JANUARY: all caught up

Sometime in the middle of winter I began to dream of fishing. Literally. Usually I dream of catching carp on warm, sunny days. The dreams are fairly true to life and remarkably un-dreamlike. Sometimes I am wading along a small stream, sometimes walking the banks of a placid lake. The sight of a "dream" carp, cruising the shallows or nose down in the mud triggers the familiar shot of adrenal excitement. I'll stalk the fish carefully and make my cast. Sometimes I lose fish, sometimes I land them. Often I'll set up my camera for a self-portrait.
The dreams are very pleasant, but when the unattainability of the experience becomes too depressing I start to search desperately for real-world fishing opportunities.
Such an opportunity arose this week. Between snows, the weather warmed to a balmy 44 degrees with a light rain. I headed out, through a snarl of traffic, to the closest tailwater to hunt for some hatchery trout. I was alone on the water, except for a flock of gulls. I worked my way along the bank, watching for signs of fish. Finally, within casting distance of the gray ramparts of the dam I spotted a rise. With all it's various ducts and chutes closed, the dam produced no current at all, but I rigged up a nymph under a small indicator just as I would for fishing a lively river and made a cast. There was a flash and I found myself hooked to a lively little fish.

I fished happily in the shadow of the dam for two hours, dodging gull guano, hooking trout, and enjoying the rain.
I haven't had another dream yet...

DECEMBER: fly style

In December Tara and I flew to Oregon to visit family for the Holidays. My younger brother's girlfriend introduced us to the latest fashion: hair feathers.
"I could tie a nice fly with those" was my immediate thought, and in fact it turns out that fly shops are the main retailer for hair feathers. So when Tara got her own feathers, I made her promise to give them to me when she took them out so that I could tie some flies.

Tying flies is a classic, almost cliched winter time activity. Many fly fishers spend these cold, dark days at the vise stocking fly boxes with a careful assortment of patterns, sizes and colors. I do not. I like to go through my flies and throw a bunch out. At the end of the process, this is how I like my fly box to look:

Above is my back-up box, it holds 90% of my flies and usually sits unused for most of the year. The box I actually carry on my person when I fish looks like this:

Between the two boxes: 44 flies. Add in the odd salt-water patterns and over-sized poppers I have lying around and you have a grand total 59 flies. For most fly fishers, the discovery that they possess only 59 flies will send them into a feverish frenzy of fly-tying. I'm not kidding. I once read a fly-tying article in which the author pronounced that he never went fishing without at least three boxes of ant flies! Three boxes? Of ant flies? Seriously? It's enough to make me question my methods. I guess I'm either doing something very wrong, or very, very right.

NOVEMBER: stripers

NOTE: I am not a big fan of winter. When the weather turns cold I get less active; I do less fishing, and less blogging. Due to a fairly cold and snowy winter so far, I've gotten two months behind in posting what little fishing-related news I do have. In an effort to catch up, I intend to retroactively publish posts for November and December.

The carp had gone deep for the winter and so my friend Toby suggested we catch some bait and try for striped bass. Our first stop was below the dam where Toby managed to hook two baitfish (herring or shad of some kind.)

Next we headed above the dam and rigged up four rods with fresh cut-bait. We had some action on one rod but whatever was out there avoided the hook and escaped with a meal. It was a bit too cold to be comfortable just standing around but we stayed out until dusk, which, at this time of year, comes at around 4:30 pm!