Indian Head Fly Fisher Club at Work

Club members were busy teaching 8-13 year olds (and, of course, by default, their mothers) how to tie flies and cast flies with a fly rod. We found that 8 and 9 year old boys are probably too young to teach to tie flies, but they did fairly well with the casting part. I worked with a 13 year old boy who was casting 50 feet by the second day of instruction. That is quite an accomplishment. He is also picked up tying flies pretty well and has even built his own box to hold his fly tying stuff. Pretty cool. His ten year old sister picked up casting real well and also ties flies well. We converted the whole family into fly fishing and they intend to attend our meetings. We had a cute 8 year old blonde girl that picked up on the fly tying and casting real well. So those two mornings were fun. After finishing today's session we went home for lunch and then five of us drove over to the Owyhee River to help Eastern Oregon Fish Biologist, Ray Perkins, unload 12,000 six inch rainbow trout into the river. That was a lot of fun. The air temperature was 100 degrees and the water temperature was 52 degrees. It is wierd to have the feet too cold and the neck too warm! You can see the pictures. Perry was leading me to a hole to watch feeding browns while we waited for the truck to arrive from Sisters, OR. We had to pass through a huge dense growth of brush and wild alfalfa when I said, "Perry, we are standing in poison ivy." Yeah, we were!!! He had long pants on I had shorts and river sandals. I was about a foot and a half into the patch and the leaves were touching all over my feet and legs. I have always been real good during my first 64 years to avoid poison ivy by being pretty watchful. I have heard that ten percent of people are immune to it, but I never really wanted to find out if I was one of the ten percent. I think that I am. At least, I never got itchy, nor do I have a rash and I was most assuredly in contact.

First time I have ever used a net to put fish into the water. I have always used the net to take fish out of the water. On Sept. 8 and 9 the biologist will shock the river to determine how many of the 40,000 three inchers planted on June 3rd and how many of the 12,000 six inchers we planted today survive. Club members said that those big 18-28 inch browns were in a feeding frenzy with those three inchers being dumped into the river. Made them think of videos of piranhas feeding that they have seen on nature shows. A guide had two clients fishing below the bridge where we dumped half of the fish. They just quit fishing and moved above the bridge because the browns suddenly shifted from small mayflies to six inch fish. The Owyhee is considered by many fishermen to now be the premiere brown trout fishery in the world. One can certainly see people from all over the world fishing there. Fish that are caught are usually over 20 inches and the good fisherman often can catch ten or more fish in a half day. I am not one of those good fishermen. So, Troutbirder, pay attention to this post if you are looking for a really exciting place to fish and to test your skills. This is a catch and release fishery for browns, but RB can be kept. I talked to a fisherman this spring during the club's clean up day on the river who had caught a 7 pound RB that morning. He was pretty jacked because it took him a half hour to land the fish. He released it. If you Google images for Owyhee River brown trout, you can see lots of pictures and read lots of accounts of fishing the Owyhee. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dreamsonthefly.com/idapwr.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.dreamsonthefly.com/owyhee.html&h=227&w=302&sz=9&hl=en&start=15&tbnid=1bPcc2LG3u-06M:&tbnh=87&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3DOwyhee%2BRiver%2BBrown%2Btrout%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26rlz%3D1T4RNWN_enUS237US237

I just provided one of the sites picked at random.

Gramma J and I have found a new author who writes somewhat in the style of Tony Hillerman, but we think even better. He has humor in the manner of Patrick McManus, but is a better story teller than either Hillerman or McManus in our opinion. Not much better, but a little. He sets his stories on the Southern Ute Reservation in SW Colorado and his main character is a 7 foot tall Ute Indian who is an owner of a very large cattle ranch and a special investigator for the southern Ute tribe. He has a very old reclusive aunt who is a Ute shaman so there is some of the mysticism of the Utes worked into the stories just as Hillerman works into his stories some of the mysticism of the Navajo people. We find the stories to be very entertaining, so I have to leave you now and go read more of the Butterfly Woman. Oh, yeah, the author's name is James Doss.

Pape Coyote is still loving you all,

Good Night