I smell a fishing trip

Sometimes you just know the fishing is about to be spectacular.

We've had a freeze early this week.

Now we're entering a stretch of warm fall days...

...and the smallmouth are calling me.

They know winter is coming and they'll be active. They'll be ravenous. Even the big girls will be coming out and they'll be ready to dance. It's time to put on the neoprene tuxedo and hit the afternoon dance floor!

Sometime during this warm stretch I'll be in the water looking for bruisers like the one above.

This was the 3rd pig of similar size I caught on a trip last spring. I had a feeling like this in my bones that day too. The old lizard genes were feeling the seasons change and pushing me toward the water...

...although I admit that feeling might also have been helped along by monitoring the weather reports, USGS river gauges, and various fishing forums.

Hopefully I'll be posting more fish like this soon.

In the meantime, here's a question to ponder. How big is the fish in that photo above? Take your best guess and I'll post the size later.

Grocery run

She likes fishing again!!

Last time I tried to take her, she diverted us to the mall instead. There she skipped down the aisles singing "I don't have to go fishing, I don't have to go fishing..." On that day, the full weight of my failures as a father were upon me. I expected, nay deserved, to be arrested on the spot by the Department of Children and Family Services. What child of a respectable father could prefer the mall over fishing?

But today..huzzah!! I'm saved!!

What was missing on my prior attempts, it seems, was a black velvet party dress and a quarry lake stuffed full of brain-dead salmonids.

Is that not cute enough to split an atom?

Despite the lowly status of our quarry, the day did hold some challenges.

While provisioning for the trip at McDonald's, my endearing daughter promptly received her Happy Meal (avec Barbie doll, no less) from the crackerjack staff assembled behind the counter. My order was apparently far less interesting. After 15 minutes of watching everyone in line behind me get their food...and a short public soliloquy on the fine service I had received, I gave it up on my McHeartattack and headed for the lake.

When we arrived, things were even grimmer still.

Some people had actually failed to catch fish!! Among that mass of trout-fishing humanity, not a single stringer had been deployed.

For a short while I was afraid that same fate might befall us as well. Every year it seems the toilet trout seem to crave one specific thing. One year it's worms. Another year it's a Mepps spinner. Another year it's minnows. This year, apparently it was corn.

Frankly, I don't keep corn in my tackle box. Nor did we find any while we were digging worms. The mepps, worm, rapala, powerbait, kitchen sink and C-4 combos we threw at them simply did not produce. Fortunately, some kind soul saw our plight and gave us their margarine tub full of kernels.

Ha. That's the ticket...or was it?

Understand that this lake is stuffed obscenely full of domesticated O. mykiss. They were flying around us everywhere. The lake was black with them. Sardine cans have lower densities of fish. But they still didn't bite.

Two hours of light left. Time for drastic measures.

We headed for the corner.

Normally, I don't give out fishing locations. Catchable trout, however, are only marginally fish so I'm not really breaking that rule here.

In the southwest corner of Clear Lake in Kickapoo State Park ...catty-corner from the concession and boat rental dock, beside the road and just to the right of the handicapped fishing platform and the shoreline so compacted by generations of grocery trout anglers that it puts concrete to shame...there beside the little stand of emergent weeds and under the picnic table someone threw into the water at some point early in the Mesozoic era...somewhere under the heart-shaped carving that reads "Brittany loves Travis"...lies the mother lode of all catchable trout.

I am reasonably sure, there is a hole under that carven picnic table bench. And that hole, it can hardly be refuted, serves as a direct pipeline to some satanic trout hatchery grubbing trout out of the earth like so many Urukai. Those trout are always there.

Tomorrow, if Jupiter plows into the Earth and sends us spinning into the sun, I have no doubt whatsoever there would be trout back under that bench by next Thursday. They just keep coming...and coming...and....

So yes. We paddled to the corner.

Erin had gotten tired of the canoe by then so we beached it. I showed her "her" root where she should sit and gave her "her" rod that she could hold while she watched "her" bobber..which remarkably...she actually did. In short order the bobber was plunging and the fish were flopping and the girl was squealing and we were feeling pretty darn happy to be out fishing together.

Three fish were on the stringer. "That's one for your brother and your mother and me, now we just have to catch one for you."

"For me? Ewwwww...I hate fish."

"Well if you're going to catch these fish you have to eat them."

"No way, I'm not eating any fish."

"Well if you're not going to eat the fish, you have to eat the worms we dug."

"I'd rather eat a worm than a fish."

We stopped fishing then.

We also did our community service. The bucket of corn kernels was passed to the couple beside us who had not managed to get even a bite while we were there. I wished them luck and paddled off. After we racked the canoe we had to drive past them to exit the park. They were fishing in almost the exact spot we had just left but hadn't even had a bite.

