So, at long last, my worst Baja camping nightmare comes true: I am awoken from sleep to see standing outside my tent a dude packing a very large pistola. He´s wearing a black ball cap and pointy black leather dress shoes (amid the scorpionic rubble of a desert arroyo) and his mustashioed face is peering very suspiciously under my sun tarp. Yikes! I mean, ¨Buenos dias!¨
Hm, OK, he´s with the Mexican marines, based in Mulege. This means I can go from 100% alarmed to about 85%. What are the notoriously incorruptible Mexican authorities doing camped out on a little cove on Isla San Marcos, which is the marine version of the middle of hardly anywhere? Not, like, intercepting a drug shipment to take possesion of, or something like that, I hope?
In fact, this morning visit wasn´t a total surprise. The previous night, just after laying down in the sweet silence of my arroyo camp, I heard a boat motoring slowly into my cove. It came in slowly, under light of a couple of weak flashlights. Alarm level: 110%. I got up, grabbed my can of bear mace and an aluminum rod tube, and exited the tent. Last thing I want is to be trapped in a tent, surrounded by ill will. Nor do I want to give up all my goods without some kind of fight, which could include machete swashbuckliung, aerial flares (horizontally deployed) and large rocks as well as the bear mace. Some will say this is stupid, and I don´t necessarily disagree; it´s just that I would rather feel stupid than helpless and weak.
Anyway, no attack nor confrontation ensued. After creeping into the shadow of a bush, I heard a lot of bumping and goofing around down on the beach, and distinctly heard a boyish male voice whining about being hungry and could we eat soon please? This gang of goofs was most probably a bunch of fisherman, and I figured the worst-case scenario was that they would spend the night, make a lot of noise, find my camp, and try to make me have mescal shots with them.
I was just about to go back to my tent and just be quiet, when one of the dudes came up from the beach and stopped right near me, in the full glow of the moonlight. He dug a small hole with a shovel, and before I could make a move, dropped his pants and squatted. Christer. I was hidden in the shadows -- but if I moved, he might notice me, and then wouldn´t THAT be embarrassing . . . .
Based on height, hat and mustaches, I´m pretty sure that the dude I watched wiping his ass was the black-shoed commandante.
After a bit of an amused morning chat, the commandante went back down the beach. Then, two by two, uniformed dudes with machine guns came up and inspected my camp, all with a vaguely irritated air. I gather it may have been their responsibility to make sure the area was secure, and that the commandante blamed them for not taking notice of my camp. I don´t blame them so much: the camp was intentionally located behind a bluff that obscured views from the beach, exactly to discourage curious visits. It worked for five peaceful days running last April.
When I loaded up the boat and launched from the beach, they were just about finishing their breakfast, with eggshells and shrimp tails tossed down on the beach along with emptied hot sauce cans and coke bottles. I felt grateful that they at least dug cat holes for their turds.
Sad to say, the island-based fishing was a bit disappointing, altogether: one big skipjack on the yellotail bajo, a small cabrilla, a sculpin, various ambitous pufferfish; just about zero strikes over the reefs that produced plenty of large pargo and grouper back in April. More than once I looked wistfully over at the ¨haystack hill¨ on the mainland, where the sierra bite was probably still running hot, with lots of corvina in the bay to boot.
I paddle out there across the channel both for fishing and for a small adventure. This time the fishing was not so hot, I didn´t get marooned by the wind, but still, there was a little bit of an adventure after all.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Pain, Predation and the End of the World
[This is a thing that I wrote for a website that has since disappeared from the interwebs, so just for safekeeping, I am posting it here. Google, as we all know, shall be eternal]
Not long ago, websites and newspapers carried the headline:
Not long ago, websites and newspapers carried the headline:
“Injecting Lips with Bee Venom Proves It: Fish Feel Pain!”
If you remember those articles, then you know that they didn’t present any first-hand reports of unbearable agony from aggrieved carp or catfish. Rather, they described how a group of scientists injected bee venom into fish lips, and then observed (as evidence of pain) head-shaking and rolling and thrashing behavior very familiar to anyone who ever injected a fish with even a non-poisoned hook. Perhaps like me, you reacted to this news by saying, “well, sure. Fish don’t seem to like being hooked. What a revelation. Did we really need bee venom to test that hypothesis?”
Perhaps we needed the bee venom to suggest the intensity of the ostensible pain, and to emphasize the sadistic cruelty of sport fishermen. At least in some interpretations of the experimental results, hooking a fish on the lip with a #18 pheasant tail on 5X tippet is very similar to putting rubber gloves on your hands, sticking a syringe into the lip of a fish, and injecting bee venom into it.
But I don’t think that’s quite right. In fact, I think bee venom-injection sounds like something from a bad science fiction paperback, while sport fishing can be viewed as a ritualized version of what fish themselves do routinely when they prey on insects and other fish. That is, it is a stealthy search based partly on the haplessness of the prey which ends in violent struggle and either escape or capture. From smolt to minnow to adulthood, a typical fish will pass very few of its living days without some degree of exposure to this painful principle; a fish is chased by herons, by otters, by other bigger fish – by its own parents! And sometimes it is raked by a claw or has its tail snipped and survives to tell the painful story (figuratively, unless there is an experiment proving that fish can talk, too). Fish live and die by the predatory sword, and on their unluckiest days, they may end up encountering the top predator of all, looming over the surface of the water and then – this would be the truly weird part for our supposedly sensitive and thoughtful fish – letting them go free, alive. Unripped-apart, unswallowed and uneaten. Is it a kind of joke? A cruel one?
Maybe it is cruel. Life is cruel. To me, animal rights extremists are like the political idealists who say communism could work, if only people weren’t so selfish and greedy – that is, if people weren’t inherently human. In the case of predatory cruelty, a ban on sport fishing could work if people weren’t also – do not try to deny it – inherently animal. Perhaps some people are better than others at completely shutting down their instincts for search and capture. Or perhaps they end up displacing those urges into other, potentially less or more harmful behavior. In any case, sport fishers are among those people who choose to pursue, often on weekends after dull, civilized days on phones and computer terminals, an activity that mimics the instinctual act of finding and capturing prey. If they choose to do it with a fly rod instead of an elephant gun or a gill net, then in my humble opinion they have chosen one of the most gentle and aesthetically pleasing of all the options.
