Back in the Saddle

Now that I've totally alienated my readership* by taking yet another prolonged hiatus, I figured it's well past time to get back on the blogging horse and provide some sort of update.  Things are starting to crank back up in Southcentral and it's already late May so I'll gloss past our epic snow year and stick to the fishing.

As I mentioned in my last post, this year was all about fishing--even in the dead of winter.  To that end, Sam and I kicked things off with some very early season fishing.

We turned down a powder day for this?

We both had hall passes from our familial obligations and met up with a bunch of friends the night before that had rented a house outside of town to catch a concert.  Suffice it to say that I can only pretend to party like I'm still 20 . . . and standing in 32-degrees water when it's snowing is a great hangover cure . . . even if the fish aren't cooperative.

* * *

Our first day out with the drift boat came sometime in April, and was a success.**  Grandma Jan was up visiting Mason and, once again, set the bar.  We ultimately tied into three fish that cold day, which was spectacular given the conditions and the short amount of time we were on the water, but only got one fish to the boat.

Jan, working on her grip-and-grin.

The Wife, taking advantage of Mason napping.

The Wife and I have been trying to think of a name for the drift boat.  Given the fact that Jan was about the only person on the entire river to catch a fish that day, and the success my mom had out of the boat last year when she came up to visit Mason, we might need to think about this developing trend as we consider our options.

* * *

Moving ahead in the calendar, not long ago I found myself down south a ways for work and had the opportunity to get out for the day.  It was classic Alaskana.  At various points we saw snow, rain and hail--and I still managed to get a mild sunburn.  We dodged humpbacks on the way out, chased steelhead in very skinny water all day, then had to evade a grizzly family on the way back.

Always fish the undercut bank.

* * *

The last real development is that I'm committing myself to spey casting for the next month or so.  I have a longer switch rod that I'll be using with the hopes of focusing on slightly different water than I usually fish.  It's early season, so you never know.

I've also been hitting the vise a fair amount this past week and tying up various tube flies, so we'll see how that turns out.  It's all new to me, but I came across this post and figured I'd give it a whirl.

Meet Mr. and Mrs. Sculpin.  The cones are separate from the rest of the fly.

* * *

So there you have it.  Now let's see, what got left out . . .

Well, for one thing, Mason now crawls and can't stay away from The Pooch's water bowl, which is constant entertainment--for Mason, at least.  I'm pretty sure he looked at me and said "dad" yesterday, but since he's only nine months old it was probably a coincidence. After all, "dad" sounds awfully similar to every other sound he makes.

I have a new job as of last week, which promises to be a significant upgrade as far as actually getting shit done.

And finally, The Blog is undergoing a bit of a revision.  Nothing formal, but if all things go according to plan you should notice a subtle change in content.  Although I take care not to specify where I fish, I'm a bit tired of providing the local fishing report so it's time to shake things up.  Stay tuned.
______________________

* Hi Mom.

** Hell, every day in the drift boat is a success--I could float circles in a mud puddle day after day and not get bored.

Belize

Russ on the lookout for permit.

So, in case you were wondering, Belize is awesome.  This was the first real vacation The Wife and I had taken together, and it did not disappoint.  Our pictures are still something of a mess (my only fishing pictures are of Russ, for example) but if you're contemplating a trip to Belize here's a few quick lessons learned...

1. Just like in Alaska, fishing in Belize can be a total crapshoot.  We had two full days guided along with a decent bit of non-guided fishing.  One of the guided days was a near complete bust.  High winds meant we couldn't get out to the flats--and couldn't have cast well even if we got there--while rain and cool weather meant everything was shut down.  It's never good when the guide tells you it might as well be snowing.  With few options, at the least the reef fish cooperated.

My first fly-caught mutton snapper, also known as "Dinner."

Russ with a jack.

2a. and 2b. It doesn't get much better than chasing tailing fish on the flats; and, don't expect to catch a permit your first time out.  Our second day guided was with a local guide out of Placencia and he was phenomenal, just don't judge him by his website.  We got up at 4:30, drove the hour-plus from Hopkins to Placencia to meet the guide at the dock by 6:15, and fished until dark.  Our guide was mildly disappointed we showed up so late.

A typical Belizean bonefish.

We caught bonefish all morning, grabbed lunch on the beach, then fished the reef for snapper and jacks until the tides became favorable for permit on the flats.  

Russ wandering one of many flats in search of permit.

The panga is the boat of choice in Belize.

