Caught Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band at the local watering hole last night. One of the most kick-ass, high-energy shows I’ve seen in a while. Not to mention The Rev’s guitar playing will leave you slack-jawed. They’re on tour right now, and if they’re in your neck of the woods, don’t miss it:

Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, they apparently loves them some bass as much as do.

 Linkage.

pink salmon run

As you read this 5 million pinks are on their way home to the rivers and streams of the Puget Sound.

WDFW breaks it down

Snohomish – 1.8 million
Skagit – 1.2 million
Green – 894,000
Puyallup – 688,000
Stillaguamish – 392,000

Organize a dawn patrol and assemble at your local beach pronto!

Just in time to fever pitch the summer steelhead season stoke and right before you start asking yourself why in the hell you’re not headed to BC this fall, Action Man with the Action Plan Lani Waller graces PDX Friday and Bend on Sunday to cram a heapin’ pile of steelhead skater soul food down your hungry cakehole. Should be pretty bomber to hear the man speak again and all joking aside, this is one dirty old hippie steelheader who’ll mainline you some heavy mojo. He’s one of the greats an awesome young punk like you might even learn a couple billion things from.

A badass dry fly steelheader of more than 45 years and counting, Mr. Waller will be reading from his new book  A Steelheader’s Way and then getting deep on some heavy-vibe Lani  philosophicalizations about life and all-things-steelhead, which for a lot of us, sorta go hand in hand. Above all, it’s a hella good example that, despite age differences and flyfishing styles and whether or not you say Dude or Mister or what sort of pants you wear, real steelheaders do speak a common language called Soul.

Tickets are $25, with every single nickel of the proceeds going to the Native Fish Society, who will in turn use that cash to fund critical habitat projects, science-based studies on which to create more-informed fish policy and advocate for the recovery of wild, native fish in a political climate where most everyone else just wants a bunch of swimming hot dog hatchery puke and to stuff their head in the dirt. Flattered to have Mr. Waller as a supporter.

Where:

July 31st, 6:30 pm
Ecotrust Building, 721 NW 9th
Portland, OR

August 2nd, 6;30 pm

McMenamin’s St. Francis, 700 NW Bond

Bend, OR

Call the Native Fish Society office (503-829-6202) now to reserve your place.
SWEET: Beer and wine available for purchase.
 

from Dave P in PA

from the same gig… awesome….

been waiting for something like this since a bitchin’ hot Eddy pinned that king on 2 lb. mono and made the lovesick Gussy follow that fish all night in The River Why’s Line of Light chapter…

Hot correspondence, just in from the Double R:

It’s about time. I mean, how many times do I have to go back and re-read The River Why, wishing there was another book, wishing there was another author who could capture the rain-soaked, moss-covered, sleep-deprived psychosis of life as a coastal steelheader?

Finally, Oregon’s own John Larison, the courageous author who brought us The Complete Steelheader (Stackpole Books, 2008), has delivered the goods. His new novel, Northwest of Normal, is a tight, gut-wrenching, fast-paced story about modern steelhead maniacs and those who suffer around them. Larison deftly portrays the ups and downs of life as a fishing guide, struggling with an uncertain future, tenuous and tangled relationships, and the economic and environmental demons that threaten to destroy wild fish and their natal rivers. His imaginary Ipsyniho, a small town and it’s river, is located somewhere in Western Oregon, with flavors of Cottage Grove, Siletz, Tidewater, Glide and Idleyld Park. The Oregon Country Fair, renamed “Carnival” in the book, figures prominently in the story line, as do the legendary pot growers of the upper Willamette Valley. Larison weaves a rich textile of sex, drugs, violence, betrayal, brotherhood, love and, or course those silvery sea-run rainbows that make us crazy.

I’ve been waiting for this book, and yet there was a natural reluctance to pick up and read a novel that presumes to describe my world, my life, my experiences, as Larison has done in Northwest of Normal. I was ready to hate it, but I ended up loving it. And I hope he keeps writing novels, because I want more.

I won’t give away more details of this great story, so no quick synopsis here. And be wary of other reviews and blurbs published on the internet. Most of the reviewers have either not read the book or missed the point. It’s not “humorous” or merely “quirky.” It’s tough, painful, frantic and true to life. You’ll be handing it off to your friends before you know it.

