Legend has it that in some bodies of water, in a certain mountain range, in one western state – all of which will remain nameless – the brook trout are so good at reproduction, and so bad at decision making that a fisherman once pulled dinner from the water, for his entire expedition, using only a line, a hook and a cigarette butt. I wasn’t there, but having fished many of said unnamed bodies of water, I believe it. Of course, to a mature “sportsman”, like myself, who takes pride in his craftsmanship, such a spectacle may be mildly amusing, but holds little real personal interest. With fly placement and selection demoted to nonfactors, and the puzzle all but solved, my attention wanders and I’m soon wondering if there are any “good” fish to be had. Then I’m on to weighing the implications of an introduced game fish blatantly out-competing the locals. Before long my mind has left the lake altogether to wrestle with such egocentric conventions as “sporting” and “standards”. I may still be standing there, rod in hand, hooking fish, but I aint fishing.
Luckily I’ve got a fishing buddy who periodically helps me adjust my point of view. He’s 3 years old, 3 feet tall and, at the moment, crushing it. With square little Fred Flintstone feet planted on deckwood and the reel of his bent Zebco Dock Demon squawking each time a 12 inch snapper gets feisty, he’s got their number. And the fish are as boundless as his excitement. He isn’t hung up on any labels and he’s not running his experience through any synthetic filters. The fish are biting and that’s all he needs to know. Who needs analysis and second guessing? Not my kid. He’ll stick with giddy wonder, thank you very much.
We’re on a fishing trip to Islamorada, land of everglade and open-ocean, snook and tarpon, dorado and sailfish – very serious fishing business – and no one in our party is having a better time on the water than my son. Every snapper he pulls from the lagoon is as prized as the proudest of silver kings and he greets each one with a gaping grin, a fist pump and triumphant “Yes!”
By the time he’s caught dinner the staid, dignified “anglers” of his family have caught his enthusiasm. The eager little fish, which weren’t worth our attention when stepping to and from the boat, are suddenly grounds for high fives and another round of rum and tonics. The eager little fisherman is suddenly a sage. Fish with a kid he tells us, and fish like a kid.
Native fish are cool, that’s just my opinion. There is simply something to be said for a fish that is living in the place it evolved. Maybe there are better reasons but that’s what it always comes down to for me. Don’t get me wrong here, I spend more time fishing for rainbows and browns (not native in my neck of the woods) than anything. But there is something special about native fish. Beyond the fish, they tend to live in spectacular places. I have to remind myself to look up once in awhile.
Reading a river isn’t exactly easy, but at least there’s some printing on the proverbial page. Rocks, banks, bends, eddies, riffles, pools – the features of moving water are myriad and often readily evident. 25 miles offshore though, it’s a whole different story, or more to the point, no story at all. 360 degrees of cobalt swells just don’t have a lot to say… particularly to a northern Rockies trout fisherman who doesn’t speak the language. I think I’ve picked up a couple keys to offshore success though. Turns out that if you want to catch anything beyond sea-sickness and a sunburn, you need to get high on some good weed.
Surprisingly enough, getting high typically precedes finding weed. It all looks like one, vast, undifferentiated ocean to you and me, but the birds who earn their livings out there see things differently. High above the waves, they can look down into the water column and spot schools of baitfish. Keep your eyes to the skies until you spot a pod of circling, swooping, diving seabirds. Those are your airborne accomplices, and they may be over the mother lode.
Birds mean bait, but alas, bait may not mean bights. Just think of all the elkless days spent staking out a perfect piece of habitat. Same deal. If the birds alone aren’t enough to get the reel ripping party started, what you really need is some good weed. Sargassum and other types of seaweed will form-up into floating mats and miles-long lines. The how, where and why this happens is, for me, yet another of the sea’s well kept secrets. What’s better understood is that the pelagic predators we go to sea for often use these weed lines like the local supermarket.
If you can find birds working a good weed line, you may just bring home some groceries of your own.
The rise was visible down the bank, just into the shade under a russian olive. My two year old was hanging onto my leg and my wife was on the sticks. Our daughter was crouched on the cooler next to me. It was the first time our entire family had been in a drift boat together.
Working to keep my line out of my son’s hands, I laid down a cast into the fish’s feeding lane. A bit nervous on the oars, my wife was just getting into a rhythm. The boat matched the speed of the current. The drift was perfect. On cue the fish surfaced and inhaled the PMD.
The water erupted and so did our crew. The fight was on. Instantly, my daughter had the net at the ready. We were able to bring the healthy rainbow to the boat to take a closer look. Not every moment of the day went this smoothly. But we can choose how we want to remember it.
