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By Dan Zambrano, October 17, 2010 10:38 pm

Late last week, my fishin’ buddy, Sean sent me a text about an hour after I had had the same thought: “smmr nd ner, bttr hit LAr this wknd or 2 L8” which translates to “The end of the Summer fishing season is near, we better hit the L.A. river this weekend or it will be too late.”

Perhaps it was some unconscious thing we each felt from years of watching for the subtle changes in our seasons or perhaps we had each felt the constraints (read that as anxiety) that comes with shortening days, but in any event, we both seemed to sense that change was in the air and we might not have another chance to brown-line the Los Angeles River before the first rains of the seasons flooded the channel — changing the bottom terrain and washing fish and vegetation downstream so as to render unproductive the spots we had worked so hard to learn.

That being said, I texted back, “Sun aftr 3rd” which translates to “ Let’s hit the river on Sunday afternoon after church.” (more or less).

Sunday couldn’t have cooperated any better. The air temp was pleasant. The winds were light. The lush summer growth of saplings on the sand bars provided plenty of shade and, best of all, there were virtually no other anglers at our target site. In other words, urban fly fishin’ at its best.

We both eagerly headed upstream, rigging our 8-weights as we walked.

We hop-scotched the various pools where we had each had taken fish on previous visits and we fished hard…but with no success.

The lengthening shadows from the lowering sun added to the beauty but also increased our anxiety and desire to find the fish before it got too dark.

While we fished, long, noisy v-formations of Canadian Geese began to fly in overhead before dropping down to the smooth water out toward the middle of river.

Despite the intensity of our quest, it was one of those moments that truly takes the breath away and the few pictures we were able to snap betray the shakiness of our hands as we watched in awe. We were after all, and as I’ve said before, standing in the geographic center of some tens of millions of people and roughly eight minutes from the very heart of Los Angeles.

It was utterly amazing. The only thing lacking were the fish.

As the shadows grew deeper we reluctantly turned and began making our way back toward the car. Normally at this point of the day, we would hump it up the steep sides of the bank and walk along the flat portion at the top of the channel where we would be less likely to trip or slip. This day, however, neither one of us seemed willing to concede to the River so we fished our way downstream, back over the water we had already covered.

I have no idea if it was dumb luck, sheer desperation, acquired skill or a combo of all three, but some little tickle in the back of my skull told me to switch flies to a bright yellow egg pattern. I fumbled around in the gloom and took twice as long as usual to tie on my fly and after a seeming eternity, finally made my cast in the proximity of a large flotilla of paddling waterfowl.

And, just like in the movies and all the really good books, my line went tight, droplets of water sprayed, my rod doubled over and…I had my fish.

Not just any fish mind you, but a decent size Carp – a “Barrio Bonefish” that had sucked in my offering and then in a split second had stripped three-quarters of the line off my reel in an insane dash toward the deeper middle parts of the river.

And suddenly, right there amidst the green slime and bits of trash and discarded Styrofoam coffee cups and graffiti and broken beer bottles – I was back in church, if you catch my drift.

Now, just so you know, I get just as excited as the next guy but I rarely yell and scream. That day however, and for that fish, I yelled and screamed. So much so that it set a considerable number of geese off in an explosive though short-lived panic flight.

My fishin’ buddy Sean, who was yelling and screaming too (after all that’s what fishin’ buddies do) was there with the net when I finally brought my fish in and he was also there with camera ready when said fish was finally in hand.

After the obligatory pics and after I thanked said fish for a good fight and after I sent him off to fight again another day, we made our way up the steep sides of bank and onto the flat portion at the top of the channel.

It hardly took any time at all to get back to the car. “Smmr nd ner, bttr hit LAr this wknd or 2 L8”.

 I love this addiction called urban fly fishin’.

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By Sean Fenner, September 26, 2010 10:27 am

Here is a little Video Clip on The Glendale Narrows Stretch of the Los Angeles River taken from LA Creek Freak. Urban Fly Fishing on this river has been a great tool in the battle to protect this precious resource and UrbanFlyVentures is glad to have been a part of getting the EPA to recognize it (Wall Street Journal and LA Weekly)! Check out other sites like FOLAR to see how you can get involved

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By Sean Fenner, July 8, 2010 10:27 pm

You have probably read at least one of my rants on this site, about how the Los Angeles River is underutilized and undermanaged. Well the Evironmental Protection Agency has taken the River a step in the right direction by declaring it “traditional navigable waters”, which lands it back into the helping hands of the Clean Water Act. This ruling means alot to alot of people, and most of all it means that we may soon see this waterway restored back to it’s natural beauty!

