EMBT 20 Questions

Today it's my turn over on Eat More Brook Trout to answer 20 questions. Enjoy.
 

Rescue thyself!

Over on the Trout Underground, Tom lamented the resourcefulness of anglers in effecting self-rescue when faced with trouble stream side. He asked readers to leave "your least believable self-rescue story below".

The criteria are that your story must be: 1) unbelievable, 2) about you, 3) a great big made up lie.

Mine is below. Stop over and add yours to the list.

The Winter of  '09

Fishing late on a winter afternoon on a unusually warm January day I was unaware that the rising water had cracked off shelf ice all along the river. I started to see small bergs but was awoken to the true danger when I happened a glance upstream and notices a slab of ice the size of a 1950 Buick coming towards me. I waded as fast as I could to streamside but it was too late, I was bowled over by this careening berg and plunged into the cold water. Everything went black.

When I awoke I was trapped below an undercut bank jammed solid with rapidly refreezing ice debris. Only my upper torso was free of the icy grip in the air pocket created by the bank’s ledge. I spent the next three weeks trapped in the pocket entertaining myself by singing sea shanties and carving ice netsuke with my nippers. Fortunately a river otter burrow was in this bank and when they emerged to hear my shanties I would seize them, wring their little necks and enjoy some weasel sushi. I fashioned their pelts into a fine cap.

A brief thaw in February allowed me to escape the grip of the ice. I snapped off my now lifeless legs and free of their dead weight was able to pull myself up the bank. In the eddy where I had been trapped a pod of trout rose vigorously to a fine midge hatch. Lacking a rod I took a streamside reed, added three yards of 5x tippet and cast a gnat into the frothing water Tenkara style. I immediately hooked a large brown and while my improvised gear held the gangrenous wasting of my casting arm caused me to lose the whole rig and three fingers during the battle. Utterly disgusted with my angling performance I crawled several hundred yards back to the main road and thumbed a ride home.

Tying in hot weather

The trout are down due to the August like weather over the past few days and between work, volunteer, family and social commitments, I'm not going to carve out some angling time for the next few days (though I will be destroying clay disks on Sunday!).

Fortunately, I have air conditioning and a full tying bench with quite the backlog of flies.

Here's #1 of about 80.

Fill Er Up!

A start

I don't have to many details about the Yellowstone trip. I know where I have to be on the 24th of July and I have my airline tickets purchased. I guess the rest will be sorted out by our hosts: TU, Simms, OBN, & YPF.

One purpose of this trip is to ply the angle and for that I'll need some flies.

I'll bring the regular boxes that contain every standard offering of nymph and dry, though I must check the boxes thoroughly as I didn't get them quite as full as I wanted to this past winter.

In addition, I'm going to lay in a supply of larger flies that are commonly fished out west during the summer. Chris' guidance was for Stimulators,Royal Coachmen, Adams', and Hoppers. I'll have to add some ants to the mix as well. And maybe a couple of streamers.

So here's the first pass at a tying list (Four of each size)

Stimulators: 8,10,12
Royal Coachman 8,10,12
Parachute Adams 10,12,14
Hopper 8,10 (I may buy these...we'll see)
Black Ants 10,12
Yellow Bugmeisters 8,10
Orange Bugmeisters 8,10
Olive Buggers 8,10
Black Buggers 8,10
Brown Buggers 8,10
And a handful of articulated streamers in Black, Olive, Yellow 8.

And I've got to go look in the nymph box to see where the gaps are.....

So that's more than eighty flies. It seems like the right combination of sufficiently ambitious and slightly delusional so that when I fall short I won't be too disappointed.

The Yellowstone Box: oddball PMXs and Bugmeisters I had hanging around plus a mouse!

Mission Accomplished!

I caught this wild trout in the gutter on my garage.
Thanks, Trout Unlimited!

I fished for trout yesterday; wild trout.

When I look at the reports all over the intertubes I find other folks are fishing for and catching trout too. But that's not surprising, since conservation organizations like Trout Unlimited have helped to raise conservation awareness and drive positive change.

What's surprising is how effective TU has been in such a short time. When those angling elders first sat around a campfire in Michigan and envisioned a coldwater conservation organization, trout fishing sucked and was in decline. But people across this great country flocked to the TU banner and a bunch of crazy guys went from being a strange voice in the darkness to an organization and then a full fledged movement; The Trout Unlimited Anti-Coldwater Massacre Movement™.