Some might reply that it doesn’t matter if you use a daisy to do it – if you are causing needless pain to a poor wild creature then you must be a cruel, vicious sadist. But this doesn’t hold up well when measured against anecdotal evidence. In his definitive book Backcountry Bear Basics, David Smith observes that predatory bears seem far from angry: “When an animal clicks into predatory mode, the anger and stress you see during defensive aggression is absent. A black bear hunting moose calves is about as angry at the calf as a butcher is at chickens.” In fact, they seem strangely at peace when stalking a calf, with their “ears up, eyes wide open, intensely alert, yet somehow relaxed.” It’s when they feel threatened or cornered that they get apparently (that is, anthropomorphically) angry: they lower their ears, and foam at the mouth, and rush in with claws and jaws ready to inflict some seriously painful injuries.
The same can be said about most fly fishers. To the extent that hooking, fighting, and releasing a fish is predatory behavior, it hardly appears to be vicious, angry behavior. When casting and drifting flies, most fly fishers seem overcome by an intent tranquility, lost in the flow of the motions. When hooking and fighting a fish, they’re more like the hunting bear: eyes wide open and head up and alert. And then, in the strange moment of actually handling a fish to unhook it (and I can imagine the ironic sneers from animal rights activists), the prevailing feelings are of admiration and tenderness. For my part, I feel this way about it: I think the fish is beautiful. I want it to go back and recover. And that’s not selfless kindness – I want it to live to strike again another day, and to get bigger by violently killing smaller fish and insects, and to spawn prolifically, among other untoward things. On those rare occasions when I don’t want it to recover – when I want a shad or salmon to quiver and go still and give up its flesh to a well-oiled iron grill – even then, the emotions accompanying the knockout blow and the scaling and eviscerating are themselves very peaceful and solemn, with no sense of sadistic glee or malice. Quite to the contrary, there is a sense of deep, simple fulfillment which is exactly what I believe I am seeking in my sport fishing.
Let some activists try to get between me and the river, however, and then you may see something more analogous to the cornered grizzly.
I’d like to offer some anecdotal evidence of my own, based on observations of fish behavior, hoping all the while that I don’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing the fish. Specifically, I’m thinking about a fish that I hooked one lovely spring afternoon on the Pit River while drifting one of my favorite nymph patterns from The Fly Shop in Redding (I’m a fly buyer, not a fly tyer, I’m afraid). It is a distinctive hare’s ear pattern from with a special flash back and a hexagonal tungsten bead head, and often the fish seem to find it irresistible. This particular fish took the irresistible fly, but then, after a short display of frantic ‘pained’ thrashing, it put on a sudden burst of strength that took me by surprise and snapped a 4x tippet. I’d had enough time to say to my buddy across the river, “this feels like a hot one!” before it departed with my nymph unattached any longer to the line.
Later on in the evening, we fished back over that same area when the fish were keying onto large mayflies on the surface. I did not fail to drift a large dry over the same lie where I had earlier hooked and lost the fish, and lo! – a nice strike and a decent-sized rainbow came to hand after a respectable fight. But one look proved that it wasn’t just any old hungry rainbow: it was exactly the same one who had seized and snapped off my hare’s ear earlier in the day. The distinctive fly was still lodged in his mouth, from which I gently removed it with some extra satisfaction at winning in the end.
This, obviously, is not proof that the fish didn’t feel pain. This fish may have been agonized by the hook of the nymph, thrown into acute depression by the experience of fighting against the line, but then driven by desperate hunger to strike the mayfly an hour later (or, agony and desperation may be as foreign to fish as Trigonometry is to a dog). But is does seem to prove that fish are not completely thrown off the rails by their ‘painful’ reactions to being hooked and fought – in other words, it ain’t the end of the world, as suggested by fish biologist Robert Benkhe:
There is strong circumstancial evedience that “pain” in fishes is not comparable to that of higher vertebrates, nor is catching a fish a very traumatic experience for the fish (otherwise catch-and-release regulations wouldn’t work).
My experience on the Pit River strongly suggests that fish keep on feeding after being hooked. Probably, they keep on fighting and spawning and doing whatever else they do down there underwater. Maybe a bit of thrashing and rolling on the end of a fly line is just to be expected for fish born into a world that includes homo sapiens, and if they survive it, as trout demonstrably do in many heavily fished catch and release waters, then it’s just another day’s work to them.
At the same time, it is another day’s play to me, and I don’t have any remote intent of giving it up because somebody stung fish with bee venom and sent out some wrongheaded conclusions for general consumption. If you can prove to me that my sport fishing threatens to make wild trout actually disappear from the rivers, then you’ve got my attention. But so long as sport fishing causes vicious, angry attack responses chiefly in animal rights activists, then by all means, fish on!
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Trompe la mort!
A year ago around labor day weekend, I blogged (predictably) about a fishing/backpacking trip; and on that occasion, I uploaded (lamely) photos from another guy's trip to the same area. As explained in that post, this was necessary because I had decided not to take a digital camera because digital cameras are "heavy" -- at least in a backpack context -- and not really "necessary." Not necessary? That turned out to be a rather strict opinion in the end.
This year I must be feeling a bit more liberal, because I went ahead and carried a digital camera around at altitude in the exact same area for 40 or so miles. It is perhaps not all coincidental that I am feeling in a whole lot better shape this year, too, for the climbs and slogs and slides-through-softball-sized-talus of this particular trip seemed a whole lot easier. I suppose it's also not coincidental that last year my typical summer day involved sitting on my ass in an office and eating three-item bentos from Ranch 99 for lunch before imbibing Belgian ales at the Refuge in the evenings instead of the things I have been up to this year: walking for a month in New Zealand, fishing my ass off in Baja, and paddling 250 miles in Alaskan lakes and rivers. Not to mention walking 40 miles or so in Emigrant wilderness a couple of weeks ago. Conditions this year are right for camera-carrying.
In addition to the complete set on picasaweb, I offer these exact replacements for the lame, not- my-own photos posted last year. First, the photo of one of the region's lakes:
(a different lake, yes, but a better one, I think)
And second, a picture of me (not some other guy's hairy-ass hand) holding a golden trout that I caught:
The fishing was good. The backpacking, all inclusive, was greater than Great. To do this stuff, if you have the legs and the pain threshold to do it, is to make magic, to weave spells, to cheat death. I walked the John Muir Trail at 19 in the usual daze people live in at that age. But I am even more dazed and confused to still be able to do it now. After a deep, terrifying scare from plantar fascitis a few years ago, I find that I can still walk where I want to walk, even with a whole digital camera weighing me down. So I do really feel like a "Tromp-la-mort" -- a phrase stolen from the novelette that made up my main tent entertainment, Balzac's Pere Goriot.
Which reminds me: take Balzac. Take a pricey stick of wine-infused salami. Take cave-aged gruyere. Take the best olive oil you know. Take a delicious toasted-sesame-seed rub for your fresh, sweet trout. Sure, take plastic-packaged udon and ramen noodles; but use little miso powder packs instead of the MSG packs in the packages, and add liberal amounts of fuere wakame. Since it is your own back and not a mule's, little powder coffee packs from Starbucks are acceptable for morning coffee. Certainly, take all the time you need in the morning, since dawn starts are for alpine climbers and slaves.