Here’s an all-too-real excerpt:

“You’d think between the two of us, we could convince a dumb hatchery clone,” Danny said while walking down the beach, his fly line kept aloft by short strokes with his single-hander. No one could cast like Danny. He leapt onto a rock, the movement of his torso and arms already gaining speed, and released the forward stroke: the rod arching into a C then snapping straight, a tight curl of line unfolding toward the distant horizon—the whole fly line, at precisely the same moment, leveled and settled to the river. Danny’s casts wrote cursive across the sky.

Andy D-looped another cast and felt the current bring the line into its swing. He looked to Danny, and the rod nearly jerked out of his hand. A fish. He raised the rod and instantly felt the telltale thump, thump, thump of a steelhead on the other end. Danny shouted, “About time!”

The line razored open the water, a thread of river climbing the monofilament.  And then it was beside them, airborne, its silver body contorting wildly—a heavy bird taking flight. The fish dove under the rushing rapid, the neon line giving chase off its tail, and strained against both rod and current. When it finally tired and came near shore, Danny swiped it with the net.

He trotted up the bank, beaming at the weight in his hands. “Good fish,” he said.

Andy reached in, took the hen by its gill, and pressed it to the stones.  He lifted a rock and smashed its head.  The body throbbed under his grip, trying to find water and escape. He came down two more times, fast and hard, and finally the body quivered—its spinal cord cracked and its misery ended. Thank you.

“Andy.”

He lifted the fish by its gill.  A stream of blood ran down its lateral line.

“Andy,” Danny said, pointing at the tail.

There, fat and obvious even in the low light, was a healthy and natural adipose fin. The dead fish, still quivering in his hand, wasn’t a hatchery clone at all, but a native steelhead.

bass water

I know they’re in here.  I drop the anchor in a spot where I can cast to a piling, a sunken log, overhanging branches, a weed bed and that mysterious looking dark hole up against the bank.  I slowly work the fly through every piece of cover. Then pull the anchor, work the shoreline; paddle, anchor, cast, retrieve.  Nothing moves to the bug.  The sun’s long set when I drag the boat out of the pond. On the drive home I think about bass flies and what would have worked.

Within any story there’s gotta be a million trillion backstories, and this one starts pretty near around 2001, I think. Winter season, highwater February and it’s cold as all get out. This guy and I keep running into each other on the river and over the course of these meetings, I befriend a stain I’d eventually come to call the Cap’n. Now, the Cap’n's real name was Jeff Mishler and while he’s a pretty interesting guy in his own right, the lines (and flies) he was fishing almost 10 years ago now were diabolical and being a fool for winter fish, I had to know more. I’d never seen anything like these shooting heads, pieces of level 14, 15 and 16 wt. saltwater lines all spliced together with 50 lb. Cortland braid fulla Aquaseal to make a shooting head some 20 feet shorter that I was fishing at the time, casting heavily weighted flies a full five or six inches long clean as all hell. Clearly, this Cap’n fucker had seen something paranormal.

Flash forward a few months or a year, can’t remember on account it’s all a blur of rainsheets and backroad two-tracks and whiskey and pieces of cut lines and somehow myself and a few friends had been indoctrinated into Cap’n's renegade basement band of steelhead line fiddlefuckers, pretty much fishing together constantly, keeping each other’s secrets and proudly still are to this day. Got so bad back then we started calling line companies, buying up old backstocks of these saltwater heads nobody wanted and making these lines folks had come to call Skagit heads, all borne out some mythical creature named Ed the Cap’n had lived with in Russia. With these new lines we were making based on something Ed told Jeff and a few others who told someone who told someone who told someone else, our winter steelhead rods started to go from 15 foot 10 wts. and 14 foot 9′s to 13′ 6″ 8 wts, the 13′ 7′s and smaller each year. Seemed like every season we were fishing smaller and lighter sticks because we could actually cast the flies we wanted to, and it wasn’t just my friends and I. This shit was quietly happening all over the Northwest, influenced directly by one guy a lot of us had never yet met, stories passed down through some quasi-Indianlike oral tradition around rainy winter campfires, building to legends and more and more ideas followed by questions. Fucking magic, all that. Felt like an entire region of winter steelheaders were in on something super sinister you couldn’t find out about unless you knew someone who knew something. Home-built gear, light years ahead of anything commercially available at the time, super tailored to the rivers we were and still are fishing. Best part was hearing the Cap’n tell the Kamchatka stories about his campmate Ed, who’d apparently had this box full of line diagrams he’d drawn out and cut lines stashed under his bed. No one was allowed to look. Ed was abstinent about it. He said the lines were built not just to cast more efficiently without tiring after sun-up to sundown winter sessions, but to cast certain flies he called Intruders. Like the lines Ed was building, we all promptly picked up on and perverted his Intruder into a million different variations of flies. Flies that actually swam instead of just swinging. Crazy-ass nutjob shit, right?

