Back Setback

What strikes me most about getting old is the diminishing amount of time. As you age, time starts to run out on you. The world, however, stays just as large as ever, and the amount of water you haven't yet fished remains dauntingly immense. You look at what you've accomplished in the first half (or two thirds!) of your life, and you realize that you'd better hurry up and get things done.

Motivated in large part by this general sense of urgency, I packed several activities into the 24-hour period starting last Friday. I grabbed an hour and worked out with weights at the Google gym before ending the work week. Saturday morning, I did a bunch of work on the computer, hunched over it in a typically unergonomic manner. Then I threw the kayak on top of the truck and drove over to paddle ten windy miles on the Petaluma River (no strikes), stopping both before and after to help a friend of mine lift a large band saw in and out of his truck. While we were watching soccer and drinking beer I noticed a slightly odd feeling in my back, but decided to ignore it. After all, I needed to come home at midnight and lift the boat around and hose down all my salty gear before getting into bed. I need my back to just quietly do its job so that I can do the things I do.

I could no longer ignore my back when my eyes opened the next morning. Coming out of sleep, my dreamish mind could have sworn that a heavy specimen of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis was sitting on my lower back and gloating as he twisted around a large, crude spear head that was thrust deep under my right scapula. I am talking REAL pain, so bad that I was genuinely awed by the raw intensity of it. I couldn't move without making the spearhead twist. I couldn't bend my neck down one millimeter from a strangely cramped position. I couldn't even go to work for three days -- I was really and truly down for the count.



If you are an active person who depends somewhat on getting outside for your general sense of well-being, then maybe you can imagine my sinking spirits. All this was especially depressing because it happened in the heart of my paddling ramp-up for a Christmas time sojourn fishing on the Sea of Cortez. They told me it would be windy and tough conditions, and I shrugged it off thinking, "whatever, I'm a pretty strong paddler here." With my rhomboids in spasm, I couldn't even shrug at all! Paddling around in the wind was hard to imagine. Very depressing.

OK, I'll stop whining and cut to the good news: the caveman gave up and went back to extinction on Thursday, and by Sunday I was out on the bay doing an experimental two-mile paddle (no strikes). So far, no recurrence of any bad symptoms, and the flexibility of my neck is back to normal. I'm having high hopes of doing a decent delta paddle this weekend (some strikes? Please?) and going down to Baja as planned.

What is the plan? Basically this: after visiting my favorite uncle in Palm Desert, make the hard drive all the way down to Magdalena Bay, perhaps stopping to do a bit of paddling at San Lucas Cove. In fact, I'd go no further than San Lucas but for the poor timing of the season and the worse timing of the tides, which should be pretty extreme around the 12/23 full moon. "Mag Bay," by contrast, will have mellow conditions and tends to fish well year-round I hear. By the time I turn back north, the tides will be better for a couple of stops on the way, the last of which may include some cool paddling around the Enchanted Isles near Puertecitos, which I hope will be interrupted early and often by the strikes of triggerfish, pargo, grouper and perhaps a bonus corvina or yellowtail. We shall see.

One thing's for sure: the phrase, "well, at least you have your health!" is no idle platitude . . . .

Home Truths

On my recent trip back East I saw one friend propose marriage to his girlfriend, helped another friend bury his mother's remains, and helped another friend get into a five-pound smallmouth.

"That's the biggest bass I've caught all year," he said.
"You just haven't been going with the right guide," I said.

It was an intense and rushed five-day weekend back in New England, full of emotional and memorable moments. But like Nick Hornby's Arsenal-based memory in Fever Pitch, my memories of this trip will hinge on my personal obsessions -- on the sharp visual recall of a bronze finned missile sailing through the air, spraying us with lake water as he tail-walked next to the canoe, and breaking the rusted hook on my balsa popper (the guide let his five-pounder get away, intentionally of course).

We got these fish on the same lake that I visited back in a June post. It is a special place partially under protection from Acadia National Park, and its specialness for me is proven by my adamant efforts to carve out an evening to fish there with my old friend in the old canoe that he inherited from me. To clear Tuesday evening I had to dine with my parents Monday evening, which meant rushing out of Massachussetts and doing a hard-nosed six hour drive from weekend party scenes in Northampton. It ain't easy rallying your hung-over buddies to start a Monday morning road trip, but I did it with the motivation of lake water lapping by the shore (see the third stanza).

In a way this lake is truly the home water of my childhood fishing origins, while the Pit River is more my adopted adult home. We go there and regress, with my friend Stroutster usually bringing worms and fishing them under a bobber like we did at age 12. A few years back, I took the hook out of the mouth of a small yellow perch, stuck it back under his dorsal fin (Ow! Sorry PETA!) and before long, no kidding, a big fat smallmouth took that bobber for the ride of its life. On this latest trip we operated under the all-artificials rules for October, with Strout taking his fish on a krocodile spoon I had left over from Alaska, and me working poppers on the floating line. I guess we may be finally growing up.

Ah, and we all know where that ends! Let me tell you that, after helping my friend bury his mother, I went straight back to my parent's home and gave my mom a pretty urgent hug. Inevitably, we fell to talking about hers and my father's wishes for the scattering of their remains, and her answer briefly took my breath: she named the very lake I have been writing about. She and my dad too, have had some special times there. I have fished with both of my grandfathers, now dead, on that lake.

So it makes sense why they would want it to be their final resting place, this beautiful glacially carved lake full of healthy fish. It makes sense, too, that I keep wanting to go back there to connect up with so many factors: with my childhood joy, with the sense of being together with my parents and grandparents, with the real sense of bonding with my fishing buddy, with the sense of being young and being older too, with the sense of beauty all around and peace inside -- to wit, if I may continue Nietzscheanly in this sappily symphonic vein of prose -- to have a strong and acute sense of just BEING.

I'm afraid I could keep going on with this psychobabble and philosobabble. That's what you get when you take a personal passion like Arsenal football or fly fishing and make it the main organizing factor in your life. But this is a fishing blog, so let's not let it stray to far into the author. Let's think about getting back to that lake in Maine in August (following the proposal-friend's marriage) when they'll be even more aggressive to topwater flies, and maybe even taking the time to get out to storied spots like West Grand Lake on the kayak. In the end, though, pound-for-pound, the bass from a certain lake on MDI are the heaviest of any.

New Tricks

Pit Boss is getting old. On his most recent Trifecta trip, he stumbled around in the current, banged his feet into a painful tenderness, and wondered if an era had ended. I used to get so fired up to go up there and stagger around on the slippery rocks, fishing deep slots in the canyon. And now, though I still find the Pit River beautiful and wonderful, I have to admit that I'm less drawn to the aggressive stream wading and more drawn to types of fishing that involve kayaks, perhaps some salty water, and hopefully some fish that are counted more appropriately in pounds than inches.

Enter, right on cue, my first California halibut! I haven't made many serious attempts after them due to the depths, weights and baits involved. But now I know that, under the right conditions, you can catch a flatfish on a lure that runs around four feet deep. I was trolling an x-rap around striperish rocks near the top of the tide Friday when I got the strike of the year -- BOOM! something hit the lure so hard that the rod came flying over the cockpit rim and hit me in the chest before nearly being pulled back into the water. In this most uncharacteristic failure of my improvised rod-holding setup (which held the strike of 93 pound tarpon, after all), the bale of the reel got pried open, and I held the deeply bent rod for about 1.43 seconds trying frantically to pop it back in before the fish suddenly shook the hook free. "Whoah," I'm thinking, "was that a 25-pound striper -- or what?"

It was probably a 'butt. Trolling back over the same area I eventually got a smaller but still solid strike that came up big, brown and flat. A California halibut has to be 22 inches to be legal, and this one appeared to be just a wee bit bigger judged by the way he lay flopped over both sides of my cockpit. Not that he laid there for more than .37 seconds -- this guy gave up the fight pretty quickly, but reserved plenty of energy to make a terrible ruckus at kayakside. Lacking any kind of club and needing to bleed the fish for the table anyway, I jumped deep into the sea of bad karma and just cut the hallie's gills and let him take a few minutes to quiet down that way.

The next bit of knifework had me stumped: "so how do I fillet this flattened-out freak of nature?" For certainly a halibut is freakish, with its upturned crosseyes, tiny little gut cavity, and long, meaty flanks. It occured to me that halibut must have to feed constantly to stay fed, while a big-mouthed, fat old striper can gorge and nap Thanksgiving style. Anyway, the internets do come to the rescue again with helpful illustrated instructions on how to fillet a halibut.