It’s six o’clock Friday afternoon. Your kid’s been sick all week, your sleep deprived, work-stressed wife has a headache, and supper-time is about to expire with you down 0-3. Time to settle for a box of mac and cheese, and kiss tomorrow morning’s fishing excursion goodbye, right? Not so fast! Go deep with a batch of Speedgoat Hail Mary and the weekend is saved. It only takes 20 minutes, and you’ll come off looking like the Doug Flutie of dinner.
What you’ll need…
½ # Wild Meat – I used antelope round steak but any venison steak cut will do
1 Onion, sliced
½ # Mushrooms, sliced (and apparently invisible)
Capers, 4 Tablespoons, drained and pressed dry
Peanut oil
Butter
Mixed Peppercorn Blend (red, white, green and black), freshly ground
Kosher salt
1 # Spaghetti – If you’re Gluten-free like E and I, try Jovial. If not, congratulations. Enjoy a beer for me.
¼ Cup Parmesan Cheese – I used pre-grated. If you have an actual block of parm in the fridge, better yet.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil – Cheap stuff for cooking and good stuff for dressing pasta.
Step 1: Melt a few pats of butter over high heat in a cast iron skillet or dutch-oven. Just as it starts to brown, cut in an equal volume of olive oil and swirl to combine. Add mushrooms and onions and sauté, stirring frequently. 
Step 2:The mushrooms and onions will take a few minutes. A hefty pinch or two of kosher salt, added directly to the pan, will help speed them along. While they’re doing their thing, get the pasta going, and press the drained capers dry with paper towels. You can also use this time to cut and pepper the meat liberally. Bigger than bight-sized chunks of meat annoy me when served in a mixed dish. I enjoy carving into a steak, chop, or roast at the table, but who wants to saw away at their their risotto or chili? Eating pasta should require nothing but a fork. Do the knifework on the front-end and it’ll serve-up much better. Plus each antelope morsel will get more thoroughly browned. 
Step 3: When the onions and mushrooms form an orange-brown caramelized crust , pull them from the pan and set them aside. Add the capers to pan and let them sizzle-up for a couple quick minutes until crisp. Set aside in their own small bowl.
Step 4: Re-oil your now extremely hot pan, this time with peanut oil. Just as the oil and pan begin to smoke, toss in the meat, leaving a little elbow room between pieces, so that each gets maximum pan contact. With small pieces you can cook 90% of the way through without stirring or flipping, scoring you a major browning bonus. Browning is your friend… your rich, savory friend.
Step 5: When the meat is cooked to your tastes, remove the heat and add mushroom, onions and capers. Toss to combine.
Step 6: Plate cooked pasta and drizzle lightly with high quality olive oil. Top oiled pasta with meat, mushrooms,onions and capers. Garnish with Parmesan.
Serve with a chilled dry white, and don’t forget to pack your terrestrials for tomorrow. It’s summer after all.
STS Hail Mary Speedgoat
½ # Wild Meat
1 Onion
½ # Mushrooms
Capers
Peanut oil
Butter
Mixed Pepper Blend
Kosher salt
1 # Spaghetti
¼ Cup Parmesan Cheese –
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1. Saute mushrooms and onions. Remove from pan and set aside when done.
2. Toast capers in pan until crispy and fragrant. Set aside.
3. Saute seasoned antelope over high heat. Return mushrooms, onions and capers to pan and remove from heat. Toss to combine.
4. Dress cooked pasta lightly with extra virgin olive oil. Top pasta with meat and shrooms mixture. Serve with grated Parmesan.
PMD’s and Yellow Sally’s were coming off. We were fishing to pods of risers. It was the first true dry fly hatch I had fished this year and it took some adjusting to. Having fished streamers with 2x all winter, punctuated by working on my strip set for a trip to the salt, my hands were heavy.
Big fish were looking up and I broke off the first three I hooked. A variety of excuses and rationalizations could be made but the lesson was clear. I needed to better protect the 4x tippet I was fishing. So I switched to 3x. This was a band-aid for being heavy handed and reefing on fish like it was a tug of war contest. But I also believe in fishing the heaviest tippet you can get away with. It worked.
It’s a park now, mown green-space and graveled paths owned by the city of Williamsburg Virginia. But when I was a boy, not so much older than my son is now, “Government Property” was a tangle of tidewater forest and marshland where earthen battlements – remnants of the civil war – lay hidden in opportunistic underbrush, their soldiers replaced by snakes and coons. Meadows overgrown to little-boy chest height and crawling with ticks, took forever to cross on short legs in the August sun, while acres of hardwood canopy offered a devil’s bargain of shade and suffocating humidity. Through the heart of this pocket wilderness wound Queen’s Creek, and jutting into her brackish water stood a rickety half-rotten dock.
