Fishin Sabbatical

Trifecta 2.0

2011-10-31T07:44:00.000-07:00

Change -- the essential process of all existence.

So said a profound Mr. Spock in "Let that be your Last Battlefield," and so too says Pit Boss after completing, at long last, a Trifecta for 2011. Rituals like the Pit Trifecta reassure us and comfort us, letting us pretend that today, which starts with hot coffee just like any other day, is not going to be too different from yesterday, letting us pretend that 2011 is just the same as 2001 and all the things we love and enjoy are going to remain the same for us until we never, ever die.

Now that I am just about "old," I am well aware of how true that statement is. I didn't even need to drive up what used to be the bumpy, muddy old dirt middle of the Hagen Flat road, getting myself mentally ready to settle into my favorite old renegade camp next to the abandoned mine entrance, and instead see this:

Yep -- right there where the famous Pit River Bar used to be, there is now a big brown "Fee Area" sign. Just at the moment, there's no fee and no one else camping there, so on Saturday night it was just me and the spanking brand new iron fire rings and sturdy new picnic tables, plus the familiar and sweet sound the river makes going through that part of the canyon. But soon, will it be full of boisterous families and big RV's with their generators running all night, and picnic plates and cigarette smoke blowing in the breeze?

I wonder. I have been down this trail many times. It used to be very hard to describe to people how to find the access and get down to the river. That problem is "solved." It also used to be some of the toughest, most physically challenging wading in a river famous for being difficult, and Pit Boss has (yes it is true) taken a swim or two down there. And now, with the increased flows, is it going to be easier? Hm. Might want to add a third little cartoon showing little kids getting swept downstream in the current to drown under a strainer? I'm just saying.

The road was graded smooth and driving in the canyon was way too easy, and it looks like they are going to pave it. As far as I could tell, it's safe to ignore the "Road Closed" signs on Pit 5 and head on up all the way to #3 (I did, of course, catching trout in each reach and making it an official Trifecta). It occurred to me that they're just trying to do on Hagen Flat Road what they did on the North Fork of the Feather, where there are plenty of nice clean campgrounds and access areas.

There's a reason why I never ran for Feather Boss, though. The Pit is (was) my kind of place: steep, wild, overgrown and difficult enough that few people wanted to fish there despite a fine, fine population of wild trout. I liked it that there were no trail signs nor campgrounds nor rangers, and if the price you pay for that is to wake up on the morning of Opening Day to the sound of shotgun blasts and an idiot yelling "Yeah! Yeah!" (and laughing at how stupid the guy sounded) or driving late into a dark Pit 4 renegade camp and finding a largish drinking party of Burney dropouts, led by a thin bespectacled man holding a tiny dog and wearing nothing but a grass skirt (and laughing even harder -- Mike Hadj will remember both these crackups), well, that was the price and I was happy to pay it.

Boy oh boy has it changed. A little piece of my heart goes brittle and breaks off when I see two cars parked by my "secret" access point on #5 (PB always drove his truck back off the main road where it couldn't be seen), or when I see those little cartoon fishers on a sign where you used to see nothing but pines and poison oak. But then again, every time I get a little love from my old friends, still swimming fine under the increased flows, a healing process takes place:

Maine State Micropterizing

2011-09-19T13:54:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I learned an excellent new word: Micropterus. It sounds lovely and looks cool in Verdana font, and it refers to a couple of my favorite feeshies, the largemouth (micropterus salmoides) and smallmouth (micropterus dolomieu) bass. Texas salmoides got some free publicity here back in April, and now I would like to say a few words about Maine state dolomieu and some related species. Without further adieu, here is a specimen of dolomieu:

Many of my trips back to my hometown in Maine have started off with a simple ritual where I show up at my parents' house, give them a hug during which I pickpocket their car keys, and then drive off to go bass fishing in one of my favorite old ponds. This time I was a little more polite than that, partly because I wanted to spend some quality time with the folks, and partly because a flight that arrives in Trenton at 3:30 really doesn't allow enough time to put together a kayak and get staged up for fishing. I did in fact fish every other night of the trip, three times yakking and twice in my old canoe with my buddy Stroutster, who has become the Custodian of the Canoe. This canoe:

That picture was taken just last night during a really fun trip to a little pond that the Custodian and I have been fishing for (jeezus!) over 30 years now. Miraculously, it still fishes well, despite certain observations made by a grumpy old feller who owns one of the few little cabins on the north shore . . . you see, he told us by way of a greeting, "there ain't any fish in this pond." Suggesting perhaps we might go elsewhere, sir? Good luck with that one. The truest fortune cookie I ever got at China Hill said, "You are a person who loves to do what people say can't be done."

So we made a point to hoot and holler as loud as could be when I had a bass jumping around on the line before the clock even struck five. A plan was mooted (and quickly tabled) to leave that old feller a nice big pickerel on his doorstep when we left. We are immature, yes, but not quite that bad anymore.

Stroutster is an old-school bait man and hardware-flinger, but it turns out that he had never taken a fish on a topwater lure before last night. After watching me catch a couple bass on poppers and hook pickerel (esox niger) right and left with the same fly (with the pickerel tracking it in their cool way with a little wake, and then slashing at it their unsubtle, adrenaline-splashing manner), Stroutser switched to a hula popper he had in the tackle box. Cast cast cast -- but that was not the popper destined to pop a man's topwater cherry. No strikes. When it became clear they didn't want to hula, we instead tied on a zara spook and verified an important fact: they love that weird shit. Witness:

I really wanted to get the strike on camera, but a few leaps will have to do:

The air was already getting decidedly autumn-like in Maine over the past week, making for lovely cool conditions and magical late dusks with lots of vapor rolling off the surface of the water as you paddle back to the launch under headlamp light. Fortunately, the water (which of course has higher thermal inertia than atmospheric air, as we all appreciate) was still warm enough that topwater was ON. I took a few greenish balsa poppers with weed guards, fished them 90% of the time, and brought them back today with literally no paint left on them. That's how Maine State Micropertizing should be, I figure.

Alagnak Skies

2011-09-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

You know what's a good way to look at photos of the sky? Put them in a fancy Mac screensaver that changes the focus and pans around on them! It's the next best thing to sitting in a camp chair under big open skies and occasionally getting up to do astounded 36o's:

Since few people in their right minds are ever going to find themselves camping on a gravel bar in the lower Alagnak river in August, I'll go ahead and make a Picasaweb album of photos of such skies. Here are a few of my favorites from the last trip right here inline though:

That was my last morning on the river, and it started very beautifully at around 42 degrees.

