Since ice-out the whole world’s brimful of water and overflows with each passing blow, it seems. Down low the trillium are blooming with wet feet, but nobody can tell whether the Hendricksons have read the memo, and we’re all standing around at the pull-offs looking sideways at each other and not daring to complain about too much water. When the sun finally emerges it’s instantly warm, and we groan and stretch and make note of the fattening buds on the branches, and oh did you see the stickjam blew out up there by the Wall Pool. Yeah, the pool that’s had a standing wave in it for weeks, right, and we’re off to have a look at this meadow or that little feeder, splash-crashing through widening potholes full of the same caramel-colored water that’s now carving off the oxbow up by Bill’s place. It’s enough to make a guy quit drinking just so he can start again.

On the way home there’s a guy in red-checkered flannel way out in his yard, reclining in a lawn chair next to his burn pile and smoking a cigar. Damned if he isn’t going to burn something. Viking points for hanging tough, flannel man, might not rain tonight.

Towanda Creek is a small Susquehanna trib in northern PA. It’s a put & take trout stream at its upper end, and becomes more of a smallmouth thing later on. There’s a thousand streams just like it, maybe you know one or two.

It already suffered from low summer flows before the hydrofrackers moved in and started drawing water off to mix with sand and salt and proprietary chemical brewskis to make fracking fluid to be injected into their gas wells. Thousands of gallons of water are used for this, and it’s gotta come from somewhere, and in July you can just hope they leave enough for the fish.

Fish find ways to survive low flows. Well, some of them do anyway, at least for a while, we hope. But now there’s been an accident at a gas well near the headwaters, and words like “uncontrolled”  and “blowout” and “emergency” are being used to describe the spill of fracking fluid that swamped the well site and dumped into poor Towanda Creek. Shares of Chesapeake Energy Corporation, named after the bay to which their vomitous oopsie will ultimately flow, are up 3%. Way to go, pricks.

He was a balding glob with a patchwork sunburn and his accent suggested Tuscaloosa or Biloxi or maybe Shreveport.

The fish were prowling up and down the beach in front of his house. I assumed it was his house because he was standing on the balcony in his grippers and leaning on the rail and scratching his balls while pointing out what we already knew.

“They’re chasin MINNERS. Can’t y’all see them clouds a bait?”

We’d flubbed the first couple of shots but the tide was still cranking and the fish were still moving in and out of the bait swarm.

“Try a little ole silver spoon, or sumpthin. They won’t eat that damn HAIR.”

There was a bust at our twelve o’clock and a big shower of anchovies.

“Here comes a nuthern…BIG BASTARD…see that big white hole in the middle of that bait…he’s smack-dab in it!”

The fly landed and the fish elevated and nosed it and turned away. The fat man laughed and swigged his beer.

We stopped to change flies and he watched us from the balcony for a bit and then he hitched up his drawers and waddled inside.

When he came back out he was gashing on a sandwich the size of a coon and we were hair-tight to one of his goddamn tarpon.

The Hudson bass have an edge to them, seeing as they survived 30 plus years of General Electric trying to kill the river with polychlorinated biphenyl. When they start rolling in the early season into the tidal creeks and mud flats, the hibernation is over.

The Chesapeake bass had it in a bad way this winter, with 10 tons worth strangled in the poaching incident we know about, but the Hudson bass keep coming. As John Waldman wrote in his book Heartbeats in the Muck, “The population was conserved through the inadvisability of its consumption.”

I’ve seen people keep city fish. I bet they don’t realize the extra zing in the meat comes courtesy of the people who made their toaster oven.

This is a bridge and tunnel crowd. One of the guys here took the subway then the bus and walked the last stretch along the street in his boots and waders. It’s spring, time for everybody to do what they do.

I can think of a handful of places in the Columbia River Drainage where a fella could make a go of it.

synopsis…

the whole enchilada…

NY Times Article.

