Early Spring Fishing

Dave and I headed west yesterday to check on a favorite spring creek of ours. We arrived to find most of the creek open and the water running clear and low, but for a few thin ice patches along the shoreline. We did our usual slow walk, looking intently for holding trout in hopes of casting our dry flies to one or two. Instead we hooked a few on streamers as there wasn't enough sun to make the early stones active. In one section of the creek, Dave spotted a 20 inch male holding on the bottom of the creek just below the thin ice shelf. He dangled his fly onto the ice edge and gave it a twitch to drop it into the open water below. A few strips of the fly through the fishes zone to try to induce a strike, but nothing.This fish didn't budge and we soon realized that most of the bigger fish in the creek were still spent from last fall's spawn and in recovery mode. One brown we came across had a huge repala gash on it's nose and it moved more like a pike than a healthy active brown. They might as well have had a sign on their backs that said, " I won't play today, so just leave me alone." We did. Our hopes of casting dry flies wasn't meant to be as the sunny, 13 +C day they forecasted turned cloudy and windy. These are the ever changing days of early spring.

Learning to Wade a River

When I first started fly fishing one of the first things I was forced to learn in a hurry was how to wade a river. Dave took me to the South Ram and we hiked into the canyon together. I had always retained a small fear of water since I had almost drowned as a kid, but over the years I had come a long way to enjoying water sports, most of which I had experienced on lakes. This picture shows me mastering a deeper/faster crossing on my own. The river was a little off color and higher than normal that day, so this crossing involved trusting what I had learned about reading water and feeling my way across with my feet, as I couldn't see the bottom. It was definitely a little intimidating at first, but soon I had this skill under my belt. Looking back over the years I've been guiding, I remember a number of guests twice my size who I've escorted across the river. I think I remember the words Dave first told me, "keep your feet shoulder width apart, angle across and slightly downstream, fix your eyes on a destination across the river and go with the current as oppossed to fighting it." "Lose that yellow jacket and those red shorts next time we go fishing together k"  was the other words I heard that day. I quickly learned something else that day - bright colors can alert the fish of your presense.

How it happened

We had but a couple guests at Fortress that weekend. I seldom make plans to fish but for an hour a day with people, but these guests wanted me to fish with them. The day started slowly. We noticed flocks of birds on the lake about 1km away and motored over to see a good chironomid event and wound up catching several nice fish in short order before the "hatch" waned and we switched over to casting a few streamers. I managed to break my rod while fighting a fish, breaking at the ferrule. I managed to land the fish using three pieces, and was going to quit because there was a growing discrepancy in numbers caught, but the two encouraged me to fish. The assumption was that I'd revert to the chironomid rod. I tried that for 10 minutes but nothing much happened and I couldn't get it out of my head that the fish were much deeper and I'd had hit after hit on the streamer I'd been using. That, plus the fellows were catching on streamers while I had to wait and wait for my single chironomid to get down. I looked at my broken rod, reeled in my floating line, and picked up the broken bit. To my surprise, 3 bits of a rod with a type 5 line can still shoot well into the backing by adding an extra false cast. The broken graphite eats into your hand a little, and the rod is a little tough to grasp as well due to the lack of cork in the grip, but the principle remains the same. Flex and shoot. And it did just that. The other concept of concern was landing fish. The first cast, fish on. That graphite ate into my hands a little more. So I put a glove on (genius, I know). It wasn't fluid nor really easy, but it worked. And for some reason the fishing Gods smiled on my spot because while the two fellows were in their boat 40 yards from mine, I proceeded to cast and catch fish 4 of 5 casts while they periodically had a bump, hit, or fish landed. I felt awkward. In one boat was a broken rod shooting into the backing, catching 30 or 40 trout, while in the other the fishing was slow. I stopped several times and when asked why, I just kind of played coy. They insisted I continue. So I did. The fish never really did stop. Thankfully, the two began to have equal success at another shoal.
So, how did it happen that I was able to do so well with a broken rod? It was the lower section of the rod that was broken, not the tip. Yes, a cork grip is nice but not necessary. A longer rod is nice so that your false casts don't whistle by your ears, but it's not necessarry. A longer rod is nice to keep your false casts off the water, but if you speed the line up and allow the load and shoot to carry, a long rod isn't necessary. Shooting line to the backing is no harder with a 6 foot rod than it is with a 9 footer. A butt to hold onto to control the line at your feet is a little nicer, but if you make sure that on your retrieve you lay loops of line on the floor of the boat instead of just twisting coiled line atop itself, you can ensure that tangles are kept to a minimum. Broken bits of graphite can get into your hands, but if you clean the broken end and wear a glove, you can avoid the splinters (even better - a bit of duct tape would work). While fighting the fish, all one has to do is slide your hand up the rod a touch and hold it 18" higher, thus gaining leverage by using your lower fore arm and wrist to keep the pressure off one spot (your grip). The tough part is netting your own fish at that point, mind you, as the leverage I just spoke of is lost when you slide your hand back down the rod to gain height with the rod tip to get the fish' head out of the water to slide the net under it. But, you make do. So, if you're out and break the lower end of your rod, it isn't the end of the day. Just find a place for your broken piece for the day, find a place for your reel so you can store some line, and give it a go. Improvise a bit. It's just a broken rod.

