Some Good Years Left

The way I have been stealing fishing hours in the interstices of my overworked, silicon-valley-slave lifestyle of the past year or so, I have always felt like I deserved every damn little bit of goodness and happiness coming from fishing, and therefore haven't noticed something important: it has been GOOD and better than normal, better than before.

This came home to me a moment ago when I was reading back to blogs from a few years ago, when I camped on a delta levee and had a ball in general -- but only picked up a few two-pounders for my troubles.  What?  Well, generally, that's the delta: if you're not in the right place (in a massive quasi-wilderness of waterways) at the right time (in a swell of tidal currents that changes speed and even directions, daily) then you're out of luck.  Sometimes you hit it, often you don't.  Sure, I smacked the hell out of small stripers on the San Luis forebay with topwater all through September -- you expect that.

But check it out, on the big old delta, even with my lil kayak program, which limits me to a 10-15 mile range instead of the zipping and zooming 50 miles or more claimed by motorboats, I have been catching good fish every damn trip since they started in October.  

October:

November:

December (OK, I took a break in December, but this still looks like good luck, right?):

January, in cold-ass, turbid water:

And last week, one of a dozen-fish FEBRUARY day!!!

Yes, I have been taking this for granted, along with radically wonderful Baja fishing over Christmas  break, and Thanksgiving ceviche in Costa Rica . . . what an ungrateful pig I am!  I should have been thanking my lucky stars while scarfing down a "Four Fish Feast" on New Year's Eve (sierra-grouper-snook-bonito), and the same for the day I fried up most of that big vermillion rockfish . . . but in flashes, I guess I actually was :)

Reminded of the reminding power of this blog a moment ago, though, I wanted very much to make sure to remind myself: though I'm aging and achey and overworked and disgruntled, I have been having it pretty damn good. So I should shut up --

Must Love Wild Dogs

There was great power in a wolf, even in a coyote.  You have made him into a freak -- a toy poodle, a Pekingese, a lapdog.  

    -- John Fire Lame Deer

I'll need to tread lightly here, as I come from a dog-loving family.  Some of my fiercest sisters love dogs to distraction.  One of them passionately advocates for pit bulls, while the other takes in any well-behaved mutt with a big heart (which you might think would incline her fondly toward me, but is not always the case).  My mother continues, at 70-something, to care for the latest in a string of cairn terriers of varying degrees of likability.  My maternal grandmother and grandfather are infamous for naming all of their poodles "Twiggy."  Twiggy Two, Twiggy Three, Twiggies four, five . . . how high did the Twiggies go, anyway?  I lost count long before we lost both of the grandparents.

Needless to say, those dear old Twiggies are exactly what Lame Deer refers to above.  How did we get to a point where a wolf was transformed into a poodle, and not only did humanity fail to be appalled by this turn of events, but was made strangely happy.  "Here's my best friend at last!" we said, instead of "What in tarnation have we created here?

Let's put our domesticated dog and a wild dog side by side, in very literal terms.  This is exactly what happened when, a couple months ago, our local (and very lovable) golden doodle (a perfect name for my current purposes, I must say) came in direct contact with coyotes.  The doodle belongs to my landlord and landlady, while the coyotes belong just to the general neighborhood of hills and houses.  Every once in a while they start to raise an unholy chaos of cries, barks and yips in the middle of a sunny day, and then, some minutes later, your human ears start to hear the ambulance siren on Old San Jose Road that set them off.  The coyotes are loud, and they're close.  It is my belief that they live near the top of a little arroyo that I could hit with a stone thrown from the landlord's yard.

And, Rosie, golden doodle-cum-Escape Artist, broke through the fence one day and made her way down there.  The result was a few hundred dollars worth of veteranarian stitches, a few shaved patches in wiry white fur, and a somewhat chastened domesticated creature.  Much to their credit, the doodle's owners didn't go crazy with blood lust for coyotes.  Unlike certain ranchers described by Lame Deer, they eschewed poison or booby-trapped carrion, and viewed the problem in terms of supply (domesticated dogs encroaching on coyotes) rather than a problem of demand (coyotes creeping up and trying to eat us all in our backyards).

Just for fun, let's take a minute to imagine this particular encroachment from a coyote's eye-view . . .  and I don't mean that we should try to morph our minds into the coyote's, but rather that we should try to imagine what it would be like if some human creature, domesticated by who-knows-which unwise alien race, were to suddenly come at us out of left field . . .