This one I like because it reminds me of the train of storm clouds that Saruman conjured up to stop the Fellowship on Caradhras the Cruel . . . maybe the old coot was standing over Bristol Bay right then chanting, "Ahni, mani, padma, hah!" or whatever the cloud spell is:

For me, there's something magical about the sky over a big flat expanse of tundra:

And there's always something special about the last bit of sun break in a deepening sky:

And there's the moon:

in beginning corners dawn smirks

and there's the moon,thinner than a watchspring

(Poem XIV of ViVa by E. E. Cummings)

Two Halves

2011-09-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

You know how your favorite cliche-wielding soccer commentators like to point out that it is "a game of two halves," as though that were the most profound observation they ever made? They seem to pull that one out when they are looking at a first-half result that goes against the run of play, or maybe one of those grim scoreless affairs, and they hope or expect that things will change in the second half.

My Alagnak float last month was kind of like that. Fat with cohos in the lower river, it was pretty darn quiet in the upper river. Conventional reason says that all the big rainbows probably followed the sockeye migration all the way to Moraine Creek. I was willing enough to go join the mayhem of guided parties and bear-gawkers up there, but was unable to land due to a complete white-out; and by the time we flew back to the Kukaklek outlet, it was too bumpy with three-foot waves for landing at the outlet proper. I got put down in an unideal spot, and found myself deeply baffled by travelling TWO WHOLE MILES downstream without a SINGLE STRIKE:

A little later the pressure started to ease up with the odd rainbow and good numbers of grayling. In fact, the little island where I camped on nights 1 & 2, had a handful of prime riffles on its four corners that predictably yielded a few grayling per hour, as long as I rested them properly between sessions. This was good, as I lacked the spirit to break camp and head downstream during a 28 HOUR stretch of UNCEASING RAIN, and instead just hunkered down with my pretty grayling friends:

This was pretty far from the worst of outcomes, since a big part of what I was seeking from the upper river was solitude in the wilderness. Into my third day the weather cleared, and I found myself catching grayling and char and even whitefish, and just kind of basically joyfully playing around in a big old river and wide-open landscape that allowed me to imagine that I was the only human left alive.

Solitude is very cool, but so are certain encounters with humans. Imagine spending a very quiet couple of hours on a gravel bar in a remote river, cooking up some ramen and coffee and drying some of your stuff off, and then, just as you are getting ready to leave and even talking to yourself a little, you hear a voice calling out, "is that ERIC???" Whoah -- "is this a hallucination?" is the first thing that flashes through my mind. Not for the last time I reflect that maybe eating those special ones with the little whales printed on them back in high school wasn't such a good idea. But no-- lo and behold, it is Dan Cole, originally of Maine and now of LA, and his high school music teacher Darrell, also from Maine (and with a real accent), moving downstream in a CANOE!!!

One of Dan's many distinctions is that he is the sole witness to my legendary Brooks River Mousing session, the night I caught double digits of big bows on a Moorish mouse but had no living camera handy to prove it. And here's the dude showing up out of nowhere on the Kukaklek branch of the Alagnak! Small world indeed.

Though actually, I should have known or at least suspected. Knowing that Dan is also a portable boat guy who has no problem dealing with Alaskan conditions, I actually hit him up earlier this winter as a possible partner on a Meshik River float. But he told me he already had a trip planned with a pal from back East, and I filed it away as a no-op, as they say in software.

Long story short, I had some really great company for about twenty hours. We went through the rapids together, and if you thought maybe a sleek, longish canoe might have some trouble making the hard left out of the big eddy, then you'd be right:

While my temporary float partners bailed, I put the 6wt back together and started officially fishing the lower upper Kukaklek. It was almost entirely more ten-inch juveniles until I hit this one and gave the boys some good entertainment in the form of a demonstration of the desperate art of paddling yourself to shore with one arm while holding a fly rod high in the air with the other while a strong fish jumps and runs circles around your blow-up boat. (Note the clown suit, which doubles as backup waders and which seem better for going through rapids where you might end up swimming.)

As soon as we got to the confluence camp where the Kukaklek and Nonvianuk branches come together, the skies opened up with a real drencher. No matter -- we set up one of my tarps and had an awesome scotch tasting: my precious 18 year Macallan and two types of Ardbeg single malt from Dan, including the incomparable Uigeadail. Holy shit that is a drink -- peaty like Laphroig but with lots of the same sweet, syrupy flavors as the Macallan, and a burning finish that lets you know you are alive! It immediately got promoted to my top 3 and a bottle now resides in my cabinet, thank you very much Dan. In exchange for this, I guess it was worth watching you and Darrell drink half my ten day's supply of Macallen in twenty minutes' time . . .

Oh also, I should compliment Dan on some excellent work starting a fire with the completely soaked fuel available that evening. Darrell contributed some soaked Cohglan's firesticks, I contributed about 75 pages of Edith Wharton, and then some guys we have never seen before and would never recognize, ever, because they were definitely (for the record) not ourselves, stopped by to throw a funny sign in the fire:

Does that funny sign say "No Trespassing?" Huh. That would be weird. It would almost be like somebody thought they could put up a sign in the middle of Katmai and expect people not to camp in the area. Good luck with that one.

After parting with the boys, who had a much faster boat and only two days left before their pickup vs. my five full days, my float resumed its calm pace. I started seeing a few bears, and I am sad to report that one of them was no longer alive. This poor gal (a sow) was washed up in the shallows with a bad case of rigor mortis, bleeding from her nose. I now share a distinction with Timothy Treadwell -- I have touched a bear with my bare hands -- but for all my poking around I could not find a bullet hole or any sign of foul play. It took all my scant good sense to not pull out my river knife and take a claw for a necklace:

I said a little non-verbal Bear Prayer for her and moved on. The good news is that there was no shortage of living cohorts around:

A mom and cub on the bank just downstream from this funeral scene (quite possibly they ended up eating some of her).
A big-tracked fellow that visited my tent one night, sniffing very loudly and taking off with a loud growl when I said, "not too close boss!" while clutching my mace can in the sleeping bag, heart REALLY racing.
A shyer guy who, perhaps somewhat indignantly, recovered a rotting chum salmon carcass from the shallows where I had thrown it and restored it to its place on the bank about 50 feet from my camp -- perhaps having a nice cheesey nibble or two as well.

Oddly enough, I recovered my lost 2010 Brooks Camp bear pin in the tundra at that camp, and stuck it up on a tree where it could help my bear friends scratch their many itches:

At the camp where I got so aggressively sniffed in the dark wee hours, I confess I was being a Bad Boy. Almost always, I follow proper bear-safe protocol to the letter. Being a solo guy who inevitable ends up with some fish odor on self and boat, this is pretty important. But on this particular occasion, I just absitively posolultely could not tear myself away from a little creek swirling with cohos -- the first place where I caught a nice fresh silver one -- and so ended up camping on a tiny, muddy strip which was too close to the riverbank, too close to my food cache, and too close also to a wolf highway. After the bear woke me and almost caused me to pee in my tent, I lay awake and listened to the wolves howl; first one haunting, descending voice; then another one or two join it; then more . . . and I am here to tell you that that is one HEAVY chord to sit and listen to alone in the wild.

