From the quality blog Way Upstream, comes a cautionary tale via The Tico Times about the promises made by mining companies and the collision of promises with reality. The Bellavista Mine in Costa Rica is an open pit gold mine, that despite Central Sun Mining’s frequent promises and assurances, had the integrity of it’s retention ponds and impoundments compromised by land slides and heavy rains, leaving the surrounding land and water in danger of massive pollution by mining tailings and chemical leftovers, the residues of extracting gold from the rock.

Costa Rica had imposed a ban on opne pit mining in 2002, but the Bellavista’s mining concessions had been granted earlier, so the mine was exempted from the ban and by 2005 was in operation, despite protests from local residents and international environmental groups. Now stop me if this sounds familar:

“the humble local village, with ailing infrastructure, scant jobs, rising crime. An anxious mayor, scrambling to live up to campaign promises of a better life. A people, if not quite desperate, hardly thriving. Enter the brawny transnational corporation, flashing foreign money, with its promises of new jobs, untold riches, better lives, a future for the village’s children. The company, then called Glencairn Gold Co. (now Central Sun Mining, Inc.), launched a public relations campaign.”

Now, the mine is closed, 350 villagers are out of work, and there appears to be surface water pollution, and potential ground water and soil pollution. The reason? Everyone outside of the mine and government blames poor regulation, faulty design and indifference on the part of the owners and the regulators. Central Sun Mining? They blame an act of God and surely accept no responsibility or liability.

I have this friend who’s been southern-hemi for the past six weeks and will remain so for the next six. He drops pictures like these on my email while I click and drag and command-shift-whateverthefuck, and the rain blasts the windows, and the big river surges past the freeway brown and foamy and littered. The last fish I touched was a snout-flossed sucker with a bait hook hanging out its gills and I couldn’t feel my toes.

I was gonna call him a fucker, but he’s a good friend, I think.

Mingo’s art girl done went and made a statement this fine winter hump day, shielding herself in attempts to make an obvious point: James Prosek and those women-fearing flyvirgins that follow him make heterosexual women feel creepy and want to cover themselves as if they were oppressed Afgani. this is anunnacceptable way to regard the females, whom we believe should be free and careless as nature’s wind with their expression. see, we love us the ladies. always.
so diggit on the skills front: she’s holding up two things at the same time.

By our art interpretations, she’s asking you to make a choice, stains. real flyfishing? or books by emo mangirls?

sure, your interpretations may vary, but gotdam this woman’s an enigma. best artful holder upper we’ve ever seen.

via fark

Been cold ’round these parts lately. The rivers is too low, water’s too clear. The steelheads won’t truck with low and clear water. Blue sky too, that don’t help t’all.

I didn’t want to have to do it, but likes I told the wife, “There’s no choice, I have to go carpin’.”

Angling for thee winter carp is a gamble on the account of all the ducks that that have to be rowed up; sun, water, ice and wind have to be proportioned just right.

I string up my fly rod and tie on an orange crawfish, #6. Then I pulls my waders up over two pairs of long skivvies and one pair wool pants ‘cuz I know that the waters gonna be cold. There’s snow on the ground, just enough to cover the rocks and sagebrush. All that whiteness makes it real bright so I don my polarized glacier glasses. Air’s cold too so I pulls up my balaclava.

The shallowest parts of the flats is frozen over solid but walking around on the ice is easier than wading through boot deep mud. I makes my way out to The Reef. It aint any kind of reef t’all, just a sunken island that has anywheres from one to three feet of water over it.

An ice cap hovers over yonder island like a lenticular over a mountain top. Conditions are about perfect: cold enough to freeze but plenty of sunshine to warm up the carps and the crawfish.

With the sun high enough over this desert reservoir the crawfish crawl along the top of the submerged island towards the sunlight at the edge of the ice cap. For awhile they warm themselves in safety even though they are fully exposed to the yellow light of the winter sun.

The first sortie of large, slow moving fish, glides along the ice shadow like so many dirigibles over a beach head and the crawfish are caught unawares. A half dozen of their number are lost to the hungry maws of three stealthy carp. The rest of the tiny crustaceans scuttle back to the safety of shade and ice.

