fishing for words

(and tossing out random thoughts)


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consideration of a vehicle as fly fishing tackle, and finding there’s no mid-life crisis car for fly fishermen

In the year of my 49th birthday, I’m talking to myself a bit more than usual. Sure, people tend to carefully back away when this happens, but it’s not what you think.

Lamborghini LM 002 : A fly fishing vehicle?

The LM 002, probably the only Lamborghini suitable for fly fishing decals/stickers.

Most of this mumbling is in the car on the drive to work during the early morning darkness — courtesy the early hour, daylight savings and welcome rain — and its rooted in an all-too-common internal dialogue, this time debating the vehicle that might best replace my trusty and economical 2003 Honda Accord sedan in about two years.

By now, putting two and two together would suggest this is about a ‘midlife crisis car.’ I prefer to think that it’s more a reflection of a better financial position, and certainly not indicative of compensation for some perceived inadequacy.

Why the heck would I think about something so far in advance? I’m a big proponent of saving a few thousand bucks buying a certified pre-owned vehicle, which are often covered by a warranty as good as, or better, than those covering new cars.

Unlike those who are retired or freelance from home — with a commute fueled only by coffee — my decision-making process involves a bit more pragmatism. It boils down to a reliable conveyance to the place of work, hopefully with a modicum of comfort at minimal cost.

But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Sporty would be nice.

When it comes to fishing, that better mileage certainly won’t be frowned upon during longer drives to trout waters. Maximization of fishing time requires space for a fully rigged 9-foot rod or three and all the associated fly fishing gear. Until a dedicated fly fishing vehicle joins the fleet, it’d be nice to have enough clearance for the occasional drive down a graded forest service road.  That eliminates sports cars.

Though the EPA ratings of many small SUVs/CUVs are in the 30 mpg range, my Accord regularly hits 32 to 34 mpg on many fishing trips, in the real world, even if that entails traversing both sides of the Sierras. And driving 250 miles a week to work adds up when gas is $4-plus a gallon. Wanting any replacement vehicle to do as well, or better, eliminates any truck and many crossovers. Sure, a Subaru is worthy of consideration, but only the revised 2013 Imprezza and its crossover version (the new XV) offer hope of better mileage, but seem to fail in the real world. The new Mazda CX-5 warrants some consideration, but it’s expected to earn an EPA rating about equal to the Accord. The Toyota’s RAV4 and Honda’s CR-V fall in the same range.

My conclusion is that I have no reason to impress the ladies there is no vehicle to satisfy all of the above requirements.   

Years ago I thought, as I took up fly fishing, that I’d get by with a single rod. While I’m not a rabid rod collector, in a few short years I’ve already accumulated half dozen rods, with each dedicated to specific types of flies, conditions or species. 

But as far as a vehicle goes, and for now being limited to one, it appears that practicality will win this round.

P.S. We’ve been through this before: an improving economy doesn’t lift all boats equally, but always lifts the price of gasoline. Maybe I’ve been desensitized to it, but the price of petrol here hovers near record levels, again, and will likely rise a few more nickels before California’s general trout opener. The journey, the food, and the companionship are all part of the experience. But how much money are you willing to spend on getting to that skunkin’?


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what we saw last week… (2012-03-14)

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the good side to a bad wet season

The '97 ready to roll.

An excellent combination: sun, clear skies and a motorcycle.

The separation between Northern and Southern California is customarily delineated by rainfall or lack thereof. But not so much this year. The hope of a Miracle March making up for a dry, spring-like January and February is fading fast. I’m just a little bit worried that not all of the recently tied flies will get wet this year.

Still, I shoved aside one hobby for another, rolled the motorcycle out of the garage, geared up, set the choke and pressed the starter. Spark plugs fired, the engine caught, then sputtered and died. I tried a second time, it sounded as if it were flooded. After more thought than it should have taken, it dawned on me that this March day was already warm enough that there was no reason to apply much, if any, choke.

My son and I hadn’t really decided where we might ride, just that we would. But Sean’s suggestion of the Russian River Brewing Co. had lodged in my head, so we headed out Hwy 37, skirting the northern edge of San Pablo Bay (which is part of and north of San Francisco Bay), through the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge — a significant destination on the Pacific Flyway — and along the southern reaches of the Sonoma and Napa valleys. A cloudless sky and migrating birds looked down upon us.