TU created local pods all over the great land to deal with local water quality and fishing issues. In time, a small group of national leaders emerged to knit together resources, share best practices and to help with legal and political issues. And Cold Water™ once again became cold; and water was Clean™.

But that wasn't enough.

These national cats began to think grander thoughts. They thought things like "Perhaps we could make better progress if we did a bit of what our opponents do; marketing and lobbying and spinmeistering"* So, they started "lobbying" and "marketing" to opinion leaders and politicians.

In fact, in 2011 when the oil and gas industry spent $150,000,000 helping to convince law makers that they were the preferred stewards of all the lands, TU overstepped their conservation mandate and fired back with a $280,000 broadside.**

And I know you're thinking what I'm thinking: "Are you fucking kidding me, $280,000?! You really expect to be heard with that paltry sum" "Extractive industries seeking to ruin my fisheries, YOU ARE TOAST!"

The word was out. The influence was peddled.

Not to be outdone, when companies were green lighted by the Supreme Court to give unlimited sums of money to political campaigns to further their goals, TU stuck it to them by releasing aggressively worded press releases, provocative blog posts, and by chopping down the mightiest tree in the forest with... a... herring.***

And the grand marketing machine began to hammer home key messages.

In short order the Pebble Mine issue was on everyone's lips. In fact, a fishing buddy of mine saw my decal on the car last weekend and said "What's a Pebble Mine?"**** That, my friends, is the sweet sound of marketing victory. Congratulations, TU!

Locally we've done some great work protecting, restoring and sustaining our fisheries. Now there's Clean Water™ all over the place despite the fact that our population has grown and development is rampant. The fishing has never been better and should continue to be so for forever.

And now, it's time for TU to once again respond to the up-welling of local voices.

If one believes everything one reads on the internet, as I do, the prevailing winds have shifted:

• TU is on longer a fishing organization.
• National leaders are environmentalists, not conservationists.
• TU's messages are dishonest.
• TU only cares about western issues so that they get to go on hog-seeking jitneys to large western rivers.
• Members are tired of paying for National Staff's weekly pizza lunches.

Those shifting winds coupled with the unmitigated success that is reflected in Cold Water™ and Clean Water Everywhere™ leads me to one, unequivocal and irreconcilable truth:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, BABY!

Good on you, Chris Wood!******

As such, I call for the immediate dissolution of Trout Unlimited as a national movement organization.

The future stewardship and support of the Oil and Gas industry, the Mining industry and the National Cattleman's Beef Association suffice for me and should suffice for local chapters as well.

Thank you, Trout Unlimited. We'll miss you.

Sort of.

BONUS FEATURE

And while we're looking at organizations that really have outworn their welcome, here's a few more.

• Exxon Mobil: Originally a company that gave out dinosaur soaps with every fill-up and was named Esso, now they're distracted by Oil Industry domination. Enough! Move on! You're top dog: $120 billion in revenues, $20 billion in cash on hand. Mission Accomplished! Free soap for every man, woman and child on the planet.
• Apple Computer: Ditto. Crap, $30 billion in cash, an iDevice in everyone's hand. wtf, is next, brain replacements? Steve is dead. Move on already.
• The American Civil Liberties Union: Surely, when the Ku Klux Klan seeks your assistance, your work is done. Good on you, ACLU!
• Walmart: You've killed every small town department store on the planet******* and "forced" us to purchase so much crap from China that we no longer make anything in America. What more is there?

/sarcasm

Notes:

* They also thought "How can we get members to pay for our pepperoni pizza lunch every Thursday".
** The total Environmental Lobby***** spend was $16M in 2011. When you take the 2011 spend of the Oil & Gas lobby at $150M plus the Mining Lobby spend at $32M you find that the Environmental lobby is outspent by more than ten to one just by these two lobbies alone. And I imagine that ranchers and farmers and other lobbying groups spend money ensuring that they will prevail as stewards of the land. Everybody wants to be king.
*** I stole that part about the herring from Monty Python. It isn't true. In fact, they cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a Brook Trout. That isn't true either.

**** True story. He's now better informed.

***** I know, you don't think of TU as an "environmental" group (unless you do) but that's where they're lumped for the purposes of tracking spend on lobbying.