But the warmth of the sun is too much to resist and them crawfish have short memories anyhow so, en masse, they crawl back toward the sunlight.

The carp, who are known to have better memories and superb hearing detect the clicking and scraping sounds their prey makes as it migrates across the rocks and clam shells to warmer water. In two’s and three’s more carp fin their way to what has become a buffet at the edge of shadow and light.

I considers myself a friend of all animals but the phenomenon that takes place before me holds a slight unfairness to the ‘dads so I enter the melee on their behalf. To be fair and accurate I should report that it is my fly, the orange #6 crawfish pattern, that enters the melee but it is me that launches it into battle.

The results of my fly’s forays into the abyss are predicable and entertaining.  Not so much fun for the piggish koi who resent having to pull against my rod in such cold, but lots of fun for me and I can’t help but think that the shy little crawdads appreciate the slight reprieve from predation.

The black sheep uncle had a birthday yesterday

“If you go back and read our founding fathers, they didn’t say life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; they said life, liberty and the right to own and control property,”

Donny Beaver, New York Times, January 21, 2006

oh really?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

The United States Declaration of Independence, Signed in Congress July 4, 1776

The rivers were wild and so were the fishes that returned to them. Thankfully Ralph Wahl and Roderick Haig-Brown were there to chronicle the Golden Age of Steelhead in the Pacific Northwest.

admittedly, i know this scene all too well.

From the latest issue of “Wild on the Fly”

“www.busterwantstofish.com, takes its name from the dialogue in The River Runs Through it and provides visitors with additional comedy in its quirky posts. If you aren’t amused by a picture of a woman wearing a very large bra (that fits) and is holding a box of fly line with Lefty Kreh’s picture on it, then this site might not be for you”.

As Epol put it “What a great way to be pigeon holed. I can live with that. ‘Hey you one of those guys from the site with the chick with huge Majoombas that hold shit up.’Oh yeah, giddedy giggedy.” Yes sir we are and we are proud to host the finest holder upper in the known world.

Thomas Tod Stoddart’s Songs and Poems was originally published in Scotland in 1839.  Stoddart was well known and well loved in his native Scotland, but his writing has, over the years, escaped the notice of modern anglers. A shame. Stoddart can be at once tender, funny, profane and biting — and he’s always fun  to read. Songs and Poems is long, long out of print and book collecting scumbags have kept his works from me (now priced in the 100s of dollars) for far too long.

Until now!

Stoddart’s works have fallen into the public domain and Google has recently taken it upon itself to digitize these classic public domain texts. What’s it mean? Now all of Stoddart’s books, including An Angler’s Rambles, Angling Songs and The Angler’s Companion to the Rivers and Lakes of Scotland are now free and available on the internets. O! Anglers! Thee glory!

 THE ANGLER’S INVITE.

COME when the leaf comes, angle with me,
Come when the bee hums over the lea,
Come with the wild flowers—
Come with the mild showers—
Come when the singing bird calleth for thee!

Then to the stream side, gladly we’ll hie,
Where the grey trout glide silently by,
Or in some still place
Over the hill face
Hurrying onward, drop the light fly. ‘

Then, when the dew falls, homeward we’ll speed
To our own loved walls down on the mead,
There, by the bright hearth,
Holding our night mirth,
We’ll drink to sweet friendship in need and in
deed.

whilst i was crying into my Rainier about horseshit weather and no steelhead, the lady just came home from a hike and produces what looks to be the equivalent of about two or three hundred bucks worth of Oregon White Truffles. hot damn!

fellas, these things smell like heaven and eat even better. the Oregon truffles are professional hunter-gatherer shit:

Pretty sure January is the most suck month here in the Northwest, a fact made glaringly clear this shit-ass evening. This has little to do with the fact me and the dog froze our dickholes off in 36° cold clear flows on two rivers while rocking the road program today. no one around, no grabs, no fish rolling, no good reason to think we had the world by the junk and put conviction through our bottom hand and into the day’s castwork. the rain’s back, so that’s a plus, tho. too gotdam bad that rain ain’t brought a fish to our fly today. such is Janusucky. one pull, that’s all i was asking. that’s all a fella should ever ask.

