Never underestimate how closely you are being watched.
That warning is especially true if kids are around. Sure, they might not LOOK like they are paying attention, but you had better quickly drop any misguided illusions that they aren’t.
If you’re doubtful, try this little experiment: Say something derogatory about something like a particular brand of product when the kids are within earshot and then go shopping with them.
Deliberately put the aforementioned item in your shopping cart and watch what happens.
You are being watched.
Now, the upshot to this is that through careful mentoring and guidance, you can instill your love of the outdoors and fishing and such into those same malleable kids who would unwittingly pass along any disparaging remarks you made about the neighbor during dinner one night to that very same neighbor during your annual summer block party.
Since you are being watched, I say – use it to your advantage
Case in point: our God-daughter has heard me talk long and lovingly about fishing since she was old enough to understand the meaning of the word. By carefully encouraging her and coaching her on the virtues of fishing (there are some!) she naturally now wants to go fishing with her Uncle Dan. I have even given her a pink Barbie pole and tackle box just to let her know that fishing can be chic and stylish. I carefully and deliberately model my behavior and speak enthusiastically about the “benefits” of things like hooking yourself, and getting spined and stepping in duck droppings and using porta-potties that are long overdue for emptying and…well, you get the picture and, as far as my God-daughter is concerned, all those things are part of fishing and are somehow part of the fun – though sometimes she is not quite sure if I truly understand the definition of “fun”.
Nevertheless, she likes fishing and always wants to know if I still like fishing even after a fishless expedition.
I know I am being watched.
So a couple of weekends ago, I had an opportunity to once again expand my God-daughter’s idea of what constitutes “fun” when it comes to fishing.
Through a series of convoluted scheduling changes I was able to spend the afternoon at Downey Wilderness Park with her and our fishing gear. I hadn’t read of any recent fish plants so I knew the odds of actually catching anything there were already pretty slim but it was the place with the easiest access within the time frame we had.
With this information already in the back of my mind, I decided to put the emphasis on technique and style. I rigged her pole with a fairly heavy egg sinker and I let her pick the color of Power Bait (despite my dislike of bait-fishing). We settled on neon green which I dubbed “booger bait” much to my protégé’s delight. I baited her hook, pretended to lick the leftover “booger bait” from my fingers, again to her delight and disgust, then reviewed proper casting technique and finally just let her go for it.
Sure enough her first cast sailed halfway across the narrow section of the pond I had deliberately chosen and her confidence level soared. Anyone within earshot surely heard how amazing that first cast was. Then, after untangling the ensuing birds-nest and re-reviewing the intricacies of spinning reels in kidspeak, I set up shop next to her.
I intentionally choose the fly reel with yellow floating line and tied on a big, gaudy dry fly despite the slim chances of anything actually making a surface hit. I then made sure to make my first cast near to her line so that she could immediately brag that her casts were farther and better than mine.
Everything was going pretty much according to plan…then the mosquito fish showed up.
Now, I should have remembered from previous trips that in the eyes of a seven-year old, fish of any size are likely targets. So when a swarm of mosquito fish hustled up to the bank in front of us in the hopes of picking up some scraps of our lunch, suddenly the objects of our pursuit seemed all the more real and attainable – so real, in fact that the bait on the end of a certain Barbie pole rig lost some of its appeal and catching mosquito fish grew in importance.
So much so, that a certain young fisher-girl raced excitedly up and down the bank shouting out questions about mosquito fish as they alternately fled and followed her.
I answered a multitude of questions about mosquito fish. More questions than I knew I could be asked about mosquito fish. I made mosquito fish sound like the absolute best harbingers of big fish that one could come across.
And then it happened.
In the excitement of the moment, a certain young fisher-girl misjudged the uneven terrain between grass and concrete and within a split second was suddenly sitting in six inches of lake water.
The look that followed was a mixture of shock, mild fear, a little pain and embarrassment. I knew that I had to think up a positive spin on the situation and I had to think one up quick.
I knew that she wasn’t hurt and I knew from the way she was sitting that she wasn’t in any danger but I also knew that I only had one chance to save seven years of careful and deliberate work.
“Oh my gosh!” I blurted out. “ You did it. You actually did it. And year’s ahead of schedule even.”
The change in facial expression from near tears to puzzlement told me my ploy was working.
“You have accomplished in one afternoon what it takes some fisher-folk decades to do.”
“What did I do?” She asked with a slight whine and a little tremble in her voice while climbing slowly out of the water.