Following a satisfying Sunday fish fry, I decided it is worth the effort. Not sure if I'm going to start drowning dead sardines with a six-ounce sinker, but I do think I might start refining my jigging technique. One can imagine how tasty a fat, fresh Alaskan halibut would be . . . and next summer I shall be quite determined to find out about that.



Speaking of new tricks, another notion filling up my fishing imagination is a trip to Baja California. Sierra, pargo, snapper, corvina, yellowtail -- how is it that this didn't occur to me before? A fishy friend has been stoking me up with his recent tales of billfish and dorado down in Cabo (by the way JT, if you are reading, would you like a couple of small halibut fillets?) By the end of my current work contract in February at the latest, I'm going to see about adding some of those new species to the list too. The future remains bright as a high seas sockeye!

Collateral Damage

Originally trained on Maine lobster (mm, tomalley) with a four-year degree in Japanese sushi (minor in sashimi), your correspondent is voraciously piscivorous. Shad? Sardines? Little crispy smelts? Lemme at em! And yet, I almost never kill and eat a striped bass for a very simple reason: I'm already mad enough without further increasing the mercury levels underneath my hat. Big stripers get plenty of mercury concentrated in their flesh after years and years of eating thousands of smaller fish, each packing its own little toxic punch. Naturally there are many fisher folk out there who love to kill and keep a big show-off fish, but god save their brains and livers. I release big stripers and only very occasionally keep a small one to sautee.

Now, about the nine pound, 28-inch striper I am about to describe here -- we DID try to release him. I hooked him on a plug with only the rear treble hook attached, and I fought him in as fast as I could to keep him from getting fatally overtaxed. If anyone needs proof of that, witness exhibit A, the remains of said plug:


Obviously, that fish was pulling hard. And I think I know why: when we got him boatside, he was bleeding profusely out of his gills. The hook -- including the bent tine -- was firmly in his bony lip, but I theorize that he swallowed it deep on the initial take, and ripped the hook up through one of his gills before embedding it deep in the lip. Ouch! And dang. This is sad. Stripers are tough customers (I once knifed and clubbed a small one before watching it jump off my kayak deck and swim away), so we figured on giving him a chance to recover . . . but he bellied up, and we ended up scooping him back up with the net.

This sad death through collateral damage is unfortunate, but not an entire waste. For one, my neighbor's cat Jose got to scarf up some delightful little scraps of fish innards.



The neighbor herself, who states firmly that she will have no more kids and can therefore handle a little mercury, got a nice three pound filet to bake. A highly piscivorous friend down in Santa Cruz took the other filets with a vow to mate it with lemongrass and other good things. And, last but not least, I made a lovely little lemon-and-capers sautee out of the tail ends for Sunday lunch. Probably none of this fine unfortunate fish will go into the freezer to be forgotten for months, which is surely the fate of so many of the 'trophy' stripers that people kill and keep.

This fish was landed on a small but well-rigged motorboat belonging to my friend Mike. It is a MUCH better platform for fly casting than a kayak, and I do hope he'll take me out again despite the blood and savagery that I brought onto the clean floor of his boat. The spot is good kayaking grounds, too, and overall this is a good sign of striper happiness to come. Can't wait until the delta starts turning on!

As a side note, you may notice over the course of these blogs that your correspondent is rather hard on equipment, including reels run over by trucks, rods broken while wave surfing, and plugs twisted into scraps by stripers. I'm reminded of a time when I somehow ended up watching a bit of "Survivorman" on TV with some of my 'indoor friends.' They said to me,

"Hey Gillie, this is the kind of stuff you do out there, right? Eat bugs and sleep in swamps, right?" And I said,

"Wrong. I buy the best equipment I can afford, surround myself with it, and then destroy it piece by piece."

Some casualties of the summer in Alaska: middle pole of MSR four-season tent; new handheld depth finder; Altitech barometer clock (which wasn't as waterproof as it claimed); third in a series of surprisingly fragile GPS units; and so on. Certainly a few fish died and got digested, but all of that was intentional. Going forward, I will keep striving to hold down the collateral damage.

Getting Back to Ekwok

I mentioned that I wanted to write something more about Ekwok, and I still do. Actually, I'd like to get back to Ekwok physically as well as verbally, since it is a very logical take-out for a trip down from Twin Lakes through the Chilikadrotna and the Mulchatna, or a similar route down the Stuyahok or Koktuli. The idea of the long three-river float only tightened its grip on my imagination this summer. And the idea of using village flight service instead of expensive float planes just makes sense.

What makes Ekwok interesting to write about is its status as a native village. That makes it a bit tricky, too, for I am a white boy and I may get in trouble if my comments end up sounding insensitive or condescending or in any way verbally oppressive. I live in the middle of Berkeley, and I do NOT want the Berkeley Thought Police to show up at my door in a Prius and disarm me with a severe astral tai-chi advanced yoga down-dog beat-down.

But you can't pretend it doesn't matter. One of the first things I heard from the first two guys I met in Ekwok was a joke about bears: the reason I didn't have any trouble with them is simply that they don't like white meat, haw haw. They were friendly enough guys but they both had liquor on their breath at 2 p. m. in a supposedly dry town. I tried to ingratiate myself with the first guy by giving him my eight pound anchor, which I no longer needed. I'm pretty sure he was pretty pleased. I saw this guy one more time before flying out of town the next day, when he showed up at my camp to brag to me about his fresh marks and bruises from the night's fighting. This time it was 8 a. m. liquor breath.

Have I done it already? Are the BTP coming in the Prius to stop me stereotyping native Americans as wild drinkers? If so, they are too late. When I really needed them was when a guy appeared outside my hotel room in the middle of the night in Anchorage with his entire t-shirt spattered with blood.

"Jesus buddy, are you OK? Have you been shot?"
"No man, I've just been fighting," the guy slurred. "I've been fightin' em ALL tonight!"

But let's get my narrative back to Ekwok, where I set up a camp on the gravel of the airstrip and dried out my boat and tent in one of the only sunny days of my entire trip. While I was busy with this, at least fifty four-wheelers drove by my camp, often with four or five people hanging on them, and sometimes with people waving to me as they checked me out. In a town where the full-sized roads peter out into forest single-track after just a few miles, cars and trucks are very few. The four-wheeler is king. And the cheechako camped out at the airport is entertainment! After several dozen four-wheelers had paraded by, one finally stopped to say hello. This was George Taylor, who not only introduced me to his wife Vera, but invited me to get on the other fender and come over for coffee. I said I was just laying down for the night but would love to take him up on that offer in the morning.

And so I did! And I'm glad I did. George was a genuinely kind man who seemed to sense what I really needed after two weeks on the river alone, and provided it: morning coffee, a phone for checking on planes, and intelligent conversation. This mellow old fellow, it turned out, was a rabid environmentalist determined to stop the Pebble Mine much as John Muir was determined to stop the O'Shaugnessy dam. I hope he and his associates at http://www.stoppebblemine.com/ end up doing better than John did. George seemed deeply offended that people would even consider putting a mine at the headwaters of the river that ran by his home and provided the salmon for his backyard smokehouse. "They've got a hundred-year history of making fools of us, but I'll tell you, this old Eskimo knows when they're pulling the wool over his eyes."

George actually was an eskimo, a transplant from native lands far north of Ekwok. This apparently made him something of an outsider in Ekwok, which may be what made him sympathetic and kind to the cheechako over on the airstrip. His wife Vera was a true Ekwok native, and I was amused to see that even after only a day in town I recognized a few of the people in her numerous family photos on the wall. Before I left to go catch my plane George made sure to give me a copy of "Shadows on the Koyukuk," which is the bildungsroman of a half-white half-native from the native lands north of the Yukon river. It is a very good, recommendable read for anyone interested in Alaska.

It's funny what an unexpected dose of human warmth from unexpected quarters can do for your psyche. I had to sit several hours in the rain on the Ekwok airstrip waiting for my plane, but I did so with a rather pleasant sense of being in a special, pleasant place (it helped that the town mailman, a guy named Bill, took my water bottle and filled it with hot coffee for me). Sitting there on the bags containing my boat and camping gear, I got some of the odd sense of being a highly random element that accidentally fell into the correct spot in the puzzle, if only momentarily. I've had this sense when landing the tarpon with the Nicaraguan dudes (see January) and a few other times in Japan and elsewhere.



