American Potcake
A GROUP OF UNIFORMED US CUSTOMS OFFICIALS HAS ASSEMBLED TO INSPECT THE CONTENTS OF MY CARRY-ON LUGGAGE BEFORE I AM ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE BAHAMAS FOR HOME.
They each peer inquisitively through the zippered opening of the black tote and repeat, “Oh my God! She’s adorable.”
I have known for years that I wanted a Bahamian Potcake for my next dog. These bright eyed, slender dogs, common throughout the Bahamas, stole my heart. The Potcake, only recently recognized as a breed, is a kind of super-mutt made up of the working dogs that colonists brought to the islands to work the plantations. They are wicked smart, hardy and, once bonded to a human, fiercely loyal. They, in many ways, exhibit the traits I admire in the Bahamian people. Not surprisingly, as they, without meaning to be insensitive, share a very similar backstory. Each has carved out a life for themselves under harsh circumstances, maintaining strong family structures, and living by their wits. The Bahamians and the Potcakes, not only exist but thrive, against all odds, and in doing so have developed a strength of character which is both admirable and endearing.
I’ve been fishing at the Andros South Bonefish Lodge for many years. The staff and guides there have become friends and the island of South Andros a place of refuge where I feel an uncommon sense of well being. There is a small family of potcakes there, who I have become attached to, the eldest being a female named Brownie. Although these dogs enjoy the adoration of anglers from around the world, they are not exactly domesticated. They are not exactly feral either but some of them, especially the puppies, are untouchable. Brownie, however, is one of the best natured dogs I have ever known and, from each litter, at least a couple of her pups has her sweet disposition. While all potcakes are great dogs, this family line is truly special to me.
South Andros is a poor island. Its people, for the most part, have big hearts and small wallets. There is no veterinarian on the island and few folks have the money to fly a dog to Nassau for medical care. Certainly not for non-essentials like spay and neuter. As a result, a huge population of feral potcakes fight for limited resources. The name potcake comes from the traditional Bahamian dish of peas and rice, which leaves a burned matt in the bottom of the pot, called the potcake. These are thrown out for the dogs and beyond that their diet is random lizards, bugs and whatever washes up on the beach. Many of them starve, or are killed for hunting livestock.
This year, things lined up for me and I decided it was time for a dog. I could adopt a dog easily at home, but what I wanted was one of the Andros potcakes. There are always fresh puppies and I found myself drawn to one in particular. A little black puppy, the runt of the litter, who the guys at the lodge named Permit because she was impossible to catch.
Read More »Shutter Speed for Freezing Action
THINGS HAPPEN FAST IN FLY FISHING.
Line whistles through the air, fish leap out of the water, guides swoop in with the net. It’s fun to capture these moments of action with the camera but often we fail and end up with a shot that is blurred beyond recognition. The solution is shutter speed. Today’s DSLR cameras are capable of amazingly fast shutter speed. A shutter speed on 1/8000 of a second will take crisp shots from a speeding flats boat. When you know you need that kind of speed there are a few things to keep in mind. You may find yourself needing an ISO setting as high as 800 in bright sun to get the shutter speed you need. In most cases
Read More »Tiger Trout
Wild tiger trout may be the rarest of the trout family.
They are a hybrid of a female brown trout and a male brook trout. They are distinctive, the dark modeled pattern of a brook trout’s back extending down their sides to their belly. This bold pattern won them the name tiger trout. The pattern more closely resembles the coat of an ocelot but I suppose ocelot trout sounds silly.
Browns and brooks are both fall spawners so it’s bound to happen that some big beautiful brown trout catches the eye of an eager brookie but getting a tiger out of the deal is still tricky. A brook trout, being a char, has 84 chromosomes and a brown trout only 80. A fertilized egg will yield a fry only 5% of the time. The resulting tiger trout is sterile so there is no tiger trout to tiger trout reproduction.
The science guys have figured out how to make tiger trout in the lab. They fertilize the brown trout eggs with brook trout milt and then shock them with heat which causes the eggs to mutate adding a chromosome pair and boosting the success rate to 85%. A pretty cool trick but why would you do it?
Well, it turns out that the tiger isn’t just in the stripes. Tiger trout have the attitude to boot. They are aggressive piscivores and grow quickly, eating every smaller fish they can. For that reason they have proven to be an effective tool for controlling invasive species. Since they are sterile, there is
Read More »The Legend of El Dorado
Golden trout of the Wind Range
For as long as I have been aware of their existence, the golden trout of the Wind Range have loomed large in my imagination. For years, hell decades, I’ve dreamed of hiking into those mountains to catch one of the worlds rarest trout.