the Banknote, he’s an upstanding enough gent to let me and the Wonderdog leave a boat in his backyard in trade for periodic use, so seeing as it wasn’t gone when we did the driveby, we hitched ‘er up in anticipation for a sunday and monday putting flies through little forgotten central WA coastal buckets and trying to grab up on the 40-hour-week-world by the figs. escape, man. getting to think it’s the gold standard by which a steelheader measures their life.

or any fisherman, really.

that’s about when the red phone lit up with calls from the crew. the messages, for suck. gorge is messy, gnarly with black ice and the big river’s wind. heaven’s highway’s closed to traffic. Dirty T, good man, beatdown with dissapointment and a left sittig with a freshly stocked box of Intruders, Leeches and Bad Hair Day Prawns. T ties flies so fine i had a good plan to give him a cherry piece of grease and steal a few when he was out there, if only as a silent compliment. par for the course when you ‘re a killer tyer, friends always jack your shit. how these trips go. fella was ready to roll west, but knew he’d be a fool to try and make it into PDX tonight. tomorrow’s freshies on the mountain will suffice, but barely. we both know that snow-instead -of-steelhead program all too well this year. it’s time for the liquid goods.

guess the Ma Nature whittles our good plan down to nothing yet again. fuckin’ January. Me and Dirty T had this window, see, looking bright-eyed at two days of dark-day escape to a magic place where alder and doug fir give way to bigass spruce and all-day mist, where river flows were gonna line up just so, and there’s no cell service. makes for a shitpile of hope. the early wild girls are beckonin’, and we know what canyon they’re holed up in so something kick-ass inside makes you nut up and freeze like it’s gotta be, then sleep in the trucks after trying to warm yourself ’round a poor excuse for a fire that’s more smoke than flame. something primal in your soul’s gotta get there, to regain that sorta familiar feel of a winter beatdown asskicking, proper.

said it before, but it makes you feel like you again. makes waking up earlier than the city you live in feel real crittery; packing gear at 4 a.m. and driving outta town again trying to figure out some new plan and telling yourself it’s just as good.

Birddog’s first cast a week ago, first pass of the day through the run. The river’s already a little too far into the clear side of green, and it’s only gotten lower and colder since. A week prior and six inches higher, I pulled a skinny little Skamania stray out from river right, where fir meets sky, off that swirly tongue. Just a bump, a pull and a weak thrash, then it swam up to me and flashed its scar, as if to say “eat me,” which I did. But this day we find ourselves wading where we’d rather be fishing and searching for pulls in green holes usually best left to hardware.

A trio of gear chuckers scoured the bucket behind us with jigs and drift rigs and blanked, to which we all expressed an exaggerated amazement. Hopes run high, even in the face of a clear, bottom-of-the-drop river. And we hoped it all the way to the ramp at dusk.

The cold rain is supposed to turn to snow tomorrow. I love fishing in falling snow. There’s another river, it runs a little harder for just a little longer; doesn’t go so bony so fast as that one, might even color up a bit in this cold drip, and I think I’ll have to give it a go.

Yes, I know you’re thinking we made this up; we didn’t. From the band’s website

“This second effort by the Troutband features songs written by James Prosek (as with the first album) as well as original songs and vocals by Joe Dochtermann. This album was forged through years of winter retreats to an attic recording space in spooky Gebung Road, Alfred, Maine where Joe’s parents moved from Westport, Connecticut. Inspiration was found in icicles and frozen steps to the studio and random paraphernalia left by the previous tenants of the attic (as well as absenta con agua). It is an eclectic group of songs ranging from straight folk to just weird, to happy pop. Breakup songs, together songs, all. Most of the instrumentation was done by Dochtermann and Prosek though other musicians have cameo performances.”

You can get a listen here. Simmer down emo fans, there’s no word yet on Prosek signature eyeliner or if the tour merch will have patches to put on the back of your cardigan.

