I’m cleaning out my liquor cabinet at home. As cleaning goes, this isn’t the worst thing. I mean, I’m drinking liquor every evening, and I’m actually being “productive” in the process. That the liquor is of rather marginal quality, purchased during the less discriminating years of my youth, is of little consequence. Actually, given the nature of some of this stuff, I can probably lay claim to loftier goals than simple productivity. Ridding the world of such noxious and dangerous distillations as Goldschlager and Drambuie is surely worth a Nobel Prize of some sort. Either Peace or Chemistry should do. From what I hear they’re practically tossing the things out like candy at a small town Christmas parade these days.

I’ve found that I can drink almost anything if mixed with the appropriate amount of soda. The type of soda is relatively unimportant as long as it’s present in sufficient volume to tolerably dilute the liquor. Ginger ale, Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper. They’re all okay although good old Coca-Cola Classic is the preferred diluting agent. As a matter of principle I refuse to ruin a good root beer on this stuff.

It’s amazing how much stuff one can accumulate when taking up a new interest. And it all seems so important at the time. You know how it is. You don’t really know anything about it. Actually learning about it will take too long. So you do the natural thing and buy a bunch of stuff. Somewhere down the line you realize you really only like good bourbon, single malt Scotch from Islay, bamboo fly rods and dry flies.

You know where this is leading. For those like myself, who tend to over-do things, a similar task must eventually be undertaken with one’s hobbies, or else you will soon find yourself buried under the rubble. This usually isn’t as much fun as cleaning out the liquor cabinet, but, luckily, cleaning out the liquor cabinet can ease the pain if performed in parallel. I first cleaned house with my fishing a good many years back. During my early college years I was into conventional bass fishing when suddenly I realized that the high-speed bass boat, couple dozen rods, and two ridiculously gigantic tackle boxes full of all manner of lures just no longer did “it” for me. The reason I wanted to go fishing in the first place was to get away from just this sort of thing. I had been reading a book on backpack fly fishing in the Rocky Mountains. This was “it.” This was what I wanted to do. I would take up fly fishing and get away from the competitiveness, crowds and expense. Don’t laugh about the expense part. I was naive and idealogical, and really I do still believe it possible to take up fly fishing without spending a fortune. It’s just not likely.

So anyway, I cleaned house. I didn’t exactly get rid of all my bass fishing gear, but I cut out its practice almost completely. At first my fly fishing was fairly simple and cheap. I had a rather inexpensive fly rod, cheap reel, level fly line from Walmart and a handful of flies. Slowly I improved my system until I had some nice gear that was actually fun to fish with. I was going for trout in East Tennessee several times a year and loving it. Toss in the regular local trips for bass and bluegill and things were positively rosy.

Then things took a turn for the worse. First came tying my own flies, then rod-building, bamboo rods, silk lines, photography, and running a blog about it all. Late last year, after we got back from Glacier, I crashed. The evidence is the utter lack of new content over the past few months. Everything just got to be a bit too much. I went fishing less last year than any other year in my life. What recreation I did take part in had begun to feel like a second job. For example, at one time I was working on three graphite rods, restoring an 8wt bamboo rod, repairing a bass rod for a friend of my father’s, tying flies for the whole group in preparation for the Glacier trip, reading three books sent to me for review, and sorting and editing hundreds of photos. The evenings and weekends just weren’t time enough to finish it all, and certainly not if I actually wanted to go fishing in there somewhere. A change had to be made. The house had gotten pretty dusty.

Much of this is a byproduct of growing up and getting older, I suppose. As long as I have a house, a full-time job, a family and all the attendant responsibilities I simply won’t be able to play all the games I want to play all the time. I mean, I love all those different aspects of the sport, but if I’m to retain my sanity, some of them must be tossed out with that empty bottle of Southern Comfort.