“You have learned the all-time greatest secret of fishing.”
“I fell in the water and got my shoes wet and my pants are dirty and …”
“Shhh.” I hissed, with a silencing wave of my arms and furtive glances about, “Don’t say another word or you’ll reverse everything. This is great! This is newsworthy. This is a proud day in fishing history. Come over here and I’ll take off your shoes in the special way so we don’t waste what just happened.”
Intrigued, my soggy fishing buddy dutifully squished her way over to me. Kneeling down, I gently removed one shoe, held it up ceremoniously and poured out the collected water from inside. I then did the same with the other shoe and also with each sock.
“You have now entered the Society of Tried and True Fisher-folk. Fish will forevermore fear you and your trusty Fishing Pole of Victory. You came to the park today thinking we were just going to have some fun, but you leave a full-fledged fisher-women. Congratulations.”
The smile on her face spoke volumes. Her posture straightened, her head lifted, her eyes sparkled. Her soggy pants didn’t seem to matter quite so much.
“Can we tell Mama? Can we tell Papa?”
“Oh, absolutely. In fact, we must tell them and we must document this great day with pictures. Go stand by your tackle box.”
And just as quickly as it began, the crisis was averted and we ended up spending another hour pleasantly moving around the lake chasing the ever elusive “monster fish that lurks in every pond where mosquito fish are found”.
Yes, you are being watched and if there is any lesson at all to this little story it is that we veteran fisher-folk can model positive behaviors and help the next generation (one that is generally becoming less and less attuned to the realm of nature that we so much enjoy) develop a keener, finer sense of the great outdoors…and maybe a sense of humor to boot.
However, should you doubt the conclusions drawn from this episode, Let me offer you a little proof from the other day: Just two weeks after the great “splash down”, my God-daughter enthusiastically invited herself to accompany me and my fishin’ buddy, Sean on an impromptu afternoon getaway at a local lake.
Once we arrived at our chosen lake, she happily cast away between us as we worked our way around the perimeter, never once shying away from the water’s edge. She even agreed to pose for a picture while lipping one of the small Bass Sean managed to pull out with one of his custom shrimp flies.
The three of us had a great summer afternoon enjoying the sun, the sounds of ducks and kids, the sparkle of the water and the occasional zing of a tightening line.
Yeah, I am being watched and hopefully I am making it clear that I love this addiction called urban fly fishin’.
The other day I received a call from a buddy of mine that works with DFG and he told me they would be stocking over at La Mirada Park Lake within the next hour or so. He said I should go over and check it out since I was already off work, and I figured why not get out for an hour. I picked up my camera and drove up to park with my 5 weight in hand, just in case the fish felt like biting a fly. When I got there the truck was already dumping in the fish, and the bait fishermen were lined up along the edge with their powerbait in hand, those guys are like bloodhounds on a scent when it comes to stocked fish. I was amazed to see the Trout start on the bite as soon as they hit the water, and within about 30 minutes I had netted 4 or 5 Bows. These were some of the most beat up looking Trout that I have ever seen, and it made my heart ache to be on a clear stream catching wild Rainbows. But these genetic mutants are what keep many of the poachers and powerbaiters out of the sierras and local streams, so I guess it’s a necessary evil. It’s just hard to see such a beautiful species breed down like this!
I got up this morning, and the first things that went through my mind were “I want an Iced Coffee from McDonalds and I want to fish”. So, I took up Dan’s advice and decided to head over to La Mirada to see if I could get a Catfish on the fly. The day started out great I caught a few Juvenile Largemouth, and hooked up with a Cat that went straight for a sunken cement block and broke me off so quick I had barely had it on the line. But on the very next cast I got the surprise of my life an Oscar!!! Now obviously someone felt this guy got a little too big for his aquarium and decided to dump him on the Park Lake down the street, but man was it fun to catch on a fly. This fish fought extremely hard for it’s size and there is nothing like adding a species to the lifelist. If that is not the most awesome thing that has ever happened to me, I caught another one just a couple of casts later. I think that after your blood pressure and heart rate go up that high you are supposed to have a doctor check you out, but we will see if there is any permanent damage!
Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I write a piece on patterns and consistency, I get thrown a curve ball and am forced back to my stand-by position that “nature writes the textbooks but doesn’t necessarily read them”.
Case in point: I recently wrote that much of what we do in fly-fishing is to look for identifiable patterns that we can imitate or exploit.