Wrong. I’d later learn and eventually sit down and get to tell Ed what exactly his fiddlefucking meant to winter steelheaders like me and a hundred others, I’m sure. Without knowing it, Ed fueled an entire culture with his badass, limitless ideas about what we all could do with a two-handed rod on the winter rivers we called home. What I didn’t know at the time was I was watching—even participating, in part, along with a whole bunch of guys—in a fundamental change to fly fishing culture on a worldwide level starting here in the Northwest and moving east to friends in the Western Great Lakes and further. I gotdam hate the word revolution, but that’s really what it was. Ed’s revolution, whether he wanted it or not. We’d all seen too far into where he was going to ignore it or stop it and it was perfect. Fucking perfect. By the time companies caught on and we didn’t have to cut our own lines anymore, guys we’d meet from Sweden and Scotland were talking about this Skagit thing as if the techniques and technology had transcended one region and reigned the Northwest terror across damn near every anadromous river on the planet. Ed’s ideas even gave birth to T-Bone Larimer’s ideas for the Airflo Compact Skagit, what many consider to be the best gotdam salmon and steelhead shooting head a fella could fish on the Northwest rivers, taking Ed’s idea of a shooting head 3 to 3.5 times the rod length and pushing that even shorter and more efficient. Commercial fly patterns followed suit. Rods were designed around the heads. Single-handed lines based on Ed’s influence were designed for steelhead, trout and bass fishing. Then two-handed trout and smallmouth rods for swinging smolts and sculpins. The shit became bigger than one river or region. Ed’s ideas became an industry.

And still, you go back to Ed. Still fishing more than most, probably headed upriver on the Ktok at this very second to some backchannel full of rainbows for a night of rolling soul, not saying a whole helluva lot unless you ask, still thinking and pushing the boundaries of what, exactly, a two-handed rod is capable of and still rocking Megadeth or something on the way to the river each day.

Fuckin’ A, Ed, you dirty old Pork Rind. Thanks for your brain, stoke and thanks for the soul, man. I, we, mean that with the most honest of intention. And thanks to the Cap’n for capturing a bit of how much Ed’s influence changed what could be done on a Northwest steelhead river. Can’t wait to see the rough cut, Cap’n. For now, we gotta settle for the trailer:

the left foot of god

The calm before the storm that chased me off the flats after a short afternoon of quality capr fishing – high water, wide flats and feeding capr.

Thank you, Bob+Silver Bullet Band…

thee mighty SUNN O))))  are currently on tour. bring earplugs, holmes.

This prop-frog was inspired by Jim Stewart’s Buzz Bug.

From Flies For Bass And Panfish, Stewart and Allen, 1992.

Designed to mimic popular wood or plastic suface bass plugs.  When retrieved with short strips the propeller spays water and causes a surface disturbance.

If you happen to be one of those people who still have confidence that Northern Dynasty, the company behind the proposed Pebble Mine, will somehow run an entirely clean operation with no impact on the surrounding environment, or that ND’s COO, Bruce Jenkins, is truly being honest when he says things like, “it’s premature for any reasonable person to formulate an opinion about whether or not this project’s benefits outweigh the risks,” just consider that one method Northern Dynasty has proposed for disposal of its toxic tailings is to pump the waste into Lake Iliamna, and/or other surrounding lakes. For those unfamiliar with the area, Lake Iliamna is the largest freshwater lake in all of Alaska, home to the headwaters of critical salmon spawning rivers, and to the people who live along its shores and depend on its salmon runs.