I guess all of this is getting around to my saying that you can expect some changes on the site this year. I plan to do more fishing for the fun of it and less of the stuff that began to feel like work. Most of this boils down to a simple change in attitude rather than a drastic change in the actual activities. For awhile there I felt like I needed to post new content on the site every couple days just to keep the site viable. What “viable” meant is anyone’s guess. All I know is it began to feel like work. So now I’m just going to post something when I feel like posting something. I mean, no one out there is paying me for this stuff, so why should I feel like I have to please some intangible boss? I write because I enjoy it, at least I plan to from now on and that’s how this started anyway. Also, any ideas I had about building rods on the side for some spare change are getting tossed out with the Jack. I still plan to dabble in building rods, but it will be for my own pleasure. Maybe some day I might sell some rods on the side but only after I extract myself from the rat race. One job is enough, thank you. And I’m going to make a conscious effort to simplify my actual fishing. The first steps have already been taken. I’ve cut my Smokies fly boxes down to two tiny tobacco tins, one for nymphs and streamers and another for dries and wets. The vest will be left at home for anything other than a full-scale expedition to tough and unfamiliar water. I’m not buying any new rods until there’s a real need for it. New emphasis will be placed on backpack fly fishing, which is my favorite anyway and one of the reasons I took up fly fishing to start with. Certainly, I still plan to take photos when I go fishing, but once again the attitude will be different. I will engage in photography because I like to, not because I feel like I need to for the site or to improve my skills or for any other reason than the shear joy of it.

Looking back at all I just wrote, here is what I see: a poor and exceedingly verbose attempt to tie cleaning out the liquor cabinet with simplifying my fishing. But you know what? I don’t care because I had fun doing it, and that’s really the point, right? Why has fishing (and really recreation in general) become so blamed serious? I guess that can of worms is topic enough for another essay. Anyway I’m back, I’m not planning to let the site die (in fact I just paid another year’s hosting bill last week), I’m determined to have a lot more fun with fly fishing (and fishing in general) in the coming year, I hope to share some of that with you, and I really do think the site will be improved because of it. But if it’s not, then who cares? Take care,

Nathan

In A River Runs Through It (whether the movie or the novella I don’t remember – I sometimes confuse scenes from the two), Norman Maclean tells of how his father valued brevity in writing. Reading through my post about online fishing magazines, I realize this is something sorely missing from my own writing style.

The latest issue of Fish Can’t Read was just published. It’s full of good material. I like it. I also like Catch magazine. Between the two, you’ll find just about the best fly fishing content on the web. I’m just not sure the periodically-published flipbook style will persist. I think more regularly published high quality content will eventually prove more successful. There – that’s really all I wanted to say with that bloated post from a couple weeks back.

Jason fishing a small North Alabama stream in early morning light.

Brevity is also of use in reporting on the fishing trip Jason Kelley and I took over the weekend. The plan was to scout lots of potential smallmouth streams in our area, and catch some good fish to end up the season. We did scout several streams, some of which looked very good. We didn’t catch many fish. No smallmouth. We tried everything we could think of to no avail. The weather was great. We sampled several good beers. Dinner at Logans Roadhouse was good, and both Alabama (for me – Roll Tide!) and Arkansas (for Jason – Go Razorbacks!) won big in their games on Saturday night. We decided that we didn’t face enough adversity to deserve to catch any fish. With that in mind we plan to take our next trip during severe storms, only drink Natty Light, eat turkey dogs charred over a campfire and be Vanderbilt fans for the night. To the left is a shot of Jason fishing the first creek of the morning. I’m still editing photos, and I’ll post a few more as I finish them. I imagined how I wanted this shot to look when I snapped the photo and came pretty close to getting it there in the post-processing.

Take care,
Nathan

I really don’t think there is that much wrong with the online fly fishing magazines, at least not the ones I like (namely Catch and Fish Can’t Read). If you haven’t checked them out, you should. Catch is chock full of great photography and sweet videos. It’s unique in that it focuses solely on the photography and videography of the sport. Fish Can’t Read is broader, sporting well-written feature articles in addition to nice photography. Both magazines are published on roughly the same timeline as a print magazine might be, and both use a digital flipbook format. As I said, I like them both, but I’m not sure either will ever be a roaring success, at least not financially.

