Now I’m leaving, on a jet plane…

Final blog post before Chris and I head to Colorado in the wee hours of the night. In preparation, let’s watch some of my photos from last year’s Montana trip again. By the way, I produced a 40 minute DVD in sort of a diary format of fishing in Montana. It is for sale at a ridiculous price of $10. I’ve sold enough copies to almost buy a cup of coffee at McDonalds. Don’t let the fact that it didn’t make the New York Times Bestseller list stop you from ordering a copy. It isn’t bad. I intend to do a lot of video on this trip as well. Only this time, I think I am going to morph this video in with eastern brook trout fishing for a feature DVD with a conservation of native species theme…something like “Eco Fishing: The Importance of Native Species”. What do you think? We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got a lot of technical garbage to do on my computer to get it video editing ready again.

 

Trip Prep: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I’m seriously pumped and incredibly distracted. Today is Wednesday and on Friday, sometime around an unmentionable hour of the morning, an epic crusade will begin. I will roll out of Charleston metro towards Parkersburg for a rendezvous with my ecoangling wingman NA then on to our final ground destination of Akron, OH-10. From there, our journey will seek the friendly skies as we zip into Denver, Colorado. By early morning we will be in our rental car with NA’s next of kin (brother) heading towards Rocky Mountain trout water. You effin right.

This trip is about the natives. Chris (NA) and I are native freaks. We will be targeting the Greenback Cutthroat, the Rio Grande Cutthroat (may be listed as engangered species by the end of the month) and the Colorado River Cutthroat. We will also spend some time on brookies, river strain greyling, kokanee salmon and some of the big trout that will be trailing the kokes scavenging eggs.

Prep – The Good

I normally carry 6 to 10 fly boxes on my big vest. When brookie fishing I normally carry one box. Seeing that I am mostly targeting voracious feeding cutts, but with a smattering of other things, and not wanting to be out there without 13 different varieties of #14 hare’s ear nymphs (sarcasm) I made up a resonable consolidation. I switched vests for this trip to a Fishpond backpack/chestpack style vest for the convenience of having a nice backpack for all the hiking we’re going to do (also plan to summit the highest peak in Colorado, Mt. Elbert). So I’m taking only three fly boxes. Two of them will be in the backpack for specialization, but the main box for the front chestpack is as follows…

they don't stand a chance

A – Feng Shui, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, #62 white chernobyl ants and my Chi with some room left over.

B – #16 Tan Elk Hair Caddis (EHC)

C – #14 Adams Wulff Parachutes

D – #18 Adams Wulff Parachutes

E,F - #8 Conehead Olive Woolly Buggers

G – #12 Tan EHC and CDC/Elk

H – #8 BH Squirrel Tail Nymphs and a couple of #8 Black Buggers

I – Assorted Big Honkin Stimulators

J – Assorted Big Honkin Hopper Patterns

K – #14 Hot Hayne AuSable Parachutes (HHAP)

L – #12 Tan EHC, Bleached Wing

M – #12 Olive EHC, Natural Wing

N - #14 Royal Trude

O – Assorted #14 stimulators

P – Assorted #16-#18 stimulators

Prep – The Bad

I can’t find my ipod fm tuner/charger or my polarized prescription sunglasses anywhere. Kind of pissed about that.

Prep – The Ugly

Leaving a day before my daughter’s 3rd birthday and not coming back for 9 days. I’m in some serious dog-housage over it. Yard passes will be hard to come by in September.

censorship, even when it is unneccesary

This is wrong on so many levels, but you will laugh. I know you will

Extreme Geocaching

Yesterday wasn’t such a good day. I thought it would be though. I had work to do in Princeton so I printed off a few geocaches to log in between some travel time while working in the area. If you aren’t into geocaching it is a pretty cool game where you find hidden containers by GPS coordinates. For me, it is similar to why I love brook trout fishing, it is about the different places you get to see that you otherwise wouldn’t. I also like the personal competition of racking up numbers of caches found. A small sideshow of geocaching is to be the first to find (FTF). When someone places a new cache there is an all out free for all to be the FTF. Living in Charleston being a FTF is about like winning the powerball. Once the thing is published someone will find it within an hour or two. So I discovered a new cache near Bluewell and thought I’d be the first to get it. I visited it around 10:00 am and spent entirely too long climbing through poison ivy and slick stream boulders looking for the stupid thing before giving up, but this was just the first bad event.