I need not even mention this, but -- take at least an ounce a night of single-malt scotch, and mix it with snow when your camp is high enough. If your first day is short, pack some "heavy" but "necessary" ass-kicking beer or wine. Do all this, and you will trompe la mort for sure, my friends. Here's some of the advice Trompe la mort gives to poor little Eugene:
If you were just a bloodless slug, there'd be nothing to worry about: but you have the wild blood of lions in your veins, and an itch to do twenty crazy things a day. You will submit to this torture, the ghastliest ever known in God's hell.
Submit to it like I do: go backpacking.
Trompe la mort!
This year I must be feeling a bit more liberal, because I went ahead and carried a digital camera around at altitude in the exact same area for 40 or so miles. It is perhaps not all coincidental that I am feeling in a whole lot better shape this year, too, for the climbs and slogs and slides-through-softball-sized-talus of this particular trip seemed a whole lot easier. I suppose it's also not coincidental that last year my typical summer day involved sitting on my ass in an office and eating three-item bentos from Ranch 99 for lunch before imbibing Belgian ales at the Refuge in the evenings instead of the things I have been up to this year: walking for a month in New Zealand, fishing my ass off in Baja, and paddling 250 miles in Alaskan lakes and rivers. Not to mention walking 40 miles or so in Emigrant wilderness a couple of weeks ago. Conditions this year are right for camera-carrying.
In addition to the complete set on picasaweb, I offer these exact replacements for the lame, not- my-own photos posted last year. First, the photo of one of the region's lakes:
(a different lake, yes, but a better one, I think)
And second, a picture of me (not some other guy's hairy-ass hand) holding a golden trout that I caught:
The fishing was good. The backpacking, all inclusive, was greater than Great. To do this stuff, if you have the legs and the pain threshold to do it, is to make magic, to weave spells, to cheat death. I walked the John Muir Trail at 19 in the usual daze people live in at that age. But I am even more dazed and confused to still be able to do it now. After a deep, terrifying scare from plantar fascitis a few years ago, I find that I can still walk where I want to walk, even with a whole digital camera weighing me down. So I do really feel like a "Tromp-la-mort" -- a phrase stolen from the novelette that made up my main tent entertainment, Balzac's Pere Goriot.
Which reminds me: take Balzac. Take a pricey stick of wine-infused salami. Take cave-aged gruyere. Take the best olive oil you know. Take a delicious toasted-sesame-seed rub for your fresh, sweet trout. Sure, take plastic-packaged udon and ramen noodles; but use little miso powder packs instead of the MSG packs in the packages, and add liberal amounts of fuere wakame. Since it is your own back and not a mule's, little powder coffee packs from Starbucks are acceptable for morning coffee. Certainly, take all the time you need in the morning, since dawn starts are for alpine climbers and slaves.
I need not even mention this, but -- take at least an ounce a night of single-malt scotch, and mix it with snow when your camp is high enough. If your first day is short, pack some "heavy" but "necessary" ass-kicking beer or wine. Do all this, and you will trompe la mort for sure, my friends. Here's some of the advice Trompe la mort gives to poor little Eugene:
If you were just a bloodless slug, there'd be nothing to worry about: but you have the wild blood of lions in your veins, and an itch to do twenty crazy things a day. You will submit to this torture, the ghastliest ever known in God's hell.
Submit to it like I do: go backpacking.
Trompe la mort!
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Binary Dances with Trout
What? Did I really not post a single post since New Zealand? Lame. For there has decidedly been some fine fishing in between: a super-sweet trip to Baja that rendered fresh hamachi sashimi and a grilled collar to remember; a driven bass-fishin mission in Maine that lured dozens of smallmouths (and larges) to the surface and subsequently alongside a kayak; and, just the other night, a typically magical night of shad silliness on the Sacramento during one of those looooong summer evenings that ends with a watchspring-thin crescent moon in the pink June sky.
I think I can guess why there was no documentation of all this. I'm in the middle of my life's second serious sabbatical, and in six months time have settled deep into a little comfortable cocoon made up of country living, sweet fishing, and a life of the mind that is so increasingly inner-directed that it does not even allow self-indulgent blogging. Why should I write about what I experience, as long as I experience it?
Besides the obvious answer -- "you are not, and do not actually want to be, alone in this world, as much as you may think it, DUDE" -- there is the simple fact that writing about something, or photographing it, or painting it, gives it a shape that you can turn over much more tangibly in memory. It gives me a little hook that I can go back to and get caught up in memory, again and again. And I do like that.
I would stress the shape. In the past, it has given me great pleasure to create sonata-shaped trips made up of three distinct parts. My 2007 and 2008 trips to Alaska, for instance, were beautiful, fishy sonatas. 2009, a single, all-to-short presto! But for this year, for the final act of my non-employment, I have written out (or planned) what is best described as a binary dance -- you know, like all those priceless little bits of which Bach's sonatas and partitas are made. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L05xsjRvFEw
To be brief (as I must, since there is World Cup soccer to watch before I head to the airport tomorrow), my dance has these two parts: 1) a sea-kayak fishing stint on and around Naknek Lake; and 2) a river-kayak stint that takes me down Moraine Creek, across Kukaklek Lake, and down into the Lower Alagnak for the fourth time in my increasingly rich life. It would be nice to think I can do repeats of each part (as most of the performances of Bach do), but it will be a through-composed performance. Unless I drown or am eaten by a bear, that is. I know from experience now that such morbid outcomes are less likely than a lightning strike.
Within these nicely-shaped parts, there is of course a fair amount of complexity. I'll hang out first at Brooks Camp, drinking beer and drinking in the coolness of that place. I may do the portage over to Grovesenor Lake and continue on around the Savonoski Loop, or I may decide to stick to fishy water and just backtrack to Brooks after visiting Colville and American Creek. Hell, I might even be as lazy as before, and not do the portage at all! I have proven myself all too easy to entertain in and around the Bay of Islands, where the trout run to 34 inches, where pike swarm in backwaters, and where arctic grayling make a visit to Idavain Creek into a small side-trip into fish nirvana.
