Weekend Update

I had a trip planned to fish Grant County over the weekend. Decided to fish closer to home due to the chance of cloudy/cold water from the recent rains. I fished LaCrosse County on Sat. It was windy and rainy and would have been miserable had I not been fishing. Fish we hitting pretty consistently-caught fish on streamers and nimps-mostly nimps. The fish of the day was this nice 15" male brown trout, which took a #18 pheasant tail. I saw it come out from under a lunker structure, grab my fly and then head right back to the lunker again. Prettly lousy fight-as with all of these fish right now.

The release...

The stream....

In other news, the Black River is alive with water. Friday morning I woke up to a 95% ice covered river. One hour later, it was 95% ice free and starting to rage.

Late in the day on Friday, there was still some ice.

Late Sunday, there was water everywhere.

It won't be long now!!

Rainy weekend in store

I have a trip planned with Johnny Rotten to Grant County for the weekend. Its going to be wet. It makes me dream of this day...

Where Smallies Live

Rock, trees, stumps, whatever gives this fish a place to ambush is perfect. Find some water with rock and you’ll find the fish. Fishing for smallmouth on small streams and creeks is a thrill. With the right conditions smallmouth can be very predictable.

Scouting

I took Junior out to do a little scouting and some fishing for the Wisco trout opener. I only had a couple of hours and decided the time would best be spent investigating a couple of streams close to the house.
I found some real nice looking water. The substrate was mostly sand (like most of the rivers North of the La Crosse river) but this section had a bunch of habitat work and I moved some fish out from under the lunkers, but not many.

Look at these badasses.

This was an interesting stretch of river. It was impossible to fish with Jr. on by back because of the alders and elderberry lining streambank. But it had tons of aquatic veg and I'm willing to bet some brookies too. I'll have to get back here again someday.

-Looking forward to a weekend trip to Grant County!

Other days it does matter....

I got back to that certain small creek full of nice sized fish. The fish were there, they were chasing my flies, but they were not taking them with the same type of reckless abandon as before. As a result, I ended up with a number of short-strikes and some follows, but I landed no big fish. Instead, it was the usual for this creek-lots of small trout. I only took a photo of one fish because it was a pretty little brook trout. Most of the fish that I have caught in this stream are about the size of the trout shown below, which is why I have been so excited about finding the larger trout.
35 degrees and sunny, great day to be out!

Here is why I suspect the fish are so active in this stream. There are a number of springs all along the creek.

There are also a number of nice deep holes with overhead cover. Some bigger fish sit under that log. The challenge is swinging a fly under there.

Brook trout are pretty eh-and they like big flies.

Some days...

Some days it just doesn't seem to matter what fly you use, where you cast it, or how you retrieve it. Sunday 02/28/2010 was one of those days.

Leaving the house, I was looking forward BWO's and midges on the wing. When I got to the river, I saw no such action. After picking up a few fish on nymphs, I started to see a couple of bugs in the air. I switched to a soft-hackle and started swinging and skating it down and across. At that point, I knew it would be a good day. A nice sized fish (~16") moved about 10 feet for the soft hackle, took it into it's mouth and turned away, breaking my line. I promptly cut my leader back to 3X and put on a streamer. The fly was modeled after the 'steelhead samurai', with a marabou tail and a pine squirrel wing, but it didn't really matter what the fly was. After this point I caught fish on streamers down and across, upstream dead drifted, and stripped in crosscurrent. Fish were in riffles, in pools, in tail outs. Fish where everywhere and moving sometimes long distances to my fly. It was one of the finer days I have ever had on a driftless area stream.

I won't go into details about the fish, because I have no photos of the day (dead battery) and so you will just have to take my word for it. But in the end, I landed no fish over 16", but over 10 fish were at least 14". That is simply huge for this stream-it is tiny. It was like all of the fish that I caught in this stream last year, which were 10, 12, and 14 inches, are now 12, 14, and 16 inches. In addition to the 10 biguns, I landed twice as many 10 and 12 inchers, but who's counting. 2010 is shaping up to be a great year. I'm planning on hitting this stream again later in the week with camera in hand.