I’m late to the party on this one, but maybe you are too. Heads up. Been wearing out The Holy Coming of the Storm by Cahalen Morrison & Eli West. It’s been getting heavy, heavy rotation all winter long down here in East L.A. To the NW folks: these are your neighbors (Seattle is where they reside), so go see ‘em. Sounds like they were born in a gotdam holler in West Virginny. Shit fire! They are good.

Three new scalawags have joined the ranks, you might spot them before we get around to introducing them. This is because we’re lazy and forgetful, and fishing season is warming up and we’re sorta distracted. Enjoy.

After one of the wettest months of March on record its difficult to speculate on when spring will arrive. All this rain is prolly a good thing tho. Hopefully all that snow melts off slow and easy, pushing lots of smolts downstream and keeping our rivers cool and flowy well into summer.

Haven’t heard of it? House Resolution 1 is the current bill before the House of Representatives, the attempt to address our massive federal deficit. I think most of us would agree that fiscally, we need dramatic changes in the way this country has been doing business. Borrowing 40¢ on every dollar the government spends is insanity, not to mention completely unsustainable.

The unavoidable bottom line, regardless of political partisanry, is that we are simply spending way too much money, and we can’t continue to do that. I get it. But as an angler and hunter, HR1 truly scares the living shit out of me, and I’m trying my damndest to no be alarmist here. It is obviously a huge bill, but here are just a few of the details that you might want to be aware of, and learn more about, if you care about the future of angling, hunting and conservation in this country:

- Amendment #215 (Rep. Bishop – UT) would strip the entire budget of the National Landscape Conservation System. Among other things, the NLCS manages 2,000 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers. This Amendment would also de-fund management of important sportsman destinations such as the Missouri River Breaks in Montana, which supports some of the healthiest elk and Bighorn sheep populations in the state. Cutting this funding would also have significant effects on many rural communities that rely on sportsman dollars.

- Amendment #216 (Rep. Mckinley – WV) would greatly undermine strip the EPA’s ability to uphold the Clean Water Act by stripping it of the authority to veto permits to the Army Corps for disposal of dredge and fill material in our nation’s waters that it deems would create unacceptable adverse impact, and to designate certain areas as off-limits for such disposal. In short, sludge – even toxic sludge, could pretty much be dumped anywhere they wanted to.

- Amendment #177 (Rep. Herger – CA) restricts funds from being used to implement and enforce the Off-road Vehicle Travel Management Plans (known as Subpart B of the Travel Management Rule), which the Forest Service has spent the last six years working with the public to develop. Unmanaged OHV use can destroy wetlands, severely impact wildlife habitats, cause soil erosion, damage important cultural resources and spread noxious weeds. To get a handle on its management of OHVs, the Forest Service initiated a Travel Management Planning process with extensive public involvement to identify a manageable trail system on national forests. This process is nearly complete. If this amendment were accepted, the investment of time and resources in developing Travel Management Plans for units of the National Forest System would be for naught, and the ecological impacts and recreational user conflicts associated with unmanaged OHV use would grow.

- HR1 would also cut $393 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund - a program that pays for itself through offshore oil and gas receipts. Using the Land and Water Conservation Fund to enhance habitat protections and recreational access helps to sustain hunting and fishing traditions and the outdoor economy.

Why HR1 would, for example, feel the need to cut a program that pays for itself, like the LWCF, hints at some of the possible motivations hidden in HR1. We absolutely need to tighten our fiscal belts. But when you take a close look at the cuts that HR1 focuses on (and perhaps more significantly, the many areas that it doesn’t), it’s very hard not to see a political agenda going on here. We can’t let hard economic times be used as the excuse for a bill that caters to corporate interest to the lasting detriment of our public lands, and our hunting and fishing heritage. And to do this under the premise that it’s about ‘fiscal responsibility’ when the cuts hint at a very specific agenda, is nothing short of manipulative artifice.

I would also recommend reading Hal Herring’s excellent piece posted today on Field & Stream’s blog:

A Crossroads For American Hunters and Anglers: What’s At Stake

And the negative impacts of HR1 described above are only a small part of it. You can find out more about the many harmful riders attached to HR1 by going here.

