Musician, Freak, Dayjobber, Etc.

So, this morning, with the best of intentions, I once again -- stupidly? -- got up at the crack of 4AM and hit the local drainage. My plan was to fish a couple of fairly deep -- 4'-5'ft? -- slow runs using the shot-and-indicator nymph approach. At least, that was my intent.

Are you laughing yet? Me neither.

I was just OFF this morning. I felt out of sorts. I felt cranky. I wasn't sure why I was doing this. The first big pool was just a disaster, fishing-wise. I rigged up FAR from the pool; I snuck up SO quietly; I was trying to be a good fly fisherman. The problem was, I couldn't get my nymph rig anywhere near the "foam line" on the far bank. Of course, I have to tell you that this particular location was very tight, very brushed-in and not easy to fish AT ALL, for me anyway, but still, that's no excuse. After several frustrating tangles, recasts, etc., the straw finally broke the camel's back when I spooked the pool for certain by hooking into a mat of algae.

Meanwhile, LARiver's stern advice from the day before kept echoing through my empty head: "Don't take the easy way out. WORK for it."

So of course I went ahead and did the easy thing. Which, in this case, meant switching to streamers. Yeah, streamers: that's the ticket. Why, this will be JUST LIKE IT WAS TWO DAYS ago! The fish will be jumping out of the stream and into my net.

Yeah, right.

Today was another universe. What worked two days ago now brought me nada, zilch, unless you consider one little 6" LDR a success (that little #&$^@ took off into an algae mat and I lost a prized top-secret fly -- the nerve!). Sheesh, even the Money Pool came up empty.

Weird.

However, with a little patience -- and eventually working some different waters -- I did have some success. I was able to coax a 9" strong-fighting beauty out of a nice shallow riffle (I love pulling fish out of riffle-ly waters) using the secret streamer. I was not in a photographing mood today so I just let her go without "doing the honors" with the first fish of the day, but that fish lightened my mood considerably. I was feeling so good, I went ahead and caught and released a smaller fish, just for grins.

As my departure time drew near, I decided to start heading back to the car. Along the way, I stopped at a nice pool where I'd had success before. Again, the streamer brought me nothing. So, I sat down and contemplated breaking down my rig and hoofing it.

Then I heard it. SPLOSH. Silence. Then another one: SPLISH. To my astonishment, fish had begun rising EVERYWHERE in this pool, from the fast water at the head, right down to the tippy-tip tail end. Wow! It looked like a dozen or more fish were present, accounted for, and rising. A true hatch of some sort, the first time I've ever seen anything like it.

I hurriedly tied on a #16 EHC, “floatized” it, and began playing dry fly games. I got in some seriously nice drifts if I do say so myself; however, much to my dismay, I missed three or four strikes in a row. But I kept at it. And at it. And, finally, I experienced a serious GULP and I had a fish on! AWESOME!!! This baby jumped and played games with me for a few moments – the smart-@ss tried to lose me in the algae but I was hip to the apocalypse – and soon I had this 10.5” fattie in my new MeasureNet:



Since I started this fly fishing obsession, I’ve heard nothing but “EHC this, EHC that.” And yet, I had had absolutely no success with an EHC prior to this morning. Finally, successful rice made easy! Man, was that ever FUN. Even missing splashy strike-after-strike was great fun. At one point, I saw the water “bulge” as a fish inspected the fly from underneath, then turned away – the anticipation of dry fly fishing is simply unparalleled. I stood there, rapt, watching my fly drift through the run, over and over, with fish rising everywhere, all around it. The suspense was absolutely thrilling, a total BLAST. If I wasn’t into this game before – look out buddy, I am now! =)

What started as a disaster of a morning turned out surprisingly, pleasingly fantastic. What a complete mind-blower – I can’t wait until similar circumstances arise again.

A question: I saw NOTHING on the surface of the water to indicate exactly WHAT these fish were rising to. Could it be that there were nymphs rising from the bottom, going into “drift” mode?

One last thing: the MeasureNet is COOL. Based on my first use of the thing, I think I have been underestimating the size of my fish by an inch or so. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and, frankly, I don’t care. All I wanna do is nail another beauty on a dry fly!!!

Thanks for reading.

It’s been one of those days, the kind where you wake up dreaming and never fall back asleep.

After smoking El Skunko brand cigars during my last two troutings (new verb?), today’s class was Serious Business 101. No bullsquat. Get it on, get it off, get it over with. I was focused like a cheaply produced public-access news magazine: “Focus on Trout”.

I dreamed I woke up at 4:08AM this morning and -- groggily -- threw on my fishing clothes; next thing I know, I’m dreaming that it’s 5:03AM and I’m hiking streamside, my vision aided somewhat by my headlamp. My dream looked a little like this, all gun-metal blue mixed with Navy black:



Do you think the above image gives too much of a clue as to the location? Neither do I.

