FoulHooked...(how'd that get there?)

...though not the first...to compare us to (label us as?) a virus. Though malice may not be man's motivation for destruction, nature and consequence are equally ambivilent to intent. Every decision you make matters. This weekend I am flying west to check in with my waders model. Perhaps if I cared a little more about life, I'd just send a letter. Read Olivia Judson's piece on extinction from this week. Makes me wish I had a better way with words. Loosely pertaining to fishing; "Certainly, we’re having an impact. For example, fishing in the northwestern Atlantic has caused population collapses in several species of great sharks — including bull sharks, blacktips, dusky sharks, hammerheads. Since 1972, scalloped hammerhead shark populations off the coast of North Carolina have fallen by 98 percent; dusky sharks, bull sharks and smooth hammerhead populations have fallen by 99 percent. By comparison, blacktips are doing well: their population fell by only 93 percent. The p...

She's too cute, it's true.

Not in my underwear (hopefully). Saturday was the last time I haven't been fishing. Before that...? I think it was the previous Saturday. At a minimum, I have been fishing 10 of the last 11 days, and caught trout each time out. Many (most?) of those days have been two-outing days, usually with some lunch-break sunnys and bass and afternoon/evening trout. This is what life should be. Hopped back in my car last night after a couple hours at the creek and found I had a visitor trying to find it's way back out. No wonder the trout have been all over the Yellow Sallys . I hadn't seen any of these guys on the stream, but I tied one on for something new, and they have definitely been interested...I'd say about half my trout this week have come on the Sally. I had no idea they were here. Sometimes you just get lucky.

At least, so say several European countries, Switzerland being the latest to join . Germany and Scandanavian countries have similar policies or, at the least, wideheld sentiments. Is their logic fuzzy or flawless? Primary motive being to decrease the suffering of animals (I can see that, it's cruel to trick an animal into chomping a piece of metal and making it fight for it's life only for your own pleasure...of course, I can live with that), they rebutt arguments about the conservation implications that mandatory killing of anything you catch will reduce overall fishing pressure. OK. Maybe. Even probably. But at what cost? You remove conservation-minded anglers (who practice primarily catch and release) from the equation. I've always felt experiencing the outdoors breeds desire to protect it. By discouraging those likely to be conservation-minded from participating in the sport, aren't you potentially discouraging conservation? I know, it sounds like a little b...

Went back to the stream last night...old man in tow. The original plan had been to troll the lake for rainbows. I thought maybe the stream would be a better idea, because: -the wind is always an unknown on the lake, and it was gusting fairly well yesterday afternoon -I hadn't been to the lake in over a month , and just didn't know the trout situation out there -the canoe is uncomfortable enough with one person...almost unbearable with two...especially when I'm rowing -I knew the stream had plenty of stockies -I knew the hatches and spinner falls were getting thick -I hadn't seen another person on my default stretch of the stream since April -and of course, I wanted to throw flies at browns I could see more than drag lures across a lake over rainbows I couldn't see I had thought maybe I could convince Dear Old Dad (DOD) to try out the 3wt as well...but he would have none of that. I should point out here that the section of stream I fish is SMALL. It's no mountain...

They sure grow up fast. I've been too busy working, traveling and, most importantly, fishing to spend much time on the ole blog; there's still a lot to be recapped...and a camera still in need of tech support. Anyway, the default stream has been good to me over the past week. After scouting and sporadically fishing the "easy" pool since the beginning of the season, I finally started seeing trout there two weeks ago (holdovers? wilds?). Last week, the stocked fish showed up in numbers. Granted, pellett fed fish straight from the hatchery arent my quarry of choice, but when you can be laying your line on the water, half an hour from work, without even needing to change your shoes...sometimes the default is hard to part with. Especially when the fish are on. When they first showed up last week, they were dumb and hungry, as you might expect. Myself, being lazy, decided to leave the big fat beetle I had been using for panfish on the leader. They loved it. Rise to every ca...

You know...all those gals that read the crap I spew on here (thanks sis). Anyway, moral of the story is, try fly fishing...bet you end up liking it more than you thought. (For the guys, get your girl to try it...though teaching her yourself might not be best for the relationship). "Yup! With bright pink hats and manicured nails, I am self-admittedly a ‘girly-girl’. I’m simply a woman who likes to play in the water, rather than a diva or a feminist—a serious angler in touch with my feminine side, who spends all of my free time chasing fish in the hope that they, in turn, will chase my fly. You can be certain that there are more of us out there than you might think there are..." Please, tell me where they are. All these young, beautiful, talented, accomplished, well-versed angler-women...they're not all on the west coast are they? (Tongue in cheek...I'm sure they're out here too...just haven't had the pleasure yet.) The one disappointment from the article... ...