I wonder if they had missed a few of the finer points of the exquisite art of fishing for toilet trout with corn on a bobber?

In my opinion, they were fishing too far away from that bench.

You don't cast "around" structure. You cast "into" it. If the fish you are stalking is a cover-loving fish, those fish...the happy, contented fish that are willing to take a nibble of your hydrocarbon gew-gaw that they don't really need...are often deep in the middle of the cover you are fishing. They are immediately under and between the "B" and the "r" of the "Brittany". They are between the bark and the wood of the densest part of that lay down or rootwad in your stream.

If you miss structure by 2 feet under some conditions, you've missed it altogether. Every fish we caught today was within six inches of that that bench and those were the only fish I saw caught on that lake the whole time we were there.

The trend seems even more important with real fish. Many of the spotted and smallmouth bass we caught on Friday were glued to the logs where we caught them.

That couple was fishing far too far away from the hot spot...

...or maybe something had just temporarily clogged the hole to the satanic trout hatchery?

What do I know?

We'll eat our fish (or worms) tomorrow.

It sure was nice to see my daughter smile today.

That's hits the spot!

Ahhhhhh......

Man I needed this trip.

After several outings whipping the water for runts and nothing, the fish finally showed up. This was a gratifying day. Jeff and I didn't catch any monsters, but we landed plenty of good-sized fish on a very pleasant October afternoon.

Jeff's blog has a nice account of the trip and some pictures of the kind of fishing that we did. He put me in the front of his canoe and it was pretty easy to hit my targets from there. You'll never find a more pleasant or generous guy.



This wasn't his biggest fish, but I cheated shamelessly and had him hold the fish out toward the camera to foreshorten this shot. As a result, this fish looks bigger than the 15 inchers that were the biggest of the day.

It was indeed a cold weather bite. I stuck to a 4" tube jig and spent a lot of time not even moving the lure. Most of the casts were to root wads and lay downs.

Before 1 PM the bites produced no bumps or vibrations or movement in the line of any sort. The only sign of a fish was a slight tension that might also be a hangup on a rock or a stick. Half the hook sets were on ghosts. Half were on solid fish. Later in the day the bites became less subtle, and I even managed to take a few active fish on a #2 Mepps.

Unfortunately, the buzzbait bite never showed up. Jeff pushed it hard, but the fish were just too lethargic. Once he put away the top-waters he caught his share including the biggest fish of the day, a solid 15" spotted bass. I got another just a whisper shorter and another largemouth about the same size.



I had posted this photo as a teaser and asked where the fish were in this photo.

The answer, of course, is "everywhere", but more specifically "under the heavy wood". We caught at least 8 fish out of this snag. The majority were smaller, and laying down under the smaller logs on the right. A few were on the scour hole at the head of the root wad. The biggest one was immediately under the heaviest log...where the biggest one always tends to be. I caught him by dropping a tube jig on 4 feet of line through a gap in the wood less than 2 feet square.

We caught several fish this way during the course of the day, including the biggest smallmouth of the day, again caught by Jeff.

Final count: 4 largemouth, 3 smallmouth, 14 spotted bass with 2 15 inch spots and 1 15 inch largemouth.

Many thanks, Jeff! We definitely need at least one more good trip before the weather turns foul.

The night before: winding down the season?

So we're going to try it again tomorrow.

I haven't caught a nice smallmouth since June. The bass have had lock jaw the whole later half of the summer and Jeff's worst trips of the year have been with me.

After an enjoyable and productive spring, I have become the Jonah of river smallmouth this later summer and fall.

I'm not sure this little random walk into ignomy is going to end tomorrow either. It is entirely possible I will head into the winter on a cold streak of epic proportions. It rained a few days ago and the weather was genuinely cool for the first time in a long time. The fish may be shut down again...

...but you never know until you get there.

I'm thinking about slow presentations into structure on deeper water...warming temperatures loosening up the bite in the afternoon...and that one secret stream I haven't tried yet where the smallmouth are usually thick and fat and ready to bite on a sunny fall afternoon.

It's time to pull out the stops and break the cycle.

We'll see what happens.

Something ugly, something blue, something sad and not so new

The picture above was taken in Urbana Illinois on a bridge crossing the Saline Branch. Gary and I were planning a middle school float on the river when we found it. We called the city and asked it to be removed. You can still go to that bridge and find the blacked out places where the city workers covered it with paint.

It would be nice to just float past that text and pretend it doesn't exist. Most people probably think that's the sensible thing to do.

"Oh, that's just some isolated jackass, no one who matters really thinks like that. Those problems are just in the south."

Right.

Are you aware that there were over 470 towns in Illinois alone that until very recently had "sun down" laws (don't let the sun go down on you here if you're black)? Some of those are still informally enforced. These are some of the same towns I drive through to get to my favorite fishing spots. These are places I've considered living.