The second part is the really heterogenous deal, though. Moraine Creek is smallish water (I bet it will be Lower Sac-sized) where guides still "guarantee" a 10-pound trout to their clients. It is that full of big fish! And I trust that floating it will get me some solitude there, despite the fly-in fame of this small creek. Then, the crossing of Kukaklek Lake is the big question mark: will high winds make it a dreadful, three-day chore? Or will I cross it in one day and pick off dozens of fat rainbows at the outlet? Assuming I get through the Kukaklek rapids below -- not entirely guaranteed, though I hear it is a low-water year -- things get more predictable, but essentially more variable, with chums and kings joining the sockeye and rainbows, and even a fair chance at some pike in the sloughs. Perhaps another sea-licey 25 pounder to finish up the trip, like in 2005? We shall see.
So yes, I am stoked! The day after tomorrow, the dance begins . . . .
I think I can guess why there was no documentation of all this. I'm in the middle of my life's second serious sabbatical, and in six months time have settled deep into a little comfortable cocoon made up of country living, sweet fishing, and a life of the mind that is so increasingly inner-directed that it does not even allow self-indulgent blogging. Why should I write about what I experience, as long as I experience it?
Besides the obvious answer -- "you are not, and do not actually want to be, alone in this world, as much as you may think it, DUDE" -- there is the simple fact that writing about something, or photographing it, or painting it, gives it a shape that you can turn over much more tangibly in memory. It gives me a little hook that I can go back to and get caught up in memory, again and again. And I do like that.
I would stress the shape. In the past, it has given me great pleasure to create sonata-shaped trips made up of three distinct parts. My 2007 and 2008 trips to Alaska, for instance, were beautiful, fishy sonatas. 2009, a single, all-to-short presto! But for this year, for the final act of my non-employment, I have written out (or planned) what is best described as a binary dance -- you know, like all those priceless little bits of which Bach's sonatas and partitas are made. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L05xsjRvFEw
To be brief (as I must, since there is World Cup soccer to watch before I head to the airport tomorrow), my dance has these two parts: 1) a sea-kayak fishing stint on and around Naknek Lake; and 2) a river-kayak stint that takes me down Moraine Creek, across Kukaklek Lake, and down into the Lower Alagnak for the fourth time in my increasingly rich life. It would be nice to think I can do repeats of each part (as most of the performances of Bach do), but it will be a through-composed performance. Unless I drown or am eaten by a bear, that is. I know from experience now that such morbid outcomes are less likely than a lightning strike.
Within these nicely-shaped parts, there is of course a fair amount of complexity. I'll hang out first at Brooks Camp, drinking beer and drinking in the coolness of that place. I may do the portage over to Grovesenor Lake and continue on around the Savonoski Loop, or I may decide to stick to fishy water and just backtrack to Brooks after visiting Colville and American Creek. Hell, I might even be as lazy as before, and not do the portage at all! I have proven myself all too easy to entertain in and around the Bay of Islands, where the trout run to 34 inches, where pike swarm in backwaters, and where arctic grayling make a visit to Idavain Creek into a small side-trip into fish nirvana.
The second part is the really heterogenous deal, though. Moraine Creek is smallish water (I bet it will be Lower Sac-sized) where guides still "guarantee" a 10-pound trout to their clients. It is that full of big fish! And I trust that floating it will get me some solitude there, despite the fly-in fame of this small creek. Then, the crossing of Kukaklek Lake is the big question mark: will high winds make it a dreadful, three-day chore? Or will I cross it in one day and pick off dozens of fat rainbows at the outlet? Assuming I get through the Kukaklek rapids below -- not entirely guaranteed, though I hear it is a low-water year -- things get more predictable, but essentially more variable, with chums and kings joining the sockeye and rainbows, and even a fair chance at some pike in the sloughs. Perhaps another sea-licey 25 pounder to finish up the trip, like in 2005? We shall see.
So yes, I am stoked! The day after tomorrow, the dance begins . . . .
Friday, March 12, 2010
Guide This!
I'm actually considering dropping this blog and starting a whole new one named, "Guide This!" Whilst this blog has been random and self-indulgent and always fun (for me), the new blog will have a recognizable and useful purpose (for other people): it will try and instruct people how to do "DIY," or "Do It Yourself" fly-fishing in remote or new places without any of the too-typical, too-expensive services of a fishing guide. All I have to do to get started is figure out how to accomplish that without expressing a bunch of negative resentment toward people who do guiding for a living.
I could make the obvious analogy to prostitution, but hey people -- I have been working as a technical writer for over ten years!
Let's face it. Guides will not disagree; some very lame shit happens on guided fishing trips. People with no knowledge of fishing, no skill for fishing, and, worst, no love of fishing, go out and defile the worlds best "fisheries" (a guide-ish term that I despise!) just because they had the 3 to 700-dollar wallet to pay a guide.
Case in point is a dude I met on the Wangapeka river in New Zealand last month. I was on the tenth and last day of a long backpack trip, drying out by the Rolling Junction hut and waiting for my ride back to civilization and hot showers. He and his client, a mellow-looking English bloke, were looking for some fishable water after a night of really really heavy rains. Bless them, I knew too well that they were looking in the wrong spot, for I had camped out during the whole pissing rainy night and watched the tiny, clear Wangapeka turn into a big, brown class IV torrent . . . . Anyway, to pass the time (and probably to try and sell me), the guide started showing me pictures of fat fish from a couple of rivers not far from where I had fished that week. I told him I had got a similar fish from the river, and described the touch-and-go fight that brought the fish to the net.
Oh yeah mite, you guttah fullow the fish downstream or you're funished! I hed this group of ex-football playahs from the Stites, and they refused to do it. Kipt on standing there while the fish wint a hundrid yahds downstream! I tell ya, mite, there must be twinty fish in that stream with five feet of leader hanging out there mouths, broke right where the flourocarbon leader broke off, rubbing on some rock . . . .
And I'm there thinking, yeah, that makes sense, that the long, fine leaders would break in such cases. But what doesn't compute is this: why in hell were those stupid ass goobers out on some stream where they had no right whatsoever being, and why didn't you get disgusted, tell them all to stick their cash up their fat asses, and QUIT! Right on the spot!
Poor bastard. He had money to make, a reputation to uphold. And in guiding, you don't do that by being proud and ethical; you do it by keeping your clients satisfied, and getting their fat-fish pictures and their word-of-mouth recommendations to their well-heeled (if poorly skilled) friends.
That was a sad weird tale. I also do have a first-hand story of how sordid guiding gets in New Zealand, where there are big, beautiful fish in numerous lovely mountain streams, but not really a whole hell of a lot of fish. By this I mean, a place where big, smart trout get caught once a season before they smarten up, if that often.