The Science of Felt - A very good read

"A didymo white paper was published based on the conference presentations. This paper http://stopans.org/Presentations/ScientificKnowledgeofDidymo.pdf is the best summary of didymo information available but only contains information gathered prior to 2006 and does not contain newer research results. The claims we hear today that there is no science to justify a felt ban result from the information reported at the 2006 conference and not the results of research conducted since then. So, what have we learned since 2006?"

Read the following to read more:
http://www.stopans.org/Science_of_felt.php

On the Hard Drives to Hell

At the end of last summer I made a mistake, unplugging an external drive before the heads stopped. ZAP. Thankfully I had everything backed up on an additional external drive. 3 days later the power supply on the good external drive went and, while I had all data backed up on this drive, I freaked out. Being in the middle of our season, I had a bit of a nervous time as the techie I took it to repaired the power supply. All data was there, except for the lifetime collection of music files ripped from an old cd collection and all the downloads. Bugger. But I had the important stuff. Like 10 years of photos, for example. But only 1 copy. Yikes.
I made back ups of everything on 2 new external drives, cleaned everything up on my computer drive, all just in time to go to New Zealand. All was good. We took AJ's laptop to NZ, with a new external drive for back up while there. Of course, I put the complete series collection of Frasier on that external and we enjoyed watching the series. Until, of course, one night I fell asleep watching and woke to a bright light of the laptop in my face and - without thinking, unplugged the external before shutting down the computer. You got it. Another dead external drive.
We got home from NZ to get to serious work. I fired up the home computer only to find that it was groaning and complaining of belly-aches or whatever hard drives complain about. Then, I couldn't access it to even run a diagnosis. Dead. But, I did still have 1 external drive with all good files on it.
That brings us to this week. I've been fervently capturing HD video from NZ & old footage now in HD, transferring the files immediately to 2 external drives that I am now babying like nothing before. In and out with 20 to 50Gigs at a time, cleaning the local disc often, doing what needs to be done. Then, 4 days ago, I get a prompt from Vista saying my hard drive is imminent to fail. I run a S.M.A.R.T. scan and it takes 3 seconds to fail. I run a couple of other utility scans and they say the same thing. Alas, I've spent 3 days sorting out every file on my computer, cleaning old stuff, new stuff, ugly stuff, good stuff. And you know what? This time, everything is pared down to perfection, my E & F external drives clean as a whistle and fully diagnosed as good and exact replicas of each other. Every file on the computer drive is doubly backed up.
I finally learned to take this stuff seriously. While on the Hard Drives from Hell, down 2 hard drives in 2 months and 3 external drives in 7 months, I'm at least 3 or 4 computer IQ points smarter. When capturing HD, downloading files, and moving stuff around as often as I do, especially in the size of files we use for HD footage, there's a ton of room for bad sectors and blocks to reveal their ugly heads. And if I don't stay on top of chkdsk and defrag, use diagnostic tools at least periodically, and check in the events section of Admin Tools, I won't see warnings or know what's going on behind the scenes.
So, if you've sent me an email this past week and I've been a little tardy replying, there you have it. I've been sorting, weeding, saving, deleting 800Gig of files and backing them up. Alas, I've learned something. Finally. Likely a good time to learn too. We still have 35+ hours of HD video to capture, which will no doubt fill another drive. I wonder if I'll be smarter this go 'round...

Boss Hog

Back in 2001 Dave & I spent a lot of time fishing the North Ram. We got to know a certain stretch of the river along the North Fork Road very well and soon we found ourselves naming some of our trout friends. This chunky male cutthroat was king of his pool and though there was another female in the same pool that matched his length, he chased her out whenever he felt threatened. It was late in June and early in July before the run off affected water clarity, so we spent a lot of time watching trout movement in crystal clear waters.We decided due to his big head and girth that he needed a fitting name.... Boss Hog.  We happened to both be fans of Dukes of Hazard :) A few years of high water and this flood plain river changed its course and we never saw Boss Hog again.

Hummers :)

I look forward to seeing these little birds every summer we operate Fortress Lake. A few summers back, this one had flown into one of our building windows and knocked himself out. Dave picked him up and we put a tiny droplet of sugar water in his hand. The little gaffer put his long bill into it, took a slurp and slowly his eyes began to open again and he revived and eventually flew away. Amazing really. The fact that they travel thousands of km from way down south to the Canadian Rockies and beyond should tell you how incredibly hardy these birds are. They hatch out of eggs the size of a Jelly Bean. The bird feeders we put up are such a frenzie of competition at times that if your in a pathway of an aggresive male, look out, you might get smoked in the head. What would be worse, a hummingbird peirce in your skull or a heavily weighted streamer hook? You tell me.