The Dog's Breakfast, a Harbinger of Spring

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lone Star Largemouth

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

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

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

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

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




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


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


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

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


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