But anyway, this story starts when I am on my second day of backpacking ever in New Zealand, and my first day of actually fishing in New Zealand, at sundown, looking at a big pool on a small stream with two big, giant, brown trout holding in the tail. I sneak up behind them with the UTMOST caution and stealth -- which you absolutely have to do in order to have any hope of a hookup -- and make a near-perfect cast on an 18-foot 5x tipped leader in windless conditions (god help you with that kind of leader if there's a downstream breeze), drifted it right over the first fish, and -- and -- watched the fish lazily look up and refuse my lovely size 18 EHC. What? HOW?!? I too refused to accept this, and decided to camp out next to the pool so that I could try it again in the morning.
Later I would learn that casting to inactive fish is near useless, except as target-enhanced casting practice. I would also learn that it usually takes much longer than overnight for a fish who is "doggo" to come back to life and feed. But first, I had to learn how it feels to be awoken from peaceful hammock sleep by a fucking helicopter. Yeah, I knew what this meant, and I have never zipped out of my sleeping bag and got ready for the day faster than I did that morning. It was just fast enough: as soon as I stepped foot in the water I saw three people, out there in what I thought was crazy remote woods, walking upstream in my direction. Jeezus. I started casting to my fossilized browns, still holding in the same spot, and tried to pretend I didn't know other humans were there.
Yeah, fat chance. While I'm hunched over casting in extreme stealth mode, a largely pregnant woman (no lie; it was bizarre) -- the guide's wife and chosen ambassador -- calls out, "Gudday!" I mutter something to the effect that I would like to be more quiet, and she replies, "Ow, they won't hear us TALKING up here." Long story short, I had to talk to this most unlikely of interlopers in my solo fishing tramp, and ended up talking also to her guide husband as well as "Dave from Beverly Hills," a hopelessly clueless-looking portly man with white sunscreen smeared all over his face on a cloudy day. Good on ya Dave, for having the cash on hand to hire a helicopter and two generations of guidefolk to get you to your fish. All I had was months of homework, a few thousand dollars in equipment, and a lifetime of experience, fitness, and mental preparation. Its cumulative effect was shattered by that "Gudday!" in one half-second.
Negotiations ensued. Since I was heading downstream anyway, I agreed to take the lower water while they continued to the upper. This partitioning would be beyond consideration in fish-infested Alaska, but in New Zealand it matters: fish who have been fished over go "doggo" for days, and fishing to already-stalked fish is useless, as aforementioned. In fact, the guide was a bit visibly upset that he hadn't seen my camp from the air. "We look for tints," he said. But I was hidden in the trees in my hammock. So they were forced to share the river with me, poor fellas (and pregnant gals). "Wall, we'll let ya hev this pool anyway," the guide graciously said in farewell. And then, to my drop-jawed amazement, the guide walked forty feet upstream and got his client started casting in the head of said pool.
Nick, or Niel, or something like that, based out of Nelson. Locals should know him. Actual fisherman should avoid him.
And fuck yeah, the grapes are sour -- how the hell would you feel if you walked twenty painful miles, banging down 3000 feet with nine days of food and fuel in your pack, only to be jumped by a grinning Beverly Hillbilly and his lying sack of shit guide? LAME!!!
This is why I'm not so sure about starting that other blog. To be different from this one, it would have to strive for a degree of helpfulness and objectivity. It would have to focus on how to find information in bulletin boards and books and maps, and how to get self and rod to the water cheaply and independently and all that jazz that I have been playing for a decade or so. It would have to avoid being negative about guides and what they do to fishing and to places to fish, and, for the moment, I'm not sure I'm ready for that.
I'll work on it. In the end, it actually was an enormous satisfaction to walk into those rivers and pull out a few trophy fish without paying any money at all to the latter-day manservants that call themselves fishing guides. I did it MYSELF. I know that doing so is worth bricks of gold, and when and if I'm ready, I may try to help other people mint that gold, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that unless you figure it out for yourself you may end up with silver or bronze at best. Do it real DIY style, and you might end up with brown with black spots on it, one of the most beautiful materials known to this non-guiding, unguideable man.
I could make the obvious analogy to prostitution, but hey people -- I have been working as a technical writer for over ten years!
Let's face it. Guides will not disagree; some very lame shit happens on guided fishing trips. People with no knowledge of fishing, no skill for fishing, and, worst, no love of fishing, go out and defile the worlds best "fisheries" (a guide-ish term that I despise!) just because they had the 3 to 700-dollar wallet to pay a guide.
Case in point is a dude I met on the Wangapeka river in New Zealand last month. I was on the tenth and last day of a long backpack trip, drying out by the Rolling Junction hut and waiting for my ride back to civilization and hot showers. He and his client, a mellow-looking English bloke, were looking for some fishable water after a night of really really heavy rains. Bless them, I knew too well that they were looking in the wrong spot, for I had camped out during the whole pissing rainy night and watched the tiny, clear Wangapeka turn into a big, brown class IV torrent . . . . Anyway, to pass the time (and probably to try and sell me), the guide started showing me pictures of fat fish from a couple of rivers not far from where I had fished that week. I told him I had got a similar fish from the river, and described the touch-and-go fight that brought the fish to the net.
Oh yeah mite, you guttah fullow the fish downstream or you're funished! I hed this group of ex-football playahs from the Stites, and they refused to do it. Kipt on standing there while the fish wint a hundrid yahds downstream! I tell ya, mite, there must be twinty fish in that stream with five feet of leader hanging out there mouths, broke right where the flourocarbon leader broke off, rubbing on some rock . . . .
And I'm there thinking, yeah, that makes sense, that the long, fine leaders would break in such cases. But what doesn't compute is this: why in hell were those stupid ass goobers out on some stream where they had no right whatsoever being, and why didn't you get disgusted, tell them all to stick their cash up their fat asses, and QUIT! Right on the spot!
Poor bastard. He had money to make, a reputation to uphold. And in guiding, you don't do that by being proud and ethical; you do it by keeping your clients satisfied, and getting their fat-fish pictures and their word-of-mouth recommendations to their well-heeled (if poorly skilled) friends.
That was a sad weird tale. I also do have a first-hand story of how sordid guiding gets in New Zealand, where there are big, beautiful fish in numerous lovely mountain streams, but not really a whole hell of a lot of fish. By this I mean, a place where big, smart trout get caught once a season before they smarten up, if that often.
But anyway, this story starts when I am on my second day of backpacking ever in New Zealand, and my first day of actually fishing in New Zealand, at sundown, looking at a big pool on a small stream with two big, giant, brown trout holding in the tail. I sneak up behind them with the UTMOST caution and stealth -- which you absolutely have to do in order to have any hope of a hookup -- and make a near-perfect cast on an 18-foot 5x tipped leader in windless conditions (god help you with that kind of leader if there's a downstream breeze), drifted it right over the first fish, and -- and -- watched the fish lazily look up and refuse my lovely size 18 EHC. What? HOW?!? I too refused to accept this, and decided to camp out next to the pool so that I could try it again in the morning.
