Try-fecta

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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


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

The Dog's Breakfast, a Harbinger of Spring

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.

Scatological Ambuscade on Isla San Marcos

So, at long last, my worst Baja camping nightmare comes true: I am awoken from sleep to see standing outside my tent a dude packing a very large pistola. He´s wearing a black ball cap and pointy black leather dress shoes (amid the scorpionic rubble of a desert arroyo) and his mustashioed face is peering very suspiciously under my sun tarp. Yikes! I mean, ¨Buenos dias!¨

Hm, OK, he´s with the Mexican marines, based in Mulege. This means I can go from 100% alarmed to about 85%. What are the notoriously incorruptible Mexican authorities doing camped out on a little cove on Isla San Marcos, which is the marine version of the middle of hardly anywhere? Not, like, intercepting a drug shipment to take possesion of, or something like that, I hope?

In fact, this morning visit wasn´t a total surprise. The previous night, just after laying down in the sweet silence of my arroyo camp, I heard a boat motoring slowly into my cove. It came in slowly, under light of a couple of weak flashlights. Alarm level: 110%. I got up, grabbed my can of bear mace and an aluminum rod tube, and exited the tent. Last thing I want is to be trapped in a tent, surrounded by ill will. Nor do I want to give up all my goods without some kind of fight, which could include machete swashbuckliung, aerial flares (horizontally deployed) and large rocks as well as the bear mace. Some will say this is stupid, and I don´t necessarily disagree; it´s just that I would rather feel stupid than helpless and weak.

Anyway, no attack nor confrontation ensued. After creeping into the shadow of a bush, I heard a lot of bumping and goofing around down on the beach, and distinctly heard a boyish male voice whining about being hungry and could we eat soon please? This gang of goofs was most probably a bunch of fisherman, and I figured the worst-case scenario was that they would spend the night, make a lot of noise, find my camp, and try to make me have mescal shots with them.

I was just about to go back to my tent and just be quiet, when one of the dudes came up from the beach and stopped right near me, in the full glow of the moonlight. He dug a small hole with a shovel, and before I could make a move, dropped his pants and squatted. Christer. I was hidden in the shadows -- but if I moved, he might notice me, and then wouldn´t THAT be embarrassing . . . .

Based on height, hat and mustaches, I´m pretty sure that the dude I watched wiping his ass was the black-shoed commandante.

After a bit of an amused morning chat, the commandante went back down the beach. Then, two by two, uniformed dudes with machine guns came up and inspected my camp, all with a vaguely irritated air. I gather it may have been their responsibility to make sure the area was secure, and that the commandante blamed them for not taking notice of my camp. I don´t blame them so much: the camp was intentionally located behind a bluff that obscured views from the beach, exactly to discourage curious visits. It worked for five peaceful days running last April.

When I loaded up the boat and launched from the beach, they were just about finishing their breakfast, with eggshells and shrimp tails tossed down on the beach along with emptied hot sauce cans and coke bottles. I felt grateful that they at least dug cat holes for their turds.

Sad to say, the island-based fishing was a bit disappointing, altogether: one big skipjack on the yellotail bajo, a small cabrilla, a sculpin, various ambitous pufferfish; just about zero strikes over the reefs that produced plenty of large pargo and grouper back in April. More than once I looked wistfully over at the ¨haystack hill¨ on the mainland, where the sierra bite was probably still running hot, with lots of corvina in the bay to boot.

I paddle out there across the channel both for fishing and for a small adventure. This time the fishing was not so hot, I didn´t get marooned by the wind, but still, there was a little bit of an adventure after all.

Pain, Predation and the End of the World

[This is a thing that I wrote for a website that has since disappeared from the interwebs, so just for safekeeping, I am posting it here. Google, as we all know, shall be eternal]

Not long ago, websites and newspapers carried the headline:

“Injecting Lips with Bee Venom Proves It: Fish Feel Pain!”

If you remember those articles, then you know that they didn’t present any first-hand reports of unbearable agony from aggrieved carp or catfish. Rather, they described how a group of scientists injected bee venom into fish lips, and then observed (as evidence of pain) head-shaking and rolling and thrashing behavior very familiar to anyone who ever injected a fish with even a non-poisoned hook. Perhaps like me, you reacted to this news by saying, “well, sure. Fish don’t seem to like being hooked. What a revelation. Did we really need bee venom to test that hypothesis?”

