Category: Coldwater

Posted on

Brook Trout, Libby Camp, North Maine Woods, September 9-14, 2023

(37)

We didn’t drive to Libby Camp the obvious way. If we’d stayed on the highway we could have driven on paved roads a good bit longer, so of course we didn’t do that. We drove the back way, west and then north around the back side of Baxter State Park. Kris drove and I napped.

I napped because I was sick, having been blindsided with a cold on the flight to Maine the morning before. I worried that it might be Covid, but it felt so purely like a cold that I didn’t worry much, and anyway there were no tests handy. I had been fine the day before we left. When I got onto the flight the next day I felt awful, but by then I was committed. By our second day in camp I was tired but mostly recovered. And anyway by then it was Kris’s turn to be sick, and she was doing an exemplary job of it for both of us.

So for me the cold was short-lived but rife with misery. The morning we drove to Libby Camp from Bangor I felt so bad that I didn’t even pretend I wanted to drive. I alternately dozed, blew my nose, and displayed manly stoicism, manly stoicism being the same as frequent and bitter complaining. I was particularly whiny when I woke up after lunch and had no clue where we were. Kris wasn’t real sure either, so I didn’t accomplish much except to increase her angst.

Kris at least was following a downloaded route, and it wasn’t her fault that the map app had gone on a backroads buying spree. We had only wanted to see Mount Katahdin when we left the highway. What we got was a tour of the Great North Maine Lumber Roads.

There are roughly 3.5 million acres of land in the North Maine Woods, and most of what isn’t water is a mix of second- or third- or more-growth mixed timber. Most of those 3.5 million acres are privately owned by lumber companies, and all of those dirt roads exist for the happiness of lumber company lumber trucks. By both the rules of the North Maine Woods and simple physics Nissan Rogue rental cars must yield.

I’m guessing returning a flattened rental car to National would have raised questions.

Back to that first day, at the Telos Road checkpoint on the backside of Baxter State Park we paid our $100 entry fee for a week in the Great Private North. Had we been 70+, our passage would have been free, but all in all we got our money’s worth. I’m not in any hurry for free passage. It’ll get here soon enough.

Jeffrey Labree, not Neil Thomas

Libby Camp has been in the North Maine Woods for somewhere north of 100 years. They cater to hunters, fishers, and winter snowmobilers. In addition to those field sports they offer family adventures–hiking, orchid hunting, canoeing, staying in a cabin in the woods with no TV or internet . . . It sounds wholesome and unforgettable. When I was 10 if my parents had taken me there I’d have been in heaven. I was pretty much in heaven six decades down the road.

We had signed up for Orvis Week, and there were three other anglers with us for the week: Bruce from South Carolina, Mike from upstate New York, and Paul from Tampa via Austin. Off and on while we were there we also met other anglers. There was a nice downstate Maine couple who interpreted many things Maine for us, and who called the state game warden at Bar Harbor to make sure we’d be safe notwithstanding the projected arrival of both the Thomases and Hurricane Lee. And the first night at dinner there was a strong personality who complained that while he had caught plenty of fish, he hadn’t caught anything big. Outside of politics I’ve rarely met someone with such a strong grasp of missing the point, but he was amusing, and his friend was along for the ride. After dinner they left for Portland, five hours south. I hoped they wouldn’t hit a moose. I’m rather fond of moose.

Did you know that in South Carolina they apparently mispronounce both crappie and pecan? All I’ve got to say is that since they kicked off the Civil War and repeatedly elected Strom Thurmond, South Carolinians shouldn’t be allowed the final word on anything.

At the heart of Libby Camp is a lodge building where we all hung out and ate communal meals. Libby’s guest cabins and work buildings surround it. Everything faces onto Lake Millinocket, where Libby keeps its float plane, a trio of small motorboats, and a passel of canoes and kayaks. The lodge building has both electricity (thanks to a generator) and internet (thanks to Mr. Musk’s Starlink), but the cabins don’t have either. Light in our cabin was from propane lanterns, which were wholly admirable for producing warm glows, but were maybe not the completest thing for finding lost socks. Heat in the cabins was from a wood stove and piled quilts. Air conditioning in the cabin was from opening the windows and deconstructing piled quilts.