My reasoning is that they’ll never be able to generate the ad revenue needed to keep going in their current format. I probably spend a couple hours with each issue, so if you have an ad in there, you get my attention for maybe a couple minutes every two months. That’s just not much. For their sake I hope I’m not the average reader. With a print magazine, I might look at it every couple days for a month or so, assuming I leave it in the magazine rack by the toilet or lying by the bed. I just don’t believe these new magazines are taking full advantage of the internet. I mean, one of the things I dislike about print magazines is that I have to wait a couple months before I get a new one. Well, if you’re running an online magazine, there’s no reason to limit your audience in this way. Why not publish new content at least a couple times every week? Why wait until you have a whole magazine’s worth of content before publishing any of it? My suggestion to those looking to craft an online magazine would be to use the blog format, but not make it a blog, if that makes sense. Simply use blogging software (WordPress would work just fine) to publish your content as it’s ready for publication instead of using the flipbook format. Just because it’s WordPress doesn’t mean you have to call it a “blog.” WordPress would simply function as your content management and publication system. You could even maintain an editorial “blog” as a separate section on the site.

No one out there’s doing this, and I really don’t understand why. Midcurrent is probably the closest, but it doesn’t really do what I’m talking about here. Not yet anyway. What I’d like to see is an online magazine that publishes very high quality features at least twice every week. Maybe Monday I can go in to work and read a feature essay about someone’s backcountry trip. On Thursday I have a video about tarpon fishing from float tubes in some croc-infested swamp. For the weekend I get a full-length article related to fly tying, and the next week I am treated to a photo essay on Alaska’s monster rainbows. These wouldn’t be your typical blog entries. They would be full-fledged articles and features just like those being published in the magazines, but instead I’d be fed material more regularly. On top of that, I’d be visiting the site daily looking for new goodies, and therefore I’d see the ads every day instead of just once a month. You’d need to figure out how best to get the ads seen without causing too much irritation. That’s one good thing about the flipbook style – you see the ads as you flip pages, but it doesn’t feel overly intrusive. Personally I would publish large, attractive, image-based ads (similar in look to the ads in the flipbooks) as the feature post on days when no new content was ready. That’s in addition to sidebar and a few in-line ads. Please, no pop-ups or pop-unders!! Also, you could have a section listing guides, shops and lodges for specific locations, much like the print magazines have in back. I would actually find that feature useful.

Something like this just might pull in enough ad revenue to make the whole thing click. Of course, you’d need really high quality material. The writers, photographers and video-makers would need to be paid for their contributions. In addition to the features, you could include a breaking news section, a weekly editorial opinion section (which would be like a normal blog entry), and a forum. You’d need to maintain a presence on all the social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, but the truth is, something like this wouldn’t be that tough to do, and I’m a little puzzled as to why the digital flipbook has become the format of choice?

I think you’d have to keep the whole thing free and make it work on ad money alone (and maybe a few other things like calendars, DVDs, fine art prints, etc). I know I just wouldn’t pay for something like this. There’s too much good material out there in blogs, forums, etc. for me to pay for online content. There are still print magazines good enough that I’ll pay to receive them, but I haven’t come across any website that I’d pay for a subscription to. Midcurrent is probably best positioned to make a run at something like this, but I’m not sure it’s what they’d want to do. You may ask why I’m not trying it myself. Well, I think whoever does it needs to be positioned as an “insider.” Someone who has the clout and respect to pull in the requisite talent quickly, and maybe convince that talent to work for free for the first couple months. I’m about as far from that description as you can get. Heck, I don’t reckon I even fish any more. Doesn’t feel like it anyway. I just post and read about it, and I like pretty fishing pictures. So, what do you think? I want to see these folks succeed. I like the content, and I like the people. Plus I want a good product, and I want it more often. Tell me what you think.

Take care,
Nathan

In life you sometimes get a reminder, if you’re looking for it, of how good you’ve really got it.

A few days ago, I drug my son out to the beach to do some surf fishing. In all honesty, I think the only reason he went with me was because he’d been in trouble and was restricted from his lifeline – the Xbox. With nothing to do at the house, he probably figured watching Dad cuss on the beach was more entertaining than checking out the latest House episode.

