submitted via fax from Brandon S’ travel trailer on the banks of the Little Red River in Arkansas

Other than one little cutty about half-again as big as my fly, this fella’s the payoff for three consecutive days on three separate rivers. Only about 1/3 the mass of Mr. Pete’s, but I’ll take it.

Fish, eat and bid for charity.

WHUT: Northwest Camp
WHEN: August 7, 8, and 9, 2009
WHERE: KRO Ranch near Troy, Montana and all trout streams within reasonable driving distance
WHO: All are welcome
WHY: Raising funds for Catch A Dream

Mark your calendar. It’s for a great cause in a great place surrounded by great water. What more incentive do you need?

Donations are being accepted. WATCH THIS SPACE for details and updates.

As if it needed saying, fishing and other frivolous mayhem happens all weekend. Dinner, auction, silent auction, raffles and entertainment begin at 8pm on Saturday (hint: Buster wants that scale model Clacka for Christmas. Two if possible. Never mind why).

from Tom G at Alfred Feather Merchants, Maine

send yours to salty@busterwantstofish.com

Tyson Spey – from the fevered mind of Buster stalwart (Obi-) Jon, and the vise and lens of Brother Glista. Purple zwerkin.

I don’t see any blood

From the Seattle Times

“I had every intention of releasing it once we documented it, but then I noticed it was bleeding quite heavily,” Harrison said. “The fish didn’t look like it was going to survive, and because it was the fish of a lifetime, I decided to keep it.”

As usual there is more scuttlebutt on the WAFF.

from Bill C in Minneapolis, MN

send yours to salty@busterwantstofish.com

It began as escapism. It was an activity saved for family vacations, happy times where dad had a cooler full of beer and I was allowed to drink all the cokes I wanted. Impale a worm, drown it under a bobber and see what happens, fishing is very simple when you’re 4. With each passing year It has become a much more elaborate form of escapism but remains, at it’s core, an escape. When paired with drugs and alcohol, it is a detached, wobbly form of escape. When paired with crackling cold, sunrise light and solitude it is an empowered, confident form of escape.

It is an excuse to hike, to climb, to scramble up a loose rock face with slobbery cork pressed between my teeth. It’s an excuse to go away for days or weeks or months on end, to sleep in the dirt, to not shave. It’s an excuse (at least temporarily) to live with simple purpose: find water, find shelter, find fish, find that there are moments left over, fill them. It’s a justification to climb the highest scrabble peaks that hide cold alpine lakes or slide through swampy jungle mangrove lagoons in stealth-mode kayaks. It’s the only good reason I can think of to go to Florida. It can be enjoyed in backyard ponds and neighborhood creeks in the thin window between work and dinner. For those with the means, it can be a great way to drop ten grand in a week living in plush comfort in some of the least hospitable corners of the world. At its best, it is an excuse to connect with a select few other people who “get it”. At its worst, when there are too many people who “get it” and they begin to get in my way, it is an excuse to hate the world and its ever-increasing population for encroaching on what is so obviously “mine”.

I wasn’t raised on fly-fishing, I found it. In my house Dad played video games. There was no boat and before I displayed an unprecedented interest in fooling aquatic vertebrates, there was no tackle either. For three weeks every summer we would travel to northern Wisconsin where extended family had a cabin on a small lake. A decade before I would discover women or weed, I was immersed in fishing. In fact, until there were girls and ganja, the two things I cared about were fishing and baseball. My uncles taught both my father and me to fish and it became a way for us to connect. Fishing and brewing beer together would guide our relationship through the frothing rock garden of my teen years.
Even though I only got to wet a line in fresh water 1/25th of the year, I spent the other 49 weeks preparing for those 21 days. By the age of eight, I was reading Roland Martin’s bass fishing books, Tony Rizzo’s Musky chasing books and had a subscription to In-Fisherman magazine. By age ten, I found my uncle’s old fiberglass 7ft packrod rigged with an automatic wind reel tucked in the rafters of his open-air porch. I flailed away on the dock, piling line in front of me and picking off bluegill with little foam spiders. As I was hauling in one of those struggling panfish, I saw an s-curve and a flash and then the bluegill was gone, lodged headfirst into the throat of a pike. I fought it to the dock and tried to lift it out of the water, unsure of what else to do. It shook violently and freed itself. The bluegill popped from the gullet of the pike very much alive with only a few puncture wounds. The pike swam away slowly, it disappeared with a sway of weeds. When I think of that fish, I see it through the wide eyes of my ten year old self and it is massive. Though probably no more than six or seven pounds, that pike is seared in my memory as a trophy. That fish became my red herring, my scapegoat. I blame that fish for much of what came later, when he freed himself from the gill’ stuck his throat and controlling him, it was almost like it transferred to me. From then on, it seems like I’ve been led around by the fly rod.