****** Where the hell did TU get the money for an aircraft carrier? And what headwaters stream can they float that thing on? I sense they're getting away from their true mission.
******* I did find one honest-to-god Five and Dime type department store on Stewart Ave. in Roscoe, NY. I expect that now that this cat is out of the bag, Walmart will kill this one too.

Ripley, meet Brown.

"People who claim to own "fishing dogs" are all blinded by love. There's no such thing as a good fishing dog."

- John Gierach

Ripley, meet Brown

Today, I took Ripley fishing for the first time. She'd been in the house for a few days and was a bit stir crazy so she got a walk and I got to fish. Sort of.

I couldn't fish the spot that I wanted to fish. That spot requires a walk across a field liberally strewn with poison ivy. I'm allergic as hell and didn't want my dog covered in the stuff.

So, we hiked a bit and fished a small pool that's been good in the past. 

Ants now look like food to trout because I brought one to hand on a black ant on the second cast. Of course, the next thirty casts yielded nothing. So maybe it was just a fluke. But it should be ant and hopper time very soon.

Ripley was totally disinterested in the splashy fight and even when I brought the fish to hand she still wasn't interested all that much. I had to call her over for a look.

As far as a fishing dog, she wasn't too bad. She did get in the water briefly, but not where I was fishing. Mostly she just hung around staring at me like I was an idiot waving a stick around in the air instead of throwing it so she could retrieve it.

Pot, meet Kettle.

I have a special inventory of bile reserved for private land owners who reserve public waterways for their own use. It's especially vile when they chase off, sue, and otherwise harass those who have a legal right to be on the water. As a wild trout angler, I also find the stocking and feeding of large trout puzzling and sort of not the point.

So when I received an invitation recently to fish such waters, I immediately accepted.

I didn't even take the time to rationalize this decision, it's pure hypocrisy. But the fish are rumored to be big and dumb so that's gotta account for something, doesn't it?

This club is ancient by U.S. standards having been founded in the late 19th century. It's name would not be recognizable to the lay person and nary a peep about it can be found in Google. There's no website. There are no fishing reports ("The fishing today was the same as yesterday, excellent!). The roster of members (I expect wealthy types) cannot be found anywhere. All very discreet in a gentrified sort of way. And the fishing....

I fished the Connetquot Hatchery River a few years ago before it got shut down for whirling disease. The river ran past the hatchery, on the grounds of a former Long Island fish and game club, and they stocked the hell out of it. I hear they're stocking it again though not nearly at the levels of before. Schools of large fish prowled the pools and you stopped counting after you caught fifty fish, which was usually before lunch.It was a Disney experience for trout anglers. This club is sort of like that too.

The club is on a small river. It's about ten feet wide at most points and is classic riffle-run-pool structure though I assume some of the natural structure has been "augmented" or at least maintained. The property is well posted and while you can't float this tiny river I'm reasonably certain that wading it from upstream or downstream would technically be legal. However, their gamekeeper would sick the law upon you and you'd need a good lawyer and a pile of cash to win your day in court.

The club has dozens of beats of Browns, Rainbows and Tigers fed every other day with a hearty diet of pellets. There were six other anglers on a mile of water; a busy day according to the game keeper.

The fishing was very good though my host apologized for it being so poor. In the space of three hours of fishing I hooked at least two dozen fish landing half. The small ones taped out at fourteen inches and the large end being eighteen plus with two hogs broken off. Great fun on a four weight rod.

What's ironic about this stream being managed as Disney is it's also rumored to be a good wild trout stream. Plenty of cold water. Plenty of bugs. But for some, that's not enough which I guess is the point.

I am conflicted by fishing this river.On the one hand this club's limited membership appears to be better stewards of the river than most landowners, especially homeowners. There are great riparian buffers. Access to the river is limited to certain locations to maintain stream banks. The area remains well forested providing good cover from the sun's warming rays. Heck, the quality of the river downstream is likely enhanced by this organization's stewardship.

But is it right?

Should I care?

I'd have to go look up the land records to confirm my suspicions that the club holds no title to the river despite their postings. But let's say for a moment they don't and some court case prevailed upon them to open their waters to anyone who wades in. So now the entire business model of the club collapses and they sell of to a developer so a crop of new homes can appear along the banks with bright green grass mowed straight down to the river bank.

Would we really have won anything?