There was a point, probably when I was admiring one of the mounted moose heads, when I thought what a mighty fine job Libby Camp had done mimicking a backwoods fishing lodge. Then I realized I was a mighty fine idiot. I had experienced this weird sense of dislocation once before in Hawaii, in the bar at the Hotel Moloka‘i, when I caught myself admiring what a fine job they’d done copying a tropical bar. Sometimes you get lucky enough to stumble into the real deal.

I was supposed to fish five days but fished four, with one day off to look after Kris, sleep off cold remnants, and play the guitar. Kris fished three days and slept two. Of the four days I fished, I spent two of the days floating in canoes on ponds while our guide, Jeffrey Labree, moved me into position so that I could look good casting. Two other days we waded rivers. The ponds involved a bit of hiking. One of the rivers involved a 30-minute trip in a Cessna float plane, and the other needed four hours of driving and being on watch for lumber trucks.

There’s a lot of the North Maine Woods.

There were also a lot of fish, and I didn’t catch many larger than ten inches. Jeffrey said that one of my missed hits was easily a 20-inch landlocked salmon, which would have been a fish of a lifetime. I missed it. I’ve missed enough fish-of-a-lifetime by now to know that’s ok. The fish aren’t hankering to participate in my obsession, and just knowing they’re there and being lucky enough to spend some time in their vicinity is plenty good for me. And the memory of that hit from that fish is its own good thing. Sitting here days later and a thousand miles away I think I can conjure everything about that instant in my mind’s eye.

Landlocked salmon.

On the day I fished without Kris, I spent a day on Brown Brook Pond in a canoe, throwing dry flies that I’d tied, an elk-hair caddis and a Goddard caddis, and Jeff’s streamers until I was tired of catching fish. Jeffrey guessed I caught somewhere north of 40 brook trout and maybe as many 50, lovely tiny perfect things, and I must have missed an equal number because, well, that’s what I do. I rarely keep count of fish, not because I’m too proud to know, but because I lose track. I’ll trust Jeffrey’s number, mostly because I want to, but also because it felt like a 50-fish day. Whether it was or not doesn’t matter.

You know the best thing about fishing in Maine? The entire week we only fished with dry flies on the surface and streamers. We never fished with nymphs underwater. I know that if you want to catch fish, you have to fish underwater with nymphs, and I have done it from west to east, from here to Alaska, but truth be told I kinda hate them. Fishing with streamers–baitfish imitations–is most of what I do here in Texas, and fishing with surface dry flies is just a joy.

Fishing on the ponds you could just throw the fly any old place and the fish were like as not to be there. Fishing the streams we fished mostly downstream–which is not by any means the norm with dry flies. With the streamers you would let the streamer swing while you retrieved upstream. With the caddis dry flies–and we fished caddis dry flies and nothing else–you’d sometimes let the flies drift and sometimes skate them across the surface. It was all very satisfying.

Brook trout.

Our final day we went to Webster Pond in the float plane, and it was the first time Kris and I could really see how big things were. At the pond outfall Kris stood in one place for the day casting one of Jeff’s flies, a candy caddis. It was named by his granddaughter because it looked like candy, and Kris suspected there may have been actual candy involved. Jeff told me a story about his own childhood which I will shamelessly steal, about fishing at 10 with his aunt and uncle for Atlantic salmon, and while the party let Jeff cast to a salmon he was supported in the river current by another angler. The other angler was Ted Williams.

That last day I moved up and downstream around Kris, fishing some with the candy caddis, some with a black ghost streamer that I had tied. I picked the black ghost because it was pretty and, well, with me and flies pretty will always do it. Jeff told me later that they fished black ghosts mostly in ponds, and while I wasn’t in a pond, like I said, it was pretty. I caught some fish, and some of them were brook trout.

Neil Thomas, not Jeffrey Labree.

Kris said that day that without moving much she had caught 19 trout and asked me how many I caught. I asked her if I could count fall fish and she said no–fall fish are considered a trash fish not worthy of notice. Honestly though my judgment’s not that refined. Of course counting them or no, I had no very precise idea how many fish I had caught, and I didn’t lie, either. I told her that with fall fish it was certainly more than 19, but without, no, I hadn’t caught 19 trout.