Well, as soon as that declaration was in print — stuff happened.
Not that I’m complaining. To the contrary, I ended up having a good morning… a really good morning. Sure, it included a breakfast burrito with a little crow in it, but it was still a good morning and besides, I was able to spit out most of the feathers before they caused any permanent damage.
You see, Mondays are generally our “office and errand” day. Normally, I’m up and immediately at the computer or fixing the stuff that needs fixing or out the door with “to-do” list, checkbook, dirty laundry, stack of mail and an enormous cup-of-coffee-to-make-it-all-possible in hand.
But this last Monday, thanks in part to the time change, I awoke with the first rays of the sun peeking over… well, the neighbor’s house — but you know what I mean. Anyway, I awoke to a beautiful, clear and sunny sky.
It was one of those mornings that seem to happen every morning in the movies unless it is a horror film, which I never watch anyway. It was simply too good of a morning to start off in front of the computer, no matter how fresh or tasty the coffee or how urgent the e-mail messages.
So I quickly readied up, kissed my still sleeping wife and headed off to La Mirada Park.
Sure enough, there were numerous early morning walkers, a knot of laughing, joking older gentlemen occupying a couple of shaded benches set back on a short rise, a couple of maintenance workers, but no fisher-folk.
I rigged up a new carp fly that I recently purchased from Mad River Outfitters and began some “research”.
Within five minutes, I was rewarded with a Largemouth Bass followed, in short order, by several more Bass. Sure, they were on the small size, but they beat out the boatload of waiting-to-be-opened spam e-mails from a whole crew of totally honest attorneys in Nigeria representing the multi-million dollar estates of recently and tragically deceased relatives I never knew I had.
I continued a slow, leisurely pace around the lake pulling in small Bass about every five minutes.
About half way around the lake, as I was stripping in the fly with short, fast pulls, my rod doubled over.
That doesn’t happen often enough, so it feels good just putting it in writing. In fact, I’ll write it again: My rod doubled over instead of the normal gentle twitching that indicates a Trout or Panfish or even the short Bass I was catching on the other end of the line.
My first thought was Carp. After all, I did have a carp fly on the end of my tippet and there are numerous large Carp in the lake but… something didn’t add up. There was no line-eating, blazing fast run, no wild thrashing, no splashing, just a hard, steady, consistent pull.
My next thought was turtle. I hate snagging turtles. We used to work at a vet hospital that was licensed to see wildlife and frequently an angler would bring in a turtle that he or she had snagged or hooked. It was always a huge pain to try and remove the hook or untangle the line from a ticked off, biting, peeing and snapping turtle. The soft-shelled turtles were the worse. They have these incredibly long necks, nasty beaks and even nastier dispositions that make handling them difficult at best and dangerous at worst.
So, I groaned and hoped that it wouldn’t be a turtle and I wouldn’t lose my new fly to some hissing, whizzing soft shell.
Still my rod stayed doubled over.
Whatever was at the other end was moving in a slow zig-zag pattern and it was getting tired. Since I only had a 7x tippet I wanted to be very careful. (I know, I know, I should have been using a 4x or so but I really had only intended to play with the carp fly before switching over to something smaller. It just started working so darn well.)
Anyway, I glanced at my watch and decided to time this little tug of war. At eight and half minutes, I finally saw the head of my opponent – a catfish! And a decent size one at that.
At twelve minutes plus change, I was able to land a ten and half inch cat AND get my fly back.
Needless to say, it has been a lot of fun telling some of my other fishin’ buddies that I landed a catfish on a fly. Most of these guys are the powerbait and mackerel strips type of catfish anglers so the looks on their faces have been priceless.
Of course, they instantly remind me that it is not the normal “pattern” for cats to hit flies.
To which I reply, “Good thing fish don’t follow web blogs, eh?”
I love this addiction called urban fly fishin’.
Autumn 2009 officially began in North America on September 22, 2009 at 5:18 pm EDT.
For much of the country, Autumn or Fall traditionally means a transition into cooler temperatures, changes in the foliage and shorter days.
In SoCal, we get the shorter days all right, but for us, the Fall is notorious for being incredibly hot, dry and windy. The seasonal Santa Ana winds blow in and the temps can easily soar into the triple digits while the humidity plummets in the opposite direction to the single digits.