Then I went for another nearby cache and couldn’t find it either. I finished up some more work in the area then went for the queen mother cache. In Pinnacle Rock State Park there is a huge rock by the road that thousands of people visit yearly. However, there is another big rock on top of the ridge that has no trails to it and you can’t see from the road. There is a cache on TOP of this big rock and I knew I could get some killer photographs from up there so I was full on gameface. (See the cache description by clicking here). I had on shorts and a pair of crocs. Not really best attire. Bushwacking up through some serious rattlesnake habitat I was already on edge. Then I discovered what seemed to be the route to get up to the top of the rock. A crack between the two Seneca-Rocks-esque monoliths that was approximately 60 yards long and at about a 40 degree angle. Smaller boulders filled the crack making travel pretty difficult. I shimmied up about 25 yards into the crack when suddenly, from about 10 yards in front of me I saw the face of a GIANT BOBCAT and it let out a HIISSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!! The adrenelin rush at that moment is undescribable. I yelled, turned and bounced down that crack faster than a shot deer. Actually, for the first time in my life I knew what it felt like to be the prey. I don’t think it followed me, at least for the first 100 yards I didn’t even bother looking over my shoulder. Running down the hill I took every cuss word I knew plus a few new ones and put them all together in one single word which I repeated over and over like a mantra, hoping the cuss word gods would fend off the impending death.

I felt like I’d made it over into West Germany when I got back to the car. Like I was Simon Kenton and had just fooled an entire party of Shawnee warriors by getting away.

I decided to just take the rest of the day off at that point and go fishing. I drove down to Calcutta, I mean Elkhorn, and fished for a couple of hours before I had to retreat home. Thinking the worst was behind me I proceeded to fish a nice tributary. About a mile up I was fishing through a high banked section when I came upon a culvert near the stream of about 24″ in diameter. I noticed some food related garbage at the base of the culvert but that is nothing out of the ordinary for this filthy stream. When I got within 10 feet of the culvert I heard something inside. Thinking it was a coon I walked to within 5 feet and peered inside. I thought I heard a growl, but couldn’t see anything. Then imagine the biggest, meanest sounding doberman mixed with rottweiler snarling bark and that was the next sound to eminate from the cylinder. I about crapped my pants. I ascended the high bank rather quickly and retreated to the car. I was through with mean animals. Through I tell you.

On the way home a filthy flatbed tractor trailer threw a rock into my windshield and put a giant crack in it, then my car about blew up and I had to drive the burm of the interstate the last mile to the exit near my home to limp to a garage.

I’m staying put today so nothing can bother me.

didymo sucks dirty sphincters

Rock snot is spreading in WV and that sucks bad. It puts a hurtin on trout populations and that tees me off. Of course, it will be a great opportunity for the overzealous C&R missionaries to blame population downturn on fishing pressure. Rock snot is bad stuff. When I was fishing in Maryland a month ago I noticed that the state had installed wader wash stations along accesses. I’ve suggested this to the state TU council and not much has been said. I’ll probably bring it up again at the Fall meeting. Press releases from Mike Shingleton are not going to do much if anything. The vast majority of anglers won’t read ‘em, let alone follow the guidelines. As for me, despite having bought a new pair of wading boots just last Fall I will be retiring the felt soles soon for a more rock snot unfriendly pair of boots. Looks like I’ll be picking up a pair of Patagucci sticky rubber boots from Craig at Serenity Now Outfitters. I am particularly culpable for this debate since I fish so many different waters throughout the state. Even if you don’t fish as big a range as I do, I would highly encourage you to either ditch the felt for a while or at a minimum follow the cleaning guidelines.

Castaway’s Musical Youtuberations V

Due for another one of these. Last week’s absence due to the bamboo rodmaking school zapped all my free time and had nary a minute to bang out a blog entry. I’m getting quite a backlog of great photos that haven’t been displayed. Maybe when/if things slow down I’ll post a few on here randomly.

Till then, you can suffer through some more musical youtoobs. The theme for today’s musical yootubes is ‘Alternative Rock/Beat/Techno female lead songs’. It’s a crazy mishmash, but all with the common thread.

Some more throwback…the most addicting song ever. You’ll hum it for the rest of the day. But at least it is really a good song.

Suzanne Vega – Tom’s Diner

Some stuff from M.I.A.. I’ve got a vision for how this song’s opening would look killer in a film feature. Open up with a fixed camera stationed on a moving car looking at the speeding roadside accoutrements while the subject’s vehicle rolls into the picture. That’s the opening this song needs in vision. Anyway, here is ‘Paper Planes’.

More gay disabling by ball hogging corporate music types on youtube goings on. So here is the dumb photo stand in for this song. Close your eyes and it may be better, but it is an interesting tune. My wife likes it to exercise to.