And I think that’s true. Between you and me though, I’m counting the fall fish.

Fall fish.

Posted on

Maine

We go to Maine on Friday, via United Airlines to Bangor and then north from Bangor by car, past Mount Katahdin and Baxter State Park, further into the north woods to Piscataquis County, about as far north as counties in the continental States dare go. I’ve never been to Maine, and we’ll be so far north that to our left, to our right, and straight ahead all the land will belong to Canada. It’ll be just like the Charge of the Light Brigade, though hopefully without the cannon.

Did you know that there’s more Allen’s Coffee Brandy sold in Maine than anyplace else? Did you know that there’s something called Allen’s Coffee Brandy? Until sometime in the early 2000s it was the most popular liquor sold in Maine, though now various vodkas are higher on the list. It’s still well up there. There’s also a popular regional soft drink called Moxie, and in Maine the mix of Moxie and Allen’s Coffee Brandy is called a “Burnt Trailer.” The mix of Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Diet Moxie is called a “Welfare Mom.” Even in the interest of science, I doubt that I’ll try either one.

Moxie, by the way, was originally sold as a tonic brewed to prevent softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia. I might could use some of that. Moxie and vodka, by the way, is a Moxie mule.

Maine has a population of 1,372,000, 92% Anglo, with a total area of 35,385 square miles. That puts it 38th on the list of states by population density, ahead of Oregon, Utah, and Kansas. Roughly 80% of Maine is forested, and most of it’s population is in the remaining 20%. It’s the largest New England state. With a few exceptions, Mainers cluster reasonably close to its coast, but even along the coast there aren’t large urban centers. Maine’s largest city, Portland, has a population of 68,424. Lewiston, the second city, has 38,493. In the north and west of the state there’s forest, and some mountains, too. The north end of the Appalachian Trail is Mount Katahdin, 5,269 feet. Then there’s some more forest.

About half of the population lives in the southeast corner around Portland. All of the reported vampire population is in Jerusalem’s Lot, and hopefully they’ll stay there.

William Bradford, The Schooner Jane of Bath, Maine, 1857, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago.

Reading Maine history is peculiar. Until the Civil War, Maine seems to have been the hottest thing going. They built ships in Maine. Maine’s captains sailed the world. Maine produced timber, and there was land to be had. That’s not to say that Maine didn’t have its troubles: the English were prone to try to move the border, and Mainers had to rid themselves of Massachusetts. There were always French folk trying to migrate south from Canada. Into the 20th Century though if you bought a shoe it was like as not made in Maine. If you bought a sailing ship it was like as not made in Maine.

Then winter came, and it wasn’t. L.L. Bean boots and Hinckley Yachts are still made in Maine, and there must still be a Bath Iron Works, but I think Maine’s most significant exports now are Steven King novels and potatoes. Even Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Moxie are made in Massachusetts.

Jacobson, Antonio N., S.S. State of Maine, ca. 1892, oil on canvas, Maine Historical Society. The S.S. State of Maine was built in Bath, Maine.

Before the Civil War Henry David Thoreau wrote three travel essays about Maine, two of which were published in periodicals during his life and collected after his death as The Maine Woods. His trips weren’t far from where we’re going. On one trip he climbed Mount Katahdin. On another a Native American guide took him and a companion by canoe to Moosehead Lake. Some of the essays are pure travelogue, but they’re well written and appealing, with enough wilderness spark to provide drama. Some of the writing is better than mere travelogue. From time to time in The Maine Woods you’ll find some of Thoreau’s loveliest observations about nature, and nobody ever did mysticism and nature better than Thoreau.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable was changed into a pine at last? No! No! It is the poet . . . . ((Thoreau, Henry David, “Chesuncook”, The Maine Woods at 112, Yale University Press 2009, New Haven, Ct.))