Perhaps we needed the bee venom to suggest the intensity of the ostensible pain, and to emphasize the sadistic cruelty of sport fishermen. At least in some interpretations of the experimental results, hooking a fish on the lip with a #18 pheasant tail on 5X tippet is very similar to putting rubber gloves on your hands, sticking a syringe into the lip of a fish, and injecting bee venom into it.

But I don’t think that’s quite right. In fact, I think bee venom-injection sounds like something from a bad science fiction paperback, while sport fishing can be viewed as a ritualized version of what fish themselves do routinely when they prey on insects and other fish. That is, it is a stealthy search based partly on the haplessness of the prey which ends in violent struggle and either escape or capture. From smolt to minnow to adulthood, a typical fish will pass very few of its living days without some degree of exposure to this painful principle; a fish is chased by herons, by otters, by other bigger fish – by its own parents! And sometimes it is raked by a claw or has its tail snipped and survives to tell the painful story (figuratively, unless there is an experiment proving that fish can talk, too). Fish live and die by the predatory sword, and on their unluckiest days, they may end up encountering the top predator of all, looming over the surface of the water and then – this would be the truly weird part for our supposedly sensitive and thoughtful fish – letting them go free, alive. Unripped-apart, unswallowed and uneaten. Is it a kind of joke? A cruel one?

Maybe it is cruel. Life is cruel. To me, animal rights extremists are like the political idealists who say communism could work, if only people weren’t so selfish and greedy – that is, if people weren’t inherently human. In the case of predatory cruelty, a ban on sport fishing could work if people weren’t also – do not try to deny it – inherently animal. Perhaps some people are better than others at completely shutting down their instincts for search and capture. Or perhaps they end up displacing those urges into other, potentially less or more harmful behavior. In any case, sport fishers are among those people who choose to pursue, often on weekends after dull, civilized days on phones and computer terminals, an activity that mimics the instinctual act of finding and capturing prey. If they choose to do it with a fly rod instead of an elephant gun or a gill net, then in my humble opinion they have chosen one of the most gentle and aesthetically pleasing of all the options.

Some might reply that it doesn’t matter if you use a daisy to do it – if you are causing needless pain to a poor wild creature then you must be a cruel, vicious sadist. But this doesn’t hold up well when measured against anecdotal evidence. In his definitive book Backcountry Bear Basics, David Smith observes that predatory bears seem far from angry: “When an animal clicks into predatory mode, the anger and stress you see during defensive aggression is absent. A black bear hunting moose calves is about as angry at the calf as a butcher is at chickens.” In fact, they seem strangely at peace when stalking a calf, with their “ears up, eyes wide open, intensely alert, yet somehow relaxed.” It’s when they feel threatened or cornered that they get apparently (that is, anthropomorphically) angry: they lower their ears, and foam at the mouth, and rush in with claws and jaws ready to inflict some seriously painful injuries.

The same can be said about most fly fishers. To the extent that hooking, fighting, and releasing a fish is predatory behavior, it hardly appears to be vicious, angry behavior. When casting and drifting flies, most fly fishers seem overcome by an intent tranquility, lost in the flow of the motions. When hooking and fighting a fish, they’re more like the hunting bear: eyes wide open and head up and alert. And then, in the strange moment of actually handling a fish to unhook it (and I can imagine the ironic sneers from animal rights activists), the prevailing feelings are of admiration and tenderness. For my part, I feel this way about it: I think the fish is beautiful. I want it to go back and recover. And that’s not selfless kindness – I want it to live to strike again another day, and to get bigger by violently killing smaller fish and insects, and to spawn prolifically, among other untoward things. On those rare occasions when I don’t want it to recover – when I want a shad or salmon to quiver and go still and give up its flesh to a well-oiled iron grill – even then, the emotions accompanying the knockout blow and the scaling and eviscerating are themselves very peaceful and solemn, with no sense of sadistic glee or malice. Quite to the contrary, there is a sense of deep, simple fulfillment which is exactly what I believe I am seeking in my sport fishing.

Let some activists try to get between me and the river, however, and then you may see something more analogous to the cornered grizzly.

I’d like to offer some anecdotal evidence of my own, based on observations of fish behavior, hoping all the while that I don’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing the fish. Specifically, I’m thinking about a fish that I hooked one lovely spring afternoon on the Pit River while drifting one of my favorite nymph patterns from The Fly Shop in Redding (I’m a fly buyer, not a fly tyer, I’m afraid). It is a distinctive hare’s ear pattern from with a special flash back and a hexagonal tungsten bead head, and often the fish seem to find it irresistible. This particular fish took the irresistible fly, but then, after a short display of frantic ‘pained’ thrashing, it put on a sudden burst of strength that took me by surprise and snapped a 4x tippet. I’d had enough time to say to my buddy across the river, “this feels like a hot one!” before it departed with my nymph unattached any longer to the line.

