Stupid Big Fish Tricks- Tarpaulin Cove

There are moments, albeit fleeting, or so we think, when we wish that we could get a re-do. I have several. Okay, maybe a few thousand. However, when one has been in pursuit of big fish , it is hard to forgive oneself for mistakes and missteps. This particular memory has been burned as vividly into my my mind as the braid that was burned into my hand. And, like most catastrophes, it begins with simple mistakes that cascade, like an airplane co-pilot who refuses to question their captain about the de-icing procedure and pays the heaviest of prices.
In this instance, you must first understand the setting and the characters.
The Elizabeth Island chain, running southeast below Woods Hole, Ma, represents the most prolific striper habitat in that fish's northern range. These islands, owned by the Forbes family, have been kept pristine and beyond development, perhaps the mark of an ecologically minded capitalist dynasty. Seemingly in conflict with the addage that great fortunes are made of great crimes. Nonetheless I have a fondness for the deceased Malcom Forbes who rode a Harley in the gang know as the Capitalist Tools. At least the guy had a sense of humor, and a personality, which is more than we can say for some of his progeny.
These islands harbor the most fantastic shorelines, mainly rocky glacial deposits with sand intermixed. Rocks some twenty feet in length jut to within inches of the surface causing Vineyard Sound's treacherous currents to whip past them in rips and runs that make anyone adept at spotting good lies mutter to themselves like a streetwise schizophrenic. One of the finest spots is Tarpaulin Cove along Naushon Island. At slack tide, it sleeps, quiescent and without pretension. Put some water behind it, drain it, and a rip a hundred yards long amid a boulder field makes your senses tingle.
Such was like the moment I found it, with my best fishing buddy Dan (see pictures with innumerable smiles) in the Fall of 2006. We positioned my boat , an 18'Maritime skiff, off the rip and began casting spinning gear using surface plugs. My first few casts with Bluish Smackit popper drew little interest. On the next one, an explosive device went off. Having fished for bass many years, I was relatively adept at honestly appraising a take. This one was beyond my experience when I saw the distance between the tail and the dorsal fin, a steady, irrefutable, indicator of the fish's size. It was immense. I had caught fish to 20 lbs (39') before. I knew immediately it was my best fish to date.
A little history is in order, if only to build the dramatic tension. I have been fishing for bass and bluefish since I was in 7th grade. My experience with big fish during my formative years left me breathless and hollow; which is to say, in need of a greater and greater fix. Before this day, I had fished Cape Cod and Maine for upwards of fifteen years in search of my best fish and had banner days along with soul-crushing ones. While I am an optimist at heart, I am capable of long riffs involving alcohol and mindless self-flagellation when necessary. All of which is to say that a moment in time involving cruxification can be preserved in human memory with undue vividness.
This fish cast away my demons, as it drew braided line from my Penn without any intention of stopping. I had 8o lb mono tippet done loop to loop with braid. This was a rig i had tried only a few times before but felt confidence in. Not having a swivel allowed the line to pull cleanly through the guides. Not having a swivel also allowed the lines to bite deeply into each other when under great stress.
When I felt the weight of the bass, I struck it and put immediate tension on it. I had a single piece Ben Doerr Spinning rod, eight feet tall and with serious wood at its base. This fish ran without so much as a quiver or hesitation. No matter how I clamped the drag down, it ran. Fifty pound braid! I put just enough tension on it to see if I could get its head to turn. I let my palm rub the casing of the reel and .... tck. Off.
I suppose I could have thrown the rod. I suppose I could have slashed my wrists. All would have been to no avail.
In the end we take these lessons in humility and try to get them to synchronize with our view of the world. For me, I will never be without a swivel again.