Small Streams

This is the spot where I hooked up with this nice smally. It was my first time on this stream and I had been fishing for about 10 minutes when I hooked up. He was sitting on the far bank among some rock and tree roots in about 3 feet of water. I swung a black and tan bugger from upstream. The water was clear enough that I saw him shoot from the bank and gobble up my bugger. The next couple hours brought many smallies to hand, but none as pretty as this one. Exploring new water is a thrill. I love fishing small streams. It parallels trout fishing in many ways. A big reason I target smallies apposed to trout is my proximity to smally water. Iowa has so many great smally waters. The whole NE quadrant has great habitat. I'm looking forward to hitting some new water this year. I'll be exploring streams near Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Waverly, Ames, just to name a few. My job requires I travel throughout Iowa. I'm always keeping an eye out for the next stream.

Fish Candy

In my neck of the woods the carp migrate up the creeks approx end of March. You'll find huge schools of quilback and redhorse in the clear early spring water. The challenge is hooking up with these guys when they feed on veg and tiny insects. Once you hook up dead drifting a nymph it's about staying hooked up with the gummy mouth of a quilback.

The pattern on the side of this smally makes me drool. These two pics are edited via magic.

The Power Elite-David Brooks

You may or may not know that I'm a huge David Brooks fan. Below is a recent post of his. Here are a couple of good statements:

1) We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.
2) Now members of the leadership class are engaged in a perpetual state of war. Each side seeks daily advantage in ways that poison the long-term reputations of everybody involved.
3) There’s less emphasis on steady, gradual change and more emphasis on the big swing. This produces more spectacular failures and more uncertainty. Many Americans, not caught up on the romance of this sort of heroism, are terrified.

The Power Elite
By David Brooks

One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor.

Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.
Yet here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

It’s not even clear that society is better led. Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?

Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?

The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower.

Why has this happened? I can think of a few contributing factors.

First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.

Second, this new system has created new social chasms. In the old days, there were obviously big differences between people whose lives were defined by “The Philadelphia Story” and those who were defined by “The Grapes of Wrath.” But if you ran the largest bank in Murfreesboro, Tenn., you probably lived in Murfreesboro. Now you live in Charlotte or New York City. You might have married a secretary. Now you marry another banker. You would have had similar lifestyle habits as other people in town. Now the lifestyle patterns of the college-educated are very different from the patterns in other classes. Social attitudes are very different, too.

It could be that Americans actually feel less connected to their leadership class now than they did then, with good reason.

Third, leadership-class solidarity is weaker. The Protestant Establishment was inbred. On the other hand, those social connections placed informal limits on strife. Personal scandals were hushed up. Now members of the leadership class are engaged in a perpetual state of war. Each side seeks daily advantage in ways that poison the long-term reputations of everybody involved.
Fourth, time horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking.

Now people respond to ever-faster performance criteria — daily stock prices or tracking polls. This perversely encourages reckless behavior. To leave a mark in a fast, competitive world, leaders seek to hit grandiose home runs. Clinton tried to transform health care. Bush tried to transform the Middle East. Obama has tried to transform health care, energy and much more.
There’s less emphasis on steady, gradual change and more emphasis on the big swing. This produces more spectacular failures and more uncertainty. Many Americans, not caught up on the romance of this sort of heroism, are terrified.

Fifth, society is too transparent. Since Watergate, we have tried to make government as open as possible. But as William Galston of the Brookings Institution jokes, government should sometimes be shrouded for the same reason that middle-aged people should be clothed. This isn’t Galston’s point, but I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it.

This is not to say that we should return to the days of the WASP ascendancy. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, our system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems, which are more evident with each passing day.

Smallmouth

A nicely edited smallmouth photo from John Jensen (expert smallmouth angler and graphic artist)

Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome

"In fact, Dear Reader, you could consider this new study to be firm scientific evidence of your own awesomeness. And if you want to share that feeling with anyone, you know what to do next."

-The concluding statement from a recent article I liked. It has to do with what types of articles people like to email, or in my case pass along through a blog.

It turns out that science rules!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?em

A Road Map to America's Future?

I'm not much of a political person. From time to time I hear or read something that seems to make some sense, only to read or hear something later that suggests what I read previously was ridiculous. It is a good thing that I am not in politics or in charge of making decisions for other people, I waffle. I live life with what sometimes becomes a debilitating perspective. That perspective is that I actually have a very poor understanding of what I like. Why? Mostly because I have tried so little, been to so few places, and experienced only what I think that I want to experience.

