chore of true enormity. The backing tangled up around the line which tangled up around my legs, and I had to keep correcting the boat's position to stay near the sunken spool, which sometimes tangled backing around the paddle, which tangled it around my arms. Boy was I glad Jim had gone around the point and was not there to witness this. Finally I got the spool to rise up to the surface. Then, after twenty minutes of untangling and cutting loops of backing, I paddled for home, a beaten, unlucky man for sure.

Or was it really so bad? I had some fun with my buddy the Migration Master, watched him boat a couple of fine fish, and at least did not get completely skunked on a beautiful breezy Saturday. What's more, when I got back to my truck, I found a fourteen-dollar topwater lure under my windshield wiper. "Hey, where'd that come from?" Just coincidence that Jim and I had been comparing topwater lures earlier in the day? Either way, it felt like good luck to find it there.

Memo: Ad Hoc Meeting at the Businessman's Club

I felt I had made a friend and experienced some unexpected, amusing things, which is a big part of why I like to go around the world and Colusa county fishing in the first place.

Time to add Grant county, WA. You know you're getting close when you start seeing the signs. On route 17 South toward hatchery road:

"HITCHHIKING NOT PROHIBITED"

Isn't there something warm and friendly (if odd) about explicitly pointing that out? Then, when you get on the gravel hatchery road, they let you know that you are getting warmer:

"PRIMITIVE ROAD"

Sure enough, the road leads to a primitive place full of primitive men. Rolling into the parking lot at Rocky Ford Creek, I learned a new nickname for my fishing buddy Mike. His pals Pete and Scott greeted him with a shout of, "HAIRY MIKE! How the $%#@ are ya! How's the ^@&!n@?"

"I got married last year."

"Oh, sorry about that . . ."

Mike's friends were not the type of guys to hold anything back. They were men with beards, waders, and large furry streamers tied on large-diameter tippet. But to make sure I got the point, Scott offered, two minutes after meeting me, to show me his (#%<, so that "I would understand the reason why." I declined. I think I understood why already.

Within an hour the four of us were lined up on a small 25-yard long run that must have held 200 fish milling in brisk water two feet deep. The trout were big, beautiful, and often aggressive, chasing down furry streamers as well as sipping in small scuds and mayfly nymphs. Lots of catching was going on; four primitive men were having primitive fun. An open 12-pack of PBR marked the center of the tribal territory, and loud conversations in harsh language warned the faint of heart to make an ample detour. For the first time ever, I was having fun fishing in a lineup.


If you know Rocky Ford Creek, then you know that very few of these fish were native, and that a lot of them were probably big fat hatchery brood stock let loose in the creek. Much of the creek is slow and clear and fairly tough fishing (we took one fish in a big, aquarium-like pool by the bridge) but certain sections are a bit more forgiving (like the one where we took about three dozen). Were we disappointed that the trout weren't highly evolved, pure bred natives? Oog say, "no $%#@! way."


For Mike and me it was a welcome change to be hooking so many trout. The day before, we took the trouble to arrange a shuttle, set up and rig up my inflatable two-man kayak, and float several miles down a very lovely stretch of the Yakima river --very scenic, but for us, not very fishy. One decent fish on a wooly bugger, one dink that ate a skwala stonefly dry, and two shake-and-snap offs. A lot of work for few fish, but someone's gotta do it.



Anyway, the fun down in Grant County does not end when you're off the water. Put away your tackle, shower up (or don't) and hie thee down to the Businessman's Club. Mike and Pete were long-standing members of this venerable institution, as proven by Pete's year 2000 membership card. Mike had a card too, and seemed envious that Pete's had the term "Businessmans" spelled correctly on it. We knocked on the door. A small aperture swung out on the side, and the barman stuck his head out. To Pete's request for special permission to renew his membership and bring in guests, he replied with a question: "How long has it been since you were last here?"

I guess it figures that a club for businessmen would slow down somewhat in the current economic climate. The large space had a dozen or so tables with only one or two other parties present on this Saturday night. The gambling table for a game called 4-5-6, at which Pete reportedly excels even though he has no idea of the rules, was shut down and empty. But the pool table was still working, and the Coors was still lite. We settled in for a good evening of hanging out and listening to Scott's hunting stories.

I won't even bother to tell how, after a while, a rather tightly wound young fellow in a tight ball cap tried to goad us into hostilities with Grant County. He ended up being ushered out the back door (a site of some considerable suspicious activity throughout the evening), and meanwhile a couple of cowboy-hat club members came over to meet us, share a round, and make up for any perceived lack of hospitality. Soon, a well-preserved rancher named Huey was making us feel nice and welcome by calling us "gunts."

"What are them, Pete, Wranglers or Levis yer wearin'?"
"Uh, these are kind of, uh, combination shorts and pants made of ripstop ny-"
"GUNT PANTS! Oh, boy. Darlin', come on over here and lookit this fella . . ."

(Note: the word gunt may be a vulgar term in some urban/suburban hip hop settings, but we believe Huey had an entirely different vulgar definition for it.)

