MORE ON THE BIG BASS: Why do potential records always cause controversy?

NEWS: One of the leading outdoor blogs, The Outdoor Weblog, is shutting its doors. JR Absher has been signed on to blog for ESPN Outdoors, so you'll have to read him over there. I'll post that link in my sites list as soon as it goes live.

CONSERVATION: Utah anglers successfully reintroduce salmonflies to the Logan River.
(Link via Midcurrent.)

STEELHEAD: The prolific Dave Richey has a post today on what fishing for chrome means to him.

TRAVEL: Tarpon before the storm. Houston Chronicle writer Joe Doggett describes incredible silver king action near Costa Rica's Rio Parismina, and trying to land fish in the face of an impending thunderstorm.

PERSONALITIES: One woman's love affair with fly fishing.

THOUGHTS: In trying to articulate my views on angling to someone recently, I kept thinking back to words from an obituary that ran in Newsweek back in 1995 about Jerry Garcia, "His thin, shaky voice suggested that you, too, could sing with a band if you loved doing it enough..." It's a bit of a stretch, but I like to apply those words to how I fish and with who I go fishing. It doesn't matter if you can boom 100 foot casts, tie three-dozen flies an hour, or sense fish from a mile away. You, too, can be a real angler if you love doing it enough...

OREGON: Using a giant antenna to help track fish.

SCIENCE: Dead zones lead to more male fish.

NEWS: Ask About Fly Fishing and the Federation of Fly Fishers join forces.

TRAVEL: Apparently, Alaska is a popular fishing destination.

TOURNAMENTS: Who knew there was big carp money?

STRIPED BASS: The article's a week old or so, but it passes along some disturbing news...A great number of Chesapeake stripers are infected with a bacterial wasting disease.
(Link via reel-time.com)

MUSKIE: Dave Richey has a piece up about it.

BUCK FEVER: I've been thinking this morning about some of the sight fishing experiences I've had and, consequently, some of the pitiful casts I've made, both with fly and spinning gear. These are casts I can make when practicing in the park down the block from my house. But when it's to a real fish that's hot and on the move, everything changes. The heart rate goes up, the knees buckle, the brain short circuits for a second, and the cast you've been dreaming about making goes completely awry. I've made casts that are way too short, too far ahead, too far behind, too noisy, tangled--you name it.
My buddy Tom, a deer hunter, says it happens to him in the field. It's a lot harder to take steady aim at a living, breathing creature. Buck Fever. People who say they've never had it are the same people who lie about never getting sea sick. But the best anglers I've fished with have such a sense of calmness and focus in buck fever scenarios that they overcome it. That ability is another weapon in the arsenal that separates the truly great anglers from the hacks like me. What sucks is, you can't buy that in the Orvis catalogue.

UPDATE: Bish from New Zealand forwarded me an article he wrote about buck fever.

SCIENCE: The moon affects fishing on big and small waters.

TROUT FLIES: Not catching trout? Go retro. (Link via Midcurrent.)

NON-FISHING ITEM OF THE DAY: I saw a segment about this charity called Surfer's Healing on ESPN today. It's a nonprofit that helps autistic kids by taking them surfing--a very cool idea. (Anything that gets anyone on the water is a great thing by me.)

NEWS: Hemingway's fishing boat, the Pilar, may be restored in Cuba.

CONSERVATION: A call to ban lead fishing tackle.

CONSERVATION: Raising endangered sturgeon in the hatchery.

FISH STORY FRIDAY: I still like the idea started by the down4repairs blog, but I don't have time today to do a whole new fish story today. So I'm cheating. I'm recycling one I posted on Flies and Fins a while ago. Or, more accurately, I am pulling it out of my fishing log from February 27, 2001...
We were fishing "snook alley" in Venice, Florida, on a cold night, and the snook we came across didn't want to play along. At light after light we made presentations to fish that reacted to our flies sluggishly or not at all. I switched to sinking line and tied on a small shrimp pattern. We pulled up to a light on a seawall next to a restaurant parking lot. The pool was laden with linesiders. A group of six or seven people leaving the restaurant stopped to watch as I stepped up to cast. I felt like I was on the first tee at the Masters. I made four or five casts to the edges of the light pool with no results. One of the guys shouted out in a mocking tone, "So are you catching, or just fishing?" Just as he said it, a snook blasted out of the shadows and nailed the fly. As my rod bent and the snook tore out of the hole and went airborne, I shouted back to the audience, "Catching!" He wasn't big, but I've never had a more satisfying take.

NON FISHING ITEM OF THE DAY: Texas busting drunks ... in bars. If this catches on, I guess I'll have to confine my drinking to the workplace.

PERSONALITIES: The marlin angler from Kansas.

SCIENCE: Adopt a fish on the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers.

TEXAS: Fly fishing's roots in the Lone Star state.

LARGEMOUTH BASS: In the ultimate "Tin Cup" moment, Mac Weakley has decided not to pursue the IGFA record for his bucketmouth of bucketmouths. (Actually, it reminds me of Barry Sanders walking away from his shot at the rushing title. No matter what, he got game.) JR Absher has more on it over on the Outdoor Weblog.