During the years of the Bush administration the only thing that would get me more frustrated than the Iraq war were the people who were against it, but had no real alternative message (other than-let's just go home). I was always against the war. It never seemed quite right (what with the misplaced WMD's and constantly evolving reasons for being there). But I also could not deny some real issues in Iraq that needed to be dealt with. But how? I don't know. Thus, I was always frustrated by the whole thing, I didn't like it, but I didn't know what else we could do, go home I guess. But would that really fix anything? Then I'd hear a politician speaking out against the war (a message I could identify with) but in a tone that was clearly meant for grandstanding. They had no real message, no alternative, it was: let's just not do what we are doing now and mainly because my political party is not in charge.

Today, we get the same thing from most Republicans. Their message sounds eerily similar: "Let's just not deal with the Health Care issue and maybe it will go away." Or worse yet, "lets kill any bill in order to make the President look bad." A better, more responsible, approach is to propose some alternative way to bring down the deficit without abandoning the Gov't services that we all depend on. And you do depend on the gov't, unless you live in a glass ball with no infrastructure. It is easy to think we don't, but we do. This is why I like the recent plans put forth by Paul Ryan, U.S. Congressman from Wisconsin. You can find more information here: http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/
http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/UploadedFiles/factsheet.pdf

First off, I'm not exactly sure that I'll continue to like it in the future, but I do now (remember I waffle). The main reason I like it is because it makes some pretty major changes to how the primary Gov't expenses are handled (health care, medicare, social security). The rest of the federal budget appears to remain relatively intact, thus preserving the services we all currently benefit from.

The main premise is that people need to choose and pay for their own insurance. That is the only way we can actually see what various procedures cost, because we handle the account. I remember when Halene was born, the ultrasound technician asked us real casually, "Would you like the standard ultrasound or the 4d?" We didn't know we had an option, or what the cost difference was. The technician suggested the 4d because it was really neat. We got the 4d, it cost our insurance provider $3,000 more than the standard and made our child look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. I don't see any way to bring down health care costs without making the costs visible. To offset the cost of buying our own insurance, we get a tax break of $5,000 to $11,000 per person or couple respectively. In the end, it is expected that costs will be reigned in, people will be in charge of their care, and all will be covered. After all, weren't those the goals of health care reform in the first place? I like what I've read so far, what do you think?

Note: I truly do not have a strong opinion on this matter and welcome debate.

more basic math

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/rock-groups/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/from-fish-to-infinity/

A nice write-up on math and why it is usefull. Very simple introduction to numbers, concepts that my 3-year old is starting to grasp and which I continue to think about. What is a number?

Gar flies

Here is what I walk under every day when I get to work. He taunts me so...

I tied up a few gar flies last night in hopes that I might actually hook one this year. Any day of the week that the Black River is flowing there are gar surfacing in the pool below the house. I'm talking about the flowing portion of the black river, not the impounded portion. After many days with no hook-ups last year, I ended up just ignoring them to focus on smallmouth. Not this year, this year my goal is to not only hook and land a gar, but figure out how to get them to take on a consistent basis.
From Wikipedia: Gar bodies are elongated, heavily armored with ganoid scales, and fronted by similarly elongated jaws filled with long sharp teeth. Their tails are heterocercal, and the dorsal fins are close to the tail. As their vascularised swim bladders can function as lungs, most gar surface periodically to take a gulp of air, doing so more frequently in stagnant or warm water when the concentration of oxygen in the water is low. As a result, they are extremely hardy and able to tolerate conditions that would kill most other fish.

The interesting thing about the gar in the Black River is that they were surfacing all the way to ice-up last year. Also, the water conditions in the Black are great for smallmouth, it isn't extremely low in dissolved oxygen. Here are some links to guys fly fishing for gar. What you will find in common is that they are all catching these fish in stillwaters, not flowing rivers like the Black.

http://www.flyfishga.com/gar.htm
http://www.flyfishohio.com/heat_wave_flyfishing.htm
http://hipwader.com/2006/gr-pike-fishing-fly-pattern

Fishing for gar in moving waters (and particularly big rivers) presents a number of problems in just getting a fly to the fish. So that is really the number one issue I'll need to tackle early this year, how to deliver a 6-10" long fly across a big river to a fish that doesn't seem to want to take a moving prey item. I'm thinking a 20' spey rod would make life easier. Until the ice thaws, here are some flies.

First, unravel some rope.

Then loop some strands through a ring, no vise needed for these flies.