Still apparently dreaming (I couldn’t tell), I humped it – emphasis on hump – along the stream, bounding from boulder to flat and back to boulder again, passing what I knew were decent, consistently producing waters, all because of the memory of the Money Hole. The Money Hole was the place where my evil roommate threw a spinning lure last weekend and latched onto something considerable, something, ahem, of size.

That memory – alone, unadorned -- propelled me along my hazy-blue morning dream.

Time can either fly or crawl in dreams; this morning, it was flying. At the hour of 5:43AM, there I was, looking at it, smelling the sky, feeling the water in my blood -- the Money Hole:



Dreaming, I rigged up silently, quickly, watching for signs of wildlife around me in the rapidly lightening sky. I tied on something so weird, so ridiculous, that, in the dream, I had a sub-dream wherein Flykuni laughed at the fly -- then at me – before he morphed into a streamside cottonwood. I laughed right back at him (it felt weird laughing at a cottonwood, as much as I love those grand old Western trees) and tossed some line into the air, the water. I awoke, back in the first dream, and made what I’d call a textbook streamer retrieve. I had so much fun I did it again and soon found myself grappling with this:



Not exactly the monster two-by-four of my realities, but, heck, for a dream, she was everything I needed.

This dream morning was all about the streamers: olive bead head wooly buggers, purple bead head wooly buggers (those Prince-purple babies didn’t draw so much as a follow, drats), and that other weird streamer-thingie, the one I’m sworn to secrecy about. It was like radio station KSTR: All Streamers, All The Time. “I like streamers, ‘cause streamers can make you mine”. The radio station was playing a song whose name escaped me, by a hot new band called Royal Wulff and the Drag Free Drifts. Small fish drifted in and out of my conscious mind:





No size queen, me. They’re ALL dreamy.

I started to wake up, but quickly fell back asleep and started dreaming that I was fishing a shallow-ish (1ft or so) riffle, in fact, it was the riffle at the head of the pool just above the Money Pool. It was sure a pretty litte riffle, and so I cast, retrieved, cast, retrieved -- still in a dream-state (California?)-- and had my patience rewarded thusly:



Let’s call that a good ten inches or so and leave it at that, shall we? She sure was fat, and she sure was strong – I still can feel her body writhing against my grip, strong, sure, alive with the spirit of wildness -- and she sure looked mad at me when she swam off into the depths of the stream, hopefully a little stronger, a little wiser.

And so my dream morning progressed, cumulating in a total of eight fine, finned fish brought to net, and bookended by one feisty LDR who played me like a hockey game – I was the puck – and lost me in a sea of algae, and one LDR who went ballistic and jumped about eight feet out of the water (dream feet, that is; in reality she really probably only jumped about a foot).

It was one of the best dreams I’ve ever had.

P.S. I woke up at my desk at 10AM sharp. Did this really happen?

I can't believe I actually FIXED MY CAR MYSELF!

For those who give a rat's you-know-what, I was in dire need of a "heater valve", which routes coolant into the heater core for warming up your wet feet when you come off of a day on the water. My old heater valve was basically falling apart and spewing coolant all over the place like a bad John Holmes imitation.

Total cost? $42 plus about a half-hour of labor (only tools used were a screwdriver and a knife). Life is good.

I thought I'd celebrate by taking a quick trip "up country" this morning and splashing around a bit.

I decided to challenge myself in two ways: 1) to get onstream for at least two hours and still be at my day job by 9:30AM; and 2) to work the "close in" waters which, frankly, get HAMMERED by bait dunkers and fly fishermen alike.

Here's the scene:



I'm sure many of you are familiar with this particular place.

Up very early, I was "making tracks" on the trail by 5:00AM, and had line floating on the water by 5:15AM or so. I knew these fish would probably be particularly jaded due to the insanely easy-to-reach location, and, I was right.

I really wanted to catch something this morning, so I went with what I am learning is a stupid-effective technique: nymph and indicator. I tied on a red Copper John #14, rolled on a blob of yellow-and-pink indicator putty, and off I went.

After a scant three casts, I watched with glee as my indicator took a dive. I reared back, felt resistance, and realized "Hey, stupid, you've got a fish on the line." No aerialist this fish -- straight down she dove, right smack-dab (poor dab, always getting smacked) into a Ceasar Salad's worth of algae. Try as I might, I could not convince her to come out, and, while writhing in the mass of green sea-hair, she somehow worked free and I was left standing there, tears of shame flowing from my eyes.

From what I could see and from what I felt on my line, that was probably a good 9"-10" rainbow trout. We'll never know, thank's to my ineptitude (actually, I didn't feel that bad; happens all the time, right?).

Persevere, did I. Funny thing was, at the tail end of my drifts on the pool I was fishing, danged trout kept rising TO MY INDICATOR which, as mentioned above, was yellow and pink. Hmmmmm. Could it be The PowerBait Effect(tm)? Does anyone have a PowerBait(tm) pattern I could try?