Katalog of Kohos

2011-08-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

Hay! I kot some cohos on the good old Alagnak.

They wuz way down low on the river, below the brayds. But eventually I found em at the Tin Shack:

Kot one more there but they looked too krimson-kolored for good eeting:

Fortunately just downstreem they were a little freshr:

So the karnage got started: 1 chunk for sashimi, 1 chunk for fryin up:

Next morning missed a couple on the wogg but did end up with this broot:

Some of them kohos was bigg!

And some were silvery on the outside but

orange on the inside:

Yum! ALL you can eet, as it should be.

Heer I'm trying to say something about how corvina fishing in Baja sometimes seems like katching kohos, but this this time the koho fishing in Alaska felt kind of like corvina fishing:

Heerz one that ran CIRCLES around me, but hoo looks stoopid now, Mr. Koho????

This pikture was took right before my pickup and I thot about keeping him to bring back -- but again, kind of krimsonish:

Shor was a great last koho though! Jumped a bunch and ran me into backing on an 8wt, just so I'd remember why these kohos are so damn kool. Whether it's the Naknek or Alagnak or maybe the Kisaralik or Kanektok, I'll be back after them kohos someday again!

A Glimpse, a Glow, and a Vision

2011-07-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not even going to try and make apologies for the kookiness of what I'm thinking, or try to convince anyone that I'm not in fact crazy. If you know me, you already know that I think that what's normally considered normal in America is in fact fairly crazy, and that a little bit of craziness is fairly normal for me. So --

On my Katmai trip I had an experience of the kind that Lakota or Sioux people would probably call a vision. Left to myself, I would probably have just called it an "understanding." But then again, if I hadn't been reading about Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, I might not have called it anything -- I would have just experienced it, and would have been left, like before, with a deep unidentified desire to go back to Katmai and experience it again.

In fact, one aspect of my "vision" is that I realized that I have had very similar experiences before, experiences that I remember vividly but did not until now consider very significant. When I first went into Katmai backcountry in 2006, I stayed in a creek mouth camp where two days running my midday meal was interrupted by a family of four bears walking along the shore. The first time I retreated in a minor panic, honestly quite frightened. The second time, after inspecting their tracks and the chew marks on my wetsuit, I got out of their way much more calmly -- even, you might say, politely. The third time, it was me who walked up on their meal: the four of them, cubs almost as big and fat as their mother, were calmly sitting in a bunch of bushes and munching placidly on leaves, inspecting me carefully but without alarm as I walked around them at maybe 100 feet or less. They noticed me, I noticed them, and what I really, really should have noticed, was that it all seemed as normal as nodding to someone you pass on the sidewalk.

In my small gringo way I had entered their world, which is a natural, wild, undomesticated world as pregnant with meaning as it is beautiful to the senses. Though I didn't see the full meaning of it at the time, I knew it felt good. I fished the creek mouth in a sort of mild euphoria (admittedly, a common sensation while fishing) and paused in my casting when I saw a moose poke its nose out of the trees. Again, that animal (the moose) noticed this animal (myself) and vice versa, and the moose carefully waded across the creek mouth in front of me before folding back into the trees.

Now, without the vision, that just sounds like a guy doing some fishing and wildlife viewing. But no, really, it is more. The animals weren't special things I went out expressly to view, like someone going to a zoo or a gallery. It was more like they were my peers, and we were all cautiously sharing the area around the creek mouth for our own particular purposes. Necessarily, we were aware of each other. But I was not a big bad human with a gun or a noisy flying machine or a crowd of menacing cohorts; and they were not big scary beasts making me run indoors for cover. To be this way in this place for a few days was only a tiny glimpse of the larger, richer world of living together continuously in a sort of "natural culture" with animals like Lakota or other native Americans did in the precolombian world. But a glimpse it was.

In 2008 I paddled out into a zone miles across the lake from that creek, and I left in the evening because a storm was forecast to blow in the next day. This left me looking a little frantically for a campsite as the few mild (but disconcerting) summer hours of half-darkness came down on the lake. The second or third spot I checked turned out to be perfect: a broad, short peninsula, with a rocky headland at the end and nice long beaches on the East and West sides, plus a perfect grassy tent area smack in the middle. I am no religious man, not then nor now, but I remember feeling like there was some kind of "grace" involved in finding this perfect camp exactly when I needed it. Maybe that feeling was an initial clue that the ground was good for vision-seeking.

Little did I know how perfect a camp it would be! I started finding out the next day when I started hooking 34 inch rainbows a quarter mile out of camp. There was a secret pike spot nearby that felt similarly perfect. After waiting out the storm in the nice tree-sheltered tent spot, I spent a couple more blissful days before paddling across the lake, motivated mostly by a sense of duty to continue my trip as planned. Almost as soon as I set out, I felt that camp pulling at me to return. I got nine miles across the lake, looked at the situation, and paddled straight back. All ten nights of my trip were passed there. The words that occurred to me then were "at home." I felt at home at that spot, in a novel and powerful way.

And yes, the animals were there. There were new bear tracks on the beach every morning, all the same size and punctuated by plant-filled scat. I concluded that the bear was shy and at least for the moment, not particularly carnivorous. I took care to keep my food safe and watch out for him, but he remained invisible, walking well around my camp when I was either fishing or asleep. One afternoon I was somewhat shocked to find a half-eaten fish on the beach. Dang! Almost reflexively, I tossed it out into the deepest water I could reach from the beach, and moments later an eagle flew into the trees nearby and gave me a good, hard look. The "noticing" was happening again, and certainly not for the first time on this trip: I had seen the resident eagles every day, and I'm pretty sure they got a half-filleted fish or two from me by diving into the relatively shallow water where I tossed them. Sometimes when I was fighting a nice fish up to the side of the kayak, I'd notice them circling close or settling into a tree, noticing me. Wanting my fish. Probably not taking it personally when they didn't get it -- though the one whose fish I stole must have been pissed off at some eagle-ish level.

I consider that ten-day chunk as more of a glow than just a glimpse.

On this most recent trip, the glow cleared to sharpness at my American Creek camp, a place I have already mentioned in a fishy blog. Wolves howled and left prints all around my camp, and the eagles were ever-present there, "noticing" both me and the ospreys, and regularly stealing fish from the latter. And rather than try to describe my sharp vision in any detail -- probably an impossible undertaking -- I want to focus on the eagles and how they became a point of contact between my environment in camp and my readings in Lame Deer. The significance I have been hinting at is what Lame Deer thought of as "symbolic" significance, and his text has a nifty riff on the eagle as a symbol of American nationalism. He points out that an eagle represents powerful things like freedom, and grace, and shrewdness and fierceness -- but that somehow white Americans, carrying pictures of eagles around on their money and trotting effigies of eagles out on national holidays, are not really sensing that meaning. To contemporary whites, the eagle is there, and we know it is associated with our nationalism; but its significance ends there. The richer, stronger meaning of the eagle is absent.