Pete responded by giving Huey the affectionate name of "D!%#head, and we all got along fine. Scott, who introduced himself as "Santos" so that he could enjoy listening to the ranchers pronounce it, argued with Huey about what constitutes a world-class whitetail and mule deer. Huey had some good stories, and so did "SAN-TOSE." In addition to pictures of fresh kills, both had some pretty good pictures of pretty gals on their cell phones, too. We found that, though we hailed from very different places and did very different things for a living, there was more common ground than uncommon. And in the end, I felt I had made some friends and experienced some unexpected, amusing things, which is a big part of why I like to go around the world and Grant county fishing in the first place.

Gone Nothin'

A highlight of my recent fad for reading and re-reading Jack London is the short story "Apostate." It is set in my adopted home San Francisco, but the general atmosphere of the story feels more like the Old Satanic Mills from back East, the big red brick buildings you'll see driving through the wastelands of Worcester, Massachussetts which used to house textile sweat shops and now are nurseries for angry heavy metal bands. Apparently, in the days of London's youth San Francisco had some of those sweat shops, where he suffered for a while working on starchers and looms. His depiction of the toil almost makes your hands ache with tendonitis:

His lean fingers felt as big as his wrist, while in the ends of them was a remoteness of sensation vague and fuzzy like his brain. The small of his back ached intolerably. All his bones ached. He ached everywhere. And in his head began the shrieking, pounding, crashing, roaring of a million looms.

What struck me most about this story is its ending. The long-suffering, hard-working protagonist, who has toiled away his youth in order to feed his ungrateful younger siblings, suddenly just stops working. While ill, he takes the time to calculate exactly how many "moves" he makes with his hands in working the machinery, and concludes that he makes twenty-five million moves a year, and that "it seems like I've been a movin' that way 'most a million years." So he stops moving. He does so not just because he has calculated the existential absurdity of his Moves, but also because not moving feels so sweet and right:

Now this week I ain't moved at all. I ain't made one move in hours an' hours. I tell you it was swell, jes' settin' there, hours an' hours, an' doin' nothin'. . . . I'm jes' goin' to set, an' set, an' rest, an' rest, and then rest some more.

As I write this blog entry, I am sitting home on my first sick day in many, many months of work. No, I don't work on looms, but I'm still going to take a minute to contemplate how many Moves I make when typing away at the creation of software manuals. I'm sure it is millions of moves, and I'm sure that somehow those kinds of Moves are a lot tougher to make than typing about fly fishing, or casting flies, or paddling kayaks around. Not all moves are equal.

I know this because, like London, I did some manual work in my younger days. For a very short time at an Alaskan fish processing plant, I was a "Slimer." My pal O'Brian and I drove up to Seward one summer and almost immediately started work on a "slime line," where a bunch of poor souls in blood-smeared rain gear used blunt knives to clean off bits of guts and gills from an unending flow of fish coming out of a big gutting machine that we called "the chink." O'Brian was a handy slimer. Like an Apostate with a slightly more positive attitude, he calculated how many fish he slimed in a minute, and did the multiplications to come up with how many thousands of fish he was able to handle in a day -- some very impressive number that I can't remember.

Being slow and slopping and unskillful in my Moves, I sucked at sliming. A disgusted foreman soon moved me off the line and onto a boner. Seriously, I worked at a nice, dishwasher-sized machine that ate split salmon and spit out meat on one end and a pile of bones on the other. It was easy, slow, work, feeding halves of fish into the vibrating maw of the boner. And then -- I can still feel the Christmas-morning anticipation of it -- every hour or so, the bone-hopper got so full that I had to turn off the machine and empty the bones. This involved a walk of 150 feet which I sauntered, ever so slowly, glancing over at the busy slime line, carrying the hopper out to a big dumpster destined for a fish meal plant.

Oh, weren't those the days! Two weeks of it gave me tendonitis in my hands and wrists, and I vowed never to do manual work again. Mainly, I have kept that vow. But now I begin to wonder if the next evolutionary step might be to stop working at all, manually or otherwise. I certainly loved my lazy old sabbatical months, recorded sporadically in the earlier entries in this blog. I didn't quite do purely nothin', but I didn't do a whole hell of a lot, either -- no attempts to write novels, no volunteer work, no running for office. I fished an' fished, an' I tell you, it was swell . . .

The truth is, the current business climate may someday soon make me a test subject in the great experiment of not working. Layoffs started almost as soon I started work back in August, and in dribs and drabs they have continued right up into last week. My number may well be called, and my database-related Moves brought to a halt. I'm not going to encourage that turn of events, but I know all too well that there's not much I can do to stop it if it is destined to happen. People slave away and kiss the Man's ass ten hours a day and still get laid off -- I have seen this shameful act played out on a few different stages, and I want no part of it. If they need me, I'll work, at least up until the late summer coho migration in Bristol Bay, and possibly even beyond it. But if the axe falls, you know what's next: Gone Fishin'!!!