Tricky stuff, but I'm moving on. It was nice to visit Disney, but I'm returning to my home waters. There's still this trout that lives three trees up from the dead one and I haven't caught him yet.

You must read these guys

This stuff isn't free, it's old school paid for writing. There are two stories in the most recent editions of The Drake and Gray's that I thought were just plain excellent and worth reading.

In the July 2012 Gray' Sporting Journal, read "Beneath the Willow Tree" by Reid Bryant. It's a powerful short essay about an unlikely Massachusetts Brook Trout Stream. "Mine is a landscape of little fish", it opens. Simply fantastic.

The other gem is "The Secret Lives of Salmon and Gangsters" by Chris Hoke in the Spring 2012 issue of The Drake. It's a touching moving nice Fuck it. It's a true story about gangsters and salmon and the hope of redemption. It's good. Read it.

Ode to One Barb

Like Bilbo Baggins, Keith Barton, Singlebarbed author, chemist, and champion brownliner slipped on a ring and disappeared after a terse good-bye this week.

His voice was unique, sometimes bizarre, always entertaining. I'll miss his missives in my inbox each day and look forward to his next experiment.

Ode to One Barb (with links)

Dying experiments are what I first read,

So toxic I'm shocked you're not dead.

    I stayed for the writing

    Which was surprisingly enlightening

Disturbing visions are stuck in my head.

Free Range Dubbing, Yellow Mustard.
Ideal for the Yellow Stone.

Boots

I hate new boots.

I like old boots. They're comfortable. They hold great memories. They communicate that this isn't your first stroll off the pavement.

I generally wear the old ones until they fall apart. A few years ago a buddy who spent a year in the desert convinced me that Danners were the best boots for living in so I gave them a try. I didn't go for the hardcore high-tops that his profession chooses but instead went with a hiking variant. It was a good choice.

For four or five years they've traveled about on every sort of mundane domestic chore as well as a few trips to more spectacular locales. I've hunted in them. Fished in them. Gone to Starbucks for a Frappuccino in them. I've even done some hiking.

They're well worn; an old baseball glove comes to mind. Still watertight. I've gone through several sets of laces. The laces that are currently strung seem too new to abandon. I'll have to find some use for them.

I've given up on this pair because they've finally given up on me. The tread has been worn fairly smooth. Not baby bottom smooth but smooth enough that the parts that need to grip when grip is necessary no longer serve the purpose.

Last winter I got little purchase while shoveling. Thankfully there was little snow. A couple of weeks ago I was walking along a trail and slid down a tricky slope. Only my cat-like reflexes some minor miracle prevented me and my camera from taking a good bounce.

So the new boots were ordered. The same make and model.

Something is different though they sure do look the same. They're lighter.* The leather seems thinner. The tongue is not as robust; though that may actually be an improvement. And I keep tripping myself as I shuffle my feet and the tread actually grips.

I'll be breaking these ones in over the next few weeks. I'll have to go get them muddy, too. I can't show up in Yellowstone with crisp new gear. My feet have walked too far to be thought of as pretenders.

* Which will be helpful in outrunning Rebecca, Chris and Marc when the bear starts chasing us.

Muddy Waters

Not Trout

Overnight rain, sometimes hammering hard on the skylight, was all the proof I needed that small streams would by up and muddy in the morning. As I ran some errands I gathered additional evidence -- the sight of swollen, muddy rivers.

The gauges told me that the large rivers weren't yet up and my gut told me a certain run that Jonny and I fish on the Housatonic River would be wadeable even if the water was coming up. And it held trout.

Black Articulation

A few weeks ago I got it in my head that I needed some articulated streamers so I tied a few. They're no particular pattern. I'm sure they're in Kelly Galloup's pattern book somewhere; a Circus Peanut coupled with a Sculpin mixed with a few random pieces on my fly desk. I tied three, one each in Yellow, Olive and Black.

I had some luck last fall fishing streamers. It was one of those days when things just worked better than one has a right to expect. Yellow is a great color for the Housy whether it's stonefly nymphs or streamers and yellow streamers were the key to that day. It's a day that planted a streamer fishing bug in my brain and I've been doing a whole lot more recently.

Zebra Caddis

When I first got to the water, there were mostly Zebra Caddis on the vegetation stream side with a smattering of  small tan caddis. As I walked downstream the Zebras petered out and the were tons of the tans ones swirling crazily in the air every time I approached a bush. I looked to the water and so nothing coming off. Maybe these were yesterday's hatches though the birds were on the water so something was happening.