You’ll also find his god-awful attempts to reproduce the dialogue of his Native American guide. Tonto’s script writers produced less stilted vernacular. “Kademy . . . good thing–I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there . . . You been college?”((Thoreau, Henry David, “The Allegash and the East Branch”, The Maine Woods at 183, Yale University Press 2009, New Haven, Ct. Interestingly, “that looks like Ned and the First Reader” was my father’s standard description of messy work, as in “your casting looks like Ned and the First Reader.” I never knew there was more than one Reader until I read Thoreau. I still don’t know who Ned was.)) After reading Thoreau’s dialogues, you realize why his best work is about living alone at Walden Pond.

Paul Bunyan statue, Bangor, Maine. Paul Bunyan was also resident in Michigan, Minnesota, and Nova Scotia.

In The Maine Woods, Thoreau mentions the red shirts of the lumbermen several times. I thought certain that when we got the gear list for Libby Camp it would require us to bring red flannel shirts, but there was nary a one listed. These days anglers are more prone to camouflage than red, on the theory that fish will more easily spot threats who wear bright colors. Whatever the styles preferred by 19th century Maine lumbermen or 21st century fly fishers, it’s hard now to find a red flannel shirt, even with the help of the internet. The closest I could come was an L.L. Bean chamois shirt, probably made in China, and somehow the notion of buying a heavy shirt during the current Houston heat wave was just more than I could stomach. I’ll wear no red in Maine, and I apologize to Henry David and Paul Bunyan.

We could go to Maine to fish the seacoast. It’s a drowned seacoast, a seacoast that because of rising oceans after glacial retreat left a rugged and interesting shore. This time of year there should be not only striped bass but migrations of bluefish and false albacore. I do get seasick though.

Cornelia “Fly Rod” Cosby, the first registered Maine guide.

There was also a time when you could go to Maine to fish for Atlantic salmon, but through a combination of dams, pollution, and over-fishing we’ve done an excellent job of eradicating U.S. Atlantic salmon runs. Maine is the last North American place south of Canada where there are Atlantic salmon, but they’re critically endangered.

There are largish native wild brook trout left in Maine, when they’ve otherwise disappeared from the rest of their U.S. native range. Generally they can’t compete with rainbow trout introduced from the Pacific Northwest and brown trout from Europe, so outside of Maine they’ve been marginalized into smaller streams, and there’s not sufficient food in the streams to grow big fish. But in Maine for whatever reason they’re still the inland fish of choice.

Along with the brook trout there are also landlocked salmon. Landlocked salmon are Atlantic salmon that at the end of the last glaciation were cut off from the ocean. Apparently they make their spawning runs from lake to river in September, and they’re absolutely right to do so. September is always the best time to travel, when temperatures are starting to cool and the kids are back in school.

The last of the large native brook trout in the U.S. are a good enough excuse to see the Maine woods, but there’s also a sporting tradition. Train travel opened the Maine woods to both Henry David Thoreau and lots of traveling fishers and hunters. By the end of the 19th century, Maine fishing and hunting camps were scattered through the far Maine woods, and they were the very thing. We’re going to Libby Camp, which can trace it’s ancestry to the 1880s, but there are plenty of others. There are few things as iconic to a fly fisher as a Maine camp.

We know there can’t be a fish because the angler is wearing a red shirt. He must have dropped his hat.

In other matters, Mainer’s didn’t vote for Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020, voting 48.2%, or 357,735, for Clinton, and then 51%, or 435,072, for Biden. Interestingly–and this is repeated in other states as well–there is more than a 3% drop in votes for the Libertarian candidate between 2016 and 2020, from 5.09% for Gary Johnson in 2016 to 1.73% for Jo Jorgensen. One supposes two things, that about 2% of the population really does vote Libertarian, and that in Maine in 2016 about 20,000 voters wouldn’t vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. In 2020 most of those 20,000 voters were either more enthusiastic about Biden or less enthusiastic about Trump.

There was 73% eligible voter turnout in Maine in 2016, then 78% turnout in 2020. That’s huge turnout. To put that in perspective, turnout nationally in 2020 was 66.7%.

Maine 2020 presidential election results by county, Wikipedia. That would also double for a pretty good population map.

Maine does something peculiar with its electoral college votes in presidential elections that I don’t think is done anywhere else. Instead of all or none, it splits two of its four electoral college votes by congressional district, so in 2020 Trump took one electoral vote and Biden three others. That was the only electoral vote for Trump from New England. It’s not a bad way for the electoral college to work, though unless other states did the same thing it only hurts Maine’s overall majority.