Every fisherman (or woman) has a creation story. It might be the one good thing that an abusive, errant father bestowed on his son before fading into the night. Maybe it was what you used to do with your neighbor during summer vacations, you’d wake up early after a rainstorm and collect the worms that had emerged from the soil, dropping them into an old mayonnaise jar on the road to the lake. In your sixth decade of life you may have been invited to a fishing lodge with some business partners only agreeing to go because it was important to remain in their favor and there you may have discovered a passion you will carry the rest of your life. Maybe you had an ex-boyfriend who was a fishing guide and the ability to throw a tight loop was the only thing he left you. Possibly you have always had this intense interest in fishing. You don’t know why, you’ve never even been fishing but something about it just appeals to you, something about oceans, lakes, rivers and estuaries. Probably, it started out as an excuse to get out of the house, an excuse to be on the water. Inevitably it becomes an escape.
All fishermen are escapists, like alcoholics, adrenaline junkies, or television addicts (some of us are all of these things) we seek a way out of the drudgery that can overwhelm everyday life. Fishing is a black hole of resources: time, money, sanity. Many people have written of the virtues fishing teaches to the youth: patience, observance, silence, respect for wild places and an understanding of the importance of conservation. They claim that these virtues transcend from the water to the office or the home. I say bullshit, that’s just an excuse used to justify a constant vacillation between selfishness (fishing) and responsibility (work, family, etc). My patience on the river translates to an overwhelming impatience with being in an office or watching re-runs of Friends on the couch with a girlfriend. A true, bone-deep fishing jones has caused more than a few people to shirk all of their “important” responsibilities. I’ve given two hours notice, stripped healthy bank accounts, and left women crying in confused anger as I loaded up the truck, grabbed the dog and took off.
Fishing will not make you a more productive, healthy member of society. If you do it right, fishing will make you a lonely old misanthrope whose equity includes a beater truck, a slumping trailer near a body of water, several cases of beer, a small “garden” out back and whole rooms overflowing with rods, reels, lines, partridge skins, vices, bobbins, tweezers, nippers, silicone, prescription pills and hooks in every size shape and color imaginable. Your only friends will be your dog, the guys at the fly shop and the few friends who, like you, have managed to avoid the lull of domesticity. Fishing, like heroin addiction or religious cult membership will realign all of your priorities. They will be distilled into one flaming need: to be on the water as much as humanly possible.

The Dread Pirate Captain Jay with his special custom cork ‘toon. Word at the launch is that he paid extra for it because “he’s a wee little nancy about sinking.” But nobody would say it very loud.

From Unfrozen Caveman. Send yours to wook@busterwantstofish.com

The orange blocks illustrate the 48-year clear-cut plan for the Wilson River, just one of the seven major drainages on Oregon’s North Coast that will be devastated by clear-cut logging in our State Forests, an antiquated resource extraction model that puts wild salmonids and an entire region’s identity at the expense of the almighty, temporary dollar. The black lines illustrate the absolutely essential salmon anchor habitat at risk.

All the unproductive banter that’s gotten us relatively nowhere in the last 50 years aside, consider what it’s like to fish with a monkey this orange and ugly on your back; No matter how much time, effort, hard-earned cash and sweat we’ve all tried to put towards giving back something to the watersheds that have saved and defined our lives, it seems you’re always, eventually left standing there. Shaking in anger and disbelief at how far outta perspective things have truly gotten as the numbers of returning fish get worse, year in, year out.

Below hillsides scraped of vegetation, spawning gravel buried by slides and siltation, and the endless parade of log trucks driving precious carbon off to be milled overseas, you keep at it. You’re still out there, waded knee deep in that perfect river with your fly swinging through the fast seam that meets the slow, soft inside. But these days, you’re only half-fishing that gorgeous bluegreen water. Instead, you’re preoccupied with a final emotion far more real.

You can’t get that picture of your friend Jeff’s beautiful boy, age 2, out of your head. Or Darin’s son, age 4. Carter’s girl, age 6. Or maybe your unborn kid, scared to death of the very real possibility that you might be among the last generation of fishermen to really know the true stoke of wild, native Northwest fish.

I’ve seen the latest fish porn videos, and I’ve read all the fool-ass magazines and still, I can’t be any more honest when I type the following:

This is how it feels be a steelheader in 2009.

That money can’t buy you love, but it can help our native fish:

www.nativefishsociety.org

www.wildsalmoncenter.org

www.wildsteelheadcoalition.org

March Brown, Poly Wing

#12 TMC 900BL, mallard flank, rusty/brown dubbing, brown polypro yarn.

I’ll stand on the bank and wait for it.  For a short time the march browns will come off in great numbers.  The duns will appear upright and whole, having transformed completely before they break the surface.  The current will quickly consolidate them upon the seams and eddy lines of the river.  Trains of mayflies drift downstream until they disappear up through the air or into the mouths of trouts.

from Josh in St Paul

send yours to salty@busterwantstofish.com