September Madness

Unlike March Madness, which elicits endless online betting and flat screen watching, this is madness of a different type, fueled by a metaphoric sense of life's end. Every September, no matter where I live, I always get a quickening pulse at this time of year. Living now in Oregon, it is a bit separated from the source, the Atlantic Ocean and the world's greatest migration of living creatures- bunker, herring, rain bait, false albacore, bluefish, and striped bass- which mass along the coast and, sensing the shortening of days, begin to gather together and sweep in a gigantic movement southward before the ocean's great cooling. In Maine, the migration has begun. Bass leave the bays and inlets, the coves and rivers, and combine by age and size to form football shaped hydrodynamic clouds and begin moving. I have witnessed this in many forms and it is both exciting and sad. Exciting to think of the opportunity to witness feeding frenzies so necessary to fuel this movement. Sad, because we know what follows- months of cold and hollowness to test the spirit until the spring renewal.

And yet, I have a fondness for the Fall. I realize, now that I am pushing fifty, how limited our vision of these natural miracles really is. I see that we have a kindred spirit with the fish, who only respond to stimuli we otherwise can only guess at. When I say it is metaphoric of our own mortality, I mean it. Each year that passes brings us closer to a conclusion we have no control over writing. If I knew I could fish for another fifty years, perhaps the moment would lack something, a dimension of poignancy that gives it richness. As Orson Wells said, Death gives Life its succor.

And so for those on the edge of the Atlantic, I say get your ass out there and enjoy this moment. The best fishing of the year is upon you and you will need rich memories to get you through what follows. Now I have to start tying steelhead flies for the coming months. Ha.

The Gift of Missing Me

Last November, sitting quietly on a stump, smoking a fine smelling cigar, no doubt rolled on the thighs of an octoroon Cuban woman, I heard one of the finest lines ever muttered by a fellow brother of the flyfishing fraternity. In many ways it encapsulated subconscious thoughts I would like to think I am capable of and yet had not expressed. Like so many iconoclastic ideas, it was simplicity itself. Sitting there above a spectacularly clear pool on the Metolis River, a place your imagination is NOT fertile enough to conjure, no insult intended, he was telling me he lived in Bend, Oregon and was an aspiring guide who probably fished fifty or more times a year.

I took note that he was not a youngish man, more into his thirties, who had moments before made reference to his wife.

Always keen to know how other fishermen are able to sell their obsessional neurosis to their spouses without risking apolcalyptic outcomes, I inquired how he was able to get so much time for his unhealthy habit. He said that he had told her this weekend he was fishing and told her he was giving her 'the gift of missing me." After wiping the tears from my eyes, you decide their source, I slowly digested the line, like an anaconda savoring a fine feral pig. One reason I enjoy fishing, truth be told, is that you are more likely than not bound to find a character or two, someone whose alignment with the Earth is a bit off and who, as a result, can show you things you had not previously seen. The mystery of human relationships revealed, for example, in a passing comment. I concede that this may not be a gift that keeps on giving, and must be used with particular caution and judiciousness, but when you absolutely must go, when your irritability level has reached redline, and the thought of a river or coastal scene floods your consciousness, lifting you off the banks, and when charm seems utterly beyond your capacity, try this. But don't blame me if, as a result, she gives you the gift of missing her.

Hex Hatch- Lost Lake- Mt Hood Wilderness

Hexagenia mayflies are seldom seen, but talked about nonetheless. Large (2") and bright yellow, it is no wonder that they seek out the twilight to rise from their burrows and fly vertically into the evening. They are prime forage for aquatic and airborne predators. I saw rainbows, nighthawks and a large bat species feeding on them simultaneously. Had it been an hour earlier and these mayflies would never have survived the oslaught. They seek out muddy bottoms of alpine lakes and take at least two years to develop; as nymphs they are large- size 4 or 2's. As adult emergers, ridiculous. Check out my photos.

My oldest son & I spent two nights on Lost Lake, Mt. Hood Wilderness, trying to time the evening hatch and finding the window of opportunity quite narrow, to say the least. The hatch took off between 9:00 and 9:20pm both nights, leaving us scratching our heads and wondering whether we had missed something. But no, that was it. How ephemeral, how mayflyish.

The good news is that such alpine lakes harbor decent trout fishing during the other hours, as well as ample opportunity to enjoy the amenities of the lake for swimming and general carousing.