To me, in my hammock camp surrounded by eagles and wolves, the meaning was present. Very present. I felt it when I woke up in the morning and when I went to sleep at night, and to some degree I acted it out when walked upstream into wild country at night, after all the jet boaters had disappeared and left the wilderness intact. The wind blew hard over my head, and the current was very very strong on my legs as I crossed the creek in areas where I probably shouldn't have done, and deep parts of my brain clicked and flashed when I touched a beautiful wild fish and slipped it back into the water while an eagle circled overhead.

I was at American creek smack in the middle of my 16 days in the bush, and camping, fishing and hiking or paddling were the "ordinary" activities that filled my days. But Lame Deer's narrative points out something very important about ordinariness:

"We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which, in our minds, are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us symbols that teach us the meaning of life. This is funny, because we don't even have a word for symbolism, yet we are all wrapped up in it. You have the word, but that is all."

As wondrous as that quote is, and as happy I am with my faltering efforts to write about my vision, the fact remains: these are just words. It will take many more of them, and more references to Lame Deer's philosophy, to keep trying to convey the Katmai "vision." Hopefully I'll get some of them down in this blog, or somewhere -- and hopefully covering the thing with a bunch of words won't do too much violence to it! But actually, I think the bigger risk is to kind of forget about it, and let it get snowed under by the prosaic, sterile unmeaningfulness of my everyday life in California (sad but largely true, and it does no good to pretend otherwise). So I guess the right thing to do is keep writing. Though, if you can sort of "grok" these three photos of wolf tracks, bear trails, and tiny bugs on tinier flowers in the same way they appeared to my "clarified" mind on the trip, then none of these words really would have been required.

Katmai Skies

2011-07-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

You cannot buy the sky; you cannot sell the sky; and it is very hard to fit it in a picture frame as well. Nonetheless, I do try, and this blog features some of my meager results.

The Alaskan summer sky is an immeasurably large, constantly changing canvas of clouds and color. Once your mind gets free of the punctuate and frenzied pace of perception we white men call "everyday consciousness," those skies start to seem like a living, acting entity, broadcast on the biggest and most beautiful screen on (or around) the planet.

Anyway, my first day at Brooks presented a classic calm evening sky with lots of moisture and a glowing sunbreak:

On the next day, and the rest of my pre-trip days, the sky got colder and started rubbing with increasing urgency on the earth in the process of what is called "An East Wind:"

When there's an Easter, Katmai Air flies into Brooks Lake instead of Naknek, which means there are shuttles on which me and my boat can hitch rides. Here waiting for a plane is Taylor, who is a fishing guide but nonetheless a good guy:

That day they were flying out a bunch of gear and a single Texan tourist, who watched me put my camping and fishing stuff into the boat and commented on my apparent self-contained program, "you've got the world by the tail there, don't you?" Yes my friend, that is the idea.

Day 1 of my lake journey presented the common scenario where a grey sky comes down close over a grey lake, with a thin layer of green earth between:

That kind of sky creates some really good fishing conditions, so I wasn't complaining. Though, after a couple of days of it I wasn't complaining about a good thorough clearup, either:

What, a movie of the sky? Sure, kind of. Here's the East Wind dogging my northeasterly trending route across Naknek Lake to Fure's cabin:

Fure's is a good place for skywatching, especially after the wind lays down a bit.

I had some really lovely skies at Grosvenor, too.

On the way back to the portage, it's another one of those grey days -- but here, you can see the mountains looming in the back:

OK, I'm going to indulge myself; here's the sky, and also the guy watching the sky.

Here the sky is talking to me, saying, "hey, guess what -- you get another big East wind for crossing the lake again!!" And I am replying by getting giggly and enjoying some wave-surfing as I make the generally southwesterly crossing in beam and tail-ish winds:

But much of the time the sky is like one of your oldest friends, who can sit there with you and feel just fine without making any chitchat.

It is quite possible that I'll be back under those Katmai skies come August, and at that point, there will even be night! Darkness! Stars, if you're lucky! Here in California you can see plenty of those when you get away from all the white men -- which I assure you, I am going to do before too many more days pass here . . . .

1000 Salami Sandwiches

2011-07-05T11:27:00.000-07:00

Five lake trout dinners; four rainbow trout; two tasty char. Without that fine, sustaining meat for my fry pan, soaked as it is in omega-3 amino acids, I think my arms would have given up halfway through my 16 day backcountry sojourn. After a day spent paddling around Naknek lake in a minor gale, this is a pretty thing to see:

Even with all the fish in my diet, I was effectively starving. After a week my arms were visibly shrunken. Any mention of food in The New Yorker or The Best Short Stories of 2010 made me wince and cringe. Mercilessly, an article on Silvio Berlusconi, in addition to passing mention of pasta with clam sauce and lasagna and cake, noted that "the P.D.L. was bringing a thousand salami sandwiches to distribute." A thousand salami sandwiches!! I woke several times in the hammock on that blustery night with visions of salami sandwiches blowing in wind like autumn leaves, salami sandwiches lined up like char in a riffle, salami sandwiches heaped in a mound under a belching grizzly bear. You just guess what I had for a late night snack here on my first full day back in California.

Naturally, most of my fish, which this year were more notable in number than size, swam back unfilleted. At Brooks, I worked between the hordes of mustachioed fly flingers (note to self: do not visit again on the opener, when there are more humans than bears; it is much more fun to dodge bears than Simms-clad Anchorage types) and got my first official trout on a stimmy shown downstream:

And I got reacquainted with my old pal closer to the outlet that likes black leeches:

And a chunky feller that just about pulled my arm off when he grabbed a customized sculpin-swinging rig (I confess, I enjoyed scandalizing all the purist Anchorage-ites by fishing an indicator rig with plenty weight. Fuck those little Thunder Creek patterns, you goobers!).

By the way, many of the goobers were actually good guys and fun to hang out with in camp.

On a day off from the river mayhem, I hitched rides from the lodge staff up to Brooks Lake and harvested a small laker that seemed perfectly made to lay on this log and break in my new Swiss Army knife:

Finally launched out on the lake, I start the real carnage. A laker bleeds out:

Provides more work for my new knife (thanks again, Pavel!)