Neither of Maine’s Congressfolk are Republican, though one of its senators is a moderate Republican, which along with Atlantic salmon is a critically endangered species. Unlike the rest of Mainers, she doesn’t have a reputation for being particularly independent. The other senator, Angus King, is in fact independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.

Both Maine’s state senate and house are mildly Democratic. Its governor is Democratic.

One last note on fly fishing in Maine. Mainers created some of the most beautiful streamer flies in the American catalogue. They’re simpler variations of classic British salmon flies. I tried to tie some, though it was hard, and my results were decidedly mixed. I’m sure they’ll look a lot better in the water, and just fishing them is enough of a reason to go to Maine, whether or not I have a red shirt.

Posted on

California Packing List, Fall River and McCloud

Gear

We took 5-weight rods but never used them. Our guides had rods set up when we got there, and it would have taken some work to get our rods re-rigged. They didn’t seem excited about redoing their effort.

We took waders and boots and used those the day we wade-fished on the McCloud. We also took our Patagonia wading crampons, which were designed to provide increased traction on wet rocks, of which there were plenty on the McCloud. We bought them five years ago for our trip to the Deschutes for steelhead, and that was the last time we used them. They had worked great on that trip, but had otherwise been sitting in a zip-loc bag in my closet for the last five years. I used mine on the McCloud, and they helped. The straps on Kris’s broke, so hers are now useless. They were a good idea, but heavy and klunky. I don’t think Patagonia makes them any more.

Northern California

The Mount Shasta region of Northern California may be the strangest place I’ve ever been. There’s plenty of stuff going on, but it doesn’t necessarily sync well. There’s skiing in the winter, fly fishing, biking, hiking, bird-watching, radical right-wing separatists, libertarian marijuana farmers, and survivalists. The town of Mount Shasta sports something like 30 new-age businesses, a lot of cute old tourist motels, and the only combination liquor store-fly fishing shop I’ve come across.

There are weekend tourists from San Francisco who have strong opinions about wine lists, and State of Jefferson separatists who want the San Franciscans to go back where they came from. The separatists took over the town government of Redding when the City commissioners tried to impose mask regulations during Covid. This is the land for which God made Subarus, and also a land of Trump flags, which just about sums up its schizophrenia. It’s mostly white folk, too, so you’d think that everybody would be driving around in a new BMW calling each other Skipper, just like God intended.

June Yu, Lenticular cloud formation at Mount Shasta, 1918. Cloud formation? Not on your life. This is actually a photo of the Lemurians blasting into outer space.

Mt. Shasta juts up in the middle of things. It’s out of place and a bit out of line with the other West Coast volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. There is a debunked geological theory from the mid-19th century concerning the lost continent of Lemuria, so named because it explained the distribution of lemurs on the surviving continents and on Madagascar. Madagascar was thought to be a remnant island fragment of the sunken continent.

Here’s most of what you need to know about sunken continents. Because of the relative density of continental crusts, they won’t sink. They may move around some, but sinking ain’t in it. Of course this is likely one of those fake facts expounded by so-called scientists. Now back to Lemuria.

Lemuria was either in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, depending on who you talk to. Disappearing continental crusts have long been the very thing, Atlantis being the most popular, but Lemuria was right up there, or right down there as it were. 

Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be
Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be
Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be

"Atlantis," Donovan Leitch, 1968

Watkins, Carleton E., Mt. Shasta, California, 1870-1880, albumen print, Library of Congress; Denney, Ewen, Aerial photo of Mt. Shasta, 2006, Wikipedia.

Little known fact: humans are descended from the Lemurians, who, realizing their continent was sinking, decamped to Mount Shasta and started a new, self-sustaining civilization inside the mountain. They’re still there. Plenty of locals run into them out in the woods around Mount Shasta–you can always spot a Lemurian because of their height, their long, flowing hair, white robes, and sandals, presumably Birkenstocks. We didn’t happen to spot any Lemurians while we were there, but I reckon we could have bought a crystal that would have helped us communicate. I bet you could too.