It was good to be in the saddle again, and though we’ve ridden together less than either of would probably like, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve developed enough awareness to anticipate each other and communicate simple messages through hand motions. A bit of this signaling after we passed Infineon Raceway (the old Sears Point) had us heading north toward Petaluma, past green fields dotted by sheep and their lambs. The last dozen miles or so were the least enthralling; this section of Hwy 101 just south of Santa Rosa is always at some stage of deconstruction, and the redwoods on either side of the road always seem dusty, dirty and thirsty.

Soon enough we pulled into the free public parking (bonus!) offered for motorcycles, which just so happened to be behind the Russian River Brewing brewpub. Winding out way past the bar and through the tables, it was immediately clear that this is a popular place. (I’d later find out that, unless you’re a diehard triple IPA fan, stay away when the brewery releases its ‘Pliny the Younger’ — some folks wait up to five hours in line for the new batch of BeerAdvocate’s top-rated beer for 2009.) We tossed our names at the hostess, stashed the coaster-style pager and gulped down a few glasses of ice water.

Russian River Brewing Co. Menu

The tap menu. We opted for the right side...and it was good. Very good.

The pub is appropriately dimly lit, and the dark wood throughout quickly absorbs any sunshine that makes it past the crowd drinking and generally carousing out front. We were seated about halfway between the front and back of the place, and I had an unobstructed view of the tap menu. We’d learn that the left side tended toward ‘aggressively hopped’ beers; the list to the right was comprised of Belgian-inspired ales and barrel-aged (sour) beers. Selecting the beers in your flight is easy: pick one list or the other or both. It was an easy compromise — I was paying after all — and we opted to try the ales and barrel beers, to be accompanied by a ‘Piaci’ pizza (mozzarella, marinara, gorgonzola and pine nuts) and some hot wings.

Russian River Brewing Co. Flight

The traditional thumbs up from Sean, and a well-deserved thumbs up it is.

The grub was pretty darn good. The beers were crazy good. Our tasting included Redemption (blonde ale), Perdition (bière de Sonoma), Sanctification (blonde ale brewed with Brettanomyces yeast), Supplication (sour aged in pinot barrels), Defenestration (hoppy blonde ale), Damnation (golden ale), Damnation #23 (golden ale, triple aged with oak chips), Temptation (sour aged in chardonnay barrels), Salvation (strong dark ale), Consecration (sour aged in cabernet barrels) and Collaboration (IPA style). Only the Consecration was not to our liking, mostly because the cabernet seemed give the brew an overpowering sweetness.

Our favorites — at least mine — included Sanctification (uniquely tart but crisp), Defenestration (a clean blonde with a hop finish that didn’t linger or kill the taste buds) and Damnation #23 (a full-bodied, semi-spicy golden ale offset with a bit of oak). Thankfully, the sample glasses were 2 ounces, and we lingered over bites of the pizza, the gnawing of the hot wings and discussions of each beer.

A few hours later, well rewarded for the hour-long ride there, we started up the bikes and headed east toward the Sonoma Valley, offloading some beer along the way. After a while, Sean peeled off the main road and I stopped to refill the tank (42 mpg) before the final few miles to home.

Perhaps it’s time to think about hunting steelhead on the Russian River; any unsuccessful day fly fishing could be brightened with a visit to this namesake brewery.


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moving at the speed of fly fishing

While the youngsters flit about, expecting a burger delivered before they order, fly fisherman become one of the last bastions of stubbornness patience in a world moving at the breakneck pace of broadband.

People will visit a commerce or news website less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).

‘Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,’ said Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft.
But speed matters in every context, research shows. Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading.”

via The Economic Times

As a youngster, I always assumed that those old fly fishing guys — a group to which I still feverishly claim not to belong — were slow because of age. Time’s revealed that I was a bit hasty in judging.

Sometimes it’s a method, sometimes superstition, and more often than we might care to admit, an unwillingness to think that it’s us that’s the problem…or a belief that any problem can be rectified with just one more cast.

It might be obvious that changing flies or moving up river is an answer to refusal after refusal after refusal. But obstinately I place faith in my ‘confidence flies.’ I don’t think I’m all alone; count the number of magazine articles, blog posts and forum discussions extolling anglers to swap flies after three refusals. And that same fisherman who knows the steelhead shuffle will sight cast to that single big brown while shadows grow longer.

Then there’s that one fish that’s the ‘fly in the ointment.’ The same fish that takes the fly on that last cast — the cast after which I was going to move up river; the cast after which I was going to change flies.