We tossed some shrimp out, and even gave a topwater plug a useless twirl or two in the subdued surf of the early evening. Christian’s first hook up was a ladyfish – think of a tarpon, but instead of 50 lbs it’s 2. The fish jumped and ran like a sport fish is supposed to and, even though it was small, it lit up the afternoon. He immediately claimed superiority over me in fishing, loudly proclaiming me as THE Loser on The Beach, until I hooked a drum that probably would’ve gone 6 or 7 lbs. Then his competitiveness ebbed…

It turned out to be a mostly un-eventful outing. We caught a few more fish but really had nothing to come home and brag about. Rapidly running out of daylight, we left with sand all over us and a rumbling in the belly. I couldn’t tell then if he’d actually enjoyed himself, but I didn’t think it was all bad. Teenage boys are very difficult to read, and they oftentimes don’t even know how they feel themselves – they’re too busy trying to figure out how they’re supposed to feel.

Flash forward a few days. My son’s had a bad go of it at school, and my job hadn’t been much better. He came downstairs and plopped on the couch to catch an episode or two of Dirty Jobs with his old man. A couple hours pass, and we laughed at Mike Rowe fighting bed bugs in mattresses and cleaning out God-knows-what from the latest sewer pipe he’d decided to crawl in to. When the eyes started to get heavy and the hour grew late, he popped up off the couch to head to bed.

Just before making the right turn to head upstairs, he spun around and asked, “Hey Dad – you wanna go fishing Saturday morning?”

Now, I don’t care where you’re from our how you were raised, what your background is, how you get your jollies, nor where you fall in the political spectrum. But there is nothing in the world that feels better than having your kid WANT to spend time with you.

In this cynical world, with all the bickering and fighting, with all our problems and all we have to worry about, my son wants me to take him fishing.

Kids sometimes get a bad rap in our society. We see them through the jaded eyes the media paints them with, and too often come to expect them to be the apathetic, angry jerks we just KNOW they are. But every once in a while, every so often, a kid turns aside from the movies, video games and cell-phone texting and chooses to simply spend a morning with Dad. You can rest assured that unless God blows the whistle and we’re all asked to get out of the pool beforehand, Christian and I will be hitting the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, surf fishing in Satellite Beach, FL, during the early morning hours this Saturday.

And I’ll be smiling.

Matt

It’s been awhile since TVangler has tackled a controversial issue. Tonight I’m going to wade into one. I’m simplifying much of this debate principally because you could write a hefty book on the issue if you covered it properly, and I’m simply not writing a book, not on this topic anyway.

This is a local issue and one that has tended to resurface every few years since I was a child. Sometime back in the 60s or 70s, Eurasian watermilfoil (we just call it milfoil) was introduced to Lake Guntersville. Sometime later hydrilla was introduced. These exotic invaders flourished in the warm waters of Lake Guntersville and soon covered vast areas of the lake. TVA has attempted several methods of controlling or eradicating the weeds (mostly by using chemicals) over the years, at quite a cost to the taxpayer/power customer. The exotic weeds can choke out native aquatic plant species, they aren’t judged attractive by most lake users, and they can clog up navigation channels and water intakes. On the other hand, they make for absolutely incredible fishing. The weeds provide ridiculously abundant cover for both predatory fish like bass and baitfish like shad. Milfoil and hydrilla are directly responsible for Lake Guntersville being the hottest bass lake in the country right now. I can tell you this for a fact from my own personal knowledge/experience of the lake and how the weeds affect the fish populations. The weeds probably cost the area a bit financially in real estate sales and recreational uses other than fishing. On the other hand, the good fishing has brought national attention to the lake and untold millions from traveling fishermen.

Coming into this year TVA had given up its attempts to completely eradicate the weeds. They faced tough opposition from fishermen and environmental groups, not to mention the high cost of such an eradication program. The last few years, TVA has kept navigation channels clear and sprayed chemicals to kill the weeds around boathouses. However, the cost was still deemed too great, so this year TVA had decided not to spray around private boathouses and only keep public navigation channels clear. Landowners around the lake shore raised great cries of lament over this decision and finally worked out a deal in which TVA (read “you and I”) would cover at least part of the cost of spraying around private boathouses.