Some folks say that the Lemurians are from outer space, but the better information is that the outer space visitors–and the area around Mount Shasta is chock-full of UFOs–are Lizard People, who also come and go from Mount Shasta. Apparently there’s no problem with Lizard People/Lemurian cohabitation inside Mount Shasta, though that sort of thing is generally frowned upon most places, so don’t be surprised if you see them strolling along together out in the woods, long thin hand in sharp scaly claw.

Google Earth.

Mount Shasta really is the strangest thing. There it is, all 14,179 feet of it, dominating the measly 3,000-foot terrain that surrounds it. It’s so disproportionate to everything around it that you can’t help checking from time to time just to make sure you didn’t imagine it. Wallace Stevens got it wrong. That jar was placed atop a hill in Shasta County, California, not Tennessee, right on top of Mount Shasta.

I don’t know why the State of Jefferson separatists include two XXs in their Great Seal. Maybe that’s how they sign their name.

Hotels and Restaurants

We stayed in the Fall River Hotel in Fall River our first night in California. We split a chicken fried steak at the hotel restaurant, which suggested OklaTex depression origins for Fall River’s high cusine. There’s also a bar, and it’s a good looking bar. In the bar there were locals drinking whiskey or beer or something else manly but making sure I knew it was not Bud Light. I started to order a Bud Light and join them, but we went driving around instead. We saw the falls, we found where we were supposed to meet the guide the next morning, and we stopped at the grocery store and bought a couple of beers. Neither beer was a Bud Light. I’m comfortable with my masculinity so I keep meaning to drink one, but I’m not a light beer drinker and keep forgetting.

Actually, the grocery store, Rays Food Place, was my favorite place in Fall River. We went twice, and it had everything I might have wanted and good conversations to boot. Folk were immensely friendly, both the staff and other customers, and it may offer the town’s best nightlife. The next day our fishing guide brought us sandwiches from there for lunch on the river, and they were outstanding, which is hard to do with a sandwich. For breakfast, however, I’d recommend Annie’s Rendezvous Cafe. I’m not sure I’d recommend its Table of Wisdom, though. That looks like a place you can only aspire to.

Both Annie’s and the Fall River Hotel were for sale. I’m betting they still are. It may not be the liveliest of towns, but it’s still one of the prettiest rivers I’ve ever fished.

The next two nights we stayed in McCloud, 40 miles to the west and much closer to Mount Shasta. It’s not far off of I-5 that runs up the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, so it gets more of the San Francisco tourist trade than Fall River. We stayed at the McCloud Hotel–McCloud River, Town of McCloud, McCloud Hotel. . . There seems to be a theme here, but the funny thing is that nobody is really certain about who McCloud was. He may have been a Hudson Bay Company trapper named McLeod, but if he was, folks didn’t spell very well.

The hotel was a charming old place, laid out kinda rambling and ramshackle, but it was very well maintained and pretty. I think we got some kind of suite, because we had a couch and a couple of armchairs in the room, and a huge bath tub, more of a hot tub really, right in the middle of the bedroom floor. I’ve seen these kinds of tubs other times in other places, and I figure they’re supposed to have something to do with romance. This one would likely have taken a couple of hours just to fill, which in my mind would have killed the mood. I actually think this one was there just because they had a big empty space that they didn’t know what else to do with.

Both nights we stayed in McCloud we ate at the restaurant in the hotel, the Sage, and it was the kind of ubiquitous new-American cuisine that now seems to be everywhere. I guess it’s the new comfort food. We ate there the second night too because I wanted wine after clambering around the river all day, and I don’t drink and drive. It was very good and easy to get to. Plus I liked the wait staff.

In Sacramento our flight out was at 6:30 the next morning, so we stayed in an airport hotel. It’s something I’ve taken to doing. I book an early flight, turn in the rent car the night before, then use an airport hotel shuttle to get back and forth from the airport. I’m terrified of missing planes, and usually show up the recommended two hours in advance. If nothing else I figure that if I show up really early, there’s less chance of the airline losing my luggage. So far it’s worked. The weird thing about Sacramento airport hotels is that they’re pretty far from the airport, clustered together about nine miles away. It must be one of those California things.