One Fly, Two Fish

Sometimes, quite rarely, the stars align and fate hands you an undeniable gift. That has happened to me from time to time in life, and nowhere more conspicuously does it happen then while fishing. That is probably a result of your senses being attuned through hours of concentration to your surroundings, coupled with the knowledge that things can always end badly- so when they work out, when the hoped for actually materializes, we sit back with pride, knowing all the while that the world gave us a gift over which we had very little control. Sure, feel pride, but deep down realize that nothing needed to turn out this way, and be thankful to the unseen hand.

This is a circular way of saying that I had an experience with one fly you just do not hear about. I am a believer that there is nothing new under the sun. That is borne out by watching cable television at any hour of the day; if you can think it, then it has already happened. Nonetheless, if any of you have heard of this one before, I am all ears. It happened when I fished Long Island, Bahamas, the last two hours of the last of six days of fishing, sun starting its low angled sloping into the horizon line. The trip already having met our expectations, this was just another day of magic. We returned to the ocean flats, anchoring in an azure channel, hoping to land some jacks. As I rigged my twelve weight, I tied on an 80 lb shock tippet and a chartreuse cuda fly to do some deep dredging on the swing. Looking across the channel I was struck by a sudden surface commotion as a school of large fish, moving quickly, porpoised and disappeared. This happened several times; their backs barely breaking the surface, but by their length I thought they were some type of small shark. After several casts, one struck and I was amazed to feel a bonefish on the other end of the line, and not a small bone, but a 7 lber. Colin Cartwright, our guide and the fishing camp owner (Cartwright's Bonefishing Lodge) said he had seen this behavior, albeit rarely and usually by larger class fish, who see to come to the channel to feed on small fish.

By now the clock was running out and we made one more move before the end of the day, to the large confluence of channels where we had see and heard large tarpon sucking in air on several previous visits. On my third cast, without changing the fly, I let it sink into the blue and began my retrieve. The take was solid and I knew immediately it was a nice fish and was thankful it was on my Twelve weight with my heavy Abel reel and plenty of backing. Looking forty yards off, I watched the line rising as the fish broke for the surface, and there it was! The tarpon you see with Dan's hand in its mouth. Two fish, one fly- but a bonefish AND a tarpon? Anyone heard that one before?

Oregon Albacore flyfishing

Oregon actually has an offshore tuna fishery available to flyfishermen who don't get seasick. This is the longfin albacore. It sometimes approaches within 20 miles (with el Nino) but more often is past the 30 mile mark. I have a 12 wt and I am stocked up with bonine. They troll flies or chum them in with live bait and there is no catch limit as they are not considered threatened, which is typical American management for maximum sustainable "yield", a topic unto itself, just ask anyone currently suffering through the second great collapse of the striped bass fishery.

I also have some anchovie flies tied by Rick Vandenburg which I won as a door prize at his slide show on a cold Maine CCa gathering highlighting his offshore big boat trip out of San Diego a couple years back. I expect to do some tying shortly; nothing provides me a greater sense of accomplishment that tying big saltwater flies, using synthetic materials, like ultrahair, to form a pallet of color, blended together and anchored by a glass-like epoxy head. Trey Combs has the best offshore saltwater fish hooks on the market; I believe you could tow a small vehicle with them because their shanks are such thick posts of steel. With luck I'll have some pictures in the not too distant future to share.

Pardon my lapse of time, I had a two week renewable energy law class to get through plus twenty page take home exam. Ha.

Evil Fish- Part Two

See the Video below for Part One of Evil Fish.

I can tell you that this six day trip yielded forty pages of notes about bonefishing; when I tell people about this trip I say, "It was like every morning was Christmas." Of course, I have been accused of getting up at 1am for a four am trip, just to organize my flies and re-tie my leaders. I will tell you more about this trip sometime in the future. Right now, it being June 22d, the day after the Summer Solstice, you have no excuse but to be out somewhere on the water. I can't think of any place in the Northern Hemisphere where you can't find fish activity right now.