Speaking of elsewhere, the last couple days of my last float ended in a coastal native village called Quinhagak. In Quinhagak there was another airstrip wait, though this one was drier and less lonely; my four buddies and I got special visits from the local artisans who had lots of handcrafts and really seemed to want to exchange them for some hard currency. I step carefully here again, checking the windows for the paisley Prius . . . but just imagine if I were ignorant enough of the marine species protection act, and fascinated enough by local foods and customs, to ask if there might be any seal oil on sale? According to the protagonist of "Shadows on the Koyukuk" and other sources, a little bit of seal oil goes a long way to making a cold outdoorsman warm again, and giving him energy and strength. Western experts note that it is super-rich in omega 3 acids. And if, hypothetically, it were legal to possess, I myself might even consider keeping a small vial of it among my kayaking gear, just in case of cold times.



Ekwok will soon be starting its nice long winter. I hope George will have time to read the two books I sent him: "Coming into the Country" by John McPhee and "Sketches from a Hunter's Album" by Ivan Turgenev. After taking in the native perspective on the wild country, I wanted to send him some cheechako perspectives on the same. McPhee's book is about the Yukon country, with a great essay on floating down the Kobuk. I'm curious to see what George makes of it. I also want to see if he agrees that Turgenev describes weather and country and animals like no other writer. There's snail mail to Ekwok in the near future! And, in the more distant, I hope, more visits.

Another Little Lesson

Triton says this: thou shouldst not surf boat wakes with fly rods lashed to thy rigging.

Surfing your kayak is both fun and practical. Leaning forward a bit and riding out a wind wave or wake will get you from A to B a lot more quickly than letting the waves roll under your boat (though don't forget that the way back to A lies against the force of the waves. Plus, Triton also saith: beware when the tidal current turneth against the wave). I can't remember the name, but there is an expert, godlike kayaker, known for his trips in arctic, who makes incredible average speeds on the open water by surfing swells and waves as much as possible.

But Triton does not like his waves to be trifled with. In a playful, show-offish mood yesterday, I saw the Larkspur ferry launching and figured I would show my kayak fishing buddy Jim how easy it is to get a wave ride off its wake. I've done this before, and I did indeed double-check that both rods, spin and fly, were secure in their usual places. And when the wake came along, down went the bow, up went the stern, and WHEEEEE! Or wait -- is that the tip of my superexpensive Sage 8wt bending down under the water like that? Wow, is that the rod breaking on the second section down, and hanging weakly on like a snapped twig?

Sure enough, that's what it was. Maybe that little wake ride wasn't such a brilliant idea.

Fortunately, the rod is covered for repairs, and better yet, we ended up not needing fly rods on that outing. I found one small fish right after launching, but that was it. The typical process of elimination begins: so far, the early fall stripers are not where we have fished. When we fished there, anyway.

While I was at the launch dealing with all the gearables -- the rudder, the GPS unit, the sponsons, the pump and paddle float, etc. etc. -- some old fella out of an RV stood and stared intently at my every move. To my "how's it going up there?" he nodded and just kept staring. At length, he ventures to say,

"That looks like a LOT of work!"

To which I reply unthinkingly, "Yeah, especially if you're LAZY."

And that kind of ended the conversation. Snap off! Including rod tips, alas, especially if you're STUPID.

The Kanektok Klan

It really has been the summer of the "K." All the half-dozen rivers I fished in Alaska are rich in K's: Tikchik, Nuyakuk, Nushagak, Agulukpak, Agulowak, and Kanektok. Let's not get into the tributaries, either (Nukluk, Kanuktik, Klak, Upnuk, Koneruk, Klutuk and Tunravik). If I'd gone a little past Ekwok, I might have tried for chinooks at the mouth of Koklong creek. Targets for next year include the Kisaralik and Kasigluk rivers, or perhaps the Kwethluk or even the Kukaklek branch of the Alagnak again.

On this last leg with the Kanektok Klan, the K factor really kicked in. Kommunikation between our two waterkraft was karried out on walky talkies like this:

"This is the Kanektok Kid hailing King Kanektok, do you kopy?"
"King Kanektok here, karry on Kid."
"We just lokated a large pod of Kohos at the Nukluk konfluence, river right."

Kamping with the Klan was a whole different kettle of fish than camping alone. For one, bear-safe practices were kept to a minimum. We kept all our food in two big coolers that rode in the rafts by day and sat amid the tents at night. Our boats were quickly sprinkled with power bar wrappers and other stinky stuff, such as waterlogged turkey jerky. In the end, I committed the worst of all infractions myself, when I completely forgot about a ziploc baggie of salmon roe and left it outside of King Kanektok's tent by accident. Good thing a bear didn't come around that night, or it would have been quite a showdown!



But good company is a great thing. We had some memorable feasts on seared coho fillets and smoked char, all washed down with three varieties of single malt scotch and draughts from two separate bags of good wine, each containing five full bottles each. Dead tired from a day of fishing and full of good food and drink, we tended to sit around the fire and listen with amusement as the level of discourse descended like water down a cascade. However, we did come up with some practical thoughts, such as how to most effectively beat off any bears that might come into camp . . . .

One undeniable benefit of having some fishing buddies is the ability to fish while on the move. I've been known to hook a few from the inflatable kayak, but it's pretty hard work keeping the boat pointed the right way and the line free of slack at the same time. With a skilled rower like Bluegrass Bill or Jet (using our usernames from ncffb.org for a moment), you can fish very effectively as you float on down. Both this nice rainbow and this colorful char were hooked while just floating on down the Kanektok.





Of course, having a pal take your picture with the fish -- the so-called "hero shot" -- is also pretty kool. Our group took that to an even higher level with a high-quality film camera manned by the talented GM, creator of films on the Arolik and Kisaralik rivers, as well as our local treasure the Trinity. GM did more filming than fishing and earned his indian name, "Fishes with Camera." I hope to poach a few bits of his film to post here if I can. Definitely, I will try to obtain and post some his excellent still shots, not least because one of them depicts what is probably the biggest rainbow of the trip cradled heroically in my very own hands. For now, here's a nice coho taken for me by flys4b8 (who cracked me up badly one night by talking about "socko" salmon, a cross between the sockeye and coho, apparently):



So stay tuned for those additional pictures and any other tales that come from my rekollektions in trankwility. Krikey!

Intermission

I've been to Alaska all the past three summers since 2004, and every time my return has followed the same emotional pattern: the first week back I am elated to be in a real town with hot showers and good sushi and tragically hip cafes where you can sit and watch beautiful people go casually about their business without a single thought of running into a grizzly bear; the second week, I am a little less thrilled and even perhaps a bit bored; and then by the third week, I am petulantly discontent, wishing I was back on the river and cursing the distance between me and the summer salmon runs of the North.

Certainly that has been the story this time. I've worked hard to fill the time and have made a point of hanging out with all my favorite people in the area. I even went out to the East Sierra and did some car camping and social fishing with a couple of friends and even a friend's wife -- and let me tell you, I got way, way more sun out in those arid hills than I really needed. Ten minutes of East Sierra sun covered the entire amount of heat and direct rays that I enjoyed in three weeks of Alaskan weather.

However, one of those friends just happened to be planning an Alaskan float for 8/20, and I just happened to volunteer myself in case any of his three buddies defaulted, and to make a long story short, I just happen to be going back to Alaska in a few days. And my, don't it feel right! It's just in time to head off those third-week willies. And indeed, it lets me say that I really did play a full sonata after all, with distinct instrumentation and arrangement in each movement: 168.5 inflatable kayak miles in Tikchik country; 65 miles sea kayaking in the Wood Lakes; and a concluding 90 miles or so rafting down the Kanektok. My mind is full of fresh cohos and sea-run char, punctuated by the savage strike of big trout taking flesh flies out of the current. What's more, there is going to be some quality accompaniment, which is sure to share the whisky, the sashimi, and the wogging. It all makes that low, disorganized but promising sound of an orchestra tuning up as intermission comes to an end.

Yes gentle readers, this does mean that you may have to endure another flurry of fish pictures and maybe even a few more silly film clips. I apologize. But this is it; life will go back to normal sometime in September and the fish talk will go back down to a manageable trickle. But for now, raise the baton, conductor, and fly me back to Alaska! Bravo!!!!