That dock, decades gone, remains as much a part of me as if its pylons had been driven into my psyche instead of the acrid muck. Thirty years later, I can still bring lifelike scraps of its events to mind: crabbing, one bug-bitten boy inching a chicken neck from the bottom with twine, another poised mantis-like with the net; the taste of pride as I headed for home, trusting summer hardened soles to navigate missing planks and rusty nails, laden with bushels for Mom to steam; the ache of unchecked laughter as gathered neighbors and family, picked and told stories around a day’s catch; the thrill of self reliance as, a mere mile from home but feeling as isolated and beyond rescue as Lewis and Clark, we dodged water moccasins, our decisions and their consequences utterly our own. But mostly it was a boyhood of seemingly inconsequential moments parading by that place unnoticed. In the years since though, the tracks left by those unmarked days have ossified into the bones of a man. At the time they cost me a bike ride, a sunburn and a few fresh scratches. Today I wouldn’t trade them for my weight in gold.
What kind of tracks does the X-Box leave, and what do they grow into? I have no intention of finding out. My son, like most kids in the rural west, is surrounded by “Government Property”, known locally as the BLM, the Forest Service and the State Sections. Management of these public lands is a perpetual controversy, the discussions of which often center on economic value. Aldous Huxley was right when he wrote of an economics driven dystopia in A Brave New World that, “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” But it’s equally true that no factory ever built the foundation of a life. And given time to mature, the investment of a bike ride, a sunburn and few fresh scratches can yield one hell of a return.
My lungs were about to explode, which masked the burning in my quads. The terrain was unforgiving. So were the birds. We had been in birds all day, but it was the last day of the season and they were onto us. Only minutes prior I had managed to scratch down my first chukar of the day.
The covey had broken up and we were looking for singles. Wrapping around a snow covered spine coming off a massive ridge I would have been better suited carrying an ice axe than a Benelli. Without much warning a chukar was in flight, rising left to right, strangely headed uphill, and towards me. The bird was tearing over my right shoulder as I simultaneously spun and mounted my gun.
The physics were no longer in my favor. The forty five degree slope was unable to support me and I fell backwards, downhill, just as I pulled the trigger. Miraculously, especially given my wing shooting tendencies, I connected and the bird dropped over the ridge.
Landing on my pack, head downhill, I slid for a few feet. Once things came to a halt, I was able to take stock in the yard sale around me. The gun had been tossed and lay uphill, no injury seemed to be incurred, a few shells were scattered around me. All I could do was laugh. As I picked up the pieces, my female lab came over the hill with our second bird of the day.
One thousand two hundred and twenty-eight generations ago, my ancestor lay curled in a shallow depression scratched from the soil of a low African cave, listening to the night. Fear and Hunger waged a Great Battle in him. Fear was mighty and terrible in its strength, neither reasoned nor conceptual. It was real; a knowing in my ancestor, more prominent than sight, that out there beyond the cave he was outmatched prey. Just so, Hunger was a tireless foe, grinding forever away at Fear, like wind driving the mountain, grain by grain, to the sea. Hunger gnawed and scratched prodding my ancestor on, its message whispering incessantly from behind, “I am ever near and when you stop, you become mine forever”.
He rose at dawn, no more taxed by the Great Battle than he was by the rise and fall of the moon – each being omnipresent and unalterable – and with his club and his spear, he resumed the stalk. That is why he is my ancestor.
I love camping with kids, particularly the glimpses of family history.
Far from the run of any steelhead, I was methodically working a stretch of water with tactics most commonly applied to anadromous fish. A small spey rod in my hand, swinging flies through Wyoming trout water. And I only had a couple of minutes.
A few feet away, on shore, my kids were playing in the dirt. We were waiting for my wife who was shuttling vehicles before launching our canoe for a family float. I was getting my fishing in where I could.
Swing, step, repeat. A drift boat launched just up stream, as it passed they hollered “you know there aren’t any steelhead around here”…”I know” was all I could reply. Two casts later I had a take, my rod bent over and for a brief moment the drag began to hum. Still within ear shot, the guy in the drift boat exclaimed “steelhead?”
In that moment my body braced, preparing for the inevitable run. Hooked into a wild chromer my heart began to race. Reality then began to set in and a smile crossed my face. The rainbow, who’s situation simply deprived him being able to go to the ocean, gave me his best in honor of his sea run brothers.
The timing couldn’t have been better. As stupid as it may seem, I was glad to stick a fish in front of the passing boat. While the tug of a steelhead cannot be replicated I have become addicted to the rhythmic cadence of fishing the swing. The feel combined with it’s utility has found me fishing a two handed rod frequently, even in places that have no direct connection to the salt.