EPA declares L.A. River navigable waters

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By Dan Zambrano, June 16, 2010 11:45 pm

I am always amazed at the so-called coincidences and subtle interwoven interactions of life. Toss in a connection with fishing, and I am not just amazed, I am also amused.

Consider, for example, the following thread of events from this past week:

I spoke to my sister on the phone last Monday and during the course of the conversation, we reminisced briefly about the tiny flat she and her husband used to rent in London.

It was literally on the banks of the mighty Thames, and seriously within a stone’s throw of the London Bridge and Tower.

I could actually sit out on the balcony sipping my morning coffee and casually converse with guys who were flyfishing from the muddy banks below – all in the virtual center of one of the greatest cities on earth. I loved that little place.

So then last Tuesday, while heading to our next appointment, my wife and I were cruising down one of the major thoroughfares that knit the various communities of Orange county together when we crossed over one of a thousand small drainage channels that spider all over SoCal.

From my elevated vantage at the helm of our rolling veterinary hospital I caught a quick glimpse of the mild flow of water coursing between the rip-rap lined and concrete reinforced banks.

In the milli-seconds that I had to capture the entire scene – something which I am convinced is a by-product of growing up in the car culture of SoCal – I made the assessment that that little waterway would be a great place to practice fly casting and line mending techniques. The only thing lacking would be fish.

That, of course, started me thinking about the previous day’s conversation with my sister, those barely remembered conversations with retired stockbrokers on the banks of the Thames and…

…that led me on a whole other tangent of thought with regard to loss of native fish species, the wonders of civil engineering, the re-establishment of salmon in the Thames River, urban renewal and so on and so on

Thus, with those thoughts swimming around in my head, once we finally settled in for the evening, I feverishly tuned my attention to the info super highway and typed away into the wee hours of the morning tracking down useful information which just might possibly lead to a new, untapped or long forgotten spot to fish. I am singular in purpose, if nothing else.

I did not turn up any secret “honey hole” that I’m willing to share but I did stumble upon some fascinating info nonetheless. It turns out there are something like a hundred miles of those open channels all across the greater L.A. Basin. They in turn connect to some 1500 miles of underground pipes and tunnels and eventually it all feeds into sixty or so outflows that pour into the ocean. Seems that that little phrase from the movie, Finding Nemo, does have a basis in truth (at least in SoCal)  — “all (storm) drains lead to the Ocean”.

Folks who get paid to calculate such things, tell us that roughly 100 million gallons of water flows through this network on any given dry day. Toss in some rain and the flow jumps to an astounding 10 billion (yeah, with a “B”) gallons per day! That’s a lot of water.

One only has to look at a map of these channels and such and it isn’t too hard to surmise that SoCal was once a magical place of meandering creeks and small streams and living, breathing rivers.

As coincidence would have it, the very same day I was pondering these things, our fellow bloggers over at L.A. Creek Freak posted a great story (excerpted from a Press-Enterprise story of a year ago) about the re-appearance of the Santa Ana Speckled Dace in the City Creek portion of that waterway.

Dace are smallish and minnow-like and probably wouldn’t put up much of a fight except maybe on a 00 weight rig. The bigger battle would be trying to convince the judge that you were actually fishing for a legal to catch species.

Nevertheless, the story by Creek Freak directed me toward additional sites and eventually I came across some pretty interesting articles documenting the fact that at least until the 1930’s, honest-to-goodness Steelhead used to swim very close to the present day location of Los Angeles City Hall.

So…in a little more than twenty-four hours I had come full circle. From a brief snippet of conversation which stirred a memory about flyfishing on the heavily urbanized Thames to a study on the drainage system of SoCal to copies of historical documents indicating that Steelhead swam the L.A River to my fishin’ buddy, Sean and I crawling through a hole in a fence to fish a section of urban channel we had never fished before… Like I said, what an amazing and amusing series of interactions…

I love this addiction called urban flyfishin’.

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By Sean Fenner, May 28, 2010 5:11 am

Last Saturday morning my younger brother Steven and I had a couple of hours to go and get a quick scouting report on the main So Cal River Beds. We started the morning with Starbucks and a little bit of music to get us in the spirit.

First stop was to the LA River at Glendale Narrows. The water was clear and promising, the trees were green and lush, but the Carp were no where to be found. We walked about a mile stretch of the river with a Mallards, Geese, and Cormorants. A Chow Chow dog stopped us in the middle of our trek back to the car, as the about 14 year kid holding him back looked more scared than we did. So, off the the next Brownline on the map we went.