The indigenous cuisine of Sacramento is sushi. We picked a random strip mall sushi joint close to our hotel but far from the airport, and it was fine.

Our flight back had a connection in Las Vegas. The only place I’ve been in Las Vegas is the airport, when I’ve had a connection to someplace else. The airport makes me glad that I’m not a gambling man.

Ticks

Our guide on the McCloud warned us to check ourselves for ticks, and we did. This is not a euphemism. Fortunately waders are a pretty good tick deterrent.

You can tell this is me and not a Lemurian because I’m not wearing sandals.

Posted on

McCloud and Lower Sacramento Rivers, California, Rainbow Trout, July 8-9, 2023

On our second day fishing in California, we fished on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta. I had heard that the Upper Sacramento was fishing really well, but that the McCloud was off-color and too high from late runoff. We had our choice, the Upper Sacramento that was fishing well or the McCloud that wasn’t, so of course we chose the McCloud.

Actually I chose the McCloud without asking Kris. Don’t tell her. We were fishing with Paul Leno from The Fly Shop. I had told Paul about fishing for McCloud River rainbows on Crane Creek in Missouri, and Paul agreed that we needed to see their source. Most of the world’s transplanted rainbows share McCloud River genetics, so not going would be like Christians skipping Bethlehem when they visited the Holy Land. A lot of North American fishing starts on the McCloud.

Google Earth

To get to the river we drove south from the town of McCloud and then turned left onto an unpaved forest road. The forest road descends, and then descends some more, and then descends some more, down into volcanic rubble, ruts, fallen rocks, and dust. I was following Paul’s truck, but if I got too close, say within 50 feet, I couldn’t see the road for the dust. You know those roadside signs, Beware Falling Rock? As a child I thought they meant watch the cliff face and be ready to dodge, but I guess they’re actually warning about the rock that’s already fallen. If you hit that rock hard enough it sure could mess up the rent car.

Anyway, that’s the kinda thing one contemplates on the creep down the forest service road to the McCloud River. That, and wondering if AAA would come get me when I popped a tire. The seven miles took about an hour. I didn’t have much faith that even if they came AAA could ever find us.

When we parked the rental car at the end of the road we still had to hike a mile or so to the Nature Conservancy’s Kerry Landreth Preserve, which lets in ten anglers at a time. There was one other angler already there somewhere, but we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Apparently it’s usually full, but it’s a hard place to get to, and even after we reached the river we had to crawl down the bank through riverside brush and rock to fish.

This was youngster’s fishing. At 16, or 26, or 36, I would have enjoyed the scramble. At 66, perched above the river, trying to get a fly to drift through a 10 foot pocket in a twist of rock garden 10 feet below me, I kind of regretted that I’d traded in my afternoon nap. It was hard, technical nymph fishing, and while it was certainly challenging, I haven’t yet convinced myself that it was fun.

Paul got us to the river, coached us, and at some point corrected the way I was mending my line. Mends are peculiar to fly fishing rivers. The idea is to get the fly to float down the current with no drags or skitters or whatnot that will look unnatural to fish. The problem is that between you and your fly the river has conflicting currents, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, that are put there solely to give the poor angler grief.

To avoid drag you have to mend your line: you force slack into the line between you and the fly, either upstream or downstream depending on the currents, so that the line slack lets the fly drift true. To force slack you lift the line from the water and move an arc of line up or down with the rod tip–down if the current between you and the fly is slower, up if faster. Ideally you move the line without jerking the fly and scaring all the fish for a couple of miles.

I’m pretty good at the theory of mends, but not so good at the application. I long ago gave up on not moving my fly when I mend, and had finally settled on not moving the fly a whole lot. I kinda figured that if I diverted my eyes the fish would be courteous enough to do the same. Paul watched me and said that I was trying to throw the line, and that what I should do is lift the line and set it down as if I was writing the letter C with my rod tip. And it worked.

Dammit, it worked. Here all this time I was content with ignorance, and I found that I didn’t really like being wrong. Worse, it was easy to do it right. Dammit.

I caught two fish (which is about par for my course). With all the creeping and crawling and scrambling involved, and with lunch–never forget lunch–we didn’t actually fish that long, maybe three or four hours. At lunch Paul asked me what I thought about the McCloud.