Later on in the evening, we fished back over that same area when the fish were keying onto large mayflies on the surface. I did not fail to drift a large dry over the same lie where I had earlier hooked and lost the fish, and lo! – a nice strike and a decent-sized rainbow came to hand after a respectable fight. But one look proved that it wasn’t just any old hungry rainbow: it was exactly the same one who had seized and snapped off my hare’s ear earlier in the day. The distinctive fly was still lodged in his mouth, from which I gently removed it with some extra satisfaction at winning in the end.

This, obviously, is not proof that the fish didn’t feel pain. This fish may have been agonized by the hook of the nymph, thrown into acute depression by the experience of fighting against the line, but then driven by desperate hunger to strike the mayfly an hour later (or, agony and desperation may be as foreign to fish as Trigonometry is to a dog). But is does seem to prove that fish are not completely thrown off the rails by their ‘painful’ reactions to being hooked and fought – in other words, it ain’t the end of the world, as suggested by fish biologist Robert Benkhe:

There is strong circumstancial evedience that “pain” in fishes is not comparable to that of higher vertebrates, nor is catching a fish a very traumatic experience for the fish (otherwise catch-and-release regulations wouldn’t work).

My experience on the Pit River strongly suggests that fish keep on feeding after being hooked. Probably, they keep on fighting and spawning and doing whatever else they do down there underwater. Maybe a bit of thrashing and rolling on the end of a fly line is just to be expected for fish born into a world that includes homo sapiens, and if they survive it, as trout demonstrably do in many heavily fished catch and release waters, then it’s just another day’s work to them.

At the same time, it is another day’s play to me, and I don’t have any remote intent of giving it up because somebody stung fish with bee venom and sent out some wrongheaded conclusions for general consumption. If you can prove to me that my sport fishing threatens to make wild trout actually disappear from the rivers, then you’ve got my attention. But so long as sport fishing causes vicious, angry attack responses chiefly in animal rights activists, then by all means, fish on!

Trompe la mort!

A year ago around labor day weekend, I blogged (predictably) about a fishing/backpacking trip; and on that occasion, I uploaded (lamely) photos from another guy's trip to the same area. As explained in that post, this was necessary because I had decided not to take a digital camera because digital cameras are "heavy" -- at least in a backpack context -- and not really "necessary." Not necessary? That turned out to be a rather strict opinion in the end.

This year I must be feeling a bit more liberal, because I went ahead and carried a digital camera around at altitude in the exact same area for 40 or so miles. It is perhaps not all coincidental that I am feeling in a whole lot better shape this year, too, for the climbs and slogs and slides-through-softball-sized-talus of this particular trip seemed a whole lot easier. I suppose it's also not coincidental that last year my typical summer day involved sitting on my ass in an office and eating three-item bentos from Ranch 99 for lunch before imbibing Belgian ales at the Refuge in the evenings instead of the things I have been up to this year: walking for a month in New Zealand, fishing my ass off in Baja, and paddling 250 miles in Alaskan lakes and rivers. Not to mention walking 40 miles or so in Emigrant wilderness a couple of weeks ago. Conditions this year are right for camera-carrying.

In addition to the complete set on picasaweb, I offer these exact replacements for the lame, not- my-own photos posted last year. First, the photo of one of the region's lakes:


(a different lake, yes, but a better one, I think)

And second, a picture of me (not some other guy's hairy-ass hand) holding a golden trout that I caught:


The fishing was good. The backpacking, all inclusive, was greater than Great. To do this stuff, if you have the legs and the pain threshold to do it, is to make magic, to weave spells, to cheat death. I walked the John Muir Trail at 19 in the usual daze people live in at that age. But I am even more dazed and confused to still be able to do it now. After a deep, terrifying scare from plantar fascitis a few years ago, I find that I can still walk where I want to walk, even with a whole digital camera weighing me down. So I do really feel like a "Tromp-la-mort" -- a phrase stolen from the novelette that made up my main tent entertainment, Balzac's Pere Goriot.

