Fish Hack is back already feigning a cough in preparation of Thursday’s Nov. 1 Skirmish on the upper Rogue River, where flies-only rules change to artificial flies and lures for summer steelhead. It’s a good day to steer clear of the Fish Wrap and pound the upper Rogue for some serious catch-and-release steelhead fishing.
So good, in fact, it makes me break out in haiku.
Steelhead on a fly
That hits bottom with lead’s help –
Not pure, but legal.
You remember the drill — on Mondays the Fish Hack busts out a few non-rhymes in Japanese poetry. Three-liners — five syllables, then seven and finally five — about the outdoors.
Stupid Fish Hack tricks:
Bad poetry on nothing.
Haiku Monday rules.
Thursday was once known as the November First Massacre. That was when was the first day to side-drift roe for steelhead on the upper Rogue — the Fish Hack’s Home Water — after two months of flies-only fishing. It was awesome, catching and releasing 20 steelhead that are so keyed into sucking sucking on chinook eggs big-time right now.
But the regulations were changed in 2002 to extend the September-October bait ban through December, over a belief that over-fishing caused hooking mortality on wild steelhead. State fish biologists testified that it was most likely that fewer than 10 wild summer steelhead died from hooking mortality, but the change came about anyway.
I had coined the term The Nov. 1 Massacre in the Fish Wrap several years earlier, and somehow it became a rallying cry for the bait ban. Eventually, many anglers still praise or blame me for the rule change, and I get as many sneers and cheers each Nov. 1.
Rule change in the air:
Bait goes the way of Dodos,
Fish Hack takes the fall.
Memo to both camps — IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. I never proposed or supported or fought the proposal. All I did was write about what the varying camps believed. That’s my job.
I’m not at the Fish Wrap to change the world, just chronicle its demise. I’m no purist with an agenda. Just a dude who writes about people passionate about steelhead, steelhead fishing and the resource itself.
I fish flies during the fly season, bait during the bait season. And I’ll use anything and everything legal on Thursday to catch and safely release as many steelhead as I can. That’s called fishing.
It’s no Massacre, by any means. But the Nov. 1 Skirmish, as I now call it, still brings enough battles to merit a little hookey from the Fish Wrap.
I hope to see you out there.
A Rogue steelhead float?
It’s Rogue Elk to Takilma,
For Fish Hack that day.