Some finished flies. The top two are tied with rope and shetland wool (from a friend who raises sheep and other animals for knitting supplies). The bottom fly is tied with a long rabbit strip.

I need to buy some different colors of rope and play around with rope color this summer once I get the presentation down.

New Brew!

Ohhhhh I can smell the hops just looking at it!

A space odyssey comes to my fridge! Hal-IPA-2010

I bottled a quadruple-hopped India Pale Ale over the weekend. During the last stage of fermentation I crushed 1 oz of Centennial hops into a fine powder and dropped it into the top the fermenter. When I popped the top of the fermenter to start bottling, the whole room started to small like hops (slight exaggeration). I put 2.25 gallons into the party pig (small keg-photo) and the rest in bottles. Although it usually takes at least 2 more weeks for the beer to condition and for the sugar to produce carbonation, I dispensed a glass full while tying some flies yesterday because I knew it would taste good already. I'm worried that I'll never experience the true greatness of this brew because I'm I'll have it gone before it matures.

Next time, I'm considering dropping an individual hop pellet into each bottle. I'm crazy into hops right now because I just choked down the last glass of a thick Porter that I brewed back in Nov. Five gallons is a lot of beer to drink, five gallons of Porter is a ton! Don't worry, I didn't drink it all myself-I'm not an alcy.

I'm ready for IPA again. I tend to only brew two types of beers, Porters and IPA's (opposite ends of the beer spectrum for me). Everything else I might as well buy in the store because I don't brew them well.

dividing up the worlds gradients

People love to divide things up into categories. Why? Because continuous gradients are hard, if-not impossible to think about at times.


The world seems to divide itself up into discrete categories of 'things', yet these things share characteristics, making them more like gradients of one variation to another variation. One of the fundamental tasks of Ecologists and Natural Historians is to understand and characterize how the world seems to be both categorical and yet continuous at the same time. This is what Darwin thought about, it is what drove Linnaeus to developed a classification scheme for the worlds plants, and believe it or not, this is what is at the root of most debates on racism (we are different, but we are similar).

Take for example two fisherpeople, a bait fisher and a fly fisher. We can separate the two based on the type of lure they use, but does that truly make the two different on the whole? After all they are both fishing. On the one hand, they share a number of attributes, they typically have rods and reels. But on the other hand, the type of rod and reel that they use are different. So on the one hand, we could devise a scheme that would describe these two fisherpeople as a continuous gradient of characteristics (some shared, others varying) but on the other hand, we can call them two different classes (bait and fly). If I filled the room with my friends, we could debate the differences and similarities of bait and fly people all night. But we would just end up ripping on bait fisherman (which is ironic because we all bait fish at times). But that's not the point. The point is that the complexity of the world shows up everywhere as a juxtaposition of what appears as different classes of things, classes that are separated from each other by gradual differences. Recall that Darwin's theory was based on the premise that species share traits and that some traits vary almost continuously among species because we all share a common ancestor. Given enough time, species morph into what appears as different and classifiable but what is really similar and gradual when look more closely.

Thinking about this hurts the brain, which makes the people who think about this stuff reach for a bottle of whisky. After a couple of drinks, they end up thinking about it all over again, but from a slightly different perspective.

This was exactly what happened when a few folks got together at a conference in Scotland devoted to classification. After a few glasses of single malt scotch, they got to thinking about a classification scheme for scotch. What resulted was a great paper describing both the methods used in classification and descriptions of different scotches as well. Remember, there are definitely different types of scotch, but what makes one different from another is not so simple to describe. For everything you have ever wanted to know about Scotch, and for more than you would ever want to know about classification methods, check this out:

http://www.bio.umontreal.ca/legendre/reprints/Appl%20Stat%2043,%201994.pdf

Some favorite Steelhead pics

I like being able to fish for trout on spring creeks during the winter now that we live in the driftless. But I miss the steelhead of the north. Looking back....
Dan with a big ol nasty steelhead

This fish was caught when the water was muddy-brown water after a huge storm. Few people were fishing, and the guys that were fishing couldn't get their eggs and spawnbags down deep enough in the very deep and fast water. I took a number of fish that day, including this one and another within 5 minutes by swinging leeches on a super heavy sink-tip.

This is a special fish for me because of where I caught it and who I caught it with, enough said.

Hooking up with a 7 mo-old on my chest

I'm not sure if this was Tyler's first steely, but he sure was happy.