And then gets back-burnered to dinner by a very lunchable trout:

After three days of beautiful cloudy but relatively calm weather, a big East wind (to Katmai what the Norte is to the Sea of Cortez) comes up and makes my crossing to Fure's cabin a decidedly high-calorie event. Fortunately, one calm lee on the lake provides some protein for me:

At Grosvenor, I tried not to waste calories fishing below the surface film -- not when crease flies looked good to dollies:

And lakers were taking even dorado-grade poppers:

Photo credits for that go to Ray at Grosvenor Lodge, who is a great guy and a guide who doesn't suck:

Filming on my own, I tried to get a topwater hookup into a movie, but something always went wrong (I erased the film where the crease fly uproots a small tree on backcast and launches it into the current). In this clip, I miss a take at :30, flip the fly back out, and unbutton another take at :45!

In American Creek, dolly varden/char were as abundant as 1000 salami sandwiches. Almost all of them had a really distinctive yellow-lip coloring that I'm not sure I have seen elsewhere:

And a few had some really beautiful red coloring (the flesh of the river char was dark red too, and insanely delicious, while the lake char had bright orange flesh that was insanely delicious).

Most probably, all those douchey "sports" flying into American Creek were there for the rainbows, which came a bit thin at a rate of one per dozen char. Anywhere I have been in Alaska that lacked rainbows also lacked fishing pressure and was rich in solitude, and I think I may have reached the point where I'll just avoid the "premier game fish" on my trips. For me, it is much more fun to catch species that don't exist here in CA, especially when they have big nasty teeth and extremely aggressive attitudes:

I mean, did you ever see a trout do this to a fly?

That is the remains of 50% of my Dahlberg Diver supply, and in the end the other 50% got the hook clipped off when I was trying to release another chunker pike with hemostats. No matter; I kept fishing the hookless fly for a happy half-hour, amazed at how long they'd hang on to the thing before letting go. If you see anything like this while swimming in any lake, I recommend exiting the water immediately:

Oh and leave the red and white speedo at home. Armed with a Diver, a black leech, and a red & white spoon to find where they're holding, I am transformed into my alter ego named Dances with Pike.

I'm a fly buyer not a fly tier, and I'm not above taking possession of a Thunder Creek fry pattern that some numbnuts left in a trout's mouth, dangling what appeared to 6 or 7x tippet (I mean, come on dude); also, I am an inheritor of flies in a small way. I'm not sure if this classic smoltish pattern came out my maternal grandfather's box or a box of flies that my father kept for a while, but I can confirm that twenty-first century rainbows find it perfectly acceptable:

And lakers like it fine too:

My battery indicator started to red-line when I got back over to Naknek Lake, but I still squandered power on the kind of two-footers that seemed to be my upper limit this year . . .

. . . so you can go ahead and accuse me of fish-taling when I say that on my 15th and last day on the lakes -- a day on which I explicitly went "trophy hunting" with my ugly-ass Jet Divers and Kwikfish plugs and spoons on braided line -- I finally got into not one but two of the classic Naknek bows that stretch out over 30 inches and start getting REAL deep and fat. I currently have no physical camera battery at all, and this is why: 1) hook 30+ fatty and discover that camera says "Cambie la batteria"; 2) remove battery from camera and stick it in armpit to try and warm it up for one more shot; 3) try to reinstate battery with shaking hands and angry trout at yakside, and lo! 4) Oh yeah, that's the battery jumping overboard and sinking into 40 feet of pure Katmai lake water!!

He he. I could only sit and laugh bitterly at this idiot named Litters Lakes with Lithium. Got another giant that same day trolling a spoon directly tied to 40 pound braided line, and if you ever get jaded with spin fishing and need a quick reminder that you are alive, just get a feel for a healthy bow on that kind of inflexible tackle. It's like they are hitting you on the elbow and shoulder with a wooden bat. When I paddled out the next day, facing 10 miles of headwind after over-paddling during my trophy hunt on the heels of a very strenuous East wind crossing the previous day (read, tired as fuck and very apt to be grumpy), ANOTHER 30+ chunker came on the spoon/braided line rig for my Bay of Islands farewell. Because there was no way I was going to pull in another one of those beasts and still have juice in my arms for the paddle back to Brooks. Where, needless to say, I got into a bunch of beautiful sockeyes and trout, including on mouse patterns, of which there will be no pictures due to La bateria cayo en las profundidades del lago. But you trust me, right?

That about exhausts my fishy pictures, but I think I've got a couple more blogs worth of landscapes and that kind of crap.

Back from Katmai

2011-07-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

On such a refulgent summer morning in the Soquel Hills, it would have been hard, even if I wanted to be that way, to wish I was still in Alaska. I'm writing in my customary little morning coffee spot here surrounded by birds and breezes and beautiful things, much like it was in the Katmai wilderness in coffee spots like this:

There, of course, I shared my little coffee kitchens with eagles and ospreys and arctic terns and bears and wolves and bobcats and squirrels, most of whom were content to keep their distance when I was around. Needless to say I too would have ceded way if any brown bears had already been sitting on that mossy rock when I clambered down with my bear can and thermarest chair.

Around the corner from my bear-free, human-free Bay of Islands camp I saw a nice little bear family fishing, and then ran into a solitary brown at my pike spot.

This latter guy had a reached an all-too common semi-habituated attitude, in which seeing or hearing a human does not cause flight, but rather curiosity. He sat on his ass and watched me hook three pike from the kayak before wandering off, and kept me looking over my shoulder during a splendid session of Dahlberg-Divering from shore:

In a kind of irony, the closest I actually got to a non-finned wild animal (other than an arctic tern whose tale I may or may not tell later) was at the window at Fure's cabin. Last year I woke up one morning and momentarily stared eye-to-eye with a huge boar who immediately turned and ran for the trees. This year I was prepared with my camera by the bunk at all times, and so was able to get a video of this somewhat more casual customer:

At my American Creek camp there was no bear sign, but plenty of wolf sign, including howling each morning and some bone-chilling snarling (sorry for the cliche, but in fact that is exactly how it feels) near my hammock. I tried to film the haunting up-and-down tones they were making, but only got the breeze and closer-by sounds.

That swampy hammock camp, which I named "Puddle Camp" for the soupiness of the area where my feet had to go when exiting and entering the hammock, was at once the most wild and the most crowded camp of the whole trip. From about six in the evening to eight in the morning, roughly ten hours of light including super-prime fishing hours, the place was all mine -- a fast and powerful (barely crossable even in the best spots) clear creek full of wild rainbows and dolly varden, a place where wolf calls wake you up and Osprey TV keeps you entertained whenever you are not fishing yourself.

Truly, it was like watching a sports matchup to see how they would dive and get a fish, and before they could fly off, here come two bald eagles planing calmly out of their hiding places in the trees. Game on! Osprey drops fish and is joined by second osprey in harrying eagles; birds whirl and swoop, cries ring out over the sound of the river; but in the end, it seemed like the ospreys only ended up with one fish for each three they got. Eagles 2, Ospreys 1.

