My Tax Dollars At Work: WTH?

As I was riding my bike down the road this morning, a town truck slowly passed by me. It had the town seal painted on its doors, and the words WASTE WATER DEPT. printed prominently around it.

And I thought, ”What a crazy way to spend town money!”

Sometimes The Old Ways Are The Best To Catch A Nice Trout

I should have listened to Eve Moneypenny:

If you've read the post below about Czech nymphing, you’ll know that I’m intrigued by that technique, and have made several initial forays using it on my home waters. I decided the other day to fish the same quarter mile twice, once nymphing, once resorting to my good old dry flies. I had no luck with the nymphs. So I went back to the car and switched rods to the one rigged with a #16 Ausable Wulff. In a short run of nicely rippled water, I took this stream-bred 12” rainbow.

I’m keeping the 8’ 6” rod rigged for Czech nymphing. But when the water is too deep or too far away for dry flies, I’ll return to some really old ways and toss a 1/8 oz. Panther Martin out there with a 6’ ultralight spinning rig.

There! I’ve said it, and it feels GOOD. Fly fishing purists, including bobber fanciers nymph fishermen, should feel free to fall onto their fainting couches.

Freshly Killed Wild Trout Pan Fried In Butter Are Really Tasty!

If you’ve read any of the fishing entries below, you know I love to cast flies to stream-bred trout. You’ll find no mention of trolling. So please accept my apologies for the wording of this post’s title if you’ve arrived here in high dudgeon with blood in your eye.

I released the first trout I ever caught, in 1962. The site was the Cohocton River near Atlanta, and the fish was maybe 5” long. When I told my mentor, he was horrified: you threw back perfectly good breakfast food? The 13 year old who tossed that fish back was not clever enough to have invented “catch and release,” so the conflict between the historical “let’s catch a few fish to eat” and the new fangled “a wild trout is too precious to be caught just once” must already have been splashed all across the sportsmen’s magazines of the times.

I still catch a lot of 4” and 5” trout in my home water. I’m not a fisheries biologist, so I don’t know whether these small fish are all that’s left after “meat fishermen” have taken all the 9”ers, or if, on the other hand, these fish can’t get any bigger because they’ve got too many mouths for not enough food. I repeat: I don’t know.

But I think it’s a good question that deserves a well researched answer.

So I was interested to read a meditation on this subject in the back-page article of the Spring, 2018 TU magazine. The piece, which you can read here, is titled “Trout” It Was ‘What’s for Dinner!’,” written by Paul Bruun. Here’s how it opens:

“‘OMG, those guys are keeping a fish!’ chimed the lady in the passing driftboat. ‘What are we going to do about it?’ she wailed.

Despite current incendiary mores toward this once normal but now frowned-upon practice, ….”

Bruun reminisces from there in a warmly nostalgic way, thus guaranteeing his vilification in the Twitterverse and a dearth of Christmas cards from TU members.

For a deeper dive into wild trout management, take a look at “Lost in the Driftless” by Tim Traver. After not so many pages you — like me — will probably get fired up to buy a half dozen Cress Bugs and head for the streams of SW Wisconsin. But “Lost” is not a travelogue. Traver frames his themes around the career of Roger Kerr, a retired Wisconsin county fish manager who has strong opinions about trout fishing. Depending on whom Traver was interviewing at the moment, Kerr is either Gabriel or Lucifer. If you’re like me, you tend to view trout management in Wisconsin by TU apartment dwellers in Manhattan with a cocked eyebrow. But Traver does a good job of reporting instead of lobbying, and the book is a tasty if complicated intellectual chew.

I’ll close this entry with a question about Wulff’s dictum. Please understand that Wulff was a much more skilled fly fisherman and pilot than I am, and I greatly admire his body of work. But still, I wonder whether a few 5” trout that a youngster has caught, maybe on her initial outing, are really fish that’re too precious to be caught just once?

WTH? What A Wreck! Made A Trek To Check Czech Nymphing

After spending too many unproductive hours last summer exclusively fishing dry flies, I resolved over the winter to learn more about nymph fishing. I recalled reading something from Joe Humphreys years ago to the effect that a man could easily fish out a section of a good trout stream just nymphing (obviously that was many years ago.) I don’t mean to fish any creek out, even figuratively. But fishing where the fish mostly are instead of where I want them to be just makes sense.

So I watched lots of internet videos of nymph fishing. “Czech nymphing” seems to be the hot item these days. So I bought a neon colored leader section, tied a tippet beneath it and bent another tippet onto that such that I could add a dropper to the trimmed tag end. With a split shot a bit ahead of the bugs, I was ready to go!

For some reason, the videos do not show how to remove one or both bugs from budding willow trees; or how to keep the bugs and split shot from balling up into one hellacious mess; or how to keep one of both bugs from hooking your boots, or your fingers, or your hat; or how to keep your scant bit of dangling fly line from sliding back down your fly rod’s guides and getting tangled into the brush at your feet.

My inaugural nymphing outing wasn’t a complete disaster though. I enjoyed a terrific double-decker of Perry’s Ice Cream on the drive home. One scoop was Caramel Praline Turtle, and the other was Sponge Candy. Yummers!

I made a few notes to make the next trip simpler and hopefully more productive as I get the hang of this new thing. Here’s what I’ll do next time:

• I’ll use a leader that’s shorter than my 8’ 6” rod;

• I think I’ll try fishing with a 7’ leader as a beginner. I’ll trim a new leader to 5’ 6” and tie on an 18” tippet. I’ll tie on a single unweighted nymph, probably something familiar like a Hare’s Ear. And I’ll pinch on a split shot of appropriate size just above the knot securing the tippet;

• I customarily walk a half mile or so downstream from my car and then fish my dries upstream back to the car. To learn how best to fish nymphs, I think I’ll walk downstream from the car for about half of my time, then fish my nymph back upstream. In this way I hope to learn which attack plan works better for me;

• I’ll choose for my nymphing classroom a stretch of water that has lots of pocket water and short runs rather than long stretches of shallow riffles interspersed with gigantic pools; and finally

• the Sponge Candy was specially tasty, so I’ll go with it for both scoops.

Fishing jokes from Bible stories

North Country Grouse Roosting in the Snow

I was after snowshoe hares with my beagle Jupp back in 1983 behind my father-in-law’s place north of Malone, NY on a sunny but cold day in January. “Cold” in the St. Lawrence Valley frequently means daytime highs in the single digits with well-below 0°F temperatures at night.

Ruffed grouse, or “partridge” as we call them in the North Country, long ago adapted to surviving in frigid weather by burrowing into the snow. Back in 1983, I hadn’t learned about this behavior. I was wearing old-fashioned ash and rawhide snowshoes on this hunt, and, standing still for a moment, was straining to hear beagle music from Jupp who was trailing out of sight. Suddenly, literally out of nowhere, a partridge erupted from the snow just inches in front of my ‘shoes. I was so shook up by the feathered missile launch that I took a tumble a$$ over teacup. Regaining your footing after flopping into 3 feet of fluffy snow with two 3’ snowshoes twisted underneath you is a time consuming jiu jitsu match in which you paradoxically dig yourself deeper into the powder with every clawing effort to extricate yourself. In the future I’ll leave the deep powder to the grouse.

Here’s a photo of a snow roosting partridge, and two short video clips of grouse flushing.

Here's one

Here's another