Tim from Riverblends with a special fish. We thought we had fished most of the water that there was to fish on this particular river. Then we went for long hike up river and found some fresh fish. Very nice to find new spots on old rivers.

Andrew had a banner day. We only saw a couple other folks on the water that day becasue it dumped 12" of snow the night before. Andrew was determined to fish, and he landed a number of nice fish.

on ecologists and environmentalists

Note: This post has been edited from its original content to reflect less gender-bias.

-Robert May (an ecologist)

A friend of mine once told me that when he sits next to strangers on airplanes, he no longer tells them he is an ecologist. Instead, he tells them that he teaches biology. He said it is amazing how differently people treat him when he simply places the emphasis on teaching instead of practicing and on biology rather than ecology. While I've never had anyone accuse me of being a tree-hugger, I know how to read people's eyes pretty well. The problem is that I'm really not a tree-hugger, I'm a scientist. It just takes too long and gets too confusing to explain the difference to most people.

Ecology and the role of ecologists in our society are often confused with the environmental movement. While it is true that those of us who study the natural world would rather that our subject not be replaced with parking lots and strip malls, we study nature in order to understand it better, and in turn, learn what role we as humans play as part of local and global ecosystems. I think Schneider and Kay (1994, Complexity and thermodynamics: towards a new ecology, Futures 26: 626-647) have a nice way of explaining various aspects of this. Get ready to be educated on the role of ecologists and that of environmentalists.

Ecology is the science of the interactions of living organisms with each other and
their interactions with the physical and chemical components of their enveloping
environment. Ecology is a misunderstood, underfunded, orphan branch of science.
The sciences of the macroscopic, astronomy, and the microscopic, particle physics,
are the darlings of the funding agencies as we spend billions of our tax dollars on
Hubble telescopes and bigger and bigger supercolliders. It is interesting to know of
an astronomical event thousands of light years ago or to know that one subatomic
particle comprises eight or ten smaller particles. These scientific facts, however,
seem to intersect us in the peripheral aspects of our lives. Ecology, however, is a
science on the human scale. We humans are part of our ecosystems, and the
environment with which we interact is on a scale that is a part of our daily lives.
Those of us who study the dynamics and functioning of ecosystems are amazed that
a science that seems so important to mankind receives so little money, and that
minimal attention is paid to understanding processes that may influence the future of
humankind and the future of our biosphere.

Part of the problem is that many people confuse the science of ecology with the
environmental movement. When one of us tells a new friend, ‘I am a theoretical
ecologist’, they often think that we are members of a fringe political movement or
that we spend time lying in front of bulldozers in national forests. Even the well
known journal The Ecologist is not a journal about ecology but a journal about
science, politics and socioeconomic issues related to environmental management.
The environmentalists’ goal should be to encourage management of the local
through global ecosystems so as to maintain or enhance environmental quality.
However ecologists as scientists should advise society on ecological interactions and
the potential impact of human activities on natural resources. Ecosystem
management is about trade-offs, and the role of the ecologist should be to identify
these trade-offs. Which trade-off we decide to make is a political decision which
environmentalists can seek to influence.

Nicely put, eh. You see, the environmentalist typically doesn't care what type of management or restoration actions are taken-just so that something is done (usually everything that can be done). This results in a lot of money spent on a myriad of activities aimed at a particular natural resource concern. But the ecologist sets up experiments that reveal just what should be done about a particular environmental problem, thus saving time, effort, and money that would have been spent on the 'do everything' approach' that is usually relied on in absence of science. Underfunding of science agencies costs way more money in the long-run.

At any rate, now when you sit next to someone on an airplane and they tell you they are an ecologist, you can treat them like you would a particle physicist or an astronomer-only you can consider the ecologist a bit more socially relevant.

Outing #2

Howdy folks,

I don't have a ton of experience fishing for stream trout during winter. But the more I do it, the more I'm finding out that there are two basic ways to go about catching fish: 1) casting to 'pods' of hundreds to thousands of stagnant fish (probably recently stocked), and 2) stalking smaller groups of more 'wild' fish on smaller water with more structure (rocks, trees, etc...).

I have to admit, I have more experience with #1. This is the approach I took on my first outing of the year. I know a few spots that I think have some springs which supply warmer water during the cold months. Hundreds to thousands of fish stack up in these glassy pools. When you walk up on them, you can see them bolt. But if you just stand still, they all eventually come back. The lesson in winter is this- fish are where they want to be, and they will come back even if you initially spook them. Note: the bigger fish may not come back.