Later I would learn that casting to inactive fish is near useless, except as target-enhanced casting practice. I would also learn that it usually takes much longer than overnight for a fish who is "doggo" to come back to life and feed. But first, I had to learn how it feels to be awoken from peaceful hammock sleep by a fucking helicopter. Yeah, I knew what this meant, and I have never zipped out of my sleeping bag and got ready for the day faster than I did that morning. It was just fast enough: as soon as I stepped foot in the water I saw three people, out there in what I thought was crazy remote woods, walking upstream in my direction. Jeezus. I started casting to my fossilized browns, still holding in the same spot, and tried to pretend I didn't know other humans were there.
Yeah, fat chance. While I'm hunched over casting in extreme stealth mode, a largely pregnant woman (no lie; it was bizarre) -- the guide's wife and chosen ambassador -- calls out, "Gudday!" I mutter something to the effect that I would like to be more quiet, and she replies, "Ow, they won't hear us TALKING up here." Long story short, I had to talk to this most unlikely of interlopers in my solo fishing tramp, and ended up talking also to her guide husband as well as "Dave from Beverly Hills," a hopelessly clueless-looking portly man with white sunscreen smeared all over his face on a cloudy day. Good on ya Dave, for having the cash on hand to hire a helicopter and two generations of guidefolk to get you to your fish. All I had was months of homework, a few thousand dollars in equipment, and a lifetime of experience, fitness, and mental preparation. Its cumulative effect was shattered by that "Gudday!" in one half-second.
Negotiations ensued. Since I was heading downstream anyway, I agreed to take the lower water while they continued to the upper. This partitioning would be beyond consideration in fish-infested Alaska, but in New Zealand it matters: fish who have been fished over go "doggo" for days, and fishing to already-stalked fish is useless, as aforementioned. In fact, the guide was a bit visibly upset that he hadn't seen my camp from the air. "We look for tints," he said. But I was hidden in the trees in my hammock. So they were forced to share the river with me, poor fellas (and pregnant gals). "Wall, we'll let ya hev this pool anyway," the guide graciously said in farewell. And then, to my drop-jawed amazement, the guide walked forty feet upstream and got his client started casting in the head of said pool.
Nick, or Niel, or something like that, based out of Nelson. Locals should know him. Actual fisherman should avoid him.
And fuck yeah, the grapes are sour -- how the hell would you feel if you walked twenty painful miles, banging down 3000 feet with nine days of food and fuel in your pack, only to be jumped by a grinning Beverly Hillbilly and his lying sack of shit guide? LAME!!!
This is why I'm not so sure about starting that other blog. To be different from this one, it would have to strive for a degree of helpfulness and objectivity. It would have to focus on how to find information in bulletin boards and books and maps, and how to get self and rod to the water cheaply and independently and all that jazz that I have been playing for a decade or so. It would have to avoid being negative about guides and what they do to fishing and to places to fish, and, for the moment, I'm not sure I'm ready for that.
I'll work on it. In the end, it actually was an enormous satisfaction to walk into those rivers and pull out a few trophy fish without paying any money at all to the latter-day manservants that call themselves fishing guides. I did it MYSELF. I know that doing so is worth bricks of gold, and when and if I'm ready, I may try to help other people mint that gold, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that unless you figure it out for yourself you may end up with silver or bronze at best. Do it real DIY style, and you might end up with brown with black spots on it, one of the most beautiful materials known to this non-guiding, unguideable man.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Drowned Spork
I went ahead and re-read a few of those pre-Alaska posts, and found a whole new value in them. You know what they were good for? They gave me an excuse to tell some old stories that I never got around to telling at the time. Like the story of the four bears at my Idavain camp, or the story of the dude in his bloodied shirt outside the Anchorage flea-bag hotel -- those were stories worth telling, right? I certainly enjoyed hearing them after having lived them (and then written them), though that may not be a strictly scientific test of their worth.
I don't have any New Zealand stories. Yet.
But here's an Alaskan story from this summer that I actually started composing right after it happened, and then never got around to telling. It is the story of The Drowned Spork. At the very time that these events were unfolding, they immediately reminded me of a story from a book of cool stories, "Shadows on the Koyukuk," by Sidney Huffington. Needless to say, there is a story behind that too -- this book was given to me by George Taylor, in Ewkok, AK, on the last day of my 165-mile Epic Solo Float Trip -- but the story behind the actual original story was simply that Sidney Huffington was a badass Alaskan outdoorsman who made these "Man vs. Wild" characters look like the clowns they really are.
And before I go on, I want to point out that I am a lesser man, less than both of those classes of men. I neither have been forced into great hardship, where I was forced by Fate to confront the world with great strength and discipline (Huffington), nor have I gone out and intentionally sought contrived hardships so that I could confront them with strength and spirit (Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild), or make them into a personal suicidal psychodrama (Timothy Treadwell of Grizzy Man), or make them into a low-brow, lucrative TV show (guy in Man vs. Wild or whatever the show is called). Far from that, what I do is go out into the wild to have as fine a time as possible given the scenario, which means carrying single-malt Scotch whisky in my backpack and listening to an mp3 player all day when paddling my kayak. I bring everything I can bring to enjoy myself, and take all precautions to come back alive so that I can pack up with more whiskey and Bach and get the hell out there again for more.
Given this, it may not surprise you to hear that the greatest actual misfortune that befell me on my last trip to Alaska occurred when I dropped my plastic spork into six feet of extremely cold lake water. Sure, a few days earlier I had a hungry-looking grizzly walk by 50 feet from my bubbling oatmeal breakfast, and had another bear follow me down a narrow track, and got caught briefly in some white-out fog while paddling all the way through an arctic night; but those were only close calls. This was the real thing: in an absent moment, I turned around awkwardly on the little granite shelf where I had just finished eating grilled lake trout, and knocked the spork clattering beyond reach, deep into the cold, clear water! Without that spork, I was going to have to eat with my bare hands! Oatmeal, pasta shells, couscous, all the staples of my outdoor diet (ramen, I can tackle with twig chopsticks) -- all without the assistance of a spork!!!
I tried a few times to hook the spork on a jig, and also to drag it up with the tip of a fly rod. Useless. Obviously, if I wanted that spork, I was going to have to go down there and get it with my grubby little opposable thumb, diving or swimming into water that was a scant few degrees above freezing, on a cloudy day just below the Arctic circle. Oh boy. They didn't teach me THIS one in Webelos.