It’s that single fish that seems to have slowed me down; requiring the devotion of more time than appropriate thought to every move, every change, every cast.


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what we saw last week… (2012-02-29)

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can calling it a native fish make it so? or: how you can learn to stop worrying and love the fish that eats a fly

This week, I might be stepping into quicksand. If nothing else, it’ll be entertaining for the rest of you to watch.

While a good many local anglers applauded the California Fish & Game Commission’s decision at its Feb. 2, 2012 meeting to strike down proposed changes to striped bass regulations, changes that, at the very least, would degrade the quality of a fishery that supports considerable segments of the local economy, there was a curious footnote to the proceedings.

A desire to declare striped bass, introduced from the East Coast, as a ‘native’ California species.

California Fish & Game Commission’s then-Director Daniel W. Richards summed up the issue:

Another great comment that I heard today was this issue of what is native. [California Department of Fish & Game] Director Bonham and I had great conversation just yesterday about this. We are regularly, and just several months we were being challenged with a frogs and turtles matter of non-native species…it’s controversial and there’s both sides to it, and these striped bass have been here for 130 years. At what point in time do we…and some of the analogies we gave I thought were terrific, especially when you take it down to the human level, who’s a native Californian and who’s not. I thought it was really very apropos. I mean, they’ve been here 130 years, that’s, I don’t know, what is that, that’s three or four generations I think you’d probably call that. [Striped bass] starts to be fairly native to me.

After that, then-President Jim Kellogg, after pointing out that he worked on the first pump station on the Delta (1966-’69) and saw the numbers of fish those unscreened pumps dumped into the canal announced in his last act as president:

…because nobody’s got an answer as to how this is done, or who declares it or something like that, I’m going to declare the striped bass a native species in the state of California.

Central to the proponents of the new regulations painted striped bass — asking it be considered an invasive species — as largely responsible for the decline of the state’s salmon stocks. Opponents cited striped bass’ long history in the California Delta (declared a sport fish in 1935) and its coexistence with salmon and Delta smelt over that time. (The definition of ‘coexistence’ may be considered ill-defined in the absence of any hard, long-term, historical data.)

While most will agree that these proposed changes to the striper regulations was a thinly veiled water grab, it does bring to light a conflict that can arise between native and now wild populations of introduced fish, particularly without a firm scientific understanding that can overwhelm any argument from either side of the debate. And while the predation of introduced species changes ecosystems, there’s no scientific model to predict the consequences of eliminating such a long-entrenched species.

In the short span of our lives, does ‘native’ becomes anything that was here before us? Big brown trout and competitive rainbows have so well supplanted Lahontan cutthroat trout — it and the Eagle Lake Rainbow were once the only trout in the Easter Sierra — that rarely does one hear of an angler landing a decent Lahontan, expect those in Crowley Lake and the Upper Owens River. And it’ll be a shame when Lahontan cutthroat no longer exist in California, which is likely to happen.

But it’s hard to label the non-native trout that provide us so much recreation as ‘invasive.’

In any case, might these naturally reproducing fish populations better fit a status similar to that of ‘historical (living) landmark?’ Is there an appropriate measure of time before anyone can declare an introduced species to be a ‘naturalized citizen?’ And will the difference between native and naturalized fish populations eventually become indistinguishable, legally or otherwise?

Regardless of the answers, I’ll be the one overlooking the illegal immigration status of the trout that eats my fly.

If you’re interested, the video recording of the meeting can be found here; click on the link for Feb 2, 2012 and fast forward to about 1:35:00 for the start of the striper discussion.


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what we saw last week… (2012-02-22)

  • A species of chipmunks shifts 1,600 feet higher in the Sierras over last century. http://t.co/qXSGUZXJ #
  • I’m certain one could fit #flyfishing around a visit to every one of Forbes’ Ten Top #Microbreweries Worth A Visit. http://t.co/XKZ7EqUV... #
  • Simms to sell direct starting next August. Targets “brand fans,” leaving other buyers to fly shops. http://t.co/iuatb9RL #flyfishing #
  • Like the Dutch boy? Washington fights the pike-pocalypse in Columbia River tributary w/ catch-and-kill, gill nets. http://t.co/THyioQl0 #
  • No statue of limitations? 78-year-old granddad revists the scene of poaching in 1960s, thrown in jail, 43 years later. http://t.co/Y7nif9bX #
  • Questionable study shows no remarkable change in Sierra Nevada snowfall over last 130, though variable year to year. http://t.co/DjQDUjlh #
  • Where’s her wading belt? Joan Rivers falls while trying #flyfishing Better she stick to bass, they like plastics… http://t.co/Mnekylya #
  • Maybe they wanted gear for Polish nymphing? Boulder PD arrests suspect – a Polish national – in Denver-area rod thefts. http://t.co/nhPnALph #

