Fishing Jones

The most famous of fly fishermen are famous for something else. Ted Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Tiger Woods…(probably the most recognizable of all time is a pretend one, Brad Pitt as Paul Maclean)…The lone exception to that would be Lefty Kreh. In the fly fishing community at least, he is a one-namer,  like ”Babe” to baseball fans,  “Jerry” to VW van owners, or “OJ” to celebrity murder enthusiasts. (OK, maybe that last one doesn’t work so well.) Now Flip Pallot, not so unknown a name himself, is paying tribute to Lefty’s life in the new book All The Best. 

A hardcover tome filled with tons of photographs and testimonials from many other fly fishing brand names, All The Best reads how you’d like to think a book would turn out if your best friend wrote one about you. (Pallot wrote the book with backing from the guys at Temple Fork.) The book is, as the cover states, ”celebrating” the life of Lefty Kreh, but to me, it reads best as fly fishing history.

What strikes me the most is how Lefty seemed to be everywhere; directly or tangentially involved in every major fly fishing development of the 20th century. Getting mentored by Joe Brooks, developing the Deceiver, testing Bob Clouser’s new fly, pioneering saltwater along with Ted Williams, Stu Apte, Del Brown, and others, hanging with Dave Whitlock, Jimmy Albright, Ted Juracsik, Pallot…how did this guy manage to know so many people and fish so many places? Fly fishing as we know it doesn’t exist without Lefty and the people in the book with whom he is connected.

As it’s a biography, there are plenty of tidbits that are obscure but enjoyable in their quirkiness, like the black and white photo on p.26 with the caption:

 ”Uncle Hen,” as the Kreh children called him, built many boats like this. He would put a sand-filled washtub in the bottom of the boat so he could enjoy a fire while he fished.

Because of gems like that, but mostly for the fly fishing history lesson, All The Best is a worthwhile read.

Stripers Forever has a silent auction for a school bluefin tuna trip in Maine.

A blurry, out-of-focus photo of a haphazzardly tied bendback on a bass hook. I guess it’s more aptly described as a weedless, but whatever, they’ve worked well for bass. I’ve been tying them to use on my northern pike trip next week. She ain’t pretty but she gits it done.

…Only people with their money intact to bid again. The Sportsman’s Alliance for Alaska has more items up for bid today, Wednesday, and Friday, rolling that way until June 18th, with your cash going towards the Fight to Save Bristol Bay.

…comes the need to post the Motor City Five.

Everyone’s seen the hero footage of noble saltwater fly anglers matching wits with silver kings, but thefin.com has two short clips showing what fly fishing for tarpon is really like, a lot of the time.

Longer days make late afternoon sneak-aways easier to come by. Fish the hour before dusk and see what happens. I wish I could better remember the ones I caught today, but thoughts of those are being pushed out by the all-consuming cinder block hook-up. The one where the rainbow with shoulders explodes upon contact with your fly, crashes back to earth like a cinder block, leaps again, falls back down and then disappears. It  left me standing in the stream with a slack line, a rushing sound in my head from the adrenaline spike, and nothing more to do but throw up my hands and cuss.

“That was a monster,” I heard the guy upstream from me yell after I lost it. I think he was secretly pleased.

The resident fox came out tonight. This is the second time I’ve seen him walking the bank this spring. He wouldn’t sit still long enough for a photo.

I stopped by the fly shop and everyone (three, all told) started talking stripers. One guy knew another guy catching schoolies at one spot, and another guy claimed he pulled out a 26-incher just the other day, and the third one said his buddy got a few on sand eel patterns. You know every bit of that is 100 percent bona fide. I’m going to restart the striper hunt next week.

The Sportsman’s Alliance for Alaska is auctioning off a motherload of stuff, from fishing trips to rods, reels, shades, gear, art…anything related to fly fishing that you can get your mitts on.

The good thing is you can go decadent and spend way too much on fly fishing like you already do anyway, but this it’s time for a great cause: Stopping the Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay, Alaska. New items will be available for auction every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday through June 18th.

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Bonefish and Tarpon Unlimited has posted a petition calling for a multi-State management plan for tarpon. Here’s the case for better regulations for these fish:

Through a satellite tagging program run by Dr. Jerry Ault and the Rosenstiel School from the University of Miami, scientists confirmed that tarpon are highly migrational, with some swimming as far as 4,500 miles throughout their range from Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and up the Atlantic coast to the Carolinas. “Everything in the Southeast is connected,” said Dr. Ault. Right now each State manages tarpon separately, as if they aren’t.

Recreational angling for tarpon brings big money into the region. Economic estimates show that poon fishing pumps 5-7 billion dollars annually to the Southeast. The more fish, and specifically big fish, there are to chase, the more people will spend trying to catch them. From a pure economic standpoint, protecting tarpon is a sound investment.

“Tarpon are extremely sensitive to even light explotation,” said Dr. Ault. Tarpon are slow growing and thus slow to reach reproductive maturity. If one area in the tarpon’s range has excellent sustainability regulations in place but another doesn’t, both places are affected. As an example, Dr. Ault cited a kill tournament that posted 73 tarpon totalling 10,000 pounds over three days.

Here’s a link to Dr. Ault’s book on bonefish and tarpon fisheries.

This evening’s post is sponsored by the color brown.