Quite a Stream

As a lot of people know, there is a very good trout stream flowing into Lake Nerka. If I intentionally fail to name that stream while blogging about it, my reticence doesn't come from a deliberate, logical attempt to keep it a secret -- because it is already far, far from one -- but from a deep sense that it's wrong to 'hype up' any particular piece of water publicly and thereby have the guilty feeling that you have raised the amount of pressure on the fish there without even getting to directly enjoy it. I mean, if fish are going to be relentlessly harrassed, I want to be in on it! And if you figure the name out from all the hundred clues I have typed, then it's your own fault.

If you camped on this stream, as I did, you could wake up at 5:00 a. m. (top of the Alaskan summer morning) and pretend that it really is a secret spot. You might have to share the water with a couple of nice guys from Seattle who have been flying in there and camping out for many years just during the late July dry fly window, but they would be quiet, respectful guys just like you and wouldn't think of crowding you in any way. You could enjoy huge stretches of world-class trout water in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

But instead, let's say you sleep in to 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. This is as late as you are ever going to sleep on this stream during the trout season, unless you are deaf. Float planes landing 100 feet away are LOUD. One, two . . . three or maybe four planes come in all with a twenty minute window or so. They roar away, and then you hear the jet boat motors starting up and whining. You smell the burning oil, too, because the boats all come by your beachside camp on their way to the outlet. And from this hour until 5:00 or 6:00 p. m., all of these guided fishers will be jetting hither and thither in their boats, or getting pushed from slot to slot by guides who jump down into the water and work the boats like rickshaws. The state park has placed a limit on the number of guided rods that can fish the river during a day, but their limit is a good deal more generous than yours.

So if you're not a morning person nor a particulary gregarious one, your fishing day starts at the cocktail hour. And this ain't such a bad thing. By that time the fish are keying onto bugs on the surface, and there are few things more engrossing than a two-foot long rainbow trout rising on a reliable rhythm one long cast away from where you stand. I found that these hard-fished fellas would only take on a downstream, stack-mended presentation, but when the drift went right and the fish took, oh boy, hold on to the rod! They are hot ones. Whether it's the good food or the cold oxygenated water, these trout are champion runners. Very inconveniently for me, a solo guy, they would not sit still for a picture even after twenty minutes or so of fighting. Witness the angler's exasperated tone in this film clip, almost as though he were angry at the fish for fighting so long and hard.

I had a great time there. Fishing with Bob and Rick and occasionally talking to the friendly park ranger helped pass the time very pleasantly. I had a flask of Isle of Jura single malt whisky, and they had Laphroig and Macallan. And really, a bit of daytime fishing among the lords and their menservants wasn't so bad. I got the pleasant feeling of a showoff by casting dries while they did "technical nymphing" -- it seems that in Alaska, if you use a hook smaller than 6 and a leader less than 1X, you get to call it "technical." There were so many trout following the sockeyes into that river that we had plenty, plenty of fish for one and all. Apparently, just by accident, I hit it between the streamer-heavy smolt outmigration and the egg-heavy sockeye spawn, just when these big fat trout were most likely to feed on caddis and mayflies on the surface. I won't make that mistake again! I'll do it very deliberately.

Photography Difficulty

Here is the link to the photo album of my trip. I lament my poor skills as a photographer. Excuses follow.

One of the biggest favors a fishing buddy can do for you is to help you take a picture. When you fish alone, each catch-and-release photo becomes a comedy; you have to get the camera out with one hand, hold it in your mouth for a moment, make sure it doesn't get wet, hold it at very awkward angles while making sure not to swim, and all the while the fish is understandably trying to take advantage of the improved opportunity to make an escape. Often enough, the leader gets wrapped around your leg and snaps, or the hook just pops out, exactly in the moment before you were going to take the picture.

That's why most of the decent pictures of fish are pictures of dead fish. Dead fish (which are of course headed for the fry pan) are quite the opposite of the live ones, even allowing you to set up a timer and take the classic shite-eating grin shot. Every once in a while you do score on a live fish, as with this lucky flash shot of an Agulukpak bow:



I took some films that amused me, and I hope you will enjoy them too. But they too suffer from bad filming conditions. Most times I started filming too late, or stopped too soon, to get the good stuff. This clip of a bear running along the Tikchik river is an example; just before I started filming, the bear was making a really strange roaring sound. And then, right after I stopped filming, partly out of a desire to have both hands on the paddle if the bear came down, well, the bear came down! He crashed into the water right near me, stood up on his hind legs to get a good look, and then ran away up the riverbank as though the water were boiling hot. This was spectacular, and would have made a great film clip.

I think many of the pictures could use some explaining. For instance, "who is this George Taylor in Ekwok? What, and where, is Ekwok?" In the past I used to write such verbiage into the photo album pages, but now I'll address those issues haphazardly here in my blog. I'd like to devote a whole entry to Ekwok, which is one of the most unique towns I have seen within the borders of the United States. George is perhaps the nicest guy in that town. If you're curious, tune back in later for details.

General Reflections

I'm not a cruel person despite what PETA might say, so I will not force people to read through all my blogification to see all the pictures of fish and landscapes from my trip. As soon as humanly possible for a guy who needs to get used to staring at screens all over again, I'll put all those in an album and post the link here.

First, though, some general reflections on Alaska fishing: Finding the Fish film clip.

That is a fairly typical horde of ripe oncorhynchus nerka (or sockeye, or red salmon), taken on a small stream emptying into the eponymous lake. There is no shortage of sockeyes in Lake Nerka, though experienced anglers will know that it is ironically very hard to get them to strike a fly or lure. Fortunately in any horde of anything there are a few oddballs that break the rules. This one in the photo below took a small fly and then even landed for a special beach shot, perhaps to show off her beautiful crimson swimsuit:



To get sockeyes on the line dependably, you generally have to do something vaguely unethical and "line" them -- instead of letting them strike the fly, strike them with the fly, preferably near the mouth. That's how I got this next one on actual spinning gear (unheard of) and transformed him quickly into an edifying snack at the end of a 24 mile paddling day.





In the Little Togiak River and Lynx Creek, both tributaries to Lake Nerka, I put in some lining time and got sockeyes bright enough to eat. They are great fighters and very tasty, so I have no problem justifying the ethical stretch. Throw in a little hunger plus a dearth of protein in the bear can, and a Liner is born from an Angler every time.

Next post up I'll reflect on some real angling, in a world-class stream that emtpies into Lake Nerka. For now, here are some more long-winded reflections on film, this time regarding Alaska paddling: Kayak Cam film clip.

(I really did paddle around listening to my mp3 player, just like Paul Theroux with his walkman. Scary to think, I may be turning into that guy . . . .)

Negatively Positive

I went ahead and did it -- exercised my positive freedom negatively by cancelling the third movement of my kayak sonata. Doing so went unusually smoothly, with a polite man in Bangalore easily changing my return flight to tomorrow with no charges or changes. I'd barely hung up before the giant sinking feeling arrived and made me my skin flush with an ominous near-panic: "did I just make a giant mistake?"

But no, it's a decision that will hold. I'll keep the maps and charts and dreams and look for another sucka or two who likes to paddle and fish. There are some likely suspects out there (Jim I think you are probably reading this, right?) and I will hunt them down for next time. Or, on the other hand, I now know that three weeks alone in the bush is about my limit. Must plan accordingly.

In the meantime, I've had some really nice fishing and paddling in the smaller way that the road system allows. After wading through a few million turistas and dodging bobbing flotillas of guided kayak tours, I put in twelve miles on Resurrection Bay and got some nice silvery pinks and cohos trolling. Stopped by Ptarmigan Creek and found beautiful little rainbows aggressive to dries on a very pretty stream, and later that night found the trip's biggest coho while fishing alone (very rare for the area) on Willow Creek.

However, fishing on the road system is not really the way to rest. It's too much of a letdown after being in the real backcountry, fishing storied waters full of fat trout. I did my trip in the reverse of what it should have been -- I mean, when the plane left me on Tikchik lake a month ago, it left me OUT there. After finding a good tent site I looked around for a likely food cache, and walked over to check it out . . . "what's this, a big pile of recently chewed caribou bones, with the joints still red with blood? Maybe I won't cache my food just exactly here after all . . . ." I went five days down that river without seeing a human form, and it was a good thing to do. The big grayling were all mine, the lake trout could only chase my flies, and the world was my oyster.

Next time online I should have some photos ready of grayling, lakers, and oysters. However, I have decided to exercise my positive freedom in another small way and post about the trip in completely unchronological order. Maybe.

