AbsintheLounge

NOTE: It's winter steelhead season and few things get dedicated anglers more pumped than to think of fresh fish—chromers—pushing into Northwest streams. This isn't a game of big numbers but even a few fish can change your life. Print this. Grab refreshment and a cigar. Enjoy. gt

 Steelhead Dreams

It was one of those times early in life when every direction appeared as a dark ally, every prospect just a future downfall. Life had spiraled outside my control and I was afraid to step out of bed.

I appeared in court and said not guilty. What else was there to say? That the gun was unloaded and the girl was lying through her jealous, white-trash, trailer-park teeth? The college dean said he’d see me in his office. The judge said he’d see me in the morning. I posted bail and escaped to Alaska with visions of crimson and chrome swimming in my head.Rollin' through Southeast in an open skiff.

During March I took odd jobs tendering herring, weighing roe, cutting the heads off blackcod, and painting masts. It was my first full spring season in Southeast and the change of scenery was as refreshing as those first few days of mid-April when winter seemed vulnerable at last and the warmth of the sun announced all could change, that the dour world might finally introduce itself as lush, attractive and fresh. Soon, against my promise, I declined work. A quest for steelhead—those brawny, elusive, addictive sea-run rainbow trout—began.

It happened that my friend, Chris, had a boatload of time on his hands, too. And he had a boat. In Southeast a boat means freedom. With the seine season resting a couple months away we found that Chris, who I called Klondike, could stretch the leash as long as he brought home to his wife an occasional load of firewood and a couple sweet spruce grouse.

It proved a favorable agreement and at every chance we loaded that 16-foot Lund to the gunnells with flyrods, a tent, cases of Rainier, cheap sleeping bags, gas tanks, and half-gallons of Canadian Hunter. We’d check the tides, say goodbye to the cruel world, declare a return date, pop tops, and head out across the sounds and straits knowing if all went well the weather and waves might impede our return.

Unfortunately, we found steelhead scarce that spring. During a two-week foray, Klondike landed a single fish, a chrome-bright hen of eight pounds, but that was it. As the season moved into late-April and its prime, water conditions deteriorated and there grew a sensation that we might throw 10,000 more casts or fish another 10,000 years without a take. The woodpile reached epic proportions and we put a dent in the grouse population.

NOTE A special thanks to Ted Leeson for providing this humorous look at the characters we sometimes end up in the company of. Read this here or print out and sit down with a cocktail tonight. Enjoy. gt

Pick Thy Partners Wisely

By Ted Leeson

Maybe it’s just middle age, but I’ve drifted away some from a youthful penchant for solo fishing and these days more often spend my river time in the company of others. While fishing with partners promises the singular brand of enjoyment that comes only from camaraderie, I’ve also come to see that our keenest pleasures cut both ways. For a group gig involves, by definition, the eternally hazardous prospect of other human beings, few of whom are as competent, reliable, or well prepared as yourself. Granted, nobody’s perfect, but in this regard, popular wisdom as usual has got it all wrong. Where people are concerned, it does not, in fact, “take all kinds.” All kinds is merely what you get.An oil burner is a regular who, as a precondition of his very existence guzzles the fossil fuel of his fellow man.

Case in point: that universal subspecies of fishing companion—the high-maintenance partner, the labor-intensive buddy, the guy who for whatever reason in God’s great and mysterious plan simply cannot pull his angling shit together. He is a wading, casting, fishing bundle of loose ends, a disaster that continues to happen. Such people are angling’s version of a fixer-upper, demanding more upkeep than a ’68 Beetle, more vigilant tending than an Italian sports car. They are the oil burners of the human race.

What, we're out of absinthe again!Good Father, Bad Father

So, my wife and I got into absinthe shortly after we met each other, which was shortly before we discovered her to be pregnant, and just prior to our parents saying, “Get married for the kid’s sake.”

It was a late-May night in Alpine, Wyoming, sleet fell hard from the sky, my tent was soaked from the previous night, and my sleeping bag's zipper did not work -- cold air streamed in as if pushed by an Arctic wind. A motel night, for sure. All my fishing partner, Mike, and I wanted was to slip into a cheap motel and gather a few hours of shuteye without taking a severe hit in the pocketbook.