But around eight a. m. or so, here come the float planes buzzing in. Give it minute; yep, there's the hum of jet boat, and lo! three or four Simms-clad "sports" running by with a guide, racing the other boats up to the best spots. There were at least four such parties and possibly as many as six on the river each day I was there, and I'm sorry to say that the braids just next to my camp (the furthest I could paddle up against hard current) was a favorite spot. Bring on the earplugs! I'd never travel to Brooks Camp without ear plugs; but I did not expect to reach as far as American Creek and still have to shut out from my brain the insipid utterances of the kind of people who would hire somebody to show them how to swing a string leech. At one point I watched a sport hook a char and actually give a loud dog-whistle to summon over the guide to net it -- and the guide actually responded to that! Nature offers no spectacle more contemptible, moose turds inclusive.

Listen to me rant and complain. And it's not like I haven't seen it before; it was the same on the Agulukpak in 2007, and the Nonvianuk outlet in 2008, and it looks like it will be just the same at any trouty place in Alaska where a boat can be stashed and a plane can land. I told rangers at Brooks and Ray at Grosvenor Lodge that they should reduce the permits for people to do this stuff, but other than that all I have is valium and earplugs for the day hours, and patience to hold me through until all the naked apes fly back to their bunks.

That's when I can get back to world of experiences and symbols and sensations completely different from what we have created for ourselves with our motors and heated rooms and domesticated animals and fishing guides. This is the world described by Lame Deer in his narrative "Seeker of Visions" -- a text that made deep trails into my thinking during this trip, and which deserves a blog entry of its own. As do a few other things from the trip. If you like Katmai and can stand my writing style, stay tuned for some more discussion of a Katmai waterways fishing/paddling trip that I challenge anyone to top. After a half-dozen years of going there I think I have it clocked in pretty well, but my mind is open to any good suggestions.

Try-fecta

2011-05-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

So PG&E finally did what they have been talking about for a half dozen years, and ramped up the flows on the Pit River. It is high, it is cold, and it is -- take it from Pit Boss -- unbossable, at least at the moment. No sweetness at the Honey Hole, no love in the braids (which are now wicked deep and fast) and no way to reach a few new pools which, anyway, didn't have any fish rising in them. Damn! For the first time in my Pit River career, I got skunked. Having started as a Pit 3 guy and having carried on a long, happy relationship with the canyon reaches of #4 before going on to specialize deeply in a few certain areas of #5, I figured I would go and try for a Trifecta if I could land at least one fish in Pit 5. No go. Trifecta fail.

One of my main satisfactions in fishing is getting to know certain places until they are deeply familiar and very fond; you end up missing them when you are away too long, and feel a special warm anticipation when you are heading for them. Surely, I got a bit of that in the sweet old Pit River country, where I camped two nights and spent one whole day in the big tall trees and sweet open fields of wildflowers, bashing through brush that is now full of blooming dogwoods but will later be choked with blackberries. But I certainly noticed: the familiarity of the water itself -- the runs and riffles and pools where you expect to see a certain current speed and a certain depth and expect to hook a fish on a certain fly or presentation -- that is a BIG part of my sense of place. With these new flows, I had a feeling similar to the one I got when my ex-girlfriend went and got that eyebrow-folding surgery: "yah, rationally I know it's still you, but man -- something deep down inside thinks you are a whole different river now."

This is not to complain, though. While soaking in a 108 degree pool near Kosk Creek, it seemed like a pretty good idea to have made the drive and checked it all out.

Plus, I had my backups in place. The first move in this Trifecta-less trip north was a shad stop. Me and all the other out-of-towners are now locked out of access to the best spot on the Sacramento, but you don't stop Pit Boss that easy; he'll go through the bushes with a machete to drop his kayak in, slip down, and then paddle back on up against the current, using the shore eddy just like he saw all the natives down on the Rio San Juan do:

That is a quaint and lovely (though sweaty) feeling, to be paddling up a big river with the day's catch. Lunchtime the following day, there's some pig in the pan and I am happy as a proverbial pig in shit on the Pit:

I was hoping to share some of this shaddy goodness with fishing buddy Mike yesterday. Unfortunately, our shadventure ended up going something like this: rush like crazy to launch boat in time to fish, pick slow course upstream amid innumberable snags, hook a few fish in the few minutes we had in the best spot, and then -- then ruin the prop by running into a log on the way back down. We were probably lucky to get out of it with just a bunged up prop, but the mood was sombre. I felt bad for my buddy and his boat -- but, uh, not quite bad enough to not stick around here and have another go tonight from the yak.

The great thing about fishing buddies is that they DO understand these things. Yesterday, Mike was steaming up from the Bay Area with the boat in tow, and I was headed down from the Pit River country to meet him halfway. Being what I am, I had to stop and try for at least one trout in the Redding area. Hell, what is a trip north when you don't hook a single trout? It is SAD. Nymphing from shore on the lower Sac is hard work, but I figured with 60 minutes fervent effort I might fool one. Here's the summary report of that effort:

Hook nice fish, unbutton it almost immediately when it jumps (curse, stomp, nearly cry thinking that you blew your one chance).
Almost immediately hook another, and play it soft for ten minutes before it, too, unbuttons itself in the strong current (more crying).
In a few minutes hook another (this is almost unheard of for midday nymph fishing) and finally, finally, get it in and take a picture:

By that moment I was already fifteen minutes behind schedule for meeting Mike, so I called him to see if he might just be delayed or something excellent like that. No luck that way; but when I told him the riffle was "On Fire," his reply was pretty much, "don't worry about meeting up on time; just fish on and we'll meet later." Now THERE'S a good pal. Someone who understands the true meaning of the code phrase, "On Fire" (it pretty much means you have lucked into conditions that you may never see again, I guess). Not wanting to abuse such good will, I hung out long enough to hook one more and headed one down for the Prop MisShadventure.

I'll protest again though: no complaints here. There's worse ways to spend a late Spring evening than driving boats around and not spotting submerged logs with a bottle of wine in one hand:

The rosé is something of a tradition. In addition to the prop blowup, it wasn't really hot enough on the river yet to maximize the cool refreshing liquid; so I hope we can set up another try sometime before Pit Boss flies away to Alaska in 26 days. Like blogging at a Starbucks in Willows, CA, drinking rosé is a pretty nice way to kill time until the bite heats up.

The Dog's Breakfast, a Harbinger of Spring

2011-04-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone has their favorite harbingers of Spring. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the sight of cottonwood fluff cruising through the trees on a light breeze -- whatever sign you pick, it always feels good to see another Fat Season creeping into the temperate zone. Oddly, for me, a long-standing sign of summer's approach are the spring days when I can smell asphalt heated by the sun. It gives off a very distinct odor when hot, and it sends a clear message: get the hell off the asphalt and go do stuff on rocks, rivers, and lakes.