Ignore it? I don't think so.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/051001/1sundown.htm

Did you know that for long periods of time, the largest active chapters of the Klu Klux Klan were in Indiana? Did you know that when David Duke ran to be governor of Louisiana (my home state), every single newspaper there repudiated him and his candidacy, but the past editor of the Champaign Illinois News Gazette wrote favorable articles about him (in 1992!)? Do you remember the white supremicist who drove through Urbana looking for minorities to shoot? He hit an Asian student just a few blocks from my house. Thankfully, that student survived, but some of the people he gunned down elsewhere did not.

In our enlightened "blue" state, racism is still an ugly, destructive force that pops up in surprising and depressing places. It's often like those 2 or 3 kids that disrupt the high school class. They're just a few rotten apples ruining the barrel. Stupid. Illogical. And common.

I'll not dwell long on the connection between these worst examples of Midwestern racism and the current political situation in the United States. I've got my own views about politics. I'm right and you're probably wrong and that's all we both need to know about that.

I would hope, though, that we stop and sift some of the absolute garbage that is being repeated about Barak Obama as a person. None of it would not be taken seriously for an instant if he were not black. Are we really so stupid as a nation to fall for this again? Barak Obama is not a Muslim or a terrorist or a radical because his father is from Kenya just as Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same places doing the same things even if the people there both have a slightly deeper tan.

Vote for whoever. But vote the issues...

...and when you hear the trolls crawl out from under their bridges and spew their stupidity, don't just float past it.


See you on the river.

Taking a breather

Yesterday I submitted a proposal for a project I've been hoping to do for years and years.

If it is funded I will be able to continue the successes from this year in Placencia Lagoon.

If it isn't funded, I'm not sure what I'm going to do...keep writing grants I suppose....

...but these last few days of watching the stock market plummet like a Mexican cliff diver have been an bit unnerving. Working in this field is never something one does for finacial stability. In this financial environment, it becomes an open question if the work can even be done at all. Stock portfolio earnings fund the charitable foundations that make this work possible. The way it looks now, there won't be any earnings any time soon.

After the hard weeks' work and all the nervousness surrounding the markets I decided to take a couple of hours on the river just to forget it all for a while.

I caught 5 fish in 3 hours. The biggest was above and the only smallmouth was probably young of the year, barely bigger than my lure.

Even if the fish were shy, the weather was great.

The last fish of the day was this longear sunfish.

What an optimistic-looking little guy.

The ethical litmus of catchable trout

Here they come.

The fall season for Illinois catchable trout begins October 18th. I'll not shill for the program other than to say that I do in fact buy an inland stamp and drive to the lake to catch them at least once a year.

Catchable trout are fat and sluggish with rounded, eroded fins from life in the raceway. They put up all the fight you would expect from a piscine couch potato. None.

These are not fascinating fish. I do think, however, that they are a fascinating fishery. I think too the way you approach them probably says quite a bit about what you value in nature. I'll throw out my perspective and I'd be grateful to hear other's thoughts.

For me, catchable trout are more of a grocery run than a fishing trip. In an average year, I can catch a more economical trout on opening day than I can buy over my local meat counter. With a 6 dollar stamp, two gallons of gas, an inline spinner or jar of power bait or corn, I can normally catch a limit in less than an hour. That's 10 fish (in the days I could drag my son along) for less than 15 dollars and a 3 hour investment of time...that I would normally spend sleeping.

So what are the facts here? At what cost are these fish provided to us?

How do we get catchable trout?

We get catchable trout from people who pay for the inland trout stamp. Those funds are used to fund hatcheries that raise trout and then released them in about 30 sites around Illinois. Few trout survive the warm Illinois summer and there is no evidence that any of them reproduce. It is a seasonal put and take fishery.

The broodstock below were photographed at the Norfork National Hatchery in Arkansas. You can see the effects of the hormone treatments, milt strippings and life confined in a raceway in the exaggerated kype, oddly shaped body and worn fins.

Once the eggs are fertilized and the alevins are hatched and nurtured through their early life history stages, the parr are put back into raceways and given pelleted feeds. Because mortality due to predation and competition is minimized, production is prodigious. Millions of trout can be produced with relative ease.

Up to this point, I have no problem with the process. Based on the information I have, the catchable trout that go into the quarry where I catch them represent minimal risk to the environment. I don't have much regard for the arguments that have been raised against them in that setting (notice the spiffy italics there, those will be important later). Rainbow trout aquaculture is listed by the Environmental Defense Fund as one of the most sustainable sources of fish protein on the planet. You would have to be an incredible scrooge to begrudge them a chance to live a little longer in an artificial lake and give kids and disabled people (and merciless meatheads like me) a chance to catch them.