Since fish were most definitely rising "down there" (a few yards downstream from me), I decided to tie on a dry fly and see what might happen. I tied on a #16 EHC, fluffed it out, shook it in my powderbox, and let 'er fly. Got some nice drifts in -- some actually in the lane I was aiming for -- but to no effect whatsoever. I switched to my fly of the week, a black beetle imitation. No luck either. I guess these fish wanted their PowerBait(tm) breakfast or nothing at all. Just my luck, I was fresh out of PowerBait(tm).

I moved on, like glaciers sometimes do.

Back to the nymph and indicator rig. Got another hook-up -- it felt like a very small fish -- and added another LDR to my Basket of Disappointment. Again and again, each drift technically better than the one before, yet no takers.

Then I saw them: schools of minnows dancing around my feet. I remembered the fish Bernard kept the other day, the fat 'bow with a pelican's worth of minnows in it's ample belly, and thought "Try a streamer, Einstein."

So I tied on a top-secret pattern tied by a young man who allegedly posts here, although I have seen no one with his name post here lately. A-train, if you are reading this, I used one of your long-legged crazy-@ss streamers.

First cast into the depths, a herky-beef-jerky retreive, and what do you know? Two nice little rainbow trout skipped school and followed my presentation almost to my feet, until they scrambled-@ss back into the depths when they saw my evil shadow. Next cast and I had a fish on. Barely. A small silver crescent moon splashed the surface, tail-danced, and submerged. I hauled in line. Little Moon darted and danced, and I brought her closer and closer. Although pitifully tiny, Little Moon put up a valiant fight even as I coaxed her into my waiting net. Please, spare me your laughter:



Yeah, it was a small fish, but it was a fish nonetheless. It's not like I didn't entice *anything*, right? I had done my job and now it was time to go.

I humped @$$ (well, not literally) out of there, was back at my car at 8:15AM, was in the shower by 9:00AM and was at my desk at 9:30AM. Sharp.

Done deal.

Now that I know I am capable of pulling this little journey off on most any weekday, LOOK OUT BABY!!! If there are any of you in the San Fernando/Santa Clarita Valley areas who might care to join me for a morning fix sometime, just say the secret password: FINS.

F.B.W.

Just a quick update – sorry it’s been awhile!

Here’s a couple of links to some fishing reports, for those so inclined.

What else....hmmm....I recently recorded a wacky guitar solo for a gentleman named Ron Moses, who is a big Mike Keneally fan; that was fun. It’s for an upcoming box set Ron is releasing – his music kicks ass and I can’t wait to hear the record. Very strange music, indeed.

Tribeca’s debut album “Incident at the Metropolis” is finished and I should have some advance copies soon. We’re getting some interesting, mostly favorable reviews and, even though I’m no longer playing in the band, I still feel very strongly about this material. Check it out!

The Ultra Suede now have a sound collage (unmastered) up at the Myspace Page. We’re thisclose to finishing the album, and we’ve been rehearsing and practicing -- everything is rolling along nice, although slower than we’d like. Not to jinx anything, but we’re in discussions with a Japanese label as we speak; details as they unfurl.

The Abe Lincoln Story have a gig coming up as part of Cabaret Voltaire, an eclectic show to put it mildly; it’s happening Thursday, June 14th. Click here for details. We’re ALMOST done recording the album; it’s a big band – 10 pieces – so this project is taking some time. It’s being engineered and produced by our own Brian Mendelsohn -- ladies, Brian also plays the Chapman Stick! Oh, by the way, the Abe’s are going on a short tour this fall, a little jaunt around the Southwest. Details later.

This weekend Nipper and I are heading to Las Vegas to visit my parents and just hang out. It should be fun and I’m looking forward to the road trip. We’re also going to see The Go Go’s tonight, and last week we caught most of the set by Swing Out Sister (I made us leave early ‘cause I had three whisky sours on an empty stomach and turned weird). We also saw local XTC cover-boys Drummed and Wired and were thoroughly entertained – great selection of songs! Other than that, we’ve just been hanging out, seeing open houses, looking for vintage tile for Nipper’s kitchen, and spending time together and apart. All good.

I’ve got some more fishing trips planned soon – I am full-on one hundred percent into fly fishing now – so that’s cool. I’m also in discussions with some guys regarding forming a new, totally original progressive rock band (we’re all just talking about it now but it looks like it could happen); this band could be THE vehicle for my more adventurous works. Stay tuned! Also, I’ve been asked to play bass in pop stalwarts The Dons at this year’s International Pop Overthrow, as well as performing a solo set the same day. And, lastly, my buddy Bernard Yin asked me to play a gig with his excellent band The Migs; unfortunately, I’m going to be out of town the weekend he needed me, so I had to pass. Next time!!!

I think that brings us up to date for the moment. Kenny G sucks. Life rules. Trout fishing kicks my ass. I love streams. I love you. Until next time, remember: architecture is frozen music, so build something/anything, today. xoxox kErrY xoxox