That's right, you're sitting at home watching TV with your kids after a  well-earned dinner, when -- yikes!! -- suddenly, right through the front door, sweeps an oversized, crazy-looking dude with, say, chartreuse-colored hair and, say, hot pink skin on comically long and ill-proportioned limbs . . . I mean, this guy just does not look natural; there's something really really off about him . . . he's got big bugged-out eyes and a clumsy way of standing just an arm's reach from you as he shouts right at you and your kids, in some almost-understandable but completely ridiculous quasi-language, apparently very upset and aggressive about something you can't make out.

"BRAH RAH RARY RAH RAH BRAH WILLY RILLY ROO ROO!!!!!!!!"

The guy is making no fucking sense, and he is completely ruining your relaxing evening.  More than that, he appears to be a vague (if bizarre) threat to your offspring's safety.  So, after trying to talk to the thing and give it obvious verbal cues to leave, you swat out at it in frustration.  And lo!  a weak, feeble blow from you knocks it right over, and it runs off with a bunch of high-pitched, pathetic crying.  "I'll be damned," you think, and settle back down into the couch.

Coyotes confronting a white-furred, long-limbed "dog" barking into their den might see it something like that, and might just give the thing a gentle bite to send it on its way.

I'm exceedingly fond of Rosie the doodle, so don't tell her that I would like very much to make friends out of the coyotes.  It ain't gonna happen, I know.  Those guys down in the arroyo are living on the lam, and no doubt they have made a way of life out of studiously avoiding humans even while living in our midst.  But I sense that, in a perfect world, like one in which I could live permanently on the shores of Mag Bay most of the year, I might just be able to make quasi-friends and semi-pets out of some wild coyotes.  I think they'd accept bowls of water and fish carcasses regularly, and hopefully they would conclude that it were best not to try and eat up the strange human creature apparently providing them.  Dogs have proven to be smart that way.

If that happened, I guess the coyotes would just end up being mildly domesticated.  But they'd still be coyotes!  And I think that's what I'm really wanting here: a little less domestication, and a little more wildness, in whatever creature I pick for my best friend.

That's where you have fooled yourselves.  You have altered, declawed, and malformed not only your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves.

The Lazy Way

I never mastered (never even attempted) the truly lazy turista vacation where you sit on a beach for a number of days relaxing and reading a shitty novel.  For me, a luxury vacation is when I´m sleeping in hotels instead of pitching a tent in grizzly country or swinging a hammock between two trees. 

And that is the kind of vacation I´m on this minute!  And I´m liking it.  Sitting in my nice-ish hotel room in San Jose Costa Rica, clicking between Premier League and Seria A football matches or alternately gazing out my three arched windows at the ring of mountains around the city, I congratulate myself on being good and lazy. 

Of course, some activity has to be woven into the program.  The model for a Lazy Vacation is the trips I took to Argentina, which involved a small amount of camping, but often just involved a long hard day of wading and hiking, and then a long sweet evening of pigging out alone in a hotel room watching soccer on TV.  Maybe you think that is boring -- but what can I say?  This is how I´m made, this is what I like. 

For a time, I contemplated "popping into Nicaragua" in the middle of this eight-day trip.  Why the parentheses?  Because I "popped" in there last Christmas, and came away with two types of memories: 1, the bliss of paddling and fishing on Lake Nicaragua; and 2, strong memories of waiting in long, hostile lines at the border, sweating profusely, hauling around my kayak bag with no help from dour locals . . . bad memories.  The kind of stuff I´ll do in order to win the reward of a couple of weeks of good fishing.

But for three or four days?  Not sure about that.  In fact, I doubt it enough to have reserved four days at a relatively schwanky hotel on Cano Negro, the lake source of the Rio Frio -- all on the Costa Rican side of the border.  I have a bad feeling the fishing won´t be much, largely due to emails from a local guide who happened to be honest (rare in guides) about conditions in November (turbid, cold, and bad). 

But at least I´ll get out into the bird-loud, croc-lurking jungle waterways and give it a try.  The lake can be paddled, and one can put together a roughly twenty mile day paddling down the Rio Frio and bussing back, which I hope very much to accomplish.  In my perfect dreams, I´m dragging a popper across a shallow side lagoon on the Frio, and it gets HAMMERED by a tarpon!  Then a snook for dinner.  Then a gar for the novelty.  But, in fact, I´m expecting skunk.  That or a sudden panicked tweak that sees me running into Nicaragua for 36 hours.

My current sweet love of laziness may render that unlikely.  I have to hike across the city right now to gather my rental car, and that will be work.  Driving in Costa Rica -- that is work, amigos!  And I´ll paddle around, fishily or not.  In my current mood, it may be plenty.  Vamos a ver :)

Trifecta 2.0

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

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

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

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.