No one really knows why they are called the Santa Ana Winds, though many explanations are put forth as fact. My favorite one is that the name harkens from the Spanish colonial days and is a corruption of the phrase for “Devil Winds”. Besides appealing to the romantic notion of a California long gone, that explanation is certainly an apt description, especially when an unanticipated hurricane-velocity gust drives a size 10 wooly bugger between your shoulder blades– though I have been known to call them something else during those moments.
At any rate, urban fishing in SoCal during the Santa Anas is always an adventure – Sure, fickle breezes befoul every other cast and cause flies to drop into places not aimed for, but in the same way that the hot, irritating winds stir up the darker passions of Angelenos, they also seem to induce a frenzied, maddened bite in local Bass and Panfish populations.
Sean and I both experienced this during the last bout of “Devil Winds”, when we each had opportunities to sneak off for a couple of hours to different local lakes.
I had a scorching good time, taking a dozen five to six-inch bass on a yellow egg imitation rigged as a dropper off of a grasshopper fly – all in about an hour. Sean, likewise, smoked ‘em at the lake he hit, pulling in another dozen Bass and Panfish on a similar rig, though the lake he hit was paradoxically shrouded in coastal fog.
What made these little ventures exciting was the fury with which these relatively small fish hit our flies. These fish charged and fought and shook their heads just like the big boys. I even had one shake out the hook only to have another one hit it before the ripples of the first fish had died down.
When we compared notes, Sean told of similar ferocity amongst the fish he encountered.
Chalk it up to the season or the winds, either way, we both had a devilishly good time pursuing this addiction called urban fly fishing.
“Those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happern. ”
“Serendipity”. A ten dollar word that translates to roughly, ” I had no freakin’ idea that would turn out so totally awesome”. It’s a word to use when you want to throw a kink in the stereotype that brownliners are a step down on the flyfishing/intelligence hierarchy. It is also how I would d escribe our day on the water this past Sunday.
About 3:30 in the afternoon we headed off to La Mirada park to try our luck among the hard core catfish fisher-folk and the innumerable kids that were hurling enough lead at the lake to make it feel like a beach assault. We hop-scotched between the families feeding the predatory ducks, squeezing in just close enough so as not to appear too predatory ourselves but near enough to piggyback on the chum line being laid down by all the two and three year olds emptying their bags of cheetos into the lake. The wind was steady and made for a slight chop on the water, which was good for stealth but bad for anything other than casts made to the East. Our slow but fruitless dance around the lake was interrupted only to give a short lakeside instructional session to a ten-year old who nearly stove in the back of my head with the cannonball he was using for weight.
We had just about decided to move to another lake when my 8 foot, 5-weight “dinked”. I honestly thought I had snagged some algae but played in the line anyway. Sure enough, I had managed to hook up with quite possibly the smallest large mouth bass on the planet. Exhausted from the battle, I forgot to snap a photo but it wouldn’t have a mattered much anyway unless you use a hi-def,=2 0home-theater sized screen for a computer monitor. Still a fish is a fish and it boosted our spirits just to know that we could, in fact catch a fish in an urban lake even amid the barrage of live fire lead and rooster tails.
Knowing that retreat is an effective and honorable strategy, we opted to head over to Laguna Lake, which despite it’s name, is located in the middle of Fullerton — about fifteen minutes away. Now, old-timers who haven’t been there in the last three years or so will hear you say Laguna Lake and simply burst out laughing. Laguna lake recently underwent a multi-million dollar make over and it’s once again a decent place to fish. Prior to the fix up though, the place just stank. The water resembled hospital jello and you didn’t have to fish, you just had to walk along the shore and scoop up dead carcasses from underneath the ducks that lined the shore like day workers at Home Depot.
Now, it is a different story.The place is clean, the number of ducks is regulated, the water flows in a cleansing circular pattern thanks to a series of pumps and jets and there is plenty of space to make decent back casts around most of the lake. Plus you can park along the street for FREE. A good number of families were already set up along the shore mostly bait fishing. We headed over to a clump of rushes that had produced for us in the past and we begin fishin’. Almost immediately we began pulling in small bluegills. ; As we split off in different directions, we each continued to haul in bluegill after bluegill. At one point, my cell phone went off while I was playing a ‘gill and the ID indicated that Sean was calling me. I answered, thinking something was wrong. “Dude, switch to a small dry. You won’t be sorry.” I did and I wasn’t. All told, when it finally got too dark to see what we were doing, we counted close to a hundred bluegills and green sunfish caught and released between the two of us.
And that is what you call serendipity.
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