Shiney Toy Guns has a bunch of tunes I like. This is one my wife likes best for running. Again, punks disabled all the real videos so another gay stand in has to do. Le Disko…

New Photo Galleries

I’m experimenting with some new flash software. It takes a lot longer to load than my other gallery xml formatting, but is sort of a neat effect software. I can do a bunch of neat things with it, but unfortunately I can’t get it to stop locking up my system when I add music to the slideshow. I think it will be a nice feature to add to the arsenal though. It does a lot of neat stuff.

Anyway, here are the galleries. The first one includes shots from my most recent brookie outing with Nathan (see report below).

http://www.vandaliarodworks.com/brooktroutJuly08/brooktrout.html

The next one is some black and white shots of my kids and my nephews last weekend.

http://www.vandaliarodworks.com/smithkids/smithkids.html

Let me know if you like the format or if it takes too long to load for you. I have the slowest available DSL and the first trial of the brookie slideshow took about 2 minutes and the one of the kids took about 30 seconds to load.

I’m on vacation. Let’s party.

Don’t have to be back at verk (East German accent on purpose) until the 28th. The twenty-freakin-eighth. How cool is that? Plan is for the first ANNUAL Vandalia Rodworks Bamboo Rodmaking School to commence on Monday. I’m somewhat inept but prepared, so I think we shall have barrels of monkeys. Actually, just haven’t done a rod making school before, so the verk shall be mighty at the beginning until I gauge the progress of the team. Hopefully we get so far ahead that we are faced with the difficult decisions of ‘where to fish’. Although given the strange water levels we’ve had in recent months we could be forced into chasing gauges. ‘Tis well.

This Is Fly has a new issue out. Check it out.  

Then let’s party.

Golfballs and Largemouths

I spent the past 3 days in the eastern panhandle for work. As you may or may not know I spend a good bit of travel time in that area. This time was as busy as ever and had to work late each day. I had a coworker with me who hasn’t fished in a couple of years, but is a golfer. I haven’t golfed in a couple of years, but am a fisher. So we compromised about our few hours of free time left each evening. We played golf, then fished. The golf course ponds in Moorefield were full of hungry bass and bluegill the size of your head. Nothing big was caught, but I did hook a few giant fish. I started out using a worm pattern that I’d picked up at Anglers Xtreme a few years ago, but I couldn’t keep the weedless hook in the fish. Being used to trout and having a long fly rod makes it difficult to get a good hookset on those tough mouthed creatures. So I switched to a conehead brown zuddler and I hooked and landed a largemouth bass on nearly 10-15 consecutive casts. Ended up with well over 20 fish and they shut down on the zuddler after it got pitch dark. So I tied a big popper on my partners rod and resigned to relaxing on a bunker mound and watch the goings on. Then someone nearby started launching fireworks into the night sky and it made for a really cool show. The following evening we played golf at The Woods in Hedgesville, but were so hungry by the time we finished that we decided to forego fishing in favor of food.

 

Biggest Fish

Work Hard

Play Hard

Grab Bag

Water levels are freakishly erratic this month for sure. Two weekends ago the WV highland streams were abnormally low considering the world record wet spring we had. Then yesterday I was going to attempt some southern WV streams to discover that they were all blown out. So Nathan Reese and I decided to head north. Nearly every body of water we crossed was high or blown out completely, but the brook trout stream we targeted just west of Elkins was at normal to low flow. It is a brook trout stream that has yielded some bruiser brook trout to me in the past years, but had not been visited by me for some time. I discovered that the local mouthbreathers had deposited several garbage truck loads of litter and filth along the stream. There were dead tents, thousands of cans and bottles, household garbage strung about and plenty of fishing line hanging around. I reiterate that in no way do I subscribe to the commonly held belief that rampant poaching of brook trout occurs in WV. I don’t believe it does happen. I fish too much and in too many places and see very little evidence of hee haw angling pressure. This stream is getting hammered. But despite that, there is still a good population and always will be unless the habitat is strangled. Which is what worries me. I did not find any big fish, but in no way do I blame the angling. I found banks of siltation that had not been there before. Entire riffles were smothered with sand. Looks like the four wheelers are taking quite a toll on the creek. So yes, the mouthbreathers are killing this creek, but it wasn’t the five foot stick with the fishing line tied to it that I found on the bank, it was the ATVs (Asshole Tresspassing Vehicles) that are doing it.

I’ll have some photos up in the next few days. Until then, enjoy some completely unrelated blasts from the past that you will never see combined together on any other blog, ever…