Memo: Ad Hoc Meeting at the Businessman's Club

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

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

"HITCHHIKING NOT PROHIBITED"

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

"PRIMITIVE ROAD"

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

"I got married last year."

"Oh, sorry about that . . ."

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

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


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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Gone Nothin'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solstice Blitz to Baja

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

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



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



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



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



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



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

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



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

Fun with Fishies

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Good and Glad

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

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

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


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

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

Out of the Wild

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

The Foy of Hooking

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

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

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

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

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

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




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




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




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




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