For the folks who use the California stream season opening day as a harbinger, this year may be a bit of a disappointment. A LOT of water and snow fell on California this winter, and the streams are running high. Up until last week the lower Sacramento, which I like to fish between 5000 and 10000 cubic feet per second, was running around 50000. The Feather river, whose confluence with the Sac could potentially be a great place to pick up the first few shad of 2011, is running around 10000 cfs and is reportedly pushing the sand bar (where I like to anchor) way on over toward the Yolo county side, creating a deep slot that could be pretty hard to fish for a guy with an inflatable kayak. Don't even talk to me about the Pit; sure enough, I would have been out there last week getting ahead of the open bait season like usual, but there were very dependable reports of high muddy water running through the alders creating some pretty impossible wading and fishing conditions. I'll wait on that one this year.

If you are one of those true die-hards that are willing to line up on Hat Creek and indicator nymph your own little ten-foot section of the lineup, then power to ya. I can't handle that kind of crowd even when I'm not fishing, so I went for a nice bike ride yesterday. Today? Watch some soccer on TV, maybe take a damp hike, read books, write blogs . . .

But in fact, a couple days ago I experienced a very unique and telling harbinger of jumping fish and high cotton: I packed up 15 or so days of camping food and sent it to King Salmon, Alaska. Because I am such a predictable person, such a repeat offender and human broken record, I have done this or something like it for the past several years running in anticipation of long kayak expeditions in Katmai national park. I just keep going back! Each time with a little more self-consciousness of how unoriginal and non-adventurous it looks, but with a balancing measure of increased joy and satisfaction in the paddling, fishing, and relaxed hanging-out in real wilderness.

In itself, wrangling two weeks of food into a large bear can and a small kevlar sack is actually a mildly stressful puzzle. Here's what it all looks like after it has been sorted, bagged, and laid out for cramming into the containers:

By buying all the goods at Trader Joe's (dried blueberries and cheap macadamias), Whole Foods (Inka Corn and Emergen-C packs), Safeway (couscous packs and spam!) and Starbucklers (those nifty little dried coffee deals), I can make damn sure that I have stuff that I like and that will fit in the bear-safe containers. If you rely on the A&G market in King Salmon you're likely to end up with a mixed bag of mac 'n cheese and slim jims, which is palatable enough in camp but not ideal for powering a paddler over 100+ miles.

Because in the end, the name of this game is transporting from mouth to muscles critical substances such as calories to burn and proteins to mend your tired, shrinking, overworked tissues. On day three or four I am sure to wake up stiff and aching, with arms that feel about 50 pounds each and shoulders that can barely lift my hands up far enough to even pick my nose. The breakfast-based antidote for this is:

A starbucks Via pack in a titanium mug.
A precious, protein and vitamin-rich balance bar.
One pack of instant oats with dried blueberries, honey, dried milk, and pecan bits. Did you know pecans were the fattiest, most calorie-rich nut, after macadamias?
One more via pack to seal the deal.

This menu plus all the stumbling about between tent, food cache, and dining area, plus the wakefulness-inducing possibility of a brown bear stopping by for a bit e, are generally enough to get the blood flowing for the day -- even if it is all being executed amid a cold, steady slug of rain from the Bering Sea. Once you get those tired shoulders moving again, they start to feel much better and will even uncomplainingly propel you across the lake and pull in a bunch of char, trout and pike. It always amazes me how much heavy activity you can do with a body that normally prefers to sit in a lounge chair and gaze at a television. As long as you keep it up without too many long pauses, you're good to go.

Still, I can't help but feel a slight dread of The Portage. Between Naknek and Grosvenor lakes there is a 1.5 mile portage trail that gets used periodically by paddlers doing the Savonoski Loop. The first time I ever saw it back in 2008, I took a good look at it, imagined carrying all my stuff over it on foot, and paddled nine miles back to the other side of the lake. Last year I took the sucker on: based out of Fure's cabin on the Naknek side, I carried the boat over on day 1, and then made the next two trips after resting and fattening in the cabin. 1.5 miles may not sound so bad, but please consider: the trail is muddy and slippery, and climbs; the spruce forest has about as many bugs in the air as oxygen molecules; and there is potentially a mama grizzly traveling up the other way trailed by cubs. In fact, last year there was a big solitary male hanging around the Grosvenor side of the portage. I spotted him while carrying around lake trout fillets in a ziploc bag, and he did not run away, oddly enough . . . then at Grosvenor lodge the guide told me that someone had been false-charged repeatedly by a dark brown boar at the portage -- definitely the same guy.

At any rate, I now know that the portage is doable (with some pretty extreme effort) and that it is well, well worthwhile. The scene at Grosvenor narrows has to be seen to be believed. They call it "The Bust-Up" -- a term describing the constant violent splashing of lakers and rainbows chasing down outmigrating sockeye smolts. It is fish-a-cast action (including on surface poppers) amid wheeling birds and lurking bears, and last year I had it pretty much all to myself even though there's a lodge right on the south shore. Then, without giving away too many secrets, I would point out that somewhere up on Colville lake there are several acres of water just prime for fishing pike on topwater flies. Got one pushing four feet long last year in fact. The lure of breaking that four-foot pike barrier is in itself adequate motivation to grunt over the portage.

Though, if Katmai Air will cooperate and fly a box out to Grosvenor Lodge, there will be another EXTREMELY important motivation to go over: a box of supplemental food I have prepared, that, assuming I can get it in the field, might even result in brief intervals of a full stomach during the second half of the trip . . . .

A little further up the watershed is my little Adventure Thang that I like to throw into any plan so that I don't feel so bad about always doing the same shit: some new water that I haven't touched yet. In this case, it will be American Creek, which is moderately famous for char and trout fishing. With five days set aside for the far side of the portage, I'm hoping to hike up the creek far enough to say that I have fished it (as opposed to just fishing its outlet on the lake) and get a decent dose of the Unknown.

Hell, if that ain't enough, I can always exercise the option of not going back over the portage to Naknek, and just continue on through the Savonoski Loop like all the other kayak nerds. However, I still can't imagine any really good reasons to do that when a) at least 20 miles of that course are unfishable, frigid, turbid glacial water, and b) Naknek Lake and its tributaries are some of the finest fishing on the planet. Chances of me ever seeing the Savonoski are slim.

Anyway, I'm saving the Real Big Adventure for a possible August trip. If that works out, then some discussion of the Meshik River should be showing up here before too long. Heavy fishing blog volume versus one every four months -- now there's another harbinger of Spring!