I was disappointed at the color of the water. The drive to this spot required my to follow the river for several miles and I had convinced myself in those ten minutes that the color I was seeing was not in fact chocolate milk. But then standing knee deep in the chocolate milk I couldn't see my boots. This was going to be a challenge.

I had strung to rods so I leaned the nymph rig against a tree and waded out to start swinging and stripping streamers. Black was first at bat and got a good hit and brief tussle a couple casts in but nothing after that. Yellow was next and on the first cast was hopelessly lost to some unseen obstacle. Which left green which fared even more poorly than black. No doubt visibility was helping but the fish may just have been off streamers so I waded ashore, walked back upstream and changed games.

Also not a trout.

A #8 Yellow Stonefly Nymph was on point with a #14 Zug Bug dropper -- the dropper was the first to score bringing to net an energetic Fallfish. It wasn't a trout but it was a tug on the line.

The rhythm that is indicator nymphing then took over. Step. Cast. Rinse and repeat.

It's during the not catching part of trips that the mind usually wanders to appreciate the other things that are going on. Streamer fishing is an especially good time for this sort of daydreaming and observation because the fish usually hook themselves. Nymphing on a tight line can also give one the opportunity to watch a Blue Heron ply the angle upstream while attempting to find fish yourself. Of course this sort of daydreaming can lead to what is commonly referred to as "not fishing" or "standing in the water looking like an idiot".

After a bit of tedious casting and no additional tugs I amped up the weight on the leader and swapped out the dropper to a Lightning Bug. The weight seemed to do the trick. The trout began to see the Yellow Stonefly and come to hand.

Trout that cannot be still for a photograph

Fighting and landing fish in muddied water is kind of like catching at night. You can't see the fish. You can barely keep track of where the leader is. The fight is done very close at hand because the fish can't see you. It's all very strange when this happens during the day, but that's the effect of the muddied water, all the fish were fought inside a rod's length and I didn't see them until just before netting.

Making a mess of my lens

A handful of Browns were tricked to the net before the light began to fade. Around 7 p.m. it became noticeably darker as storm clouds pressed low. Sunset was still a few hours off but I began to feel like it was time to go.

But then I saw the spinners. And I saw a few trout rising. And I tied on a #14 Rusty Spinner and had a go. Two more to the net including one surprise that came to the fly after the fish I was casting to missed the fly. That was very satisfying; a runner up, if you will, but no less satisfying.

Quitting the water before dark felt like I was leaving the dinner table before dessert. Instead of stripping off the waders I went upstream to a popular dry fly spot to see if maybe there was a better spinner fall. The short drive informed me only that I had wasted ten minutes as all the anglers at this spot were standing on the bank commiserating about the awful day of catching.

We exchanged greetings. "A couple" was my answer to the obvious question. We all watched the water hoping for something to happen and dispersed rather quickly when it didn't.

I was pretty pleased that through the mud I was able to find something in the arsenal to work a trick or two. Sometimes its persistence and creativity. Sometimes its knowledge of the particular body of water; intel gathered from someone in the know is equally good. Saturday was a combination of the above plus a bit of luck. And I'll take that any day.

An exciting evening

This evening the Outdoor Blogger Network selected the winners of their 2012 Blogger Tour. Marc and I won! I'm still stunned.

You can read Marc's entry, A Dark Form in the Land of Dreams as well as mine.

Not Quite Solstice

Under the Bridge Trout

Memorial Day weekend is the official start of summer but unless the weather is right it can feel like just another dreary spring weekend. Yesterday it felt like August; hot sticky dead air with the chance of a thunderstorm in the afternoon. Today it's sunnier, bordering on sunny, and tomorrow we may have actual blue skies. I suppose that'll mean despite what the solstice says, summer will be underway.

The hot muggy air got me interested in some summer fishing. After a late afternoon nap, required due to a combination of August-like doldrums and a day spent working outside, I threw on some shorts and Tevas and went to wet wade a small stream near the house.

The stream was a bit warmer than I expected even though I had optimistically worn sandals. Even though this water is heavily shaded it can't escape the warming effect of eighty plus degree air temperatures. Hopefully the weather will return to something more seasonable soon.

I walked by lots of good water figuring I'd start at a small pool I've fished often and work back to the car.