On Monday, July 5th, in a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court made it far easier for Northern Dynasty to pursue that possibility if it chooses to do so, by upholding a definition put forth by the Bush Administration to label mine tailings as “fill” rather than pollution, therefore skirting around prohibitions stated in the Clean Water Act. While the ruling in question concerned the Kensington gold mine in southeast Alaska (owned by Coeur), which had petitioned to be able to dispose of its tailings into nearby Slate Lake, it is also one method that is being considered by the Pebble Mine as well. Yesterday’s ruling makes it a much more likely possibility given that other disposal methods tend to be a lot more costly.

Damn the justices of the Supreme Court who voted in favor this ruling (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Breyer and Kennedy); a ruling which undermines the very type of thing that the Clean Water Act was intended to outlaw. Far beyond merely the Bristol Bay issue, however (as if that isn’t bad enough), this ruling opens the doors to a potentially devastating amount of impact to our watersheds wherever mining activity occurs.

Read Alaskan commercial fisherman Izetta Chambers’ passionate op-ed piece on the Supreme Court ruling in the recent Anchorage Daily news.

For more on this decision, and other recent, quietly-made Supreme Court decisions which help protect corporate polluters, in the recent L.A. Times: Justices Ok Dumping Mine Waste in Lakes.

And if you’ve somehow been living under a rock and haven’t heard about the Pebble Mine, or the award-winning film by Feltsoul titled, “Red Gold,” check the trailer and learn more here.

I’ve been over to Dos’ place and yes he does have at least three benches set up.

From Dos Zapatos.

send yours to salty@busterwantstofish.com

Wherein the loud Americans get all wooty. Here’s your host, the Hideous Jabbering Head of Izaak Walton with a nakkin on!

This is all the confidence that I can put on, concerning the merit of what is here offered to their consideration and censure; and if the last prove too severe, as I have a liberty, so I am resolved to use it, and neglect all sour censures. So eat chain, haters! Let’s blow some shit up!

“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.” -(The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784,Harvard University Press, 1975, 142).

“Whoever dares to look upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about” -Brigadier Lord Hugh Percy after returning from Lexington Green, April 19th, 1775.

Brother Glista tied this special yesterday just for us. But since we just can’t have nice things, he’s gonna give it away. It’s Buster’s Fourthe of Julye Name That Flye Contest! Name that fly in the comments, Glista will pick his favorite and send you the fly. Best get on it, because he’s probably been drinking and who knows how or when he’ll decide.

This is just fucking beautiful in a hilarious way.

“Gay Loggers for Jesus President Brian Leland said his group offers a more fiscally conservative Independence Day parade. Unlike the Tea Party, his group will pay for all costs incurred by the march, he said.

“To us, it seems really ironic that an organization that is concerned about taxpayer burdens, taxes, spending by government, that they should incur additional costs to the city,” Leland said.

Leland said his organization currently does not include any loggers or homosexuals, but is open to anyone.”

Bra-friggin’-vo, fella. Gaper, can you grab me a t-shirt?

June 5th, 1976. Teton county, eastern Idaho. The dam on the Teton River failed, sending a wall of water 15 feet high and 7-8 miles wide, downstream.

11 people were killed.

Thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed.

Estimates of the damage were well over $1 billion (in 1976 $).

During construction, Trout Unlimited teamed up with other concerned groups and filed an injunction to get construction on the dam suspended, citing inadequate environmental analysis. The judge threw the injunction out, and construction continued.

One of the points raised by the coalition was insufficient examination of the porous rock on site. The porous nature of the rock that the dam was built on was noted as a key reason for the dam’s failure.

The dam failed before it had entirely filled. It continues to be the worst failure in the history of the Bureau of Reclamation.

Fast forward to today. The State of Idaho has recently granted $800,000 to research new water containment options in the upper Snake region, including considering rebuilding the Teton Dam.

The Teton River is home to a struggling population of native Yellowstone cutthroat. There are other, safer and less impactful options to address eastern Idaho’s water needs.

She won’t make the jump to light speed but the SloughVette is plenty fast.  Stealthy too.

This one’s pal saw the fly first but she jumped on it, leaving him in a puff of mud.

Come to Daddy.

Right in the kissa!