Fortunately, I remembered what Sidney Huffington had done when his dogsled team had sent him crashing through actual frozen water, actually above the Arctic circle, creating a serious hypothermia emergency: he immediately built a huge fire, and while warming next to it, built another fire to keep him warm while he stood on the site of the previous fire and dried off his naked self and clothes. Well, hey! I already had a small fire going for my fish grilling, and all I needed to do was build it up into a huge blaze, and then I could stay warm in my birthday suit in the Alaskan wilderness, just like Sydney did!
To make a long story shorter, that is just what I did: after stoking the fire up to a big wide blaze that covered half of the little granite shelf on a little granite island, I stripped down, dove in, and retrieved the goddam spork. Indeed, the fire was hot enough to dry me off and keep my shivering frame from freezing while I put back on all the layers that were critical for getting through the day up there. But all the time, I was chucking and shaking my head, thinking the following:
Huffington stoked up his fires to save himself from certain death due to an unforeseeable accident in the middle of an icy wasteland; I did it so that I could more conveniently eat pesto-flavored couscous with extra virgin olive oil and toasted pine nuts.
Do you get it? Is that story gettable? Is it even a story? I am very grateful that nothing really serious even happened to me when I was camping alone out on Naknek Lake, where serious things can certainly happen. I'm also grateful that I can laugh at myself and my precious spork. I'm grateful that I ended up reading Huffington, and that lessons from that book helped me out in a sudden plastic-cutlery emergency. I guess I should also be grateful for the big old Google server where this written-down story will live for a while and relieve the pressure on my forgetful mind. It's one of the things blogging is good for!!
I don't have any New Zealand stories. Yet.
But here's an Alaskan story from this summer that I actually started composing right after it happened, and then never got around to telling. It is the story of The Drowned Spork. At the very time that these events were unfolding, they immediately reminded me of a story from a book of cool stories, "Shadows on the Koyukuk," by Sidney Huffington. Needless to say, there is a story behind that too -- this book was given to me by George Taylor, in Ewkok, AK, on the last day of my 165-mile Epic Solo Float Trip -- but the story behind the actual original story was simply that Sidney Huffington was a badass Alaskan outdoorsman who made these "Man vs. Wild" characters look like the clowns they really are.
And before I go on, I want to point out that I am a lesser man, less than both of those classes of men. I neither have been forced into great hardship, where I was forced by Fate to confront the world with great strength and discipline (Huffington), nor have I gone out and intentionally sought contrived hardships so that I could confront them with strength and spirit (Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild), or make them into a personal suicidal psychodrama (Timothy Treadwell of Grizzy Man), or make them into a low-brow, lucrative TV show (guy in Man vs. Wild or whatever the show is called). Far from that, what I do is go out into the wild to have as fine a time as possible given the scenario, which means carrying single-malt Scotch whisky in my backpack and listening to an mp3 player all day when paddling my kayak. I bring everything I can bring to enjoy myself, and take all precautions to come back alive so that I can pack up with more whiskey and Bach and get the hell out there again for more.
Given this, it may not surprise you to hear that the greatest actual misfortune that befell me on my last trip to Alaska occurred when I dropped my plastic spork into six feet of extremely cold lake water. Sure, a few days earlier I had a hungry-looking grizzly walk by 50 feet from my bubbling oatmeal breakfast, and had another bear follow me down a narrow track, and got caught briefly in some white-out fog while paddling all the way through an arctic night; but those were only close calls. This was the real thing: in an absent moment, I turned around awkwardly on the little granite shelf where I had just finished eating grilled lake trout, and knocked the spork clattering beyond reach, deep into the cold, clear water! Without that spork, I was going to have to eat with my bare hands! Oatmeal, pasta shells, couscous, all the staples of my outdoor diet (ramen, I can tackle with twig chopsticks) -- all without the assistance of a spork!!!
I tried a few times to hook the spork on a jig, and also to drag it up with the tip of a fly rod. Useless. Obviously, if I wanted that spork, I was going to have to go down there and get it with my grubby little opposable thumb, diving or swimming into water that was a scant few degrees above freezing, on a cloudy day just below the Arctic circle. Oh boy. They didn't teach me THIS one in Webelos.
Fortunately, I remembered what Sidney Huffington had done when his dogsled team had sent him crashing through actual frozen water, actually above the Arctic circle, creating a serious hypothermia emergency: he immediately built a huge fire, and while warming next to it, built another fire to keep him warm while he stood on the site of the previous fire and dried off his naked self and clothes. Well, hey! I already had a small fire going for my fish grilling, and all I needed to do was build it up into a huge blaze, and then I could stay warm in my birthday suit in the Alaskan wilderness, just like Sydney did!
To make a long story shorter, that is just what I did: after stoking the fire up to a big wide blaze that covered half of the little granite shelf on a little granite island, I stripped down, dove in, and retrieved the goddam spork. Indeed, the fire was hot enough to dry me off and keep my shivering frame from freezing while I put back on all the layers that were critical for getting through the day up there. But all the time, I was chucking and shaking my head, thinking the following:
Huffington stoked up his fires to save himself from certain death due to an unforeseeable accident in the middle of an icy wasteland; I did it so that I could more conveniently eat pesto-flavored couscous with extra virgin olive oil and toasted pine nuts.
Do you get it? Is that story gettable? Is it even a story? I am very grateful that nothing really serious even happened to me when I was camping alone out on Naknek Lake, where serious things can certainly happen. I'm also grateful that I can laugh at myself and my precious spork. I'm grateful that I ended up reading Huffington, and that lessons from that book helped me out in a sudden plastic-cutlery emergency. I guess I should also be grateful for the big old Google server where this written-down story will live for a while and relieve the pressure on my forgetful mind. It's one of the things blogging is good for!!
Saturday, January 23, 2010
New Year, New Trick, New Zealand
In the week leading up to my Alaskan trip last summer this blog received a post per day, leaving no doubt for anyone actually reading that the blogger was excited about his trip. "I'm going fishing in Alaska! I have a PERFECT two-week plan!" It wasn't so much a need to shout this out to readers, but rather just a strong need to vent it -- the excitement was bubbling over and leaving accumulated gasses in all corners of my consciousness, bored to tears as it was with my normal daily life. Writing was a healthy distraction.
So why haven't I written a whisper about the two months of careful, engrossing planning for the upcoming trip to New Zealand? Certainly, I have been obsessing on this trip in the usual way. Trip planning may be my own particular geeky specialty, like entomology and "the fascination of what's difficult" can be for other fly fishing geeks. Taking GPS waypoints from Google Earth, trolling around on bulletin boards for tips, reading and re-reading available books and articles -- I do my homework when it comes to trip planning, and, far from treating it like a chore, I enjoy the hell out of it. The planning process stimulates the mind and the imagination. When the process is finished, the product is a thing of beauty: a logical plan for navigating the landscape (and waterscape) backed up with the right gear to get it done and the best possible information on tactics to help join fly to fish.