AK Update: 'Gak, 'Wak, 'Pak and Back

I just flew in from Dillingham, and boy are my arms tired. It's not so much the flight as the 20 mile paddle against headwind squalls that did it. But you know, you get halfway across the lake, and you pick your suffering: a rainy night in the tent with no fishing nearby, or a few more hours of slogging it out. I slogged.

The rewards were worth it, in the form of a sockeye sandwich: fishing a great sockeye stream (the Little Togiak) bracketed by two days each on the incredible Agulukpak and Agulowak rivers. Without really intending to, I happened to hit a short window between smolting and egging where the trout are willing to look up to dry flies. So, if you like sight-fishing dries to two foot long rainbows, it was a good time to be out there. By the time I got to the 'Wak they were starting to key on pink egg patterns too. All of it was great fishing.

I feel a little odd blogging without any of the pictures I took, but those will come later. I hope I'll also get some mental energy to spin out some of the memorable images from the two trips I've just finished -- like, for example, the rainy night I popped my head out of the tent to scare the crap out of a grizzly who had just captured a nice salmon. I swear, he looked more surprised than me! He took the fish by the head and ran off into the woods, cruising right into the area where I had put my food cache. Hm. The way he took hold of the fish made a sudden image flash through my mind: a griz taking hold of the dry bag I was using with my bear can and running off the same way. Good lesson. From that night on I kept the top of the bag open so that the can would be sure to slip out under any pilfering attempts.

I saw at least one bear a day on that 14-day, 168 mile deal. Only one on the week-long, 65 mile lakes paddle. Go figure.

Ah, this is good, writing with a lower 48 audience in mind reminds me how special all this is, with the grizzlies and the riotous fishing and the long days of midnight sun. Amazing how quickly you get used to it and start taking it for granted. By the end of the two week trip, the most special thing in my world was a joyous reunion with hot water and soap. Oh lordy that was nice. And then last night, I found a bit of 7th heaven watching the Houston Dynamo beat Club America at a Mexican restaurant with very excellent seafood and Tecate on tap.

Next move is to some clear water streams just north of Anchorage and then over to Valdez to chase cohos and pinks (the remaining salmon species to be ticked off) in the salt. I'm also busy trying to decide on the third leg of my trip; the truth is, I've had enough solo camping in the rain to last most of a lifetime, and I'm considering cancelling the ten-day paddle in Prince William Sound until I can get some foolish buddy of mine to come along and share the fun and misery. But that's still TBD. Long paddles and camping out has made me lean and clean, and I bet I'll be missing it after a week of roadside fishing . . . .

Bad Barb Karma

The writer I sit next to at work, a Bhuddist vegetarian, has been chiding me about my karma lately. Fishing in general does not sit well with his ideas. But when I told him about snacking on shad roe -- eating literally thousands of unhatched little herring souls at a sitting -- he shook his head and said, "it's your karma."

So thoughts of my karma arose almost immediately yesterday when a writhing striper impaled the soft underbelly of my forearm with a nice, sharp, barbed treble hook. "That's what I get for using these freakin treble-hooked plugs," was my first thought. Usually I remove the front hooks on a two-hooked plug, not only because six hooks is overkill, but because I think it decreases the frequency of snags. But yesterday I was fishing the thick water around the Sisters with a new deep-diving rapala and I hadn't gotten around to removing the front hook. "You lazy bastard," is the follow-on thought to that.


At first it actually was a very lovely scene, with a seal swimming around in the growing tidal eddies and some deep bends in my spinning rod. The attacker was actually my second fish, and I was thinking greedily about the last hour or so on the outgoing, when the wind goes down and the fly rod comes out. But it was not to be. I brought the fish in too fast and he stabbed me! God save my karma, but I quickly realized that if I were to avoid further arm carnage, I had to immobilize the fish completely using just one hand -- no free hand to let go of the fish lip to grab a club or knife -- so I gave this 18 inch fish my hardest death grip around his gills and neck. Whoah. So much for the pretty scene.

OK, so now I'm bobbing in the current with a bug-eyed dead striper attached to my arm by a barbed treble hook. I fumble around with the nippers and finally get the line cut and the fish lip unhooked. A larger wave hits me this instant, and the strangled mangled fish plops into the current to feed the seal. "I must have done something really, really bad to deserve all this" is my growing conclusion.

But what to do now? A moment of fumbling around with the split rings that attach the hooks to the plug proves that there's no way I'm going to separate those from the plug with one free hand. Paddle two miles back home with five hooks swinging around wildly with each stroke? Not wise. Perhaps I could push the barb all the way out and crimp it down (though in fact I had no pliers nor hook file handy). I try to push the hook up through upward through the skin, but the angle's not right and the bends of the other two hooks press up on my arm. Ain't comin out that way.

And this is where a memory flashes through my mind and I realize what I did wrong, where all the bad karma really comes from: I have allowed myself to be amused, not once but many times, including in writing, by the misfortune of a fishing buddy with a barb in his flesh:

A half-dozen casts into the morning I heard a plaintive call for help coming over the wind. Upstream, my friend had waded out of the stream and was headed downstream in my direction. What could the problem be, I wondered? ‘I am not going to tie his knots for him,’ I thought. When he got close enough, I saw the problem clear as day, and winced: with the barbed hook of a medium-sized rubberlegs pattern driven deep into the upper part of his chin, he had very nearly fair-hooked himself with a wind-contorted backcast. Regarding the painful process of going back to the hotel and extracting this fly with a pair of pliers, I will spare the reader as well as the subject. My buddy forbade me to ever show a picture of him with the fly in his face, and I am probably not even supposed to write about it here.

Oh, how evil of me to enjoy that story so much. I had to pay at some point. And now here I am floating around a couple of stinky guano islands with a grand opportunity to punish myself even more by pulling this horrible hook backwards out of my arm. So it must be, and I give it a go. No pain, but no success either -- and there is something extremely unpleasant about pulling a barb so hard on your very own flesh and blood, notwithstanding the lack of pain. I give it another, harder, pull and it budges. Boy this is unpleasant. Could I pass out and drown because of this? No, I don't feel nauseous or light-headed, just very, very nonplussed. So I give an animal howl and pull the horrid thing all the way out.

If you're not already cringing at this tale of silly groserie, here are the remaining details. A vein must have been involved, because a lump the size of a golf ball immediately raised on my arm and spewed blood like a tiny volcano. I held my arm out over the water and tried to keep the bright red blood off my boat, which is flying with me to Alaskan grizzly country in a couple weeks. For a moment I was just kind of mesmerized by what was happening to my arm, and I considered taking a photo which would probably have ended up here on this page.

I didn't take the photo, and it occurred to me that I finally made a good decision after quite a string of questionable ones.

To end this long story, I'll report that with teeth and one free hand I got some gauze and big band aids out of my first aid kit, which always travels in my cockpit dry bag, and stanched the flow. The arm still worked fine for paddling, and after a bit I tested it on trolling and retrieving. No big deal. But getting back to the launch and really cleaning it and dressing it seemed the right move, so there went my evening tide.

At this point, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against infections. That might take karma payback too far and mess with my Alaska activities. A doctor friend gives me two weeks to feel right again, but I think that's a bit drastic for a little karmic pin prick. I mean, it's not like I had to saw the dang arm off with a knife, after all! We shall see. Keep posted.

Spring BS

Ha! The Spring bullshit is all about mating and fishing, with the fish doing one and me doing the other. I didn't mention in my last post, but Verona got very good. With my heaviest tungsten line hung straight downstream, I was into 'em even when I couldn't bogart the best spot.



But who likes a lineup? Rd. 48 has come on, and the quiet of the runs upstream from the launch there makes shadding so much sweeter. Rushing back from Maine on Friday, I went up there Saturday and got into double digits of some very nice fish. Sunday wasn't as good, but it wasn't bad either. Ah, mating and fishing . . .

Speaking of Maine, the smallmouth were very much on the mate back there. Conventional wisdom, which Mainers love more than anything, was saying that the water was still too cold. It took a Californian sneaking up quietly in a yellow kayak to go out and prove them wrong on two beautiful lakes on Mt. Desert Isle. Here's one of two nice fish one lake



and the largest of a very good number of active bass on another pond



Many thanks to my high school bud Brian, who pointed me to the right spots as only a real fisher can do when talking about his home water (Brian grew up in a camp on the pond's shores. Now he runs a beer pub called Sierra Grill that everyone must visit when in Northampton MA).