I have to severely restrain myself when I describe our afternoon of permit fishing lest my head might explode.  I had four or five solid opportunities at permit--ignoring all the times I flubbed the cast or otherwise spooked the fish before even giving them a chance to reject my fly.

After a morning of very soft bonefish takes, I asked the guide what I should expect if a permit took my fly.  He responded, "you'll probably break it off."  I took that to mean that they take hard.  Later, after missing an epic opportunity at a herd of permit that looked more like a swarm of locusts destroying a midwest corn crop than a school of highly sought-after game fish tailing across a flat, the guide says to me "it's just not yet your time."  I nearly shat my pants watching that school of fish tailing on top of my fly. 

Russ and I both agreed that the guide's dry sense of humor was a plus since he definitely put us on fish.  Combined with his frequent, yet appropriate use of swear words, I'd book another day with this guide in a heartbeat.

This fly will not catch you a permit.

3. You can't see everything Belize has to offer in nine days.  We easily could have drug this trip out over a couple months.  Leading up to the trip I kept joking that we should have just bought a one-way ticket.  Little did I know how right I was.

The Mayan ruins are amazing.

Mason enjoying Labaantun.

The Wife and Mason kayaking the Sittee River.

Taking the Little Man out for some snorkeling.

Mason's big fan of the beach.

4. The food and drink of Belize is underrated.  The state beer of Belize is Belikin, and if you can only drink one beer on a trip this is as good as any.  Our trip also coincided with the tail end of lobster season--and it doesn't get much better than fresh seafood, local fruit, and a healthy portion of rice and beans.

The view from our front porch.

5. Good friends make a great trip even better.  The Wife, Mason and I met up with our good friends Kelly and Russ for this trip--in fact, they were a large reason for The Wife and I finally getting off our duff and making the trip happen.  The Wife, Mason and I would have had fun in Belize by ourselves, but it's always better to be surrounded by friends.

Russ, Kelly and I in Punta Gorda, Belize.

6. Alaskans don't do well in direct sunlight.  Scroll back up to the third picture--the one of Russ holding the jack on a rainy, windy day.  The whole day was overcast and most of it was rainy.  Yet somehow I ended up with my most severe sunburn in years.  Ridiculous.

Wild Rivers

Choosing the right beer for the occasion can be tricky.  But, fear not my friend, Sierra Nevada and Western Rivers Conservancy have teamed up to make your decision just a little bit easier.  For every 12-pack of Pale Ale or seasonal beer sold through September 10, Sierra Nevada is donating a portion of its proceeds to river conservation partners, including the Western Rivers Conservancy.  Sierra Nevada makes a damn fine beer and the Western Rivers Conservancy does damn fine work, so get to it and drink up.  Now, if only Anchorage would recycle glass . . .

Testing out the new net

It's always fun to throw back the suds and go on a fly tying bender, if however brief, which is exactly what Sam and I did Sunday afternoon.  After the prior day's flexible rod sampling, my fly selection was looking a bit thin and in need of some attention.  Of course, once my fly box is full, I'm compelled to go lose a few flies--and thus a vicious cycle is born.

The fact that I had just bought a new giant-sized net pushed us over the edge so The Wife and I set out Monday for a rare weekday fishing excursion.  The lack of crowds was a welcome change, although those 20ish inch fish don't look so big any more:

We caught a handful of fish but the highlight of the day came when, while seated at the oars approaching a bend in the river, I hooked into a nice fish and fully confirmed that I cannot, in fact, play and land a fish while rowing the boat and containing the puppy dog.  Karta had a grand time through it all.

A gluttonous tragedy

I first ventured to Alaska in earnest in 2003, well after the heyday, to work a seasonal fisheries job for the U.S. Forest Service in southeast Alaska.  I had just been accepted to law school and was looking for one last epic opportunity to chase fish. 

You really ought to click that picture and make it a bit bigger.

Having, to that point, been almost exclusively a catch-and-release angler who valued fish first and foremost for their intrinsic and sporting value, I was disgusted to see people with readily-available alternative food sources setting gill nets across entire stream widths that effectively blocked entire salmon runs, dipnetting more than they possibly could consume in a single year, and generally killing everything in sight in an orgy of overabundance and shortsightedness.  Yeah, your freezer might be full this winter, but what about the winter a few years from now?

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to later learn that one of the most prolific sockeye fisheries in that area had been closed.  From a 2008 news release:

The weir count to date is 90 sockeye. The weir count in 2007, as of the same date, was 2765 . . .

***

As I eluded to in my last post, The Wife and I spent the Fourth of July weekend fishing and camping.  I had pulled an all-nighter on Thursday in order to meet a work deadline and was in no condition to go anywhere after work on Friday but bed.  It had been a rough week.

