Fishing pals back east killing it

So I think I’m done being smug about the fishing in Oregon. The boys back east are banging it up this spring. My brother is killing it off the coast of Brooklyn and the big man Matt Z. is literally crushing monster brown trout on the Delaware River, seemingly every other weeknight. Matt Z is coming out here tomorrow, and I’m not we’re going to stack up. Check the tale of the tape:

You goons need your own blogs.

Bauer fly reel factory tour post is up

Not to toot the old horn here, but for those of you who don’t check in on the Oregon Fy Fishing blog regularly, please see the Bauer fly reel Factor Tour post. I think it’s an awesome video (of course) and it’s a pretty good read if you’re interested in how a small manufacturing business survives with the majority of its operations in Oregon. I’m looking forward to any feedback you have.

McCain onboard for cap and trade, so where is Gordon Smith?

Well folks, the Post-Bush era of climate change policy has begun in the U.S. Senator John McCain in a speech in Portland yesterday addressed global warming, vowing to set limits on green house gas emissions and to implement a carbon cap-and-trade scheme.

So if the anointed leader of the Republican party is on board to reduce carbon emissions, you might think a Republican, Oregon senator up for election this year might want to get behind this issue, since it’s obviously important to his constituents.

In fact, according to the Register-Guard McCain spokesman Jeff Sadosky said McCain chose Oregon as a backdrop for his climate change speech because it is a state with “a high percentage of independent voters and a reputation for weighing environmental issues when sizing up candidates.”

Nonetheless, Gordon Smith is unfazed and has kept his head in the sand. Smith has had ample opportunity to take a leadership role for Oregon on climate change policy by joining Senator Wyden in sponsoring the Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act, but instead he’s chosen to duck that responsibility.

Our fisheries are in decline, and are further threatened by global warming, especially in the Columbia Basin. Even if you feel that climate change is inevitable, an act of God, etc., you need to be behind the Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act if you care about fishing. The fact is that climate change is happening and a Cap-and-Trade system will help fund wildlife projects that will help our fisheries adapt to a warmer, changed earth.

Gordon Smith is running agains two Democratic candidates with strong environmental records. I urge you to read up on Jeff Merkley’s environmental info as well as Oregon Dem primary primary candidate Steve Novick. And please sign up for the National Wildlife Federation’s Target Global Warming Campaign.

Contact Gordon Smith:
Washington, DC Office
404 Russell Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202.224.3753
Fax: 202.228.3997

Eugene, OR Office
Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse
405 East 8th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401
Phone: 541.465.6750
Fax: 541.465.6808

Southern Oregon weekend extravaganza blows up my Civic

Last weekend we traveled down to Southern Oregon to visit with the folks at the Bauer Reel Company. I’m putting together a feature article and video profiling the company and its operations in Ashland, OR for the Oregon Fly Fishing blog. Bauer and crew pictured below.

In case you’re wondering, I have lost my mind with this video thing. You’d think that if you can take a decent photo and tell a decent story, you might be able to pick up a video camera and do something interesting with it. It’s not that simple. The learning curve is steep. I’m currently an iMovie noob, but getting better. Not that iMovie is going to cut it for long. But how much money do I want to spend? Not much. You’ll understand once you finish reading this post…

After spending a day with Bauer, KP and I spent some time in Ashland. We got last minute seats for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Midsummer Night’s Dream which was amazing. Fifth row back, center stage. Just to give you an idea of why this was so great, they did the entire play word for word, but the acting was so great, you knew exactly what was happening. I’m ashamed to admit it as an English major, I would never have been able to understand that play without the actors for context.

We tooled around Lithia Park for an afternoon, and the mandrone trees were in bloom. See photos below:

We spent three days at our usual Southern Oregon base, Valley of the Rogue State Park. It’s not the prettiest and definitely not the quietest place in Southern Oregon to camp, but I did catch a mammoth steelhead there once and we know what to expect. We stayed in our new car camping tent, a behemoth REI Hobitat 4. It’s great. Lots of ventiliation, room to stand up, room for gear. Katie loves it — as compared to the little 2 person Eureka we had been using the last few years.

We also checked out Jackson Wellsprings hot springswhich was well worth the $6 entry fee. We also hiked to the Sasquatch trap on Applegate Lake, on the Collings Mountain trail. There’s a great article in the Mail Tribune on Ron Olson, the guy who set up the bigfoot trap. I took some cool photos of the trap and some flowers, below:

We also got to check out (illegally!) the view from the bottom of Lost Creek Dam, the uppermost dam on the Rogue River above the “Holy Water”, which seems like a bit of a misnomer for an artificial fishery below a giant dam. But I digress — the point is, the snowpack is melting like crazy and the Army Corps is pumping a ton of water out, everywhere. But it was especially dramatic here.

We tried to see the other extreme of the Rogue River and do a short day hike on the Wild and Scenic section on the way back home to Eugene, but luckily we noticed the thermostat on the Civic going bonkers, up and down. Long story short, I took it easy driving all the way home from the Wild Rogue to Eugene and blew a head gasket on the corner of 30th and I-5. Way to end the trip.

