Fall cast and blast II

Day 2 results much similar to Day 1. Grouse flushed with none accidently flying into the direction that the birdshot was flying. The day was warm and the dog got a work out. Here he is lying down on the ground drinking from his bowl refusing to make eye contact with me because he is so disappointed in one half of the team.


As usual the cast portion of the day went much better.





With no grouses to bring home I took a couple of trout for the old man back at the cabin.


There are essential vitamins and nutrients in fresh caught brook trout that are very beneficial for 86 yr olds.

U.P. Report: The Triple AAA Road

The Kennecott Eagle sulfide mine project is looking like is it is going to happen in Marquette County. All that is left is the ruling by the state supreme court. I figured I should get up there one more time, as i haven't fished there in a while. Saw some of these along the way.



So I had along my handmade map to get us out there from Big Bay. Don't know why but the Triple AAA road is really well known in the U.P. Say - "I'm going up by the Triple AAA" and every one knows where you're going.



The trackless forest primeval, the Yellow Dog Plains, headwaters of three great watersheds, the Salmon Trout River, The Yellow Dog River and the Escanaba. It look pretty good from the map book even.



But the Google tells a different tale. The MDNR, and the MDEQ haven't yet met a logger they don't like. Lots of good toilet paper there yah know. Notice the interesting pattern of cutting and how it looks so much like the Escanaba River state forest outline ?



On the ground the jack pine plains don't look so bad, but its one of those things. What did it look like before it had been parcelled out, and parcelled out again, and parcelled out again.



The rivers that cut through the forest were super pretty.












Caught a ton of these little guys. There were alot of foot prints on the bank. A lot of expensive new cabins along the river, too.









Packed a righteous snad for dinner.



So I imagine I'll be posting about the acid rock runoff flowing into these streams, putting three watersheds at jeopardy, including one with the last moderately healthy run of coasters on the south coast. I have some pictures to look at now.

August Ties followup

looks aside ...





the ugly flies do work ...

Wherein I teach ...

Two weekends ago I broke my long standing prohibition on teaching any one fly fishing. Being a fly fisher of modest skill and less success, and a caster who's talents lie on the border between bad and execrable I feel I am not really qualified to teach any one about this.

On the other, the brother in law of 30 years wanted to go to fly fish for trout on the family property on the Escanaba. He has demonstrated some proficiency with other loathsome arts a spinning rod and since he already occupied a position as a university professor and Dean of the College of Art and Sciences at Dominican University, I felt his basic life skill set was already as useless as one could possibly conceive so what difference did it make if he learned to fly fish poorly? you know, when you are at the bottom you can only go up right?

To his credit he did say he would use one of the broom handles that masquerade as resident fly poles as he didn't want to risk breaking one of my "good" rods. I gave him a quick casting lesson and after 5 minutes on the lawn at the cabin, I said why not try my Scott G2 8 foot 4 inch 4 weight ? after one bad false cast - he did agree to use that rod instead of the telephone pole he had been waving around in the air.

The man carefully positioned above the tailout of the big pool on the family water. This spot always holds a trout or two, except for those times when it doesn't. He's dropping a dry fly fished down and across in traditional U.P. style.



This time the tail out contained a trout. First trout on a fly rod and a dry fly.






He fortunately went on to get about another five trout to rise to the fly hooking several including one nice one, but failed to land any of them thank dog.

GUEST POST: MIGHTY GRYFF and his Master

Catch up post #3: Posted on Aug 2 but fished on July 5.

This comes from George Cleveland, Uber moderator and insect overlord at the Wisconsin Fly Fishing Message Board . After many postings about the Prairie River during the regs change fight last spring, I finally had the opportunity to fish the river, my first, and G.C. made the time to guide me along the ex-special regs water. This is his post about our trip:

By George Cleveland

The interwebs are a strange social landscape. They give one the perfect disguise, enabling a person to alter their persona to whatever template they may desire. So it is always interesting to meet someone with whom you have only communicated in the past via message board postings and IMs.

Hdw IMed me late last week and wondered if we could do a little fishing Saturday evening. He was going to be in our area picking up his Brittany "Gryffindor" from a trainer. Gryff had been attending Bird Camp while Harlan and his family did the Sound of Music tour in the Alps. A couple text messages led to a scratchy cell phone call from Gilman, Wisconsin. In an hour or so I knew I'd be meeting hdw in the flesh. And sure enough, with a little help from his GPS, the Volvo with Illinois plates was soon pulling up to the curb in front of our neighbors house.

The guy who unfolded himself from the Swedish tank was taller and a bit grayer than I expected. (As a writer he comes across as a younger man.) But there was an air that came from him that I can only describe as "authenticity" and made me comfortable in an unusually short time for an old curmudgeonly Norwegian such as myself. My estimation of him grew as I watched him interact with his dog, Gryff and later with my son and my wife. Add to that the fact that he didn't noticeably act disgusted by the chaos that exemplifies what could laughably be called "housekeeping" in the Cleveland shack and he attained the vaunted "O.K. By Me" status, in my mind.

