Welcome back to Haiku Monday, where The Fish Hack is finally back at the Fish Wrap after a couple weeks sleeping under the bridge. A series of unfortunate events kept Fish Hack under wraps for a spell, but I’m back to earn some coin to cover my betting on Cal to wallop Oregon State. At least the Oregon AFLACS covered in style.
Gambling future:
Planning for retirement
One bet at a time.
For you Fish Wrap virgins, Haiku Monday is when the Fish Hack busts some non-rhymes about the outdoors in haiku format. That’s three lines – 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second and 5 again in the third. Readers can chime in with their haikus. Best reader haiku of the week gets some used Fish Wrap office supplies.
Ahh, with a nip in the air and elk season right around the corner that must mean one thing – underwater sex. And you lucky Medfordites can be voyeurs to one of the Northwest’s best attractions next to Bigfoot.
I’m talking spawning chinook salmon, right in the heart of downtown Medford. The big boys and gals are spawning as we cyber-chat in the stretch of Bear Creek running right through the heart of M-Town. Big Mutha’s pairing up with hefty Dudes doing the dirty in the gravels of the Rogue Valley’s sewer.
And you gotta hand it to them. Everyone from Ashland downstream to the city limits dumps their wastewater into Bear Creek. Medfordians also rinse all their oil and road goop into Bear Creek. Still, fall chinook come by to spawn.
Fins pushing gravel
Into deep cuts in Bear Creek.
Redds teem with promise.
Jim Hutchins, my salmon snitch on Bear Creek, says sent an e-mail Saturday saying he counted 11 chinook spawning in the creek right behind the Rogue Valley Mall. Stand on the McAndrews Bridge and you can see two or three chinook 30-plus pounds doing the deed.
Hutchins says three even made it all the way to Ashland this year. That’s rare, Hutch says, because most hang downstream of Talent. The water’s usually too low for them to get there from here.
Unlike steelhead, chinook are true one-trick ponies. These fish will be dead and gone soon after they spawn, but some of their progeny will be back in three, four and five years. Nature at work,. Gotta love it.
Ray Troll knows the drill,
And his T-shirts say it all –
It’s “Spawn ‘Til You Die.”