Which reminds me: take Balzac. Take a pricey stick of wine-infused salami. Take cave-aged gruyere. Take the best olive oil you know. Take a delicious toasted-sesame-seed rub for your fresh, sweet trout. Sure, take plastic-packaged udon and ramen noodles; but use little miso powder packs instead of the MSG packs in the packages, and add liberal amounts of fuere wakame. Since it is your own back and not a mule's, little powder coffee packs from Starbucks are acceptable for morning coffee. Certainly, take all the time you need in the morning, since dawn starts are for alpine climbers and slaves.

I need not even mention this, but -- take at least an ounce a night of single-malt scotch, and mix it with snow when your camp is high enough. If your first day is short, pack some "heavy" but "necessary" ass-kicking beer or wine. Do all this, and you will trompe la mort for sure, my friends. Here's some of the advice Trompe la mort gives to poor little Eugene:

If you were just a bloodless slug, there'd be nothing to worry about: but you have the wild blood of lions in your veins, and an itch to do twenty crazy things a day. You will submit to this torture, the ghastliest ever known in God's hell.

Submit to it like I do: go backpacking.

Trompe la mort!

Binary Dances with Trout

What? Did I really not post a single post since New Zealand? Lame. For there has decidedly been some fine fishing in between: a super-sweet trip to Baja that rendered fresh hamachi sashimi and a grilled collar to remember; a driven bass-fishin mission in Maine that lured dozens of smallmouths (and larges) to the surface and subsequently alongside a kayak; and, just the other night, a typically magical night of shad silliness on the Sacramento during one of those looooong summer evenings that ends with a watchspring-thin crescent moon in the pink June sky.

I think I can guess why there was no documentation of all this. I'm in the middle of my life's second serious sabbatical, and in six months time have settled deep into a little comfortable cocoon made up of country living, sweet fishing, and a life of the mind that is so increasingly inner-directed that it does not even allow self-indulgent blogging. Why should I write about what I experience, as long as I experience it?

Besides the obvious answer -- "you are not, and do not actually want to be, alone in this world, as much as you may think it, DUDE" -- there is the simple fact that writing about something, or photographing it, or painting it, gives it a shape that you can turn over much more tangibly in memory. It gives me a little hook that I can go back to and get caught up in memory, again and again. And I do like that.

I would stress the shape. In the past, it has given me great pleasure to create sonata-shaped trips made up of three distinct parts. My 2007 and 2008 trips to Alaska, for instance, were beautiful, fishy sonatas. 2009, a single, all-to-short presto! But for this year, for the final act of my non-employment, I have written out (or planned) what is best described as a binary dance -- you know, like all those priceless little bits of which Bach's sonatas and partitas are made. For example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L05xsjRvFEw

To be brief (as I must, since there is World Cup soccer to watch before I head to the airport tomorrow), my dance has these two parts: 1) a sea-kayak fishing stint on and around Naknek Lake; and 2) a river-kayak stint that takes me down Moraine Creek, across Kukaklek Lake, and down into the Lower Alagnak for the fourth time in my increasingly rich life. It would be nice to think I can do repeats of each part (as most of the performances of Bach do), but it will be a through-composed performance. Unless I drown or am eaten by a bear, that is. I know from experience now that such morbid outcomes are less likely than a lightning strike.

Within these nicely-shaped parts, there is of course a fair amount of complexity. I'll hang out first at Brooks Camp, drinking beer and drinking in the coolness of that place. I may do the portage over to Grovesenor Lake and continue on around the Savonoski Loop, or I may decide to stick to fishy water and just backtrack to Brooks after visiting Colville and American Creek. Hell, I might even be as lazy as before, and not do the portage at all! I have proven myself all too easy to entertain in and around the Bay of Islands, where the trout run to 34 inches, where pike swarm in backwaters, and where arctic grayling make a visit to Idavain Creek into a small side-trip into fish nirvana.

The second part is the really heterogenous deal, though. Moraine Creek is smallish water (I bet it will be Lower Sac-sized) where guides still "guarantee" a 10-pound trout to their clients. It is that full of big fish! And I trust that floating it will get me some solitude there, despite the fly-in fame of this small creek. Then, the crossing of Kukaklek Lake is the big question mark: will high winds make it a dreadful, three-day chore? Or will I cross it in one day and pick off dozens of fat rainbows at the outlet? Assuming I get through the Kukaklek rapids below -- not entirely guaranteed, though I hear it is a low-water year -- things get more predictable, but essentially more variable, with chums and kings joining the sockeye and rainbows, and even a fair chance at some pike in the sloughs. Perhaps another sea-licey 25 pounder to finish up the trip, like in 2005? We shall see.

So yes, I am stoked! The day after tomorrow, the dance begins . . . .