Needless to say, the satisfaction in executing such a plan is only exceeded by completely and totally changing it on the spur of the moment, should that be your whim once you are on the ground, and especially if you are the type of person disinclined to obey authorities (particularly your despotic self).
OK, that's a bit of a stretch, but if you have even the remotest opportunity to quote Byron before heading on any journey, you take it!
Anyway -- I'm going fishing in New Zealand! I have a PERFECT four-week plan!!!
Or to be honest, I think it is a good plan. The difference between New Zealand and Alaska or Patagonia for me, is that I'm a complete virgin. When I toss a six-weight line out on to the Hope River in about two weeks, it will be the first time I have fished a Kiwi stream. So, despite an avalanche of good information from friends, books, websites, videos, and kind strangers on bulletin boards, it is pretty much an unknown quantity. For this reason, The Plan is more likely than ever to be broken up and rearranged. Instead of going straight to the Hope/Hurunui area around Lewis Pass (though my bus ticket is already reserved), I may go to St. Arnaud and check out the Travers and Sabine rivers. Or, hell, I might even end up walking down the Hollyford first -- it's all the way at the other end of the island, but it is the easiest trek, and might do well for a warmup. What then if my 43-year old feet or knees or back start acting up at just the wrong time? Then I'm looking a whole different, non-"tramping" (read, backpacking) trip, and the rivers change to road-accessible names like the Clarence, the Mataura, the Grey.
Four weeks seemed to be about the right window for working out these kinds of questions. I may end up wishing I had more time, and/or wishing I had brought my portable sea kayak, or inflatable river kayak, or both. But I figure I need to get the lay of the land over there before making any really gigantic plans. It's important to find out first whether New Zealand is the right place for gigantic plans -- and if you have watched the hobbit movies, you suspect that the answer is yes. I know a few fly fishers who rave pretty hard about New Zealand. In Patagonia, I fished for sea-run browns with a Swedish kook who insisted that I HAD to go try New Zealand at some point. To Ole, New Zealand was mandatory for a traveling fly fisher. I have resisted it partly because I wonder if I am up to the technical challenge of fishing for notoriously spooky browns, and whether I have the patience to walk along sight-fishing and only making perhaps a dozen casts a day, always to visible fish. But a fly fisher reaches a threshold of age where patience and skill may be adequate, and beyond which, legs, lungs and back may soon be inadequate for the task . . . .
So with that in mind, I finally quit my full-time job and got the ticket for this trip. Several months ago I moved to a terrific apartment with cheap rent (helpful for taking long trips) and then over the past six weeks have unwound my full time technical writing work (essential for taking a long trip) with a certain share of anxiety and uncertainty, and so things have been busy. The next Friday coming up will be my last work day, and the Sunday following gets me on a plane that goes over the date line and lands two days later. What I actually see or do after that, what I actually catch or (likely enough) do not catch, will be the topic of some blogging from Down Under!
So why haven't I written a whisper about the two months of careful, engrossing planning for the upcoming trip to New Zealand? Certainly, I have been obsessing on this trip in the usual way. Trip planning may be my own particular geeky specialty, like entomology and "the fascination of what's difficult" can be for other fly fishing geeks. Taking GPS waypoints from Google Earth, trolling around on bulletin boards for tips, reading and re-reading available books and articles -- I do my homework when it comes to trip planning, and, far from treating it like a chore, I enjoy the hell out of it. The planning process stimulates the mind and the imagination. When the process is finished, the product is a thing of beauty: a logical plan for navigating the landscape (and waterscape) backed up with the right gear to get it done and the best possible information on tactics to help join fly to fish.
Needless to say, the satisfaction in executing such a plan is only exceeded by completely and totally changing it on the spur of the moment, should that be your whim once you are on the ground, and especially if you are the type of person disinclined to obey authorities (particularly your despotic self).
untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell'd
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompell'd,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell'd;
Proud though in desolation; which could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.
OK, that's a bit of a stretch, but if you have even the remotest opportunity to quote Byron before heading on any journey, you take it!
Anyway -- I'm going fishing in New Zealand! I have a PERFECT four-week plan!!!
Or to be honest, I think it is a good plan. The difference between New Zealand and Alaska or Patagonia for me, is that I'm a complete virgin. When I toss a six-weight line out on to the Hope River in about two weeks, it will be the first time I have fished a Kiwi stream. So, despite an avalanche of good information from friends, books, websites, videos, and kind strangers on bulletin boards, it is pretty much an unknown quantity. For this reason, The Plan is more likely than ever to be broken up and rearranged. Instead of going straight to the Hope/Hurunui area around Lewis Pass (though my bus ticket is already reserved), I may go to St. Arnaud and check out the Travers and Sabine rivers. Or, hell, I might even end up walking down the Hollyford first -- it's all the way at the other end of the island, but it is the easiest trek, and might do well for a warmup. What then if my 43-year old feet or knees or back start acting up at just the wrong time? Then I'm looking a whole different, non-"tramping" (read, backpacking) trip, and the rivers change to road-accessible names like the Clarence, the Mataura, the Grey.
Four weeks seemed to be about the right window for working out these kinds of questions. I may end up wishing I had more time, and/or wishing I had brought my portable sea kayak, or inflatable river kayak, or both. But I figure I need to get the lay of the land over there before making any really gigantic plans. It's important to find out first whether New Zealand is the right place for gigantic plans -- and if you have watched the hobbit movies, you suspect that the answer is yes. I know a few fly fishers who rave pretty hard about New Zealand. In Patagonia, I fished for sea-run browns with a Swedish kook who insisted that I HAD to go try New Zealand at some point. To Ole, New Zealand was mandatory for a traveling fly fisher. I have resisted it partly because I wonder if I am up to the technical challenge of fishing for notoriously spooky browns, and whether I have the patience to walk along sight-fishing and only making perhaps a dozen casts a day, always to visible fish. But a fly fisher reaches a threshold of age where patience and skill may be adequate, and beyond which, legs, lungs and back may soon be inadequate for the task . . . .
So with that in mind, I finally quit my full-time job and got the ticket for this trip. Several months ago I moved to a terrific apartment with cheap rent (helpful for taking long trips) and then over the past six weeks have unwound my full time technical writing work (essential for taking a long trip) with a certain share of anxiety and uncertainty, and so things have been busy. The next Friday coming up will be my last work day, and the Sunday following gets me on a plane that goes over the date line and lands two days later. What I actually see or do after that, what I actually catch or (likely enough) do not catch, will be the topic of some blogging from Down Under!
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