You’re right- I have a huge bias when it comes to public lands held in trust by the Federal Government. Those aren’t “Government Lands”, they are Public Lands belonging to every citizen of the United States and I expect them to be managed in the Public’s best interest, not in the best interest of a specific Industry. The fact is, and I don’t dispute this, that timber and wood products are necessary, but clear cutting large swaths of old growth forest and to hell with the impact to the Public’s land and water isn’t in anyone’s best interest. I am all for smart balanced management of Public Lands, management that allows for the extraction of needed resources, but at the same time mitigates any egregious damage, and has a plan to renew what was taken.

Regarding the speech, I spent several days trying to locate a transcript or video but was unable to find one through Lexis-Nexis, Google, Associated Oregon Loggers or BLM information services. If you have a copy, please provide it. The newspaper article was written by a reporter who attended the event and I deliberately did not include some of the more inflammatory excerpts as I did not have a transcript of the speech and I would want to understand what Jim Caswell said in context and directly quote him. However, his plans for relaxing the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan are articulated clearly, which I reproduced directly from the article; although I did take the liberty of converting a sentence into bullet comments for clarity and brevity. My bad, you can pillory me for that.

I don’t blame the timber industry for wanting to have all those onerous regulations removed when all they want is to maximize the profit margin on timber harvests; that is the nature of for-profit enterprises, but I do blame the stewards of Public Lands for enabling this when they should be managing in the Public’s Interest. Your claim that as a forester you know best how to manage timber resources echoes the Regional Fisheries Councils of the early 1980’s, when NOAA and the National Marine Fisheries Service put regulation of commercial fishing and fish stocks in the hands of commercial fisherman, who promptly over fished and led to the collapse of North Atlantic cod, swordfish, and menhaden populations and ultimately led to closure of the Georges Bank off Massachusetts, which had once been one of the richest fishing grounds in the Atlantic. It’s called conflict of interest.

And a final comment on bias and slant- If I had written either ten years ago or maybe even two years from now that President Clinton was dispatching the Black Helicopter Global Socialist Storm Troopers to take your saws and skidders away, you’d probably cheer me right on. It’s not slant and bias you don’t like, it is slant and bias that you don’t agree with. I’d rather stand up, say my piece and have you disagree with me, than bow my head and not say what I think and just accept the consequences. And I’d think you’d agree with me on that point.

La Villa Strangiato – Hate Geddy Lee’s voice? Well, none of that here. Vocals instead provided by Big Al, also known as H.R.H. King Lerxst or Stan Getz (“Jazz is weird. I love singing. It’s so easy”), with help from his backup band, Mr. Milton Banana and the Guy from Ipanema. Bonus fun points if you can identify a piece of music called “Powerhouse” in there. Extra bonus viking points if you can identify the composer and venue that made Powerhouse famous (hint: not Raymond Scott, Google cheaters).

Best one-man band in the biz, Scott Biram (Smiff’s greasy fried countrybution):

Blast from the Past- Salty

Jim Caswell, W’s nominee to head the BLM and confirmed by the Senate in August 2007, gave a key note address to the Associated Oregon Loggers, a trade association, where he laid out his plans for logging in the Pacific Northwest. Key to his “management” philosophy is the elimination of three key elements of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan:

• Ending watershed assessments
• Ending plant and animal surveys before logging commences
• Ending Upper Management Review of Regional decisions

Without those provisions, I don’t see how you’re managing anything, beyond ensuring the Timber Companies can clearcut whatever they damn well feel like, which is nice because they’ll probably have a lobbying or front office gig lined up for Caswell at the end of his tenure. Now I could see if Caswell was nominated for the BLM job after serving a tenure as head of a timber company, which has been the Administration’s preferred source for heads of regulatory agencies: get former heads of corporations to run the regulatory agencies that oversee those corporations, but the really horrible part of all this is that Caswell came up through the Forest Service, which begs the question of what so horribly corrupted you that you’re going to open the henhouse door to the foxes?

Again, Mingo’s artful girl, proving why she’s still the best damn holder upper ever.