Cutthroat Stalker

Well, we survived the interesting world called California. What a trip, all 2250 miles of it.

I’ve lived a total of 13 years in California (nine in southern California), and every time I go back, I’m so glad I don’t live in the city. I really don’t like southern California because it is so over-populated (nothing personal to all those of you who live in/love the place). I try to avoid it. This trip was central California, the Monterey Bay area, which I love. And a couple of days in San Francisco (too big). Highs in the mid-60s for a whole week—that was nice! Fog every morning—not as nice, but it doesn’t bother me too much. We were less than 100 miles north of the Big Sur fires, but most of the smoke is blowing east, not north. When we were traveling from Yosemite to Monterey, and San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, the smoke was incredibly thick considering we were 200-300 miles away from the fire.

No fishing or computer access for eight days. It was nice to be unplugged for a while, but I’m definitely glad to be back. Now I need a fishing vacation to unwind from my family vacation. Doesn’t everybody need vacation time from vacationing? Luckily I have about 40 more days before I have to be back to work, so I think I can squeeze some fishing time in there somewhere.

It was an agreement we came to long ago.

One of the first times we went camping in Yellowstone as a family, I tried to get my fly rod out of the truck. My wife waved her finger at me (no, not that finger, just her index finger) in that "No, no bad dog," manner, and said, "No fishing on family vacations." I would like to think she had her other hand on her hip, but I just can’t conjure that image for my wife, no matter how much literary style it might add to the story.

And I really need to add to the story, because, that was it. One time was all it took (I’m so whipped) for me to realize, "Yeah, she’s right." A family vacation is about the family, not me off by myself fishing. And I’m okay with that. Surprisingly. I’ve been to Yellowstone 10 times or so since then with the family (we only live about four and a half hours away), and have never fished inside the Park. And it doesn’t really bother me.

So it’s family vacation time this summer. For the next ten days we’ll be hitting Yosemite and the coast of central California (Monterey and San Francisco). No fly rod in sight for ten days because family vacation means "No Fishing."

No computer access for…I don’t know. If one of the hotels has access (and I’m sure at least one of them does), I’ll log in and check things out. Otherwise, this site will be silent for a week and a half. I’m not sure which is going to be harder: fishing withdrawal or computer withdrawal.

I do have a post I’m working on that is about my eleven year old daughter fly fishing with me for the first time last week—what an incredible experience that was!

Keith Barton’s post, Old School Best Left to History, over at Singlebarbed.com was too funny! But it brought back some great memories too.

In the mid-80’s I had a friend who was learning to fly fish. He asked me one day if I wanted to go fish with him. I told him I didn’t have any fly fishing equipment. He suggested I ask around. So I asked my dad. Sure enough, he had rod, reel and flies.

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The US Fish and Wildlife Services has a new fish magazine, Eddies, to tout their successes (as they perceive them). A lot of the magazine is devoted to management issues, especially regarding hatcheries. I would like to see more dealing with conserving habitat instead of just hatchery issues. I found the brief essays on Gila Trout, Apache Trout and Bull Trout of most interest to me personally. Tell me what you think.

This was the best day I have had fishing in at least 18 months! Both stalkerS were on the prowl today near the headwaters of West Fork of the Bear River. Within seconds of entering the water, I knew, no doubts at all, that I had finally reached the pinnacle of 18 months of effort. Today was unexpected because although I have been actively working for at least a year and a half for the very results I finally achieved today, each of the other times fishing during these months I’ve been disappointed, so I expected disappointment again today.

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I tried writing this post last night, but it didn’t really jell for me until I got an email from Shane over at The Quiet Pool.

Yesterday morning I fired up the motorcycle (I love this non-rainy weather!) about 8:00 AM and headed out. Generally I haven’t had a lot of success fishing the Blacksmith after about 9:00 AM, but it had been a week since I got tired of fishing, so it was time to do it again. The bike ride was glorious—perfect temperature and nobody on the canyon road at that time of the morning. It was one of those rides where I had a hard time keeping the helmet on. I always ride with it on, but sometimes there’s a lot of that inner-conflict: be smart, safe and feel restricted, or feel free, careless and dumb? What a choice.

[The box on the back of the bike carries my waders and boots with the fly rod case on top (four piece rod). Saddlebags contain other fishing paraphernalia. Where the meadow meets the edge of the trees, that's where the river is. (The grass hay is grown to feed elk in the winter at the Hardware Ranch, located just a mile upstream from this photo.)]

I hadn’t fished a section higher on the river for quite a while. It seemed that there weren’t a lot of fish in this section whe I tried it ten or so years ago, but I had often heard that this was the "best" area to fish. I thought it might be time to try this section again.