So there’s your quick and simplified historical summary. I won’t vouch for it’s 100% accuracy, but it’s roughly correct. And now to my opinion. (more…)

One hears a lot of talk about the local fly or bait and tackle shop versus the big megastores like Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s. I generally try to support the local shops whenever I can, but I don’t avoid the big stores altogether. When we were in Destin, FL recently, I experienced something that speaks to the situation.

We had planned to do a little fishing, but I only decided at the last minute to buy a fly rod (I had debated on the drive and finally rationalized the purchase by telling myself I could use the rod on next year’s planned trip to the Keys). I hoped to buy the rod in a local shop, but I wasn’t aware of what was available in Destin, and I didn’t have my own vehicle. Still, we found a local tackle shop near our condo unit. Unfortunately it turned out to be rather short on fly gear, but they had a large selection of conventional tackle. I decided to support them anyway by purchasing a Tilley Hat and a pair of wading shorts. The other guys might have purchased a good bit of tackle (they were all using conventional gear) if not for one thing: the shop owner was blatantly rude to my brother when he asked for some advice on a good spot or two for fishing from shore. He didn’t make a nuisance of himself, just asked for a simple suggestion and what we could possibly expect to catch. I had already bought my stuff or I might have put it back. It was uncalled-for and really pretty puzzling. I don’t understand the concept of insulting your customers. I could have perhaps understood if we were asking a lot of questions and not buying anything. (more…)

It was a little over two and a half years ago that I wrote an entry on this site pining for a bamboo fly rod. Only three months after that I found a good deal on a beautiful, used Granger Aristocrat 9′ 9050. I had no idea at the time of what had taken hold of me. That one purchase opened the floodgates. I now own eight bamboo fly rods, and that’s if I haven’t missed any during my rough count. I can’t even explain how it happened so quickly. In my article, I wrote: “You may not even really have a choice about it. You just wake up one day short $700 with a bamboo rod propped beside your bed. And you feel pretty darn good about it, too!” I have yet to spend anywhere near $700 on a fly rod, bamboo or otherwise. It does, however, seem like I just woke up with a whole stable of rods. Here’s the rundown: (more…)

As a fisherman, you probably hear a lot about how some run of salmon isn’t meeting commercial fishing standards, how some particular subspecies of cutthroat trout out West faces extinction, how all the oceans are being depleted, etc. I suspect that for the average Alabama fisherman all this feels pretty distant. Our streams and rivers are full of the same fish they’ve always had, aren’t they? The talk on fly fishing sites about endangered fish got me curious about our area. I wondered how many of our fish are in trouble. I was vaguely aware of a few cases that have made the evening news, but in truth I was pitifully ignorant on the topic.

The Alabama sturgeon. Photo courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

So I did a little online research. As it turns out, we have quite a few fish facing serious obstacles to their continued existence, some to such an extent that we probably can’t halt their extinction even were we to try. Some of them I’m familiar with, some not so much. Our fish might not get the publicity of the salmons and the trouts, but that tends to endear them more closely to my heart. They’re like the poor little orphans of the threatened fish world. Some of the larger fish, like the sturgeons and spoonbills, have always fascinated me. As a child I heard whispered rumors, tantalizingly short on details, uttered by my father and his fishing buddies under the street lamp at the Mud Creek boat dock. There were big fish hooked deep in the river that couldn’t be moved with bass tackle, something large bumping a flatbottom jon boat during a night fishing trip, stories passed down from old-timers. Could they have been big sturgeon? Was that big fish you glimpsed rolling on the edge of the river a spoonbill? Maybe even a sturgeon?

My goal here is simply to make you aware of some of these cases. You may or may not care, but I think you should. Each one of these fish is a part of us, a part of what makes our state unique. It’s not just fish, either. There are some pretty cool plants and other animals that are in trouble. We lose a little bit of ourselves whenever one of these vanishes forever. The way I see it, God put them here for a reason, and even if that reason is for His own good pleasure, that’s plenty good enough for me to want to save them. Even if you don’t buy the God argument, I’m sure you’d agree that even the tiniest part of an ecosystem can have profound impacts on the whole, and, therefore, that all parts are deserving of our care and good stewardship. I figure the biggest reason many folks don’t care is because they’re simply unaware. If you have knowledge of something, it seems you’d be more likely to care about its continued existence. Like I’ve said many times on this site, there are rarely easy solutions to problems like these, but half-way to a solution is knowing there’s a problem. So with that goal in mind, let me quickly acquaint you with a few of Alabama’s threatened and endangered fishes. Links are included in the footnotes for further study. (more…)

You hear lots about so-called “stimulus packages” these days. As a fisherman, I don’t understand what the fuss is all about. We’ve been using stimulus packages for years. So, too, has the government. It’s just that there are varying degrees of stimulus, and lately the degree seems to be pretty high.