Vendetta: Keep your enemies close, the BB gun closer

In my effort to build a bird nerd, garden paradise, I’ve bought a BB gun to take out the undesireables — i.e. European Starlings. These invasive birds poke around my backyard, bug the natives in the feeders (like the AHEM Towhee pcitured below), and generally stink up the joint. Plus, they have some interesting feathers that I’m going to rope BP into showing me how to use for a top secret midge pattern.

But as luck would have it, these starlings are smarter than anything else in my yard. I keep poking my $29 BB gun out the shower window, lining up my shot and missing. And every time I miss the damn things, they get cagier. Nonetheless, I will prevail. A man needs an adversary. And apparently, some target practice. I used to be deadly with a BB gun.

Alcohol destroys my will to blog

Somehow, last week at a conference I managed to get into about a bottle of free Chivas Regal. Very poor decision making indeed. There are a number of people out in my work realm who know me, and probably know me a little better after that night. Hopefully they chocked it up the natural affinity between whiskey and reporters. Call it Gonzo tech journalism —  Hunter S. Thompson does data centers.

As ridiculous as the night’s events apparently were (as recounted to me by others), I haven’t yet suffered any career-ending fallout. That said, I still haven’t recovered. I must have literally poisoned my psyche – that’s all I can figure. Flying home from this business trip, floating in a sterile tube 30,000 feet over the continent, I felt hollow and tired.

Crusing through my 30th birthday festivities, I waved to the crowd, drank beers on autopilot, threatened to knock a guy out at a local bar (without really meaning it) — dislocated, strange behavior.

I’m half way through three great books, but the weight of them is more stimying than inspiring (Nicholas Carr’s Big Switch, John Geirach’s Death Taxes and Leaky Waders, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle… if you’re interested).

I’m weeding the garden, doing some fishing, going through the motions on the work and fly fishing blogs. One of my blog heroes, BP came down and we had an awesome afternoon tooling around my house, and beating some common sense into my brain.

But the big picture, the “My Life at 30″ promises to myself to run, write (and I mean, write — not blog) just aren’t materializing. I’m actually snapping awake in the morning and hour earlier, thinking “I should go do something”, but I don’t. And for now, I’m blaming it on the scotch until I snap out of it.

Enjoy a random photo of my cat Chester. His nuerosis and complete lack of attention span are like a mirror image of my mind:

On turning 30

Anticlimactic.

Oregon in crisis: Nalgene phasing out water bottles

This is bad. Nalgene, the company that made it cool for us to tell Pepsi and Coca Cola to take their bottled water and stick it where the sun don’t shine, just published a news release saying that they would be phasing out the ubiquitous plastic bottles on account of controversial carbonate plastic bisphenol-a (BPA). I’d heard rumors about this before, but had also heard that the amount of chemical offgasing from this material was negligable — and what are our plastic cups and disposable water bottles made out of anyway, polymerized wheat grass? I mean, it’s everywhere. That said, the news reports say animal testing studies are linking low doses of BPA to breast and prostate cancer, obesity and hyperactivity. But, who’s funding these stuides, Dasani? This is a big deal in Oregon where we are hyper-green sensitive (disposable drinking water? No way!), and also go for the outdoors look. People in NY carry yappy dogs in handbags, we attach Nalgenes to our backpacks. I’ve got three of these. Luckily KP has been drinking out of a stainless steel bottle for a few months. But how long till that kills us too?

Invasive Species are the new litter

I watched Oregon Public Broadcasting’s special on Invasive Species tonight. It’s a great way to spend an hour. You get the sense that we can actually do something about this nightmare before it pushed out all our native species. It wasn’t as Oregon focused as I’d have liked to have seen, but still good. OPB has launched a Website and an initiative focusing on invasives — Silent Invasion. The organization is doing a Scotch Broom removal at Buford Park on April 27th.

Field & Stream editors hit new low, blow up my bullshit meter

It’s hard to imagine how, but the editors at Field & Stream have hit a new low.

In it’s “Heros & Villains” section (May 2008 issue, page 30), Thomas McIntyre named Paris Hilton a hero — and then had the gall to label Arnold Schwarzenegger a villain for the collapse of the salmon fishery in Califorina. This jackass actually implicated Schwarzenegger in the Klamath River Fish Kill — which Dick Cheney was directly responsible for. Call Schwarzenegger on whatever else you can come up with, but don’t bullshit American sportsmen with this.

Thomas McIntyre is an irresponsible, uninformed, hack. I’ve always thought that a publication with the influence and history of Field & Stream came with some sort of responsibility to at least try to be accurate… I guess not. It just really pisses me off — way out of proportion with the actual offense — because I liked this publication so much.

Luckily, my subscription ran out this issue, so I don’t have to demand to have it cancelled or whatever the usual self-righteous prick response is in this situation.

Sadly, I’ll miss back page columnist Bill Heavey (not in the way that the fan from this month’s column might, but still). He had a great column this issue, with booth babes, desperation, phony smiles on the Las Vegas Convention Center floor. A lot of us have been there and it’ll be sad not to read his stuff.

I guess I’ll just catch up with back issues when I’m getting new tires, or at the barber, or wherever else this magazine ends up when it’s done spiraling down the toilet.