Not to shit on top of Bacon’s cock-tease Dean River report, but there’s a rider on the current California Budget Bill that would stop unregulated suction dredge mining in California’s rivers. Ahhnold vetoed last year’s bill to try and regulate this form of mining, which would have given Cal Fish and Game the approval authority. With the new rider in place, there’s a second chance to regulate.

Suction dredge mining basically involves putting a vacuum on the streambed and sucking up the bottom and spitting it back out. Needless to say, this isn’t exactly helpful to the insects, fish eggs and newly hatched fish that hang on the bottom.

Go to Cal Trout’s Action Page, take 10 seconds (seriously, I just timed myself) and take a stand.

Edit: Damn, I forgot this- thanks to Trout Underground for the heads up

– words rumored to have been uttered by Chris, BC West’s Grounds Manager.

Yeah, well I can explain that. You’d have done the same.

First, I gotta get this off my chest: Get your grubby, greasy hands on a copy of Art Lindgren’s Dean River Journal, and while it’s a fine depiction of the river and her steelhead, its not until page 20 ol’ Art makes any mention of the unbelievably under-appreciated, badass Dean River Chinook. Even then, there’s a paltry two mentions of these fish, found buried inside three short paragraphs. I’m floored. Shit-shocked and dismayed. For gjod’s sake and with respect to the Kanektok, these Dean kings absolutely crush a swung fly harder than anything I’ve ever lucked my way into encountering. You’d swear even a hen’s got balls hidden up inside her sea-liced flanks.

Maybe Lindgren’s omission comes because steelhead offer us hope. We’ve caught them before, so we know it’s possible. We’re confident in our flies. We know where they lay up. They ascend the river, do their business and somehow, we’re consoled by the fact they might head out as kelts and live to spawn again. It’s a bit of a puss romantic notion and all, but it seems to work. We wanna believe it’s not the last time we’re gonna see ‘em.

With kings, that’s not so. It’s about finality, ‘cause they’re not going downriver ever again. In the afterglow of a fish doling out an extra-strength can of whup ass, it occurs to a fella: there’s a better-than-average chance you’re gonna be the last person to ever see that fish, if not the first. In that sense, there’s a magic with Pacific Salmon you can’t duplicate with any other fish. This, on top of the fact that king’s aren’t supposed to take a swung fly with any regularity. We’ve been trained to think this, and on a river like the Dean, it’s horseshit.

For us, these metaphysical implications of wild chinook are unreal. The shared moment. Or in the case of this one, a 45-minute moment and one in which we were pretty gotdam sure was gonna end in heart / leader break, the what-went-wrong scene playing across your eyelids as you lay in bed that night, answered only with a whole pile of unanswerable what-the-fuck. The Beatdown, in the truest sense of the word.

The what-the-eff moment slapped me upside the head three days in. Fishing had been a touch on the slow side, given the weird weather and the fact the Dean hadn’t got her runoff. The kings were mostly still in the salt give or take a few that had trickled in on the tide, we were still waiting for them in the fresh. All a fella can do.

River was low and clear, and we were hucking 18 foot tips of t-16 way further than necessary, mending the fly deep, taking our steps and our Beatdown. 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. and proof enough to Toker and the rest of the guys in camp that we’re just a flat out fucking psycho. I think they might have either respected that or thought I was an idiot. You can’t be sure. A few steelhead had taken on the slow insides and while a damn impressive consolation, that’s not why we were here. We wanted the kings Lindgren failed to tell us much about, the ones rolling out in the heavy bounce, 20 feet further than our longest cast on a good day. It’s a huge river.

Begin the headgame, sorta like being on your first 8th grade co-ed overnight field trip; chances were good you were gonna get your greedy little fingers into something you’ve been dreaming about, it was just a matter of persistence.

Persist, we did, cause there’s not a whole hell of a lot to do up in the semi-wilderness besides keep casting and trying to talk that sun out of setting any quicker than it needed to.

Motor Midge – fly & photo by Ginseng Sullivan

“Take up the White man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.”

 -Rudyard Kipling “The White Man’s Burden”

Warning thematic and historical convergence straight ahead.