This June bullshit is just killin me. Shad on the sweet old Sacramento. Smallmouth on the spawning beds at dusk while the loons sing. And I am now counting the days until Alaska: 21.

Both And

West and East, Fly fishing and Spin, Dry and Nymph, Bass and Trout, Shad and Stripers, Sea Kayaks and River Kayaks, Road Bikes and Mountain Bikes, Wine and Beer -- every thing that anyone ever turned into a pernicious dichotomy of This Good, That Bad -- to them I say, Both And!

Truly, I am up to my nostrils with the negative attitude that people too often bring to things when they want to play one-up, other down. Why disdain spin fishing to feel good about fly fishing, if you already feel good about it? Why complain and sneer at indicator nymphing and pretend you only ever cast dries in order to feel like a worthwhile individual, when you already ARE one, who does BOTH! AND!

I for one do not want to waste my time listening to the BS and hot air issuing from the Either-Or'ers, either. Maybe in that one respect I am a little bit of a snob.

Alright, with that rant now completed, I will go ahead and admit that the motto Both And is also a wonderful way to avoid making decisions. If you can't decide whether to go whitewater kayaking or shad fishing -- well, then go Both And! That's what I did last weekend, heading out to Cache Creek for a morning run on the Mother and then moseying over to Verona for a few more hours, considerably more stationary hours, fishing from my inflatable kayak (hardshells vs. duckies? Forget it -- Both And!). In another way, Both And is what I did with my fishin sabbatical plan. So far, it looks like I can both work a job, and get in a pretty good amount of fishing, too. Just about four weeks to Alaska from today . . . .

Right now I'm out in Maine, busily both/anding bass and trout and kayaking and canoeing and friends and family. Last night was a hoot, out on my favorite old eutrophic Cambrian shield pond with an old buddy catching pickerel on bass poppers. This morning, sea kayaking with the dolphins in Frenchman's Bay. I am a bit tired from the schedule, and I'm sure it shows in my writing. Need more both and sleeping and awake. But later on there will be plenty of sleeping, underground. I made a point of arranging to fly back this Friday night so that Saturday can be devoted to the shad; bass and shad, East and West! Hooray for Both And!

Trifecta Two-fer

There are a few things wrong about Berkeley, but its distance from good trout water is the worst of all. I do what I can to deal with the freeway time: buy books on tape, keep a lunchbox of gourmet goodies in the cab, and make sure my air con is in good working order. I laugh to think of my last trout bum truck, which came completely without air conditioning. Driving up and down the 5 or across to the sierras I kept the windows wide open, and arrived wherever I was going with highly unmoist skin and hair like overused steel wool.

One extra motivation for facing those five-hour hauls to Pit 5 is the old two-fer. Doing a Pit River Trifecta is itself kind of a three-fer, but what if you add on a stop in Verona or Willows to wade or float for shad? You got two fer one! Or really, if you are into mathematics, it really adds up to five distinct fishing sojourns:

1) Friday afternoon shad
2) Saturday morning Pit 5 bliss
3) Saturday evening hatch sweetness on Pit 4 plus a dose of canyon wildness
4) Pit 3 closing ceremonies in Sunday morning sun
5) One more new evening of shadding before retiring

Thinking of this scheme ahead of me fairly gets me breaking out the door and roaring down the road . . . though sometimes things don't work out as planned. There are a few shad to be picked out in Willows right now, but I'd say with fair confidence -- after getting skunked there Friday -- that the fish are not quite in yet. In some years, they'd be swarming up there by Mother's Day. Not this year. OK, I accept that, and so on Sunday I make the special effort to leave Pit 3 early enough to get all the way to Verona by the meat of the afternoon. Verona has more fish, but even there they are not really, really IN the way they are when the run is ON, you know? I got several plucks and boated one fish anchored on the seam there, and as such was the second happiest boat in a five-boat lineup, but the first happiest boat was quite a bit happier, like maybe a dozen fish happier. It's like that when the fish are not really in: they stick to only the very best holding water and don't spread out.

That happier boat left the water around 7:45 last night, and no sooner were they hauling up anchor than I reeled up and started working on my own anchor with ideas to plunk it back down right in their happy spot. And there began the latest fishing comedy: that 35 pound, four-pronged monstrosity was STUCK in the sand and mud. I've done this drill a dozen times before, and I've got fairly good at paddling up against current, dropping the paddle, and hauling frantically at the anchor line so as to bring upward pressure on it before floating back over. But it's different when the thing is really, truly stuck. I wanted that boat's happy spot bad, readers, so I pushed the envelope and hauled hard many times, bringing the upstream tube of my IK fearfully low under the current and really testing the capsize horizon. After fifteen minutes, sweating and very other than happy, I said "%^#*& it!" and paddled for shore. I had put a float on the very end of my anchor rope, so maybe someone else with a real boat could help me get it back . . .

The first few guys I asked were still busy fishing -- as I surely would have been -- and didn't have much time for my story. I couldn't blame them, but it deepened my sense of %^#*& it to have to ask for help and be refused. Back on the beach where I landed, there was one last power boat to check with, one manned by a guy who I'm afraid I immediately noticed was both figurative and literally quite red in the neck area. He was poking around somewhat abstractly in an open livewell full of small and large catfish while I explained my problem to him.

"One a them four-pronged ones? Shit, you'll never git that out."

"Yeah, you're right. Hell with it." (I start unloading my boat, ready to leave).

"Git in, let's go git it."

He didn't have to ask twice! I was suddenly full of solicitude again.

"No, I don't need no push, just get on there. Step on my sunglasses? Don't worry on them, worry on that rod! Nearly cost 80 bucks."

I hope I don't sound judging or insulting -- I'm just trying to reproduce this friendly fisher's rural dialect. He was a man of few words and was a strong, stoic help to me in getting that anchor back. We zipped out past the boats of the guys who wouldn't help me doing about 75 I think, found the float, laboriously hauled the anchor up calling it a %^#*& (or at least I did) and then zipped back doing 75 to where his girlfriend was watching my stuff, stuff including a Sage XP with a Ross Canyon reel which cost a tad more than 80 bucks. I said something about gas money and slipped a 20 under his pack of Pall Malls, which he stoically did nor said not a thing to acknowledge. Nonetheless, 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.

The bigger part of why is actually catching fish. Since you've read this far in my blog I'll go ahead and tell you what I am quite cagey about advertising online: the Pit River fished utterly beautifully this weekend, on all three reaches. You couldn't keep the hordes of 14-16 inchers off of a tan bird's nest, and the multi-bug evening hatch was a glorious act of god: PMDs, drakes, caddis, stonefly adults . . . if I'd stuck a few of the real 20" pigs I'd have called it my best Trifecta ever, but those fellas kept hid for now. They are still waiting.



And so am I! For the shad, who are still coming. Some will swim past my new, sliding-catch anchor, but some will not. More on that later.

Losers, Loners, and Loaners

If you've read a few of these entries, you may have thought, 'this guy fishes alone a lot.' That's true. When I was a kid I played alone a lot. My small success in academics came from reading alone a lot. I backpacked from Tahoe to Mt. Whitney alone (sierra lakes are what started me on fly fishing) and in recent years I have paddled alone under thousands of commuters on the San Rafael bridge as well as (considerably more alone) among hundreds of bears and birds on the Alagnak and Gallegos rivers of Alaska and Argentina, respectively.

Why? Interesting question. Americans seem quite ambivalent about such things. On one hand there is a high-minded respect for the individualist, and on the other hand, there's a notion that if you're not surrounded by a bunch of noisy friends who cram your calendar full, you must be a loser. Let me go ahead and play my card by telling you that I consider most people to be losers. Deceived fools. There is NOT safety in numbers, there is not necessarily happiness, and there is, in many cases, considerably less enjoyment of life and its best experiences.

I was reminded of this today by Mike at Pacific River Supply, who is a great guy with tons of excellent equipment and many years of experience and river wisdom. I'll probably soon buy an Aire Lynx II from him because my Lynx I can't really carry all the stuff I'll need for 150 river miles and two weeks on the first leg of my Alaska trip this summer. Anyhow, when I was in there renting a Lynx II today he and I inevitably got to talking about paddling solo. To quote myself in an article about solo floating the Alagnak that appeared in Fish Alaska magazine,

Don't go boating alone. Any experienced paddler will tell you this, and it is true.