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I Thought I’d trya spot I have rarely fished because it just doesn’t produce much in the way of cutthroats or surface fishing. I was up close to Hardware Ranch between mile marker 20 and 21 (I hopped in where the grass hay fields are). I’ve talked to others who like the area, but it hasn’t been my thing. (see my next post for a longer discussion)

I fished from 9:15 AM - 11:45 AM. Not a single rise in 2 1/2 hours except at my fly. Some holes were on and most were off. I did land around 15 fish. I was disappointed because they were all browns. They were all in the 9"-12" range (mostly 9"-10").

The water color was a shade off. There were plenty of midges on the water and sporadic sightings of a very long-tailed, orange bodied mayfly (I really need to bone-up on my bugology).

I caught the first ten on a beetle pattern, my favorite attractor pattern when there are no rises (thanks Dan!). The last five were on my Splayed Salmonfly pattern (the fly formerly known as Foam Cross). I thought it would be interesting to see if the fish were still keying in on salmon flies. Funny thing, I don’t think the salmon flies hatch that far upstream (I don’t ever remember them that far up, nor did I see any exuviae).

This is a continuation from the Portneuf Post (so read that one first if you haven’t already).

We finished the "disappointing" fishing on the Portneuf after about four hours, an hour after my deadline imposed by Talking Bull. So it was time to head back to the West Fork of the bear River.

As mentioned in my bio, I’m pretty much interested in fishing for native species. Dan shares my passion. We love to find the streams that have cutts, and does the West Fork ever have them.  In fact, I have often wondered if it’s possible to get tired of fishing, and I think today’s events answered the question!

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Most excellent news! You now have a medical excuse to take more days off work and go fishing instead. New research shows that psychosocial stress at work increases the chance for Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Increasing the intake of oily fish decreases the risk of RA. This is a triple whammy folks: there is now a medical reason to fish; there is a good medical reason to purposely fish for whitefish (and keep them, and eat them); there is a medical reason to stop working.

Wrap all of these ideas together and here’s how it works. You show this article to your family physician (who hopefully is a fisherperson him/her self). You discuss with this medical professional the amount of fish you should be ingesting. Next calculate the catch ratio of trout to whitefish per hour on a typical day. Then determine the number of hours you would need to fish to reach your target amount of whitefish. Finally, your family physician writes a note to your employer giving you a medical release from work so that A) you can reduce the amount of psychosocial stress (thereby decreasing negative health risks) and B) you can catch fish (thereby increasing positive health outcomes).

I love science!

Yeah, okay, let’s get this out of the way right here at the beginning. These were the words of "Talking Bull" (AKA Dan) to me this morning.

If anyone read this post, they should know those were Talking Bull’s plans. I was okay with the plans when he first mentioned them—no complaints. Even after we spent a lot of time walking for no fish, I was still okay with it.

So it was my turn to plan our "if-this-is-Monday-we-must-be-fishing-Idaho" day. I chose to go to the Portneuf River in Idaho. You’d think I killed the poor guy! "Oh, Walks Like turtle, I don’t think you want to go there."

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I haven’t done a fishing and science connection since the post about lying, so I thought I’d do several rolled into one.

Beer

This doesn’t apply to me, but I know it’s important to a lot of fishermen, so I thought I’d throw this in first as an attention grabber. (But I do have a second attention grabber three articles further down!)

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It has been said that there is more written about fly fishing than any other sport. I don’t know how true that is, but I have a couple of hundred books about fly fishing and I that isn’t even scratching the surface of what’s out there. Next to actually fishing, my favorite fishing pastime is reading about fishing. In fact, I read about fishing many more hours a year than actually fishing [note to self—I’ve got to fix that].

Besides reading about fishing, I’ve spent some time trying to write about fishing. I’m no authority on the topic, but I have thought about it enough to try to categorize the types of writing about fly fishing. I’d like to share some of that with you.

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You may (or maybe not) have noticed a new page on my website listed in the top right corner: "Fly Fishing Literature." That page will have posts about the reading and writing of fly fishing. Swing by and leave me some comments.

I’m supposed to be at a meeting at work. But Dan has a plan. Oh, why do I listen?

(map and pictures below)

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Update June 17, 08): Officially named Splayed Salmonfly (the fly formerly known as The Foam Cross).

Here’s my not too pretty, but (for me) very productive "Foam Cross" (okay, a bit lame, but Dan is the master of name calling making, so until he gives it a better moniker, that’s the name).

(Recipe and Pictures below)

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