Via the excellent Mine Watch.org, comes the unsurprising revelation that Anglo American (parent company of Northern Dynasty/ Pebble Project) is one of the largest financial supporters of Robert Mugabe, “President” of Zimbabwe. Apparently while the rest of the world is pulling out of Zimbabwe, Anglo American just poured another $400 million into a platinum mine there.

(Cecil Rhodes)

Here’s where the rabbit goes down the hole and we follow. Anglo American also owns a 45% stake in DeBeers Corp, “the Diamonds are forever” jackals. DeBeers also once had a 90% market share of the world’s diamonds, but now trades around 40% of them. The mining firm was started by John Cecil Rhodes in South Africa in 1880 and he did such a great job with exploiting the locals resources, he was granted a charter by the British Government to create his own personal fiefdom, Rhodesia.

Rhodes, who later endowed the Rhode’s Scholarships, said of the British Race “I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.” Clearly this guy thought the non-Anglo incapable of governing themselves.

Eventually Rhodesia, which had an apartheid government that even neighboring white led South Africa eventually declined to support, went through a civil war and transition to majority rule. The nation renamed itself, wait for it, Zimbabwe.

Circling back to Anglo American and the Pebble Mine, the clear imprint of colonialism is inherent in the updated corporate speak of the Project’s, ahem, “Guiding Principals“, which include “Pebble will benefit people. Pebble is for Alaskans” and “Pebble will build sustainable communities”.

It seems that Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carrol has shouldered Rhode’s heavy load of the white man’s burden.

(Meet your new overlord, same as the old one)

Man, we were going along so good there for a while… “stuff fly fishermen love“. It was too good to be true — funny, easy to write, it soothed the irritated blogger’s bean with all its limitless possibility — aye… we could ride SFL for quite some time. Before you could decide whether to shit or go blind, there we were: nine whole columns of “stuff fly fishermen love”. It was shaping up to be a new classic. Looking back at that particularly groovy run one thing comes to the fore: we weren’t really fishing all that much. O! What a joy it was, all that time and no real reason to fish — rivers blown to within an inch of their adjectival banks, crap weather, darkness 21 outta 24 hours of the day. What is thee angler to do?

Rejoice!

Truth be told, many anglers don’t really enjoy fishing all that much. True! There are many, many other things certain anglers would rather do other than fishing. These activities include, but are not limited to:

* Posting remarkably banal horseshit on “fly fishing bulletin boards”.
* Getting into remarkably idiotic pissing matches on “fly fishing bulletin boards”
* Admiring one’s own remarkable taste, intelligence, wit, prose and cutting ironic wit on “fly fishing bulletin boards”.
* Tying an endless variety of minute variations on the same fly. Soliciting credit for “inspiration”, “creativity”, “technical know-how”.
* Drinking
* Bitterness
* Sex tours in third world hideaways
* Repairing/sabotaging intimate relationships
* Various forms of self abuse too sad, desperate and vile to be cataloged herein
* Bitching: topics to numerous to merit cataloging herein

The lesson? While many fly fishermen actually enjoy the occasional bout of fishing, there are many, many “expert”, “lifelong” fishermen who simply do not. These are invariably the smartest, most accomplished and most elite anglers you could meet in a day. Do not attempt to discern a non-fly fisherman from an actual fly fisherman as the no-fishers are black belted in the darker arts of bullshit, deception, and half-truths. In truth and in fact, it is best to approach any fly angler with trepidation, not because they may deceive on the nature of their quarry, but on the very nature of their avocation itself. Sad. Very, sad indeed, but yet a burden of lies, damn lies, horseshit, deception, puffery, balderdash and idiocy anglers have shouldered for centuries upon centuries. This shall not change.

friends, stains, et. al.,

we have returned, kicking and screaming, from the glorious Dean River and the laser awesomnality that is the often-hooked-but-seldom-landed, severely underrated, pretty-sure-they’re-gonna-beat-your-ass-with-a-whole-lotta-what-the-fuck-just-happened Dean River Chinook fishery.

our heart is pure, our body is toast, our bottom hand doled out 14 hour days of 100-foot swung-fly bitchslaps and our balls are strong.

fact: chinook are the new steelhead.

more soon.