What's also true, though, is that I paddle alone all the time, and so does Mike. You should have seen him glow when he described one of his solo trips. This is a guy who does a lot of guiding and group trips, and you could tell that he really, really treasures the peace and freedom of solo trips. As his face got more beatific describing this, I could feel the smirk growing on my own face. I almost said, "that's what I do almost all the time, Mike," but thought better of it. No need to boast when you are a true loner and loser . . .

Tomorrow's trip to test the rented Lynx II and compare it to the Lynx is NOT a solo one. I'm taking a buddy who has boated with me also on the Middle American. He's an unpretentious dude who doesn't mind paddling 'duckies,' as the kayaking elite say with a sneer (they are, in most cases, real losers). Talking with him just now about the logistics, I noted the fact that tonight he is currently fighting with his fiancee, with yelling in the background making it all the more vivid. I know he's excited to go, but boy was he grumpy on the phone. He is in Sartre's non-loser Hell: not alone.

Thinking these things over, I'm getting the dirty old smirk again. Only a loser would spend his day cutting and waterproofing nautical charts while half-watching premier league (down with Bolton!) and dreaming about a solo fishing trip still eight weeks away, or now be sitting around on a Saturday night eating mackerel and then blogging while half watching Mexican soccer (up with Cruz Azul!). But I am delighted to be him!

In the Bathtub

My good friend and sometime guide from Santa Cruz has called the San Luis Reservoir a "big bathtub." When I talk about fishing there in my kayak, he always expresses a sort of gentle pity for my attempts to find fish in that giant bathtub of mostly empty, clear cold water. And mostly he's right: I'm now averaging .5 fish per five-six hour paddle. Compared to the fecundity of the delta and the bay, the rez begins to look fairly deserted fishwise.

My experiences on San Luis last week suggest otherwise. I went out there mostly to remind myself what the boat feels like full of gear and to do some self-rescue practice in a fully loaded kayak (more general preparation for summertime Alaska adventures, stay tuned). After paddling across a large area of the lake, I spent a couple of hours drenching myself in chilly water and baking myself dry in the windless dry desert air. Energy had gone low indeed by the time I paddled troll-lessly back to the launch. Trying to catch fish was a low, low priority compared to taking a little nap somewhere.

But lo, what is that little splashing sound out there? It's not my paddles, because I have stopped to put on sunscreen. It's not wind waves, because there is no wind. It certainly isn't a frog jumping in, because I am a mile from either shore over 250 feet of bathwater. Could it be . . . fish?

I tied on a shallow-running rapala and paddled off in the general direction of the splashing sounds, completely unprepared for what I was about to witness: suddenly, the water in front of me became 'nervous' and just below the surface, dozens of largish schoolies changed direction and dashed by really fast on either side of my boat. I paddled straight into a large school of fish!

This was quite a surpise out there in the middle of the tub in 250 feet of clear cold emptiness. But as I kept circling the area, I noticed nervous water in various areas of the windless expanse. In one spot I finally got a hit, which immediately got unhooked. Fine, I mark the spot on GPS (completely lacking any kind of measurable range or reference out there) and do big figure eights. A couple of times I drive right through schools, spooking them again, and then finally a fish mercifully takes the plug hard enough to stay hooked. A respectable two or three pounder, but not fleshy enough for brochettes. So he swims back to join what must be hundreds of his buddies.

That was the only fish of the day. Yes, I tried flinging the leadcore fly setup I had on deck, but it seemed to be going under the shallow-running schools of fish. I was just too tired to switch it out for a floating line (not easy in the yak) or to strip it at the warp-speed required to keep it shallow. I ended up being so tired and hot from doing four miles of figure-eights after nine miles of open water paddling that I could hardly function back at the launch. But I was very very glad to have had that lesson in bathtub fishing. It is a real treat to be in a boat that draws 2-4 inches of water over 250 foot depths and actually hook up on a lure that runs at about 4 feet. Playing in the tub is good fun.

Snap on the Pit Trifecta

Reportedly there was once a drinking game popular at Colorado University called "Snapper," in which you started and stopped play with the terms "Snap on" and "Snap off." I have never played it, but I thank my fishing friend Mike for enriching my fishing life with this rich lexicon. For instance, instead of calling out the hackneyed "Fish on!" you can instead scream out "Snap on!" Similarly, a break off or an "LDR" (Long Distance Release) becomes a "Snap off." Snap terminology has taken such a firm place in my personal fishing culture that I catch myself calling it out even when I'm alone, mumbling "aw, snap awwf" when a fish gets away prematurely.

Anyway, over the weekend I was very happy to snap on one of the crucial rituals of said personal fishing culture, The Pit Trifecta: that is, successfully fishing on Pit River reaches #3, 4 and 5. Normally this cannot be done until the last Saturday in April. Normally on that day there are six million gear and bait boys out on the river angling for a weigh-in prize at the annual Big Bend trout derby. But not this year! Now, thanks to some right thinking at the DFG, all of March and April are a catch and release season on all three reaches. Hooray! I'd be upset that I didn't make it last weekend (the new opener) if I weren't so smirkily self-satisfied to have gone this weekend.

On Friday afternoon Pit 3 was fishing splendidly. I'm glad I was fishing alone because the sheer volume and numbers of catching would have been embarrassing. I probably should have stopped after a couple of hours, but I kept on trying unsuccessfully for the big ones that I know from experience are in there. Though a little bit of water was coming over the dam, the water was actually a bit low and a decently colored that afternoon. The next morning when I drove by the color was off and lots more water was coming over.


Friday I had #3 all to myself. Driving through Saturday morning there were three or four cars pulled over on #3, and zero visible activity on #4. Which was perfect, since the conditions on #4 Saturday were as optimal as #3 the day before. My favorite runs there produced more embarrassing sequences of trout: a few nice ones, dink; a half-dozen nice ones in fifteen minutes, dink; more nice ones, and so on. Again no giants, but enough 12-16 inch fish that I couldn't complain.


Tripped up by a blackberry vine, I took a nasty tumble that afternoon. Bashed the left shin hard and really thumped down on my right thigh on a boulder with all my weight. For a while there I was worried about being able to walk out. Add to that the beginnings of a cold, and Pit Boss (a nickname Mike gave me) was feeling like an old man for sure. However, the Trifecta was completed on Saturday evening with one nice fish taken on the margins of an over-high and slightly off-color #5. Normal wading would have been stupid even without bruised legs.



As I blog this blog I am at home sick with some pretty serious cold symptoms. Depending on how bad this gets, I will or won't consider it a wise trade to have gone on Sunday to float the Lower Sacramento from Posse Grounds to Girvan. It was a genuinely hot and sunny March day with very little hatch activity, but as always it was worth it. Took one nice one wading a riffle with stoneflies, got one from the kayak drifting micro mays, and completed the circle by taking a nice last fish on the surface at Girvan. Normally floating is not a huge big deal physically, but dragging the yak down the Girvan side channel and hauling it across the park just about finished me after a long day in the sun.

But in a way that's the point: to get really finished instead of sitting around wondering how the fishing is and how much you're missing. Life is short, and one must snap a few on before snapping off.

Hoping to snap up there at least once more before the meat season starts,

Snap off.

No News is Bad News

Just to confirm that fishing embers are still warm, I'll do a quick report on last weekend's fishing and paddling. The fishing actually resulting in catching, as it occasionally does, and the paddling was a healthy exercise in support of one of the upcoming summer's big fishing adventures in Alaska.

Coming up to last weekend there was a nice long warming trend of the kind that can bring the delta back to life in February. Add a steady barometer and stripers are happy little fellas. And those little ones are the only ones I was able to contact on Saturday (up to 'keeper' length at the most) but I did contact enough of them to be a happy little fella myself on my 18-mile, counter-clockwise circuit of a large island out there. The tide was with me most of the way, but I ended nice and tired with about ten striper notches and two largemouth ones. Largemouth bass in February; this is where a boy from Maine feels very thankful to be living in California.

After resting a day I headed out on President's Day to some fairly ideal tides for Angel Island exploration: five foot flood and 6 foot ebb slacking out around midafternoon. I want to get used to riding tidal currents, as it is reportedly the only way to get around the complicated maze of passages in Prince Wiliam Sound where I'll be paddling and fishing in August. For this day trip I only took the fishing rod in case of extreme temptation, like busting stripers under a cloud of diving birds -- no such luck. Should have left the fishing stuff at home, because that salt water is murder on reels. Look what it did to the nice Shimano that I got for Nicaragua:



In further bad news, the warm trend is over and weather conditions right now are such that I will delay a Pit River trip -- no historical March 1 opener for Pit Boss. I shall have to give up the name to whoever has the moxie to go up there and fish in the snow and hail. Though I don't think it will be too long yet to wait . . .