Sure, the broodstock live the lives of sexual freaks (...and is that such a bad fate after all?). Yes, some hatcheries have unsustainable use of water (Some). Ok, fine, the DNR might be a bit distracted from more important tasks when they spend time futzing around with these domesticated zooter sausages (But in a hatchery? Not likely).

My only problems with catcable trout come from:

1. Any inferred notion that this is real fishing, which indirectly supports unsustainable practices in other settings such as stocking non-native fish or stocking to sustain native fisheries or indiscriminate, unthinking catch and keep ethic.
2. Stockings in high diversity pristine settings.

Below is a picture of what trout opening day looks like in Rock Creek, a high quality tributary of the Kankakee River. Aside from the dozens of people illegally fishing from the bridge, there were dead trout strewn on the bottom, banks beaten down to erodable goo on both sides of the river and up on the shore, the ISA posting of local regulations had been vandalized. On top of that, the rainbows that were added to the system survive well into the summer, representing a potential disease vector and competition for space and food in a high quality and high diversity system.

Maybe this was fun for some people. Aside from the uncanny resemblance to a group of (Chicago) bears feeding on a salmon run, I don't see much aesthetic or recreational value here.

Whatever value is here could have been gotten in a quarry where the environmental risks are less.

In some ways, the catchable trout program is so bad that it's good. Stupid, naive trout are great for kids (and adults) with short attention spans. It's also a valuable entry to the sport, assuming anglers don't transfer the same ethics of catchable trout to more valuable fish populations. In the proper setting, the environmental costs are low. Over-summer mortality prevents establishing a permanent exotic fishery. It's a budgetary non-entity, supporting itself and representing minimal burden to the state.

So yes. On October 18th, you're likely to find me slumming with the toilet trout. Call me a meat-head. I don't mind. It's cheap meat and I'm a cheap guy.

While you're giggling at my jar of power bait, here are some points to consider.

For the fly fishers who wouldn't be caught dead catching a rounded-fin hatchery trout, but who enjoy fish they call "wild" just because they have established a breeding population:

How exactly is your naturally reproducing but still exotic population of brown trout or west-coast salmonids an environmental improvement? How much competition and predation do those fish exert on native fauna compared to these ephemeral Illinois schmoo that only last a few weeks at a time?

It blows my gourd that people here in Illinois will turn up their noses at native smallmouth bass fisheries, then sidell reverently up to these grocery trout as if they were a gift from the heavens.

For the angler who sees no difference between these catchable turds and native fish:

Sweet Jesus! People...wake up!

A challenge for all of us:

If we as anglers are not also environmentalists, these sewer salmonids will represent the only fisheries available to us in the future (minus the odd nuclear carp or heavy metal goldfish). State-reared fish in hatcheries virtually dropped into the laps of lazy anglers may not be bread and circuses, but it's distressingly close. It's certainly not the best we can do...

...but it is more fun than the average trip to the grocery store.

Somebody pass the fillet knife.

The Modern Angler: Environmentalist?

The conclusion is inescapable. If you want quality fishing, you're either going to have to act on behalf of the environment or parasitize another's efforts to keep it intact.

The press of human populations on the fisheries of the world ensures that this will always be so.



To be sure, fish will always be found in some pretty awful places. One of most hypereutrophic environments ever measured was a carp culture pond in India. In Belize, I've seen anglers catch snook in the foulest waters I've ever seen anywhere. Urban fisheries, God bless them, thrive on habitat from junked cars and cinderblocks.


...but for the most part, these are not the fisheries we hold dearest in our hearts.


We crave wild places. Solitude. Commaraderie of a few good friends. Connection to the ancient things. We want to experience something much older and bigger than ourselves and possibly...just possibly...get a small taste of our own deep history.



As an angler, we make choices every time we buy tackle, cast a vote, or voice our opinions. We choose whether those experiences will be survive now and into the future. We choose the fate of rivers, lakes and species of all types.



If you are an enlightened angler, I congratulate you with humility and sincere gratitude. You have chosen an avocation as complex and technically demanding as your own imagination and the interworkings of the biosphere. You have chosen something ancient and meaningful on the very deepest aesthetic plane. You have chosen in many ways to be the sentinel that walks and guards the old paths and keeps the planet healthy and whole.



If you are still living fully in your hunter-gatherer past and see only your immediate interests while you're on the water, it is well past time to open your eyes. For the sake of us all, think beyond what's pulling on your pole. Think about how it got there and how it will remain there, not just today but into the future. Think about the very deep future and the species and genes and habitats we have the priviledge to experience in our short life times.



Human populations can no longer sustain themselves on what we catch. We are too many, too hungry and too proficient.



Take responsibility for your actions. Encourage others to do the same.



See you on the water.