BONEDALE FISHING REPORT #7

BONEDALE FISHING REPORT #7

APART FROM THE PULLING AND HAULING STANDS WHAT I AM

I live in a neighborhood on the Oakland border, lined with mom-n-pop shops selling fresh fruit, baked goods, confections and miscellany. Old men linger, trying to figure out what happened to their acid-laden souls. They sip coffee and smile at some invisible, perpetually-suspended funny bone mallet. They’re what’s left of the pre-Starbuckian era. In the middle of it all the fashion whores neatly organize the pain of yesteryear into new shoes, clothing lines, coffee drinks, or neighborhoods where you can window shop ghetto. The indigenous tribes are no dummies and feast upon this harvest with bittersweet resentment. They realize they represent some yearning for hardship, so they play into the tattered $200 designer jeans, junkie-wannabe persona. In Carbondale, yesteryear is the 10th Mountain Division, coal miners and cattlemen. Birthing calves at 3 a.m., sub-zero, shoulder-deep in mother’s blood–cowboy, wind and animal moaning low. Double pay if you stay more than eight hours in the pitch-black mine, always darkest and coldest before dawn. – Eric Hause, my brother in arms.

The further west you go, the weirder it gets until you hit the next good piece of water, which is the Pacific. From the glassy barrels of Kauai to the Bahamas and beyond, we always come back to our trout streams–freestone rivers where anything’s possible. The mighty Colorado survives in spite of rolling gas fires, truckers headed the wrong way, smoking canyon walls. It’s counterintuitive to run into fire. If you don’t feather the oars, you have to resort to deep strokes, which always is a rookie move. My friends, you don’t toy with gravity, and the Colorado is not to be fucked with. Wade carefully and know your sections, especially if you’re floating. People from all over the west come to surf its waves. There’s a new roller just outside of Palisade that tempts me, but what if one of those errant gas trucks tumbles into the river? The biggest trout I’ve ever seen have been on the lower Colorado–a Brown and Bow too big to even guess. It’s not an easy river to fish and eats boats every year. I’ve come close on multiple occasions, and it scares me more than big Pacific surf, but between it, the Fork and the Crystal, there’s enough water to explore five lifetimes. I’ve been fishing these drainages my entire life and would be a liar if I said I knew them well.

CUT AND PASTE AT YOUR DISCRETION. Tim Heng and I went after the Monster Bass but to no avail. The Mother’s Day hatch has moved up-river and the waters on the Coli are in great shape–cold nights are keeping the runoff at bay. We’re hoping for another big flush and perhaps we’ll catch some Koi and Macks blasting over the spillway.

Live from the WORLD HEADQUARTERS

Kea C. Hause

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The mailbox at the Hause residence, where I was informally “adopted” for a number of years, living in their basement. Photo: Copi Vojta