Looking east at the San Pedro River Valley and San Jose Peak, Mexico, State of Sonora. This valley is the probable route of Coronado into Arizona.

“The general and his force crossed the country without trouble, as they found everything peaceful, because the Indians knew Friar Marcos and some of the others who had been with Melchior Diaz when he went with Juan de Saldivar to investigate.

After the general had crossed the inhabited region and came to Chichilticalli, where the wilderness begins, and saw nothing favorable, he could not help feeling somewhat downhearted, for, although the reports were very fine about what there was ahead, there was nobody who had seen it except the Indians who went with the negro, and these had already been caught in some lies. Besides all this, he was much affected by seeing that the fame of Chichilticalli was summed up in one tumble-down house without any roof, although it appeared to have been a strong place at some former time when it was inhabited, and it was very plain that it had been built by a civilized and warlike race of strangers who had come from a distance.”

-Chronicle of the Journey of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado written by Pedro de Castaneda, of Najara.

-Monsoon Rains moving over the northern terminus of the Sierra Madre Moutains

In today’s New York Times, Jimmy Prozac goes fishing with flowers. Yep, flowers. Now I’m all about getting it done- synthetics, naturals, tipping a crazy charlie with a small piece of shrimp, whatever, but this, well, read for yourself:

“Gorinsky dropped the anchor and pointed to a shaded spot against the bank. In one small concentrated area, one could see fish’s mouths poking out of the water to take the drifting flowers. In some cases, the fish were eating the flowers with forceful and splashy abandon.

Gorinsky tied a pink flower fly on my line, and I cast it into the eddy. It took a few casts to get the right drift — the fish would not take the fly if it dragged, if it did not look as if it were floating naturally.”

Full Article 

From New West Network:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Full Text Here

Grey Drakes. GREY DRAKES, GODAMMIT!! Hot and heavy and everywhere. Not to mention PMD’s, three kinds of caddis, craneflies and a smattering of Flavs. Oh, and did I mention somber, picky fish? Oh yes! Many of them! A few even came up and performed the troutski version of flipping the bird by lightly smooching our offerings.

We worked, we sweated, we hauled and hiked and rowed and switched up our game like our lives depended on it.

They even set their vipers upon us.

And in the end, we came dangerously close to joining in their mordant mope-fest. But nay, not even a supreme beatdown kept us from hanging our hats on hope and vowing redemption with new schemes on the drive home…

Hiya Scamps!

You know, being a disembodied jabbering head sorta limits my mobility, which leaves me lots of time to surf the web. And enjoy this Camelbak full of sweet mother bourbon (thanks guys). Anyway, I’ve been watching our stats, especially the search terms that people are using to find us with The Google and whatnot. Let’s have a look at the notables from the last 30 days and see just how weird you freaks really are:

how to fly fish
Oh man, uh oh. Really? Um. We don’t have bail money for you. Sorry. Would you like to buy some stickers?

bigfoot sighting
bigfoot sightings in pa
pa bigfoot sightings
sightings of bigfoot in pa
bigfoot in western pa
bigfoot sightings in pennsylvania
bigfoot of pa
Hey Wook! Your mom’s looking for you! Jeebvs, I think the bigfoot post was from our very first week of operation. I wonder how disappointed they are when they end up here. “AWW, I was SO CLOSE!”

mingo’s girl
Yes yes, we know. Relax, horn dawg art lover. These things take time.

chicks fishing
porn fish.com
No really. Stop. It’s just sad now.

donny beaver
Everybody loves the Donald.

fat boat
Corpulent Cruise Lines?

ass black buster
What?

rainbow bologna
Oh. That’s what.

fisheries in merde
You, anonymous internet person, are in the right place.

pictures of western pa trees
Where bigfoot might be hiding. We understand.

springer sluts
This is Bacon’s doing.

izaak walton animated gif
Is available for children’s parties. Rock on, mvthafvsticvs!

Complete with a rechargeable battery and what looks like a mini-gaff:

Demo:

Git Yours Today!!