Lone Star Largemouth

2011-04-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

Continuing steadily over the hill of middle age and seeing very little diminution in fishing time, I am moved to reflect on coverage to date. I have fished in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Canada, and New Zealand. Considering the size of the globe and all the water on it, that is hardly a drop in the bucket list. Out of the spots covered in a book called "50 Places to Fly Fish before you Die," only five have been ticked off so far. If I were filling out one of those maps of the states that you see on people's RVs, these ones would be colored in: Maine, California, Alaska, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Florida, Michigan, and, now, Texas.

Texas was never high on my list of targets, but after doing a little research on the fishing around Austin, where my most recent employer is headquartered, the logic became clear. There's not just a whole lotta bass fishin around that part of Texas, there's also, given a willingness to drive a few hours, some really fine redfish fishing. Yes, the redfish of blackened redfish fame! Redfish, or red drum, or what some of the locals call "salt carp," sounds like a terrific game fish: it can be sight-fished in shallow water, reportedly it will take topwater lures and flies, and it fights like hell in addition to tasting great.

Unfortunately, I can't speak to that first-hand; the wind was blowing so damn hard over the weekend that it just didn't seem worth it to make the drive. So, Laguna Madre and Port Lavaca and all that are still somewhere in the fishy parts of the future.

What's in the recent past is a couple of days of really, really pleasant bass fishing that I was able to sneak in after a couple of company days in Austin. Classic, small-pond, weed-rich, frogs-n-crickets style largemouth bass fishing. Like most fishers from Maine, I have plenty of experience with smallmouth bass. The smallie is a wonderful game fish that will take topwater and put up a hell of an entertaining aerial struggle, usually in fact a faster and longer affair than you'll get with warmer-water largemouths. But somehow, the deepest and truest expression of bass fishing -- of stalking a fat, lurking ambush predator in the weeds and rocks where he hides, the scourge of all moving critters from leeches to ducklings -- is fishing for largies in some hot-weather, swampy southern country like Florida or Texas.

Thanks to some friendly helpful guys on the Austin kayak fishing bulletin board (never heard a single response from the broader, all-Texas board, which may say something about Austin people), I found my way to a sweet little lake about an hour east of the city that is fully bounded by a state park. The lake is vaguely star-shaped, with long arms stretching out about four miles between the coves that stretch back deep into piney, flooded hill country. With plenty of weed beds and nice warm water, it looked at first glance like perfect bass habitat.

As it turned out, the Austin boys did not give me no bum steer -- that water was crawling with fish. I got out Saturday with just a couple hours of light left and some SERIOUS wind blowing and still managed to get some strikes, including topwater action back in those coves. Here is my first official Texas bass with a rabbit-strip worm fly hanging out of his big old mouth:

From Maine to the Sierras, some of your best lake fishing is always going to be at first light, and that's even more true when 20 mph winds are likely to be blowing by noon. I made a point to ignore the time difference and drag my ass out of bed for a dawn start on my first full day in the area, and that was the right call. Though a breeze was already gusting periodically, the fishing was full-on at dawn. Bam! Bam! Bam! It seemed as though the local gangs of 16 to 18-inch largemouth had never seen a balsa popper before, and were racing each other to go grab it. And indeed, I didn't see a single other person fly-fishing on the lake, even when the weekend peak of bass boats were racing around that afternoon. This is a waste, because there are acres of fish-holding water with 2 to 6 inches of water above the weed tops -- perfect country for a balsa popper to get its paint chewed off in course of an April morning.

It is amazing how quickly you can start feeling intimate with a new piece of water. One afternoon and one morning were enough time for me to cultivate some "secret spots" on the south shore of the lake. Resting in a cove with the boat pulled up in the mud, eating a slummy lunch of Jalapeno vienna sausages and corn nuts, I honestly couldn't have felt more at home on my old standby ponds back in Maine. The pine scent in the air helped. Catching lots of fish helped too. Somehow, Texas struck me as an extremely friendly place to lay back and drowsily savor an outstanding morning of bass fishing.

My last chance to throw a line was a Monday morning before flying back in the afternoon. I got out at dawn on the north shore feeling pretty sure of finding some good fishing. But as I launched the kayak, the question hovered there: could it actually be any better than the previous morning? I will not keep my gentle readers in suspense: it was. Not 50 yards from the launch I tossed the balsa popper up against some promising tule grass, and immediately embarked on about 90 minutes of fish-a-cast action. When the first motorboat putted by out of the launch, I was fighting a fat five-pounder and probably grinning most obnoxiously. Early bird gets the worm, fellas!

This is more or less how I got started on Washington state fishing a few years ago. It's nice when the company flies you up to Seattle for some training or a conference for tech writers; it's nicer yet when you can then rent a car for the weekend and go exploring some brand new water with a fly rod and a few printed-out pages of information pulled from websites. For big chum salmon and dolly varden and a crack at a steelhead, you can't beat the Skagit river country in November with a stick. And now, thanks to my Austin company sending me out that way, I have a killer bass spot in my pocket and plenty of printouts on where to go looking for salt carp sometime this fall or next spring. Thanks DataStax! I appreciate it. And I think the bass will eventually forgive you.

Scatological Ambuscade on Isla San Marcos

2010-10-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Pain, Predation and the End of the World

2010-09-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

[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:

“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!

Trompe la mort!

2010-09-05T02:05:00.000-07:00

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!

Binary Dances with Trout

2010-06-17T19:57:00.001-07:00

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 . . . .

Guide This!

2010-03-12T20:59:00.001-08:00

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.

The Drowned Spork

2010-01-26T20:37:00.000-08:00

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!!

New Year, New Trick, New Zealand

2010-01-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

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).

          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!

Fascination of What's Difficult

2009-12-15T07:43:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-23T06:37:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-20T21:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-13T19:58:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-25T21:12:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2009-06-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2009-06-23T20:16:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2009-06-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2009-06-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

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 . . .

2009-06-19T19:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-03-30T21:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T20:55:00.000-07:00

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'

2009-02-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

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!

Fun with Fishies

2008-12-14T19:11:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good and Glad

2008-11-23T20:53:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the Wild

2008-09-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Foy of Hooking

2008-09-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sockeye Toss

2008-08-31T18:29:00.000-07:00

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

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

There are more people.

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

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

"Did you hear that?"

"Yep. It sounds like bear fishin'"

"Yep. It does."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He's looking at me. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Water

2008-08-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

Branch River Banya

2008-08-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver and Salt

2008-08-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Country

2008-06-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Osprey Season

2008-05-31T11:24:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roe, Row, Roe

2008-05-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

To exhaust the recreational possibilities of Yolo county:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fishing Alone with Li Po

2008-05-04T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRINKING ALONE WITH THE MOON

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

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

Up to Baja for a Little While

2008-04-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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