Next up was the San Gabriel River at Whittier Narrows which I was hoping to see stuffed with Tilapia and again not a single fish spotted. I stopped a few older Hispanic men fishing the river and after a short great of  “Contraron Pescados” and after three simultaneous No’s,  to the other side of the river we went. We stepped around the bushes and into the “Homeless City” we found ourselves. I quickly apologized and we said our goodbyes to our newly found friends. At this point I was starting to get a little worried, as in my mind I was thinking that this time last year there were fish all over these two stretches of River.

Our third and final destination was the Santa Ana River Bed at the intersection of the 91 & 57 freeways and by this time I wasn’t in the best of mood. We had about 30 minutes left before we had to shoot home to meet my wife and get to the Aquarium Of The Pacific to meet our friends. We walked a short stretch and one guy told us he’d seen a pod of Carp earlier that morning, but no fish again (not one). On the way back to the car I viewed an Osprey carrying a Trout from Santa Ana River Lakes in it’s claws racing to get the fish to it’s hatchlings.

In short the lack of fish concerns me, especially since I have been hearing stories of guys down at all three river beds with bait nets pulling out 100′s of fish. If you decide to fish down here, please practice “Catch and Release”. The fish aren’t good eating and it’s not like the California Department of Fish & Game stocks these waters. I will be really hard for people to petition the state to get these made into recognized fisheries, if there aren’t any fish left!

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By Dan Zambrano, March 23, 2010 10:02 pm

Alright, so my fishin’ buddy Sean is back from a well-deserved vacation in Hawaii. But he picked up a flu bug of some sort and didn’t even make it to church today. My other fishin’ buddy, Ray made it to church today but then he had a rehearsal this afternoon for an upcoming band gig. My wife (and newest convert to “the way of the urban fly”) was supposed to be at the same rehearsal as Ray but she had a paper to finish writing. I had to write a paper for the same class but I finished mine last week.

The long and short of it was that if I wanted to go fishing, I was going solo.

So after a very pleasant lunch with my lovely bride and some of our dearest friends, I opted to check the conditions at the Glendale Narrows portion of the L.A. River, where I haven’t been in a couple of months due to all of the winter rain.

When I crested the small hill at Red Car Park I glanced downstream and immediately noticed that the rains had scoured away most of the emergent weeds and rushes leaving the River looking a bit plain and lifeless. I also noticed that the remaining trees growing up from islands in the middle of the River were all pushed over in a downstream direction.

The good thing about this was that I could get a rather detailed mental picture of the general layout of the many small islets and sandbars and channels that would eventually be hidden by vegetation – vital information for later in the season.

The bad thing about all this was that every bit of trash and debris lay exposed like so many open wounds on the landscape.

In a strange twist of nature and geography, the same storms that brought the white, blanketing snow to the mountains — covering, hiding and beautifying everything up there, stripped away the lush, verdant growth in the River — exposing the mud, debris and refuse of civilization down here.

Seriously, trash was everywhere. Bits of plastic bags, tarps, towels, clothing, and paper hung from the trees like Tibetan prayer flags. Mounds of debris, both organic and otherwise, were draped around the upstream side of every bridge abutment, pole and tree trunk.

It was kind of an eerie feeling. I kept wondering which items represented someone’s thoughtlessness and disregard for the environment and which items bore silent witness to the fury of nature and the lost dreams of some family who’s home hadn’t fared well in the previous month’s storms.

Then, as I got down to the water, I saw thick ropes of string algae curtaining many of the pools that had held decent size carp last summer. In fact, I would spend an inordinate amount of time pulling string algae off my flies for the rest of the afternoon.

I tried all of my favorite spots. Upstream then downstream for about a half mile in each direction, I cast to all of the productive spots of last season and got not so much as a nudge on any of my offerings.

I took advantage of the missing plant cover and rock-hopped out to where I could cast to the main channel – still nuthin’.

For several hours I worked the River ‘til my arm ached and my eyes burned.

The sun was sinking quickly so in one final attempt to squeeze some kind of proof that fish, any fish, even still remained in the River, I ventured back to an area where the water slows significantly and a large, deep pool forms.

In the summer this same pool is a favorite with bait fisherman. Judging from the piles of dried string algae strewn about on the shoreline it probably wasn’t high on anybody’s list at the moment.

Still, I had to know. So I stripped off a little more line than usual and false cast a couple of more times than usual and stretched to reach a little further across the pool than usual and… was rewarded with a rising Carp.

Not a strike, mind you, but a rise.

Sure, I would like to say that a fish took my fly and I landed it after an epic battle but…I only got a rise.