Paul really loves the place, and he was asking a deeper question than whether or not I had had a good day fishing. I had fished there for four hours on a difficult day. By July in California’s drought years, the McCloud would have been running hundreds of cfs slower. It would have been clear, and it would have reflected a Caribbean blue. We spent one day on the McCloud in a rare wet year when the water was high and cloudy, and for us old folk it was a very hard day.

Still.

Like a lot of dammed Western rivers, the McCloud pre-dam held migratory runs of salmon. It doesn’t anymore, and in my mind that’s tragic, but it’s the same tragedy shared by a lot of rivers, East and West. The McCloud is special though because it also has that strange history of being the site of the first federal fish hatchery, and its trout, the particular rainbow subspecies of McCloud River redbands, were transported everywhere, to New England and Montana and New Zealand and Argentina and Chile and, well, everywhere, even to Crane Creek in Missouri.

I guess I can’t answer Paul’s question. It was different. It was rugged. The fish that I saw were stunningly beautiful. Would I go back there? I don’t know. I’m still decompressing. Would I think about about the river? All the time. I will never forget it.

𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱 

We planned to fly out of Sacramento early on Monday, and we were only going to fish a half-day Sunday. Paul suggested that we meet in Redding and fish the Lower Sacramento in the city. We’d be fishing on a good-sized river roughly two football fields wide in the middle of a good-sized town of about 100,000 people, but when you float it the river still feels reasonably remote. More important, after our day on the McCloud, it was mighty comfortable. We were fishing from a drift boat. There were donut shops and paved roads. I could have napped if I’d wanted.

Google Earth

We were fishing under bobbers, with deep nymphs drifted alongside the boat. It is, I think, about as lazy as fly fishing gets, especially when someone else is doing all the rowing.

As usual though, I can find some way to screw things up. I could handle the floppy water haul cast we were using, and I don’t hardly remember getting tangled at all. I couldn’t get the hook set right though, and even though I got takes from time to time, Paul said that I was pulling the hook out of the fish’s mouth. I was at the back of the boat, between Paul in the row seat and the motor on the transom. Trout always feed into the upstream current, so they were facing towards us.

Whenever I tried to set the hook, I would unfailingly lift the rod to my right. I don’t know why, I’m far from right-leaning, but the bobber bobbled and I went right.

That was fine as long as I was fishing on the left side of the boat. I’d pull right and the hook would set upstream into the current, into the fish. On the right side though when I’d go right I’d pull away from the fish. It was stupid, and if I had a year or two I might work myself out of it.

Apparently I wasn’t going to work it out that morning. I caught a couple, one a tiny salmon, both on the left side of the boat, but mostly I just missed. That was ok though. I’d learned something, or at least I’d theoretically learned it.

Kris on the other hand was getting plenty of sets but then had trouble landing the fish. Sitting at the back of the boat I got to watch it all. Now mind, I lose about as many fish as I catch, and I always think that if I just had more practice, that if I only hooked more fish, that sooner or later I’d figure it out and get better. Part of the problem is that I’ve heard and read so many contradictory things about playing and landing fish, usually when I’m trying to land the fish, that I don’t really have a very clear picture of what I’m supposed to be doing. Hold the rod tip up, hold the rod tip low at 30 degrees so the backbone’s in the rod, hold the rod to the side to lead the fish and tire it, don’t lead the fish because you’ll wear a hole and the hook will flop out, tighten down the drag, don’t tighten down the drag, horse the fish in as fast as you can, let the fish run, don’t ever bother getting freshwater fish onto the reel . . .

I’ve never fished with a guide as certain or as precise in his directions as Paul. Hold the rod tip up, not back but up, with the butt of the rod in front of your face. Face the fish so that the spine of the rod is fighting the fish. Get the line on the reel so that the fish is fighting the reel, not you. It was a joy to watch him coach Kris, and to watch Kris become a much better angler in the in the time it took to land one fish, . If I had been fighting the fish I’d probably have garbled his directions in all the excitement, but since all I had to do was watch it was easier to ponder, and maybe even absorb. Some of it anyway.

Now if I could just get that hook set right I could practice.