In fishing, we have differing levels of stimulus packages just like the government. Take the chum line. That’s our version of the huge, trillion dollar, better-start-printing-new-money stimulus package. Or the San Juan Shuffle. That one’s just about as bad as the chum line, at least a multi-billion dollar deal. It may be even worse, because it’s actually chumming while trying to look like you aren’t, an act, amusingly enough, with many parallels in the world of politics and economics. The practice known as “stoning the pool” is a much lesser form of stimulus package, sort of like a tax cut for the rich. The degrees in regards to fishing are, of course, entirely subjective, there being nothing so mundane as dollars and cents by which to measure them.

Fishing stimulus packages even make appearances in the finest of our literature. Norman Maclean describes his brother Paul “shadow casting.” This was an attempt to repeatedly flash a fly over trout to convince them that a bug hatch was on, thereby stimulating them into rising. On the scale of stimulus packages, this one is way down near the bottom. So near, in fact, as to be pretty cool (once again, a subjective reckoning on my part). If you want a parallel in economics, it would be like subtly hinting to the press that gas prices are about to go up, thereby piquing interest in filling up before you get home from work. When I refer to the “bottom,” what I mean is that gray area in which it becomes difficult to discern a stimulus package from just fishing (or an artificial economic stimulus from just the normal functioning of an economy).

I thought about adding the idea of eliciting a “reaction strike” with some outrageously assembled lure to the list of fishing stimulus packages, but then I thought it probably didn’t fit. A reaction strike is an entirely natural thing. A frog jumps in the water near a big bass, and WHAM! The fish strikes with little inclination to inspect how nearly the frog really looks like a frog. So to try and recreate that type of reaction with a lure or fly is closer to “matching the hatch” than you might initially think. And that got me to thinking that I should really nail down some sort of definition if I was planning to continue with this ridiculous conversation…

………………………..

So what exactly constitutes a fishing stimulus package? To be able to say what qualifies, you need a good working definition. You could make the case that all fishing with artificial lures involves the presenting of a stimulus package, but we won’t go there (and I’m making this up as I go, so this is how I choose to do it). A stimulus package, generally speaking, is an action or actions meant to artificially stimulate or excite, with the ultimate goal of modifying the environment so that a desired end is more probable. In economics, a stimulus package hopes to excite the overall economic environment so that a gravitation back toward a healthy state is more likely. That healthy state is analogous to your convincing of a fish to strike. So, in fishing, a stimulus package is an action or actions undertaken to get the fish in the mood to strike your offering before you actually present it with that offering. By our definition, the act of fishing with the artificial lure can’t be considered a stimulus package in itself because it’s simply a requirement of the system, much like having an economy is a requirement of having a healthy economy. The natural state is you fishing with an artificial lure. The state after the implementation of your stimulus package is you fishing an artificial lure in a chum line. You’ve changed the environment so that convincing a fish to strike is much more likely than in its natural state.

As we’ve seen, fishing and economic stimulus packages are fairly similar. The basic principle is the same by definition, but one similarity that really sticks out to me is an emotional one. I can’t shake the feeling that stimulus packages are a form of cheating. No offense meant to saltwater anglers who use chum lines (or the poor AIG executives who pocketed a big chunk of our stimulus money in bonuses). I suppose you really don’t stand much chance of even locating your game in something as big as the ocean without using a chum line. Still, it would be nice if it wasn’t needed. Heck, I’m sure you saltwater fishers would agree. Don’t think there are too many folks out there who love shoveling chum (but the thought does raise some interesting possibilities in regards to those AIG execs). Some of the other stimulus packages seem enough like cheating that most everyone agrees (i.e. San Juan shuffle).

