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Flip Pallot, host of ESPN's "Walker's Cay Chronicles, will be speaking at Cabin Fever, the Penn's Woods West Trout Unlimited fly fishing expo Saturday at the Palace Inn, Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Flip's "poetry" seems to embody escapism for many modern saltwater anglers. I do like his comment, "With fishing, it's about leaving the dock."
Fishing with two feet of line in narrow canyons and hooking tough nine-inchers. Pat Wray in the Corvallis (Oregon) Gazette-Times. Here's a James Prosek illustration of the Redband -- or Redside -- from his Web site.
Dr. Tim McCue, a Billings native and the head athletic team physician at the University of Montana, offers his expertise to fly fishers suffering pain or discomfort caused, he guesses, by improper form. Daryl Gadbow in the Billings Gazette.
While inhaling gnats in the Louisiana wetlands, Tom McIntyre learns all about redfishing and spins a really fine story in Gray's Sporting Journal. The piece is full of hilarity, including this quote from Gloria Steinem: "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." Besides the good writing, the story begins with a classic photo of a redfish submarining after a fly -- something instantly recognizeable to a redfish angler. Tom McIntyre's new book is called Seasons & Days: A Hunting Life (The Lyons Press).
James R. Babb writes about clean air and water in this mildly disguised discourse on worm fishing for dinner. In Gray's Sporting Journal.
This John Gierach quote about sacred streams inspires Bob Krumm to write about fishing a friend's secret spot for brown trout. In the Billings (Montana) Gazette.
The Embrey Dam, built on the Rappahannock River in 1910, is no more (photos in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star). According to this article by Rusty Dennen, "By early March, herring and shad will swim up the Chesapeake Bay and into the Rappahannock to spawn. For the first time in 151 years, they will have access to the main stem of the upper Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers above Embrey Dam, and tributaries."
Jason Neuswanger has just launched TroutNut.com, an outstanding resource for trout-fishing entomologists, complete with hi-res photos, QuickTime movies and a unique "Compareware" application that allows you to look at various insects side by side. This is just the kind of information that the Web is best at delivering, and Mr. Neuswanger -- who is on his way to earning a degree in mathmatics from Cornell -- has added his own inventive perspective on a classic topic.
This is not to miss if you have an interest in insect biology and fly tying.
It seems like every fly fishing Web site has a page that describes tying basic fishing knots, but there are only a few that are not hard to look at. Here are a few of the better ones:
Fly Fisherman's QuickTime Knot Series (requires Quicktime)
Bill Sargeant touts Long Key in the Florida Keys as one of the greatest bonefish wading locations. One thing he doesn't mention is that Long Key was also home to the original Long Key Fishing Camp, frequented by Zane Grey and many angling notables of the era before being destroyed in the 1935 hurricane.
Just when I finish shrugging off Sports Illustrated's use of bikini-clad fly fishers to sell magazines, I find out that "In 1946, every ad for fly lines had a girl in the bathing suit," that Hemingway was encouraged to take Castro fishing at gunpoint, and that the Ashaway Company used the same symbol to sell fly lines as the one co-opted and corrupted by the Nazis from an ancient Native American good luck sign.
Vic Johnson's self-published book titled "America's Fly Lines: The Evolution of the Modern Fly Line From Its Horsehair and Silk Beginnings," seems to contain many interesting nuggets like this. According to the author's Web site, the book "profiles ... over 40 of the major firms selling fly lines in America from 1816 to date. It also explains the technology advances in fly line technology over the same period. This book is a valuable resource for anyone purchasing a new fly line as well as classic tackle collectors. It contains a price guide for antique and vintage fly lines."
Leon Chandler wrote the Foreward to the book. With 166 pages and 260 illustrations, looks like a must-read for anyone interested in the history of fly lines and fly line engineering.
Bill Barker relates a fascinating oral history of the Umpqua and his family's experience -- as fly fishermen and ranchers of land on one of its tributaries -- in catching the river's once-abundant rainbows, salmon and steelhead. It truly points to the value of "the unheralded actions of ordinary people."
Last week the Washington state Fish and Wildlife Commission imposed a two-year moratorium on the taking of wild steelhead (notable by their intact adipose fin). The Fish and Wildlife Commission is a citizens' board appointed by the governor, and it seems Peter Van Gytenbeek -- a commissioner and the former publisher of Flyfishing in Saltwaters magazine -- initiated the action with a call for a permanent ban on wild steelhead "retention."
Apparently these days the true wild steelhead fisheries are limited to the Olympic Peninsula's Quillayute, Bogachiel, Sol Duc, Calawah, and Hoh rivers, and the Green river.
Bob Nastasi, co-author of several well-known fly fishing books and the Comparadun pattern, died on Sunday.