Come Saturday morning, we geared up and headed north with our good friends Sam and Liz.  Because King Season was in full swing, we had planned to avoid the combat-fishing crowds and target areas farther up stream for rainbows.  Seemed to make sense at the time since few things repulse me more than rubbing shoulders on the stream bank with people too self interested to see beyond the tip of their fishing rod. 

From some exploring I had done last year, I had some ideas about where to go.  We drove down a too-narrow-for-my-truck two-track road to the river with hopes that we might have the place to ourselves.  Of course, we did not:

The first day only afforded us an afternoon on the water before calling it and heading back to the rig to set up camp and cook some grub.  Of course, the camera wasn't around when I hooked into my best fish--a feisty rainbow around 20" that almost got away from me down a side channel on the far side of the river.  By the time the camera came back, all I had to show for my efforts was this stick, broken roughly to the proper length and every bit as exciting to Karta as the real thing:

With the camera back in tow, Liz grabbed a hold of this guy:

 Got's to put forth the effort (there's a dog in there too):

Of course, it rained all night and by morning the too-narrow-for-my-truck two-track road turned into a too-muddy-for-my-truck two-track road:

Yeehaw!  With much coercion, we forced things along and made it back to pavement after only an hour or two delay.

While neither The Wife nor I managed to take a single picture for the remainder of Sunday the Fourth, we worked our way north, exploring new streams before ultimately enjoying beers in Talkeetna, then turning back to a nearly vacant campground that allowed us to stretch our legs a bit.  We definitely saw more people on the water than I cared to see, but I can't complain about the crowds where we chose to camp.

Having fished hard for two days with very limited success (no fish were caught on Sunday), we headed back to a familiar stream hoping to up our catch rate.  Sam found some Chinook schooling up in this big bend:

And soon thereafter we started hooking fish:

And the rainbow version:

The Wife sending it:

After all was said and done, we had had a great weekend.  We fished hard, ripped a little lip, shotgunned a couple PBRs, and generally had a great time--but something was missing.  Something was off.  For the peak of Chinook season, we only saw a handful of salmon.  There might have been more people on some of these creeks than salmon.

Little did I know, since we were planning to chase rainbows all along, but the Chinook fishery was in such dire straights that it had been closed.  This is Alaska folks.  What the hell?

Thinking back to my days in southeast Alaska, I couldn't help but wonder about the individual and collective greed that likely led to these low salmon abundance numbers.  Apparently, I'm not the only one with these thoughts.  In more eloquent words that I might provide, you really ought to give this opinion piece by a Mr. Wittshirk a read.  It's better fare than anything the ADN typically provides.

Since it's late, I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions here . . . but I can't help but look for some sort of lesson.  With our ridiculous history of overfishing and short-term fisheries management--in southeast Alaska, here locally, and in nearly every other fishery in the world--perhaps . . .

Cannon Beach

Location: Somewhere over New Mexico (I think) en route to Austin, TX.

I spent the past weekend in Portland and Cannon Beach visiting friends and attending Leia and Tyler's wedding.  The wedding was beautiful and it's always a blast to get the crew together.  We partied until 3:30am, long after the wedding reception site kicked us out and the bars closed.  Although it really was too late to call The Wife and blather through a marginally coherent conversation, the vodka tonics and rich Oregon beer didn't let me think twice about the time.

It was great to see all my Oregon friends.  I really need to get better at keeping in touch with everyone.  There really is no excuse.

On another topic, airports and airplanes are great people-watching venues, and my flight last Friday from Anchorage to Seattle delivered.  Fortunately, the only empty seat on the flight happened to be the middle seat in my row.  Otherwise, there's no telling where the man occupying the aisle seat would have put his rental video player and the cheeseburger, assorted snack pack and three bloody maries (mary's?) he ordered from the stewardess--not to mention the soda and pretzels that everyone got for free.  The stewardess didn't bat and eye when he placed his order and looked like she'd seen this sort of thing before.  I, however, couldn't decide what was more impressive, the line of beverages, the fact that the same pretzel remained suspended in the man's mustache through two-and-a-half bloodies, or the fact that the man finished everything without having to hit the head once during the three-and-a-half hour flight.

On to Austin . . .