Recently it’s been brought to my attention (several times) that fly fishermen tend to be backstabbing, petty, vindictive, self-righteous, and downright misanthropic (and not in the good way). This is not in reference to the fly vs. gear fishing dichotomy, we’ve all heard that story and the narrative is both deeply ingrained and repetitive. I’m not going to pick up that rotten salmon and try to revive it.

Lately these conversations that I’ve had (both electronically and in real life with actual beer and inarticulate grunting pauses) have been about the venom that we fly-fishermen seem to have for one another. For a group of people that cultural and linguistic theorists would lump together in a singular “Discourse Community”, we sure do seem to hate one another, and I am as guilty as the rest of you. Think about it, how many times have you wished brutal bodily harm on the guy who got to that one hole you’ve been dreaming about before you did? How many curses have you flung (either under your breath or at the top of your lungs) at the boat that cut you off just as you were getting set up for a productive bank? How many of us have heard and told the stories of stream-side fist fights or (at least here in Montana) drawn firearms?

For me the bile rarely manifests in riverside confrontations; that’s not my style. Besides, when I’m actually fishing it’s pretty hard to piss me off.  I tend to get all itchy in the crotch when it comes to the things that happen around the making of money in relation to fly-fishing, especially in the writing and publishing arenas. I particularly spend far too much time (both in my head and out loud) bitching about people “in the industry”. I do this either to their faces, their inboxes, or just to other people that I happen to know (or have some sort of magical internet connection with).

Currently I’ve been talking a whole lot of shit about a guide/writer who seems to have made it his mission to sell out some of the few secrets that remain in this heavily fished part of the country. The truth is that I think destination writers are the scourge of the artistic earth. In my view they are either lazy or lacking in actual talent and so they have to get their work published on the strength of a little known resource rather than on the merit of their wordsmithing. Usually I verbalize this in a less tempered and more reactionary way however, criticizing the person’s worth as a human being rather than even attempting to see the world from his or her perspective. The thing is, I know this guy, he’s a nice guy. I don’t want to “eat his children” as Mike Tyson once said, and I don’t actually think he’s “a pathetic meatpuppet with the articulative capacity of an ocelot and the dental hygiene of a camel” as I said to a friend about him last week. But I do wish he would shut the fuck up and stop writing about the places that guides fish when they’re not guiding. There’s a reason that we don’t take clients there.

A certain industry magazine and I had a falling out last summer when they wrote up the two shops in this area that I think are solely interested in pimping out the fisheries and making the money. I wrote an overly dramatic and long-winded email to the editor who responded by essentially telling me to calm the hell down. He went on to say (quite politely) that I should be careful about where I deposit my excrement considering that we are all trying to eat off the same table. It was the same advice my father gave me when I was a freshman in college and I slept with two girls who both lived on the same floor that I did (sorry Dad, but it appears that I’m not that quick a study, I’m getting the same advice about proximity of shitting and eating 15 years later).  I was probably making way too much out of nothing, and introducing a whole lot of negative back-talk for no good reason. Perhaps the editor was right. I have no right to stand in judgment, but yet I judge all the same. We all draw our lines in the sand according to our interpretation of morality–”Across this line you DO NOT!”–it’s just that mine happens to be the right one.

None of this is new ground. I’m not saying anything original here. If there is a point to my rant, it is to say this: I lament the anger that I feel toward all those other fishermen, especially the soulless industry types (who are in actuality generally really nice guys) and I realize that I have no justification for it, but I feel it just as strongly and just as viscerally as ever.

So for those of you who will curse my name this coming year: I salute you. As a good friend of mine used to say (it really was his mantra), “we’re all assholes, every last one of us”. Amen, and fuck you.

Post Script– Please do note that I didn’t actually mention any names in the above narrative. That’s gotta be worth something, right karma? RIGHT?