Yet, it was enough.

Knowing that the River was on the mend from the assaults of winter and that fish were still there was enough for the day.

Now, lots of guys would count the day as a wash. OK. If your only measure of success is the raw number of fish you land then the day was a wash.

But, if you count the opportunities I had to observe aspects of the River that are normally hidden and if you count the mental maps I had the opportunity to make and if you count the extra effort and opportunity I had to refine and improve my casting skills and technique then, by my count, it was a great day.

Toss in the warm sun, the diversity of bird species present and the solitude of the River on the last official day of winter and I’d say again, it was a great day.

I love this addiction called urban flyfishin’.

Comments (1)

By Dan Zambrano, September 20, 2009 6:00 am

In the world of L.A. urban fishing, the Glendale Narrows portion of the Los Angeles River is frequently and favorably mentioned. And, indeed, today it is a pretty awesome place to get in some local brown-lining.

Forty years ago though, if you said you were going to fish or especially fly fish on the L.A. River, my school chums and I would have probably called you the “Spanglish” equivalent of a hick or an idiot and might even have thrown a few rocks at you if we saw you doing so.

Not that fish weren’t found there — to the contrary, my friends and I spent huge chunks of our summers and many of our weekend hours yanking hand-sized goldfish and catfish out of the various pools and pocket waters using home-made nets and traps we carted down there on our Stingray bicycles.

Likewise, while it is not uncommon today to see a guy wearing a pair of waders while plying the middle reaches of the Narrows, back then it was black canvas and white rubber Chuck Taylors and jeans for everything – hiking, biking, fishing, fighting, football, baseball, basketball, rock-hopping, school, weddings, funerals – everything. You would have definitely caught a portion of grief if you had shown up in rubber pants in those days. Forget about roughing up the Simms Freestones in polluted urban waters, we worried about the “tenderizing” our backsides would get if we couldn’t get our shoes to dry out by the time we got home.

Yeah, things down in the River were a lot different back then.

That’s why it has been such a blast to reconnect with the River through our urban fly ventures. Being able to pass on long forgotten secrets of the river to my fishin’ buddy, Sean (aka the young guy) and re-discover old stomping grounds and stretches of water I used to know the way some guys know the route from couch to kitchen, has been good for the soul.

I’m thrilled at the way the River has matured (recovered is probably a better term). The height and health of the trees, the clarity of the water, the number of bird species and the quantity of catchable fish are all signs of a thriving ecosystem … yet, there is one thought that keeps jumping around in the back of my mind after each visit to the Narrows…

Back in the day, tens of thousands of toads inhabited the River. They were everywhere. They even made annual mass migrations into the surrounding neighborhoods that became the stuff of legend. I can remember one hot summer night when the street literally undulated in the fading light of dusk as an army of toads made their way up from the River – I couldn’t sleep for a week.

Toads where so common that the section of the River tucked between the Golden State Freeway and the old Taylor Rail Yard was, and still is, known locally as “Frogtown”. There is even an art festival known as the Frogtown Art Walk that draws its name from that little piece of SoCal natural history.

It used to be virtually impossible to go down to the River and not see toads. Nowadays, I rarely see them.

Not that I mind all that much.

Truth be told, toads kinda give me the Willys. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a trained biologist. I understand the vital role they play in the balance of things and how they eat insects and such and how they in turn are an important food source for fish and birds. I know that they serve as indicator species – canaries in the global coal mine. I know all that stuff.

It’s just that I have much stronger, visceral memories of unexpectedly stepping on them in the wet grass at twilight and of them jumping out of the dog’s water bowl as I walked by in the dark and of riding my bike into a massive swarm of toadlettes in my haste to get home before my curfew and wiping out as though I had hit a patch of black ice. (If you think parents make a stink over soggy Converses, try ‘splainin’ away “toad kill” all over your good school clothes.)

Some folks speculate that improved water flow and quality have made it less favorable for tadpoles. Others issue dire warnings about climate change and eco-altering toxins. Could be. The water flow is definitely faster than I remember and some of the old familiar rock hops across the River are now partially submerged. There are definitely fewer stagnant pools where tens of thousands of tadpoles used to congregate. Not sure about the toxins theory either. The water sure seems cleaner now. Way more fish live in the River than in times past and I don’t encounter the dreaded Black Ooze nearly as often as I used to. Sure seems to be a lot more birds living down there now too, even some of the supposedly fragile species. I just don’t really know where all the toads went.

I do know that me and the River have this forty year plus history goin’ on and toads or no toads, it’s been a wild ride.

I love this addiction, called urban fly fishin’.