I had honestly given up. I learned that no one is going to tell the guy from Georgia where the golden lakes are and it seemed impossible for me to do the leg work to find them. I thought that holding a golden trout in my hand would remain a dream, until I mentioned it to my buddy Steven Brutger, of Stalking The Seam.
“Really?” He said. “I do it every year. I’d be happy to take you up there.”
Steven and his partner, Matt Copeland, made all of the arrangements. The plan was to arrive as close as possible to ice-out. Golden trout are notoriously difficult to catch. It’s entirely possible to hike ten or twenty miles in and get skunked. Being there as soon as the ice melts is your best shot.
In June we hiked in, with llamas carrying our gear, to a base camp at 10,000 feet. We then went on our own to a lake I will call El Dorado at 11,500 feet. The environment was beyond harsh. High winds and an icey precipitation called gropple stung every inch of exposed skin. We arrived with half of the lake still covered in ice. What followed was pure magic.
Working with videographer Murphy Kane, the newest member of the G&G team, we it together this video. I’m very proud to share it with you and very thankful to Steven, Matt and Murphy for making it happen.
Editor’s note: This video is pretty trippy. We at Gink and Gasoline would never suggest any illegal behavior on the part of our readers. Residents of CO and WA, however, should consider exercising their rights before viewing! Enjoy.
The Legend of El Dorado
Read More »One Of My Favorite Fly-Fishing Photos
By Louis Cahill
Some photos remain special over the years.
There is some truth to the idea that doing anything for a living makes you a little numb to the result. I have a good friend who is an incredible guitar player but he would never play for money. He said he loved it too much. I get that.
Over the years I have taken more photos than I can count. Literally millions of exposures, many of them on film, lost forever to time. There are probably a couple of hundred which are special to me. Some because they are great photos, others because they have memories attached to them and a few that are special for both those reasons and because of what they represent.
This is one of those images and it has remained special to me for many years. In part because it reminds me of a great day. In part because i like the image, but mostly because of what it represents.
The image is of John Gierach, landing a brown trout with a bamboo rod, on the Saint Vrain. If there is a more classic image of fly fishing, I don’t know what it is. It’s also the image that marked
Read More »A Goodbye To Winter
By Johnny Spillane
GOD DAMN ITS COLD.
I have been standing in 38 degree water for almost 4 hours, the temperature is 15 degrees and the wind-chill is brutal. My fingers stopped working a while ago; the upper legs on my waders are frozen solid and I’m struggling hard to tie on a size 26 midge. Why the hell am I still out here? I’m here because fish are rising. Everywhere.
Here in Steamboat Springs CO, we fish year round, rain or shine and some of the best fishing can be during the winter, especially in March and April. While countless people are buckling into their skis, the few hardy folks that brave the elements are having the time of their lives with a fly rod. Fishing during the winter is a different experience then what we are generally used to. During the summers, we get away with 3x and big stoneflies, but the winter is a whole different ball game. Midges and fine tippet are on the menu, with the tippet size sometimes being more important than the actual fly.
During the winter, we get folks that call in looking for a guided trip based on the weather. I often get asked to check the weather report and look for the warmest, sunniest day of that week. High sun+winter conditions=tough fishing. As soon as the sun comes out, the fishing gets tough. We want those overcast days when it’s slightly snowing because the fish are much less spooky and more prone to rise. If it is sunny, the fish might move onto the sandy spots and you can sight fish for them fairly easily, but you generally will be
Read More »Ted Williams: Hall of Fame Fly Fisherman
By Jim Weathersby
You may know Ted Williams as the Hall of Fame (inducted in 1966) left fielder who played for the Boston Red Sox from 1939-1942 and 1946-1960.
If so, you probably know Williams was a 17-time All-Star, two-time winner of the American League (AL) Most Valuable Player Award, six-time AL batting champion, two-time Triple Crown Winner (batting average, home runs and runs batted in), and the last man to bat over .400 for a season–.406 in 1941. You probably also know that he served in the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps during World War II and flew as a Marine pilot during the Korean War. Finally, you may know that Williams managed the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers franchise from 1969-1972.