From the Googleplex

Looks like this is it -- I'm going back to work any minute now. I'm at the famous Googleplex, where free food and dry cleaning stop fishing sabbaticals in their tracks. It's a looong long way from Rio San Juan right now, is part of what I'm thinking. I'm also thinking that if this sees me through some cold months to shad season, then all's well that ends well :)

Fly Zone 2007

Nicaragua was fishy as I could wish, but very geary. The only strike I had on a fly was a scrappy little machaca on San Fernando who threw the hook. So I would have to admit that, for me, Nicaragua was a no-fly zone.

Not so on some of my delta home water today. After a warm afternoon of trolling around for one thin schoolie, I decided to trespass on an unoccupied dock for a bit of fly casting. To the degree that you can call 350 grains of tungsten a fly line. Anyway, it worked:



Love them stripers. Love the delta, even. I think I have my answer to "Y ahora que?" There's not much I can do here in California to outdo a San Juan tarpon, but I can certainly dredge up a whole lot of pleasant fishing and paddling out of my usual old haunts. It was just a great afternoon out there: calm, and relatively warm, and very pretty with the sunset and fullish moon rising at dusk.

Y Ahora Que?

The only problem with an experience like catching a tarpon is making the next move. If you land a ten-inch trout, you immediately cast again with hopes of a twelve or a twenty-inch trout. But after fighting a 93 pound tarpon from your kayak? The question is so baffling that yesterday I did the unthinkable and paddled on the bay without one shred of fishing tackle on board. Made a nice circuit of the Brothers and Red Rock and enjoyed some current maneuvers, but that's just stalling tactics in a life defined by fishing.

"Y ahora que?" is exactly the question I asked before Chepe and the boys showed up to bail me out, though. Maybe there will be some more divine intervention for me now. What seems more likely is some diabolic intervention, in the form of -- a job. Many weeks ago I had the evil thought of abandoning my six weeks in Patagonia (the next sabbatical plan) for a contract job short enough to not interfere with six weeks in Alaska (the main event). Talking with Google last night strongly suggests that this awful thing may happen. As good as that might be for my resume, it would put a damper on a fishin sabbatical and its related blog.

But I'm ahead of myself here. It ain't over till it's over. Don't count your tarpon sausage until it's in the boat. And so on. No matter what, I'll still be out there for Caddis Madness in March, and will go shadaholic in May. On opening day on the Pit I'll go to those rocky riverbanks thinking like Whitman that I am mad for it to be in contact with me. Vamos a ver.

Tarpon + Kayak = Comedy

Those who know me well can pretty easily imagine how impatiently I made the trip from Solentiname to Sabalos, starting at 5:00 a. m. and then ending at 3:00 p. m. when, soaked in jungle sweat from the effort of assembling my boat in a rush, I finally got back onto tarpon water. This being my fourth official tarpon trolling day, I knew the drill: get to the deep run and troll against the current at about 2.5 mph; when it shallows out, turn around and troll quickly back downstream; repeat until completely exhausted and/or dark falls. Like so many outdoor activities, this type of fishing becomes calming through repetition, even hypnotic.

That is, until the STRIKE! Over 20 feet of water, there´s no mistaking the violent, rod-whipping strike of a tarpon. Nor the deep indignation of not getting a solid hookup. I took a quick range on a shed and some trees and paddled down to repeat the same line. Guess what: WHAM! another identical strike. By now my knees are feeling a little shaky with excitement. After 20+ hours of looking for them, I am finally fishing over some grabby goddamn tarpon at 4:00 p. m. on my second to last day on the San Juan.

On the third pass the rod went down into a ¨C¨ shape and stayed that way, bringing the boat to a shuddering halt and making the drag sing that sweetest high-pitched song. By the time I´d picked up the rod and ruddered around to look downstream, the fish was already completely out of the water and looking, against the afternoon light, like the most beautiful thing I have seen in this fairly beautiful country. It came down in a fearful big splash, and I pulled up the rod in acute terror -- was it still on tight? It was.

A fool´s hope suddenly fulfilled is only one of the powerful emotions that started flowing at 50 million CFS. There was also shock and awe at the size and power of such a huge fish, as well as a wild joy, even unsurpressable glee, that burst up out its buried places every time the tarpon made another violent and magnificent jump. I made some pretty damn silly hooting and shouting and laughing noises during this stage of the struggle, eventually hustling out my camera with shaking hands to try and film this exquisite moment. Luck was really with me that day, because the very moment I hit the digital film button the tarpon made its fifth jump. Try viewing that clip here.

As long as the fish was running hard and jumping, the scene seemed somewhat like a guy fighting a fish from a boat. But when the tarpon settled down and started sulking on the bottom, it quickly became apparent that a 93 pound fish holding in 3 mph current tugging, on 40 pound braided monofilament, a 40 pound boat containing a rather baffled 160 pound gringo, is the very definition of a stalemate. Periodically the tarpon made a move for the surface to roll and thrash in ways that seemed pretty clearly to be a threat to the boat. Even in my addled brain a sense of mild danger started to grow. It was about 4:45, and this stalemate could have lasted until midnight or longer.

The cavalry does come over the hill, though, in the form of local fisherman Vicente Escobar, his young cousin Chepe, and two grinning kids all packed into a dugout canoe. ¨What are you going to do with the fish?¨ Vicente asks from a polite distance. ¨Other than lose him or be drowned by him?¨ I´m thinking . . . at this point I am as ready as ever in my life to accept some help landing a fish, normally not all my M. O. So I reply, ¨If we can land this fish together, it´s yours.¨ And quicker than you can say Sabalo Chorizo, we instantly formed into a tightly organized five-man fishing team. We lashed my kayak on one side, and after clambering into their completely unstable craft, I fought the fish off the opposite side.





And man did those guys know how to paddle. They kept the boat moving opposite the fish at all times, and I kept sweating and cursing as I knelt in a slurry of half-dead mojarras and bait, keeping pressure on the fish as best I could. Once or twice I paused in the battle to take a picture; the guys all looked at me as if to say, ¨dude -- do you want a picture, or a fish in the boat?¨ Of course, I wanted both. At the sketchiest moment in this last stage of the fight, I brought the fish to the boatside for the first time and it toootally freaked out, running under the boat with the tip of my rod broken off and amazing us all by jumping on the opposite side of the kayak. In the frantic rowing to correct this situation I was sure we were all going to swim.

But we didn´t. The team kept its wits, and as dark started to deepen, we made a successful if not pretty end to the battle. I got to where I could pull the tarpon´s head up every five minutes or so, and at these moments Chepe left off paddling and turned his crudely hewn, sodden wood paddle into a club, whacking at the big silvery fish head for all he was worth, bless him. The stunned fish still took two men to lift him up into the boat. Juego ganado! High fives and smiles all around! I got a couple of shots in the wobbling canoe, and they got some serious fish meat at 10 cordobas a pound, plus the deeply embedded Rapala plug. We´d floated pretty far downstream, and I had to scurry off to the hotel to be sure of a safe landing.

Chepe happened to live in the maze of shacks down from the hotel, and I´ll be gormed if he didn´t show up the next morning in his dugout with a big bowl of chorizo de Sabalo -- tarpon sausage. I´ll be even more gormed if that shit wasn´t absolutely delicious. You could easily pass it off as pork chorizo, though somebody might comment that it had a remotely fishy flavor. I made a little bit of a mistake by taking the bowl back filled with my extraneous fishing tackle to give to Chepe, telling him I thought the chorizo was delicous. I think this forced him, with a quietly elegant and very touching Nicaraguan courtesy, to come back to the hotel an hour later with another, bigger bowl of chorizo plus tamales and sour cream made by the Senora de la casa. I made him sit down at the hotel to have a tamale and beer with me (which was stretching social codes, since he was very much a shirtless indigenous fisherman among the bermuda-pants patrons of the town´s shwankiest 15 dollar hotel) and had to think: if we could get Hugo Chavez and Dick Cheney to go land a tarpon together, then we would almost surely have harmonious friendship between nations.

So now, on my last full Nicaraguan day chillin´in San Carlos, I´m thinking that it has been a pretty damn good first month of my sabbatical. Lots of great fishing, lots of human value, and plenty of adventure. If the plane goes down in flames tomorrow, gentle readers, let be known that I died quite happy.