Grayling Bait

I hadn't fished this lower section of the river in quite some time. Last year fallen trees from the freak October snow storm put many trunks across the river altering its course and creating a casting nightmare. Fortunately, the floods that came later in the year had pushed most of those trees against the bank creating something fishable though unfamiliar.

The catching was regular in that way you like it to be. I started with a large Parachute Adams with a Caddis dropper. The Adams was something like an #8 or a #10; much larger than anything I normally tie or cast. I think it's the fly I used up in Alaska last September to catch Grayling. This one should be on the shelf in the fly box of "special" flies but right now it has a purpose.


The first trout, a thick Brown that had signs of this year's stocking, came to the Adams on a far seam. He swirled once and missed and came right back and nailed it. Compared to the wild fish in the stream he had weight and spunk; likely a migrant from downstream.

Immigrant Trout

The next thirty yards of water is a tangle of beached and submerged trees. Some show new growth even though they're horizontal. I'm sure that mess of unhewn lumber has some deep hiding holes buried within. I considered dappling a dry in some of the refrigerator sized breaks in the branches but knew I'd need thirty pound mono to drag any trout that hit away from the root balls.

There must be trout in there. That yellow rope is now in my trash can.

I moved on.

There's a thin riffle and then a slow pool with a shallow bend. Mountain Laurel and various shrubs overhang the far bank and that's where the fish rise. I spooked the first one I cast to but the second took the caddis dropper readily. There was one fish rising in a particularly tough spot but I had no cast that could entice him.

Fooled by the Caddis

Up near the head of the pool another Brown came to hand and that's the end of the fishy water for a bit. Crossing over to the far bank I waded up to the head of a long, sandy run. I hadn't caught a fish there before on account of I hadn't fished it. It's right under a highway bridge and it's a spot that just doesn't make me feel the trout fishing mojo.

But I'd heard it's fishy, so I gave it a shot.

A place where trout live.

By now five or six Browns had mouthed the Adams that countless Graylings had smashed last year. It was coming apart. I swapped it out for a small Stimi and went to work. I had one fish on briefly on the near seam but was rewarded shortly thereafter by a confident strike - bridge trout to the net!

It was a satisfying hour or two. Enough trout on the top to make the stalk exciting. I was wet. I was muddy from crawling along the banks. I had a bag full of streamside trash I had collected. And the net was slimy with trout.

I had to walk by a few holes that I frequent on the way back to the car. Sure they tempted me, but for now I was good.

At home I put the Adams, tattered and unraveling, in the box on the shelf with the other memories. The special memories of Grayling on the tundra had been further sweetened by Brown Trout in a suburban stream.

Funky, Big Fungus

------------------------
This was my Memorial Day weekend fishing. By Monday night I had been laid low by illness. Fortunately I was well enough by Saturday to drive up to the Housatonic. Look for that report in the next day or two.

Good bills and Bad bills

I know I took a class where they talked about the process of a bill becoming a law. I also learned how all the stuff that gets attached to bills and laws as fat cat legislators bring pork back to their constituents and, in some cases, line their own pockets. I guess the process works, but it's the proverbial sausage factory.

I recently learned that the Farm Bill contains a whole bunch of good conservation stuff. While it's good stuff, it's wholly unrelated to the actual purpose of the Farm Bill -- agriculture policy (code words for agriculture subsidies). I guess we should take the good stuff where we can find it, even if that's between the corn and the wheat. By the way, given the tight times, conservation provisions in the Farm Bill are on the chopping block. Adding your voice to support those provisions would be helpful.

There's other stuff packed into laws that makes no sense either but in a more evil way. For example, the Sportsmen's* Heritage Act of 2012 is about ensuring that public lands stay open to hunters, anglers and outdoor enthusiasts, right?

Well, sort of.

At it's heart is does just that. But that's not why this bill is important.

The reason this bill is important is because it's important to the Energy Industry. One of the key provisions of the bill is opening up roadless areas to sportsmenpersons and their wheeled vehicles. But the language also opens the door for wheeled vehicles with drilling rigs on them as well. The Sportsmenperson has become the patsy of the Energy Industry.

This really isn't about sportsmen. It's about natural gas and oil producers.

You should probably write your legislator about that one too.






* Obviously written by rich, white guys wearing suits, sitting in a city. Don't they read the blogs of all the woman anglers and huntresses (I couldn't resist)