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surprising ‘emergence’ suggests fly fishermen are a gullible an affluent bunch

The last few weeks have left me not thinking too deep about anything in particular except what the lack of rain and snowfall here will mean for fall conditions on my favorites Sierra streams. The vest finally got its annual washing, and the old granola bar found within tossed. A new list outlines small streams and larger rivers near the cabin but still unvisited out of laziness for lack of time. But there’ll be no piles of new gear this year. Just a few closeout flies, a new license, of course, and a few newly acquired hooks for tying as yet undetermined patterns.

It’s clear that I’ll not be doing much to support the industry, but the proliferation of fly fishing television shows suggests that the sport as a whole has become interesting, at least to cable programmers, even when one dismisses the dangerous fly fishing date on “The Bachelor.”

Fly Fishing TV ShowsMy DVR ‘fly fishing’ wish list has picked up more shows in the last month and half than recorded during all of last year, despite a limited cable line up in which the Outdoor Channel and NBC Sports Network née Versus are the main suppliers of these shows. I’m not so certain how or why some of these shows came into existence and made it to my cable line up, but there must be some belief they are worthy of some sort of cash outlay. (I do miss “Fly Fishing the World” and Trout Unlimited’s “On the Rise,” both on Sportsman Channel, and the hard-to-find “The New Fly Fisher.”)

There are a lot of dollars being thrown at fly fishing video, from homemade DVDs to the once underground and now nearly mainstream Fly Fishing Film Tour. While instructional DVDs may be the bread and butter of this genre, it’s easier to grab the remote than insert a disc — and tell ourselves that we can easy to ignore that the gear manufacturers sponsoring these shows hope to convince us to buy stuff we don’t need.

Our efforts at resistance may be in vain. Research suggests those of us still active in the sport bought more in 2010 after a 10% drop in sales in 2009. It helps to have a captive audience; most of these shows run during the winter months when local waters aren’t available to many of us. It might be sour grapes on my part; I’m suspicious that some shows are well-thought-out tax write offs that just happen to include fly fishing in exotic places.

There’s no immediate way to determine if this explosion of fly fishing shows is good or bad† ; much of the content of these shows is fly fishing porn; beautiful shots of scenery and fish. It speaks to the already interested, generally not something watched with the girlfriend/wife or kids. These shows likely will lure into the sport some novices who will suddenly face the reality that their companions on the water will be unkempt and rather plain looking, not the well-dressed and good looking host‡ casting perfect loops to big fish.

These novices will also quickly learn that good editing always excludes those back casts that snag the tree that’s always behind us.

† Such a discussion will bring up the ever-present debate about the growth of a sport that utilizes finite resources. It’s worth noting that fishing license sales continued a two-year decline in 2011, according to a selected sampling of states by the Recreation Boating & Fishing Foundation.

‡ There are a few hosts who might be considered ‘average Joes’: Greg Heister of “Seasons on The Fly” and the goofy Curtis Fleming of “Fly Rod Chronicles.” Though a celebrity, occasional fly caster Larry Csonka comes across as that friendly guy we’d all enjoy on a fishing trip.


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start them lying fishing young

From well-known outdoor writer Tom Stienstra in the San Francisco Chronicle today, presented without comment:

Tall tale about giant bass

Word came from Pleasanton last week that a 13-year-old boy had landed a record 18-pound, 9-ounce largemouth bass at Shadow Cliffs Lake. It seemed too good to believe. Unfortunately, it was.

At Shadow Cliffs, park rangers say several people saw the boy wade into the lake and scoop up a large dead fish. Park officials said they do not acknowledge the fish as a record.

When the story first emerged, the boy said he caught the fish with a lure, that the giant bass did not fight much, and he gave it to a friend to eat. A photo of the fish I was provided showed that its eyes had turned white and its body had a layer of slime, similar to that of a fish that has been dead for some time.

This is yet more proof that, while all people are born honest, by the time they go fishing they usually get over it.