Williams passed away in 2002, but if he were alive today, he would certainly tell you that baseball was only his second favorite pastime. Fly fishing was the sport he truly loved. “The Kid,” or “The Splendid Splinter,” as Williams was known during his baseball years, became an avid and expert fly fisherman and deep-sea angler during his baseball career.
John Underwood co-authored a book with Williams entitled Ted Williams Fishing “The Big Three,” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). Underwood wrote that Williams would fish anywhere, any time. He caught black marlin in New Zealand and tiger fish in the Zambezi River in Mozambique, and he caught these and other fish with different kinds of tackle, in and on all types of water. Underwood described very nicely what it was like to fly fish with Williams.
“To fish with Williams and emerge with your sensitivities intact is to undertake the voyage between Scylla and Charybdis.
It is delicate work, but it can be done, and it can be enjoyable. It most certainly will be educational. An open boat with The Kid just does not happen to be the place for one with the heart of a fawn or the ear of a rabbit. Even his friends called him the Captain Queeg of fishing. There are four things to remember: one, he is a perfectionist; two, he is better at it than you are; three, he is a consummate needler; and four, he is in charge. He brings to fishing the same hard-eyed intensity, the same brooding capacity for scientific inquiry, he brought to hitting a baseball” (Underwood, p. 19).
According to Underwood, Williams believed there were three fish worthy of any true sportsman
Read More »In Defense of Trout, Where I Belong
YOU HEAR IT IN THE WAY THE FLATS GUYS SAY “TROUT SET,”
and in the way steelheaders say, “I don’t fish for trout.” I’ve heard carp guys call them “trash fish.” Bass guys just call them, “bait.” In some circles it borders on contempt.
Where did this come from?
How did it happen?
When did trout stop being cool?
I’ll throw a fly at just about anything that swims. “Hey Homie, we got poons,” is all I have to hear to put my ass in the drivers seat of the Subaru for sixteen hours any day of the year. Stripers, bones, musky, snook, bass, cuda, carp, shark. I’ll fish for catfish if you give me enough to drink but if you told me tomorrow that I could only do one kind of fishing for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t even have to stop and think. Trout! I bare no shame for it.
Yet, among the hip fly fishing crowd, that’s less and less the case. Some how, in the never ending quest to be cooler than the next guy the trout has lost favor. Even though it is the trout who
Read More »Fly Fishing: Don’t Turn Your Cheek, Pay it Forward
The other day I had the opportunity to guide a client who previously had put down his fly rod for many years.
As he put on his waders and boots, and I began rigging the rods, he told me that many of his good friends were avid fly fisherman. Problem was, they had made it clear to him that they preferred he didn’t tag along with them, because they didn’t want to waste their precious fly fishing time teaching a beginner. I felt bad for the guy. He had been painted an outcast by his own buddies, and every year that went by, it made it harder and harder for him to pick up his fly rod. With a comforting grin on my face, I replied, “Man, I really wish you would have called me sooner. We could have nipped this in the butt a long time ago.”
During our hike in to the river, I decided my mission for the day was
Read More »6 Proven Winter Dry Fly Patterns
Nothing allows me to forget about the cold temperatures of winter quicker, than spotting the surface rings from trout feeding on Midges or Blue Winged Olives. It’s not an everyday occurrence by any means, but when it happens, it feels like someone turns the heat up a few notches, and I’m instantly warmed head to toe. When we think about hitting trout water during the winter months, most of us don’t typically think about fishing dry flies. It’s true that day in and day out, most anglers will find their nymphs and streamers to be much more productive, but every once in a while, when luck is on our side, we can find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a winter hatch, with trout rising all around us. It’s during these special two hour windows of trout fishing, that the winter can provide us some of the most rewarding catches of the year. That is, of course, if we decided to bet against the odds, and pack our dry fly box.
I’ll gladly give up catching numbers of fish during the winter, in exchange for taking a handful of fish on the surface with tiny dry flies. The trout don’t even have to be all that big either. They just need to give me a pretty rise and tug my line a few good times. I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that I believe hatches in the dead of winter, are like rare gifts handed down from above. Gifts that should always be full appreciated by the fly angler, otherwise they may decide to not show up again until spring. Late morning through the afternoon is the time of the day when I find midge and blue winged olive hatches to appear the most, and it’s often the bitter cold days with drizzling rain or snow flurries when the hatch decides to show up. Below are six proven winter dry flies and emergers that have served me well over the years. All you need to do is downsize your tippet and rig them up, with a standard dry fly/dropper rig.
Read More »