In the end, however, the comparison fails on one major point. It’s the one big, looming difference that makes shoveling chum infinitely more practical and attractive than the latest round of economic stimulus. Fishing stimulus packages actually work.

Take care,
Nathan

I recently finished reading two books by Paul Schullery. Both were great reads, and both historical in nature. Schullery is one of the most prolific writers on fly fishing history, and he was once director of the recently much-maligned American Museum of Fly Fishing (AMFF). Cowboy Trout covers the history of fly fishing in the Western US. Schullery has an interesting writing style. Each chapter is like a self-contained essay as opposed to a straight this-happened-then-that type of narrative. The book’s focus is really about how fly fishing has become a cultural phenomenon in the West, even a part of the West’s identity. Most of the stories take place in the Yellowstone area. I learned a lot and connected many dots of knowledge that had been floating around on their own in the vague recesses of my mind. Schullery’s style carries over somewhat in his American Fly Fishing (actually I suppose it carried over to Cowboy Trout as American Fly Fishing was published first), an overall history of the sport in North America. I found both books fascinating. Schullery’s easy prose and quick wit ensure the histories are never boring. He devotes a sizable section near the end of American Fly Fishing to the start-up of the AMFF in Manchester, Vermont.

I’m about to go on a rant. Stop here if political rants don’t interest you. I understand I don’t have a 100% complete picture of the incidents I talk about below (who does? – no one from what I’ve seen), but I have enough sense to make a few general statements about how these things are handled.

For those of you not familiar with the controversy surrounding the museum, you can read about it on Midcurrent and TroutUnderground: here, here, and here. If you notice my comments attending that first link, you’ll see how I feel about the whole thing. I just have real trouble understanding the level of anger on this issue. Looking at it with what common sense I can muster, the choice of Cheney to speak at the fundraising dinner was an incredibly poor one given the feelings of many of the most vocal members of the fly fishing community, assuming you wanted to avoid a ridiculous uproar such as we’ve seen. Many claim that their inviting him is the same as endorsing his political views. I just don’t buy it. He is/was simply an important politician who happens to fly fish and who therefore fits in with the museum’s other exhibits which, incidentally, feature several other unpopular politicians. His decisions in office, while they severely hampered conservation efforts for coldwater species, were not targeted specifically at fly fishers. There were other sides to the issues. You don’t have to disagree with Cheney to enjoy fly fishing. The museum is for all those who fly fish, not only those who fly fish and hate Cheney. The museum is about fly fishing history, not politics. I’m not saying I agree with Cheney’s decisions by any stretch, I’m just saying Cheney isn’t out to kill fly fishing as an end in itself. In fact, I’d see Cheney’s enjoying fly fishing as a possible way for environmentally conscious fly fishers to perhaps change the man’s views. Laugh at the prospect if you wish, but one thing is certain: You’ll never change his views (or those of others like him) by screaming at him and calling him vile names. There is common ground here on which we might open a discourse with an important man, explain our concerns, try to understand his, and engage in meaningful discussion as to how best to work on the problems. Think of how valuable a man like Cheney could be to us if we could convert him to our cause! Certainly, I find the prospect unlikely, but one way to ensure its impossibility is to continue with name-calling. I would think the goal is to convince others of our “rightness,” not win the upper hand in a childish game of taunting. I’ve seen all sorts of posturing on fly fishing sites, all sorts of threats to no longer donate to the museum. All that just seems silly. How many of you have donated a dime to the museum anyway? Visited it? Maybe I’m wrong, maybe lots of you have, but I doubt it. I certainly haven’t. I’ve never received even an email or postcard from them asking for a donation. If they’re like most museums, they struggle just to get by. To read many fly fishing sites, you’d think the museum positively overflows with money direct from rich Republican salmon-killing fatcats. Heck, maybe they do. But I doubt it. I’m not sure how Paul Schullery stands, but I imagine if nothing else he’d be distressed at the mess in which the museum finds itself, because he understands its value to us fly fishers. Go to the museum’s website and look at the stuff they’ve preserved. There’s a lot of really cool stuff there. Lots that would either not be preserved at all or not available to the public if not for the museum. Do we really want to throw that away? (more…)