"I'm getting a beer, I think it'll help"

-- Jan August 8, 2009

So The Wife's sister and mom are visiting for a couple weeks. In anticipation of our upcoming halibut fishing trip out of homer, they've purchased team-colored T-shirts for all of us. Jan and I are taking on the Ash and The Wife. Somehow (?), my team T-shirt is pink--or, as they put it, salmon colored. As I write, Ash, Jan and The Wife are decorating their team shirts but, despite the fact that I'd look like a piss-poor Elton John imitation if I took part, they are a little disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm for the shirts. I'll just have to out fish them this weekend.

Turning the page back a few days, we headed up Turnagain Arm last weekend for a little exploring. Not to fear, I managed to take the fly rod along and, with The Wife largely abstaining from fishing, I finally managed to out fish the competition.
We tromped around the tidal flats, throwing sticks for the pooch and playing in the mud.
We also managed to see a number of sockeye. These fish sure are sweet.
And a couple chum.
I'm going to have to hook into one of those hogs this weekend. Trip report to follow.

About 20 minutes into the first day of the bar exam I thought to myself "why the hell did I move to a new jurisdiction." About an hour into the second day I thought to myself "this must be what a lobotomy feels like." Now that it's three hours after the conclusion of the final day of the bar exam, I'm thinking to myself "yes, IPA does taste as good as I remember."

Paying off your debts

With my intra-office beer debt having grown to 26 bottles, I headed over to the local convenience store with plans to make things square. After carrying two 20-packs up to the cashier, the following transpired:

Cashier: "Thirsty, huh?"

Me: "Fortunately, it's not all for me."

Cashier: [Takes my debit card and gives me the evil eye.] "You're 21, right?"

Me: [Thinking it's been a while since I was carded--although I did shave last night.] "29."

Cashier: [Swiping my card.] "Yeah, I saw your gray hair and figured you were. Just checking."

Me: [Awkward pause.] "Hmmm. Well, at least it's not falling out."

Cashier: [Handing me my card and the receipt.] "Yeah, and I actually like gray hair."

Me: [Another awkward pause as I try to figure out if this is all just a bizarre pick-up line.] "Yeah, uh, thanks."

Swan Falls

Ever notice how the slightest taste of something can bring you back to a time forgotten?

Sitting in my office as the clock strikes five, having just wrapped up the last-minute details on a rather oppressive report, I had just such an experience. The report I just finished was the culmination of tons of research, an extensive writing-by-committee experiment gone awry, and a series of deadlines that always seemed to move up without warning. Nothing like finding out on Saturday night that you unexpectedly need to rush a project to completion by Tuesday--and not receiving needed comments on a prior draft version until Monday afternoon.

All this is a long-winded way to say that I'm drinking beer. More precisely--OE. Ah yes, the 8-ball of yesteryear. For the uninitiated, it's a rather vile malt liquor most commonly consumed 40 ounces at a time by those who can't afford anything better. Its only redeeming quality is that it is produced by the Miller Brewing Company of Wisconsin fame.

While I began drinking before the legal age of 21, I didn't start drinking until I was out of high school. It was during this initial post-high-school-graduation period of discovery that I was initiated to Olde English 800. What a terrible concoction--I'd probably have been better off staying away. But I didn't.

A good friend of mine and I used to work together at a local restaurant and, at the time, I owned a 1970 Chevy Blazer. While it was more monster truck than effective mode of transportation, and may even have violated the neighborhood restrictive covenants when parked in the driveway, it got us around--9 miles per gallon at a time. On more than one occasion, following what typically would have been a terrible shift in the kitchen, him and I would load up on OE and take the Blazer down to swan falls. With OE in hand, we'd find a remote campsite and build the largest bonfire around. Drinking OE by the 40, we'd listen to the sturgeon jumping in the Snake River and tell stories until sun-up.

I imaging generations of 18-year-olds have similar experiences. It doesn't get much better than good friends, camping and cheep beer when you don't know any better.

This is October?

Lander got dumped on over this past weekend. Snow started falling on Friday and by the time the sky cleared on Sunday there was around 18 inches of the good stuff.

With The Wife out of town visiting the Old Country, I was without our regular camera and had to rely on my phone for the heavy lifting. Since I also chose the darkest possible moment to take the pictures, I'll apologize in advance for the poor quality...

This is Friday night, with a BL smoothie for scale.

Same thing on Saturday night. However, there is no need for alarm--the BL smoothie was safely consumed the night before and not sacrificed with the snow.

And, one bonus picture:

This should be an advertisement

Those of you who share my affinity for PBR should enjoy the above picture. It was taken unbeknownst to me by my friend Russ while we were on a recent fishing trip with The Wife. Not much better than a cold beer after a day of fishing. Too bad Russ' photography skills were better than my fishing skills on this day. . .