I wandered around a bunch in the rain today. It didn’t rain all day, just sort of mist and sprinkles in the morning, then actual drops some time after noon. I glanced around at the raw earth, as I walked, for a morel and saw none. It was cold and I heard no frogs, saw few bugs and even fewer birds. The trees looked gray, their buds still tight. It didn’t seem fair.

I came upon a place where a large tree had been lodged during the last flood. It spanned from one bank, across 50 feet of rushing river, to an island. From the top of the island it was an easy crossing, through a tail out, to the far bank just below the pool I was going to fish. The tree was about two feet thick and covered in bark. It sat about three or four feet above, and parallel to, the water. One hundred feet down stream, the river converged at the bottom of the island and ran straight into a rock wall. Big hydraulics swirled across a deep tank and spun out into a huge back-eddy.

It would have been easy to walk across that damn tree.

I turned around and walked back to my rig, drove down the road, over a bridge and up to another pull-off, and bush-whacked down to the pool from there. I fished and I hooked nothing.

Then I fished some other places and the rain got heavy. Colder air came down with it and the wind picked up. My hands ached. Nothing ate my fly. I made a game of casting with goofy anchors and tiny D-loops, my line arcing high and fly plunging down under a pile of T-14. A trickle of water pooled at my elbow. The last cast came easy.

“Friendly Reminder”?

Really? Coupled with a toothless law that the folks at the CRC dept can’t enforce anyway?

Here’s a tip for the WDFW and the ODFW – Make it hurt if you don’t turn in your catch records. Screw the “friendly reminder” or ODFW’s lame-ass “you could win a boat if you turn in your combined tag!” bullshit. Steelhead ain’t exactly thriving, so wouldn’t it behoove you to gather as much data as possible before they’re ALL gone? I know y’all don’t like California much, but at least CDFG has the balls to make the failure of turning in a steelhead record an enforceable misdemeanor.

Alternately, the WDFW and ODFW could sack up and make it like SE AK and the ADFG – no bait use in 35+ systems and counting, coupled with zero retention on roadside waters and a one daily / two a year limit with a 36″ minimum everywhere else (at the risk of grievous bodily harm if us locals catch you). Several zero-pass weirs and a pile of index streams with weekly snorkel surveys are in play for the ADFG, and yet you fruitcakes in OR and WA won’t even make anglers turn in a catch record?

Pathetic.

Gamakatsu shiner hook
dark green rabbit
light green rabbit
3D eyes w/shoo goo
tungsten bead
50lb hard mono

“…you have to know what’s in the box.”

Down yonder south the bubbas have always known that nothing draws ole bucketmouth out of the dark and weedy like a lip hooked live shiner.

Not a biggiant fan of the ubiquitous borrowed creativity/identity, link-and-go horseshite so prevalent in the FaceBlogger copycat tutorial on Narcissism for Virgins 101 these days, but fuck it: some shit’s actually that good, there’s still a few days of winter steelhead season left in this old man, time’s of the essence and anything funny enough to make double-dark Stumptown french press escape my nose has to be positive for the world.

Rock chucking + strategic potato placement + a 180° No Comply = Best thing to come outta the fly fishing industry since Salty told the robots they don’t need $50 Abel nippers to cut 7X.

Best of Jimbo from Idylwilde Flies on Vimeo.

Remain vigilant. Seems to me, though, that this should be easier for fisherfolk than for others. Assuming everybody’s lying, I mean.

Punchline: it’s also the trout opener in NY. Set up your own joke, you’re so damn funny.

“…in France, those who are fooled on April 1 are called the “Poisson d’Avril” (the April Fish). A common prank (especially among school-aged children) is to place a paper fish on the back of an unsuspecting person. When the paper fish is discovered, the victim is declared a “Poisson d’Avril.” While it is not clear of the origins of fish being associated with April 1, many think the correlation is related to zodiac sign of Pisces (a fish), which falls near April.”

A paper fish. On your back. Haha jerk, now you’re an April Fish. Yeah that’s hilarious.