At any rate, it is amazing how many fish you can catch from these pods. It as though they are all in line to take a fly, get reeled in and released back to the group. This type of fishing is what we all need following a month or so of not fishing, and it is what I was after on my first outing of the year. It turns out I didn't get enough of it because I went right back to the same pool on Sunday and landed ~12 or so small trout in a half hour before getting bored.

The second way to catch trout during the winter usually results in fewer trout, but sometimes some larger fish. It also requires walking longer distances. For this approach I target smaller waters with some good trout habitat. Instead of looking into the water to actually see fish, I just approach the water the same way I would in the summer-cast to structure, look for surface activity, etc...

After I got bored of casting to fish I could see, I went in search of some smaller water (one additional thing about smaller water with good habitat is the potential for midge hatches). On Sunday, I took a number of fish from riffles and pools on small midge larvae. The fish were noticeably darker than the fish in the pods, reflecting their recent spawning activity. I caught a few fish that were very slender and looking 'spawned out'. This is what I like to see, because finding where fish spawn can lead to finding bigger fish. It didn't on this day.

I experienced my first midge hatch of the year. There was enough surface activity to convince me to re-tie my leader for dry fly fishing-but not enough activity to bring the fish back to the surface after my casting put them all down. Note: this is how I define a 'good' hatch. If fish are so keyed in on surface feeding that they are not permanently put off by my casting, then it is a good hatch. If they spook and don't come back to feeding on the surface, then the hatch really isn't all that important to them.

I got two photos before my battery went dead. I landed one real nice fish (~13 inches) that was dark and spawned out. The rest were in the 10 inch range. There are some bigger fish in this stretch of river and I'll get one. Unless it gets real cold again and I don't fish for a while, I'm not going back to fishing those big pods of fish-there's no mystery to it.

Woodpile as of 1-14-2010

I'm halfway through my woodpile as of Jan 14, 2010.

Brent (previous owner) used to burn two rows of wood in a single winter. I had these four rows stacked and ready to go back in October. I burned a little wood in October, some in November, much more in December and early Jan. Although I have plenty of wood for this and next year, I'd like to save the two rows on the left for next year and just burn the rest of the two that I'm already into.

What do you think, at the rate I'm going, how much more wood will I go through?

First outing of 2010

With temperatures rising above freezing for the first time all year (and much longer than that) I did some rearranging of my work schedule and hit the water for the first time in 2010. I got on the water at about 10:00 and the sun was already out, by 11:30 I had already stripped a layer and ditched the gloves. With the sun beating down, it might just as well have been summer.

By noon I stumbled upon a pod of several hundred fish. Note: winter fishing is strange, all the fish pile up in huge slack-water pools where you would never find them any other time of the year. It makes catching fish really easy and boring. I took a number of fish from this first pod, and moved on. I soon found another area with a bunch of fish, but they were more difficult to cast to. After fumbling around there, I doubled back to the spot I was first at. When I got there, two dudes from the MNDNR were standing nuts-deep in the hole where all the fish used to be, great. I spent the rest of the day trudging through knee-deep snow and looking for fish. Next time out, I'll have a handful of spots where fish are likely to be holding-nice to have some options.
One large pod of fish was holding along the bend at the top of the photo.

First trout of 2010. Nothing noteable about it-or any of the other fish I landed.

A few memorable moments from 2009

Early spring risers

Fat fall browns

Camping

Samuels first fish

Johnny's fat brown

Tiny creeks loaded with small fish

Huge largemouth

Welcome

I know, just what the world needs, another blog, another useless piece of someone's minds, their activities, their opinions, etc...

This has been a long-time in coming. I was posting too many recreational photos and sciencey stuff on my family blog and finally got the official boot from my wife. Hence from this point forward, our family blog will be for family activities and keeping family and friends up to date on the growth and development of our kids-which is what most folks care about these days anyhow. But here, at this blog, you will find my recreational activities and perhaps my thoughts on different 'things'. Think of this as the 'man-cave' and the family blog as the 'family room'.

Things you can expect to find me blogging about:
1) Flyfishing
2) cutting, splitting, and burning wood
3) home improvement projects
4) philosophy of science
5) Beer
6) Anything else men might discuss in the man cave