The next couple of hours were spent in comfortable conversation which at times approached the subject of the evening's fishing. It had been in the 80s all that day and I was dubious about the River's temperature. Trying to steer him towards the bass that live in the Wisconsin instead, hdw averred that he really wasn't that enthralled with smallmouth. So we decided to try some of the cooler waters that flow through sections of the late, lamented Special Regs section. After transferring his equipage from his Volvo to the Taurus we made our way up the highway to the access point.

It wasn't until almost 7:30 that we found ourselves be-wadered and be-rodded and standing in the reassuringly [b]cold[/b] water of the upper River. Before we even had a chance to feed enough line from our reels to fish a small riseform spread beneath the tag alders opposite us. Harlan had tied on a chunky looking soft hackle and he cast it to the fish. But on the second cast he snagged an over hanging willow behind us. At his urging I fished to the rises with my Pass Lake and after 4 or 5 casts, hooked and landed the small brookie that had been making them.





We continued upstream. After missing a few fish with his soft hackle , Harlan changed to a Goddard Caddis. There were sporadically rising fish scattered through a thigh deep, timbered section. Including one that was feeding just off an Entish finger of deadwood pointing out into the current.









The Goddard seemed to elicit more solid takes and the Pass Lake did its usual thing, so we played trade-a-fish while we went upstream. First Harlan would catch a fish and then I'd step up and take one. The only break in the pattern was when one of us would tangle with an alder and then the other would cast to the trout while the other fiddled with his tackle.

As dusk deepened we came to a long deepish run that had been HIed decades before. The fish were still rising but both Harlan and I found ourselves missing more fish than we were hooking. Both of us struggled with hook eyes and tippet held up against the fading sky as we fumbled to change flies. Harlan finally got his attached, a big Stimulator, and flipped it to a fish that had started feeding a rod length away.

While the take wasn't splashy the commotion that followed the hooking was. H's rod, a 4 weight built on a Sage LL blank, formed an almost perfect arch as the fish fought first up and then down the stream. I cautiously tried to back away and not spook the fish. After a few minutes Harlan led the trout to his net. The 14" brook trout lay quietly long enough for me to take a quick pic and then Harlan snipped the tippet, leaving the deeply embedded fly in place and returning the chunky trout to the River. Then it was grins all around.



It was near dark now so we turned about and fished down through the water below toward the car. I had managed to get a bushy Catskill dry on my leader and other than a few taps had not had any real luck with it. But near the middle of the timbered, deep run my twitched fly brought a solid hit and after a short fight the 12" brookie was being photographed like a Hollywood starlet. (I wonder if brook trout get those little purple spots on their retinas from camera flashes.)







We continued downstream, hearing rises back in the log jams from fish that would never be caught. Shortly after joking with H that he needed a 20" brookie next, Harlan's fly was engulfed by a shockingly large rise. He failed to connect solidly but the inferred size of the fish made any joking reference to a 20" brook trout seem less absurd.

We hold these truths to be self evident

Catch up entry number 2 - posted on Aug 2 but fished on July 4th in the Driftless

My July the 4th.

Landed from old yurp on wednesday, headed up to the farm where the pup was boarded in central wisco. Spent the afternoon and fishing through the evening.

Where and what are these pairs.











My fireworks outside the tent - camped next to a stream behind some farmers trees, and the fireflies were flying.

Austria - yes that's right Austria

Report posted July 31 - but fished in Austria June26/27...

Burned a ton of miles and decided to get the kids some Old Europe culture.

This was the Fishing Hutte we spent a night in.
outside:

inside:

The back yard of the utte:


We hiked up the side of the valley to get a close look at one of the waterfalls coming down from the ice fields.





This valley is above the Krimml wasser falle - highest in Europe.

The kids at the top of the valley.



and there was trout:




The Krimml Achental is 14KM long, ending in a glacier at the head of the valley that is coming down off of Großglockner the highest montain in Austria. ( I think ). The fishing access is all controlled by the Braurup Hotel family, apparently they have been contolling it for the last 400 years or so. They issue daily permits to the 200KM of prime waters that they control, at 25 euros a day. The 14KM of the Krimml above the falls is in a preserve, that limits the rods to 10 a day, fly only, complete C&R. There were two other fisherman there for the two days I was there, I did not see them any near I was fishing, but I ran into them in one of the two "restaurants" that are up there. Basically old alpine farmhouses and the families that live in them sell beer, and homemade weinerschnitzel and milk and cheese made from the 8 or 9 cows they graze, and have on the farm, and I swear that the cream and cheese soup tasted like the wildflowers they were grazing on.



It was blazing sun while we were there with occasional rainclouds blowing through. So - by midmorning the river itself would be up in high runoff mode. I couldn't cross the river to get to this pool and big back eddy, but some monster trout were steadily rising to a grey and sulfer hatch beyond my ability to cast and mend and float a dry into this. These trout laughed and mocked me all afternoon.



The high water did bring up all the small feeders flowing in from all the waterfalls though and the trout did take refuge in these.



These were fishes that came from these feeders on dries of various types.
















The second day in the evening I fished a different stream. Thom the guide at the shop at the Braurup sent me to it. I don't know what it was called. It looked like this.



Got a few from this stream - including the biggest fish of my two Austrian fishing days.



Had one on this stream at the base of a plunge pool that I never saw. It just broke me off after about 30 seconds.