Solstice Blitz to Baja

Unless you really love highway driving, San Francisco to Loreto is a grinding, exhausting, long, ass, road trip. The soul-drag first starts to hit when you find yourself crawling at 10 MPH through the smoggy greater Los Angeles area. Then, if you manage to escape Tijuana without slipping off the road and into the very maw of existential despair -- it's just that kind of town -- then you still have to get through Colonet, Camalu, Lazaro Cardenas, and several other dusty, crowded holie places where you're better off not stopping even for a piss (my uncle did so some years back, and someone immediately stepped into his running car and drove away). On December 20, the second day of my Christmas vacation, as I started the climb from the Pacific coast up into the desert, I found myself thinking, "what the hell were you thinking?"

Settling into a camp later that night and looking up at the sky, I got the answer. In a beery reverie, I decided that I would have made the entire three-day drive just to witness that one desert night sky. Viewed from a high and dry desert standpoint, far from any electrified population center, the stars look very different. You can't look at them without wonder. As Emerson said, "If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare." But then, Emerson is the same guy who wrote, "solitude is impractical, but society is fatal." What a kook.



I saw similar skies and beautiful sunrises and sunsets every one of the twelve non-driving days I spent down there. That, plus all the fish, did indeed make the drive worthwhile. Conditions were good, mostly; when I touched down in Santa Rosalia, a stiff breeze was blowing and gringos at San Lucas were complaining of the lack of yellowtail, so I moved on to a relatively less breezy Loreto area and stuck a few barracuda and sand bass before the sun set (since I got to paddle, I count that as a non-driving day). The next morning the Sea of Cortez was like blue glass, perfect for paddling out to Isla Danzante for a look around:



That first day kept me busy with triggerfish, small yellowtail, and a decent size skipjack that had me thinking "big mossback" right up to the end. People on the beach were talking about big yellowtail at the sound end of Danzante, so I went down there the next day and found lots of gringo boats, a nice promising current, and zero yellowtail of any size. So I stuck with my nice peaceful north Danzante fishin hole, which kicked out plenty of 3-4 pound firecrackers, a few big mystery snapoffs, and then a few mystery snap-ons:



I bounced back and forth between the Loreto camp and my favorite camp on the Pacific side, spending the holidays alone behind the dunes. Christmas on the Pacific brought terrific fishing for corvina, pompano and snappers. I got my first glimpse of a snapper when three or four big reddish shapes came swooping after a small pompano that I had hooked. Aha, I thought, and tossed a streamer into the mangrove roots. Snap on! They also snapped at crease flies and topwater plugs:



On the second day there I noticed with some alarm that the higher high tides were coming up far enough to swamp my road out with saltwater. It turns out the best camp is basically an island half the time, and I did not want to end up like the guys back in my 2007 post. With this in mind, I picked a low tide, threw the truck into 4L, and escaped back to Loreto for a few more days hanging out with friendly gringos and their dogs. Overall, the little spot where I camped was delightfully free of big RVs, generators, and motorboats. Here my neighbor Ron and his yakdog, Chopper:



On New Year's Eve the tides were back down under two meters and I was back on the Pacific, having more great fishing and starting my "blood run" to fill the cooler. Obligingly, decent-sized grouper joined the snappers and corvina in the general snap-for-all -- which of course means that I immediately started losing lures in the mangrove roots. Snappers hit like a truck and run out for deep water; grouper hit like a truck and run for the roots, creating awful tangles. I maxed out at about a ten-pounder to hand, but I'm pretty sure there are a few bigger ones down there either dying in a tangle of line and hooks (a depressing thought) or who managed to get free and start gobbling down pompano and sierra again.

I got a couple of snook and the odd sand bass, and overall it couldn't have been better kayak fishing if you had scripted it. My spot on the Pacific is nowhere near as classically scenic as the Sea or Cortez side, but it definitely has its special charm. There is solitude, near-pure most of the time, and 100% pure during New Year's Eve and Day. There is the constant white-noise boom of the breakers against the dunes. There are big wide open spaces filled with birds and their lonesome calls in the wind. There are coyotes lurking in the bushes and sneaking around your camp at night, occasionally breaking into a sort of sonic fireworks of barks, yips and howls. All together, it creates a unique and wonderful atmosphere that I love to sit and drink in. I hope that this clip showing dolphins at sunset on New Year's Day can illustrate some of the unique sense of this place:



As for the long, ass, drive, I'm not so sure that I'll make it again for a mere two week window. Getting back in at Tijuana, sitting for two or three hours in a traffic jam so that some guy can take two or three minutes to scan your passport, is just too frustrating and futile. At the least, I will always, always come back in through Tecate or some other place. Wrapped inside that vow is the very safe assumption that I'll be back in Baja before too long. It contains a few of the remaining good places in this crowded, used-up world of ours. If you think I'm whining, check out 2009's first issue of The Economist and read the special report on oceans -- a sad tale of pollution, overfishing, and mass extinction. In one way, fishing with the dolphins on the beautiful lonely coast only makes it seem sadder. But in a more fundamental way, it makes the heart gladder and life richer. Viva Baja!