Dereck Bickerton reviews Thomas Eisner's quirky and fascinating book For the Love of Insects in today's New York Times. Mr. Eisner is a pioneer in entomology and chemical ecology. What I'd really like for Christmas is to be invited to fish with Mr. Eisner and Ernest Schweibert for a day; now that would be fascinating.
As far as I can tell, Frog Hair invented the process of zapping copolymer nylon with gamma radiation to make a supple line with high tensile strength. This article by Deborah Weisberg in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes the process at the molecular level.
Charlie Meyers lists many of the most important tailwater fisheries for Colorado-area anglers and a bunch of good tips about fishing them. On the list: the South Platte River below Spinney, Elevenmile, Cheesman and Strontia reservoirs; the Arkansas below Pueblo Reservoir; the Blue below Dillon Reservoir; the Fryingpan below Ruedi Reservoir; the Taylor below Taylor Reservoir; the Uncompahgre below Ridgway Reservoir; the Williams Fork and part of the Colorado below Williams Fork Reservoir. In the Denver Post.
Western Sport Shop has put up a page with an instructive narrative and some nice photos of the Sage rod manufacturing process. Be sure to look at the photo details by clicking on the images.
Sight-fishing for baby tarpon in the Everglades makes the subject of today's Walker's Cay chronicles. Writer Lynn Burkhead interviews Flip Pallot in this piece on ESPN.com.
A PBS segment this evening points to the role of Flagler in "stitching" the last piece of the U.S. to the mainland in the first part of the last century. I say civilizing tongue in cheek, of course, because the Calusa indians had settled the keys long before European Americans got there.
In fact 'Key West' is an anglicanization of 'Cayo Hueso,' "Island of Bones" in Spanish, presumably because of the horrific battles fought there by the Calusa.
But my great- great-grandfather, who was mayor of Key West in the 1890s, wanted to raise a family, start a bank and open a candy store, while navigating the turmoil aroused by the movement for Cuban independence from Spain. He sent his family regularly to New York by steamship, to visit relatives who had immigrated from Catalonia, Spain. In those days, steamships were notoriously vulnerable to explosion but the only choice -- which along with the advent of the automobile probably hastened Flagler's venture.
Flagler completed the railroad link to Key West in 1912. The stock market crash of 1929 left Monroe county, Florida, broke, so there was no attempt made to create an "overseas highway" until 1934. In 1935, just before Labor Day, there was word of a powerful storm in the Atlantic that might raise sea levels 7-10 feet. The result of that category 5 hurricane was a 20-foot wall of water that killed 50% of the population of the middle keys, many of them World War I veterans who were participating the government's work program, none of whom had access to the news until it was too late. The final move to transform the railroad into a highway began in 1936, surely as a response to the hurricane, which had destroyed the Key West link.
I remember clearly my first trip to Key West in 1979, riding a motorcyle across the old Flagler railroad, a road that purloined the original railroad tracks for guardrails. Now some 42,000 cars travel the new Overseas Highway, built next to or in place of the old railroad bed, each day.
But the truly remarkable thing to me is this: despite all the attention to the highway and the beach-bejewelled Keys (hint: beaches iin the Keys are diminished by the presence of a coral reef), despite the crass commercialism and the Hemingway worship and the arrival of cruise ship culture, the water surrounding the Keys remained -- and still remains, thanks to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and some careful individuals -- a wilderness.
If you haven't been there, go. And if you have a chance to stop at Bahia Honda and walk out over the old highway that tops Flagler's original trestle and ends suddenly a hundred feet above the channel, you'll get some sense of the history, guaranteed.
Better yet, wade out from Long Key and stand where Joe Brooks wondered about the possibility of catching his first bonefish on a fly.
(If you care to read a little more about the the role of the Keys in the development of saltwater fly fishing, Dr. Andrew N. Herd has a fairly detailed article here.)
In this issue of Field & Stream, John Merwin writes on the advantages of large arbor reels. "Fly reels designed for trout fishing have been essentially unchanged since 1874, when Charles Orvis patented the first American ventilated, narrow-spool model. Sure, a few advances have come along, such as palming rims, better metals and machining, and more sophisticated drags."
There are some real hidden gems on the Web when it comes to fishing photo journals. One of them is at http://www.performanceflyrods.com/journals.html. Dave Lewis owns Performance Fly Rods of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and his sometimes spectacular photos are from his home streams and Montana & Yellowstone.
Back in November, I incorrectly credited a reviewer with authorship of African Fly Fishing Safari. In fact, the authors of the book are Karl & Lesley Lane. Though I'm not sure if the book is yet available in the US, it sure looks to have lots of interest for traveling anglers.
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