TROUT NEWS: You will now be able to fish for brook trout along the 700 miles of streams in the Smoky Mountains National Park.

PEACOCK BASS: Just remembered to check if a freelance article I wrote on peacock bass fishing in Miami had been posted. So here's a bit of shameless self promotion on my part in publishing the link.

(Thanks to Flies and Fins South, part of the Flies and Fins empire, for triggering my memory.)

BASS: Looks like Monte Burke's going to have to write an addendum to his book. A California angler just boated a freakin' 25.1 pound largemouth.

FLY FISHING: Breaking some of the so-called commandments. I love fly fishing, too, but if you stick to it exclusively, you miss out on a lot of awesome angling.

GALAPAGOS: My final journal entry is up.

NEWS: In a development sure to make couch potatoes salivate, some guy's been catching trout out of his flooded cellar.

(Thanks to Down4Repairs for the link.)

FJ is Back in Business

I returned from the Galapagos this weekend, and will be kicking the blog back into gear as soon as I do some actual real work, which will consist of posting my final journal entry onto the web, and answering many of the 300 emails I have in my inbox.

BLOGUS INTERRUPTUS: I wont be able to post on this site for a few days. But I will be blogging daily for the magazine that actually pays me, about my BILLFISH ADVENTURE IN THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS. I should be making posts there starting on Wednesday.

(In the meantime, please also visit the other fine Fishy Blogs and Fishy Sites in my links.)

PELAGICS: The winner of the first annual Stu Apte Fly Fishing Sailfish Tournament. (Picture from the Glenwood Springs Post Independent site.)

GEAR: What to look for in saltwater fly reels.

BOOKS: Just got in a copy of The Fisherman's Ocean, by Dr. David A. Ross. It's going to be my airplane reading for my trip this week. Woke up early this morning and started perusing it, and a universal angling truth jumped out at me in the preface: "Having expensive boats and gear does not outweigh being in the right spot at the right time." Can't wait to read the rest of the book.

FISH STORY FRIDAY: Following again in the spirit of Down4Repairs, I am posting another Friday Fish Story...
Fly fishing did not come easily to me. I made my tentative entry into the practice in 1994. Suspiciously on the heels of "A River Runs Through It," but I was more motivated by my two post-college roommates, both avid hunters and anglers. Their talk of trout and striped bass piqued my interest. (Through them, too, I came to learn of the superiority of venison tenderloin.) My girlfriend's parents--who are now my inlaws--bought me my first fly rod, a pre-packaged Cortland starter kit. My parents bought me a set of waders and boots.
When I tried on the waders, my roommates told me the gravel guards went on my elbows. I didn't buy it, but--among my fishing buddies--their fictional account of me standing in a stream wearing elbow guards has been repeated enough to become an apocryphal truth. Even with the gravel guards properly placed, in stream I looked pathetic.
My casts, when I could get them to go forward, looked like sine waves. The fly line would noodle out about 15 feet and flop, nowhere near where I'd aimed it. A more likely outcome involved the line dropping in a clump in front of me, the tippet rife with wind knots. Somehow, after about a year of doing this, I managed to hook a trout. It caught me be surprise, but I remember feeling that fiesty rainbow tug against the line in my hand, and watching it leap from the water.
I was hooked, but I still didn't get it. Handling a fly rod finally came together for me standing on the bow of a johnboat, casting a popper to panfish. Someone had told me to think of the rod and line as a bow and arrow--to shoot the line you needed to load the rod. That's how it clicked in my head (none of that "four count rhythm between 10 and 2"). I started making casts to sunfish and rockbass, and they just blasted that little popper time and again.
Nothing builds confidence like panfish. Even today, for all the magesty, snobbery (see link below), and literary lore surrounding it, fly fishing for me traces back to little pumpkin seeds smacking poppers in a backwater. And elbow guards.

FLY FISHING:Are fly anglers really snobs? This article looks also at the business behind fly fishing and the niche it truly is in the grand scheme of fishing. But are its practitioners a little affected? Some are, but they're the same type of people who are snobs in everything they do. The majority of people I've met fly fishing are good people, who may just be slightly obsessive about the act of fly fishing. In fact, the best fly anglers I've met aren't snobs at all. Here's a link written by guide John McMurray that characterizes the rabid fly angler far better than the term "snob."

BONEFISH: Tagging program records longest noted bonefish migration, from Biscayne Bay, Florida to Andros Island, Bahamas. Overall, the work done by the Rosenstiel School at the University of Miami has proven invaluable for many different gamefish species.

WISCONSIN: Seeking true native brook trout.

FLORIDA: Scientists Locate speckled trout spawning areas in Tampa Bay.

HEALTH: Time to load up the boat cooler with chocolate milk.

SILVER KINGS: Two Maine guides head south and catch a case of "tarpon fever." (Link via Midcurrent.)

BASS: Deadspin, my favorite sports blog, linked to another blog yesterday that compared curling to bass fishing. BASS fans won't like it. Neither will curling fans, for that matter.

NEWS: In Missouri, a student design contest that will help people with disabilities catch fish.