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Here’s what we found at the boat ramp on Friday morning at Lake Tahoe. Needless to say, we didn’t fish.
The video’s a little dark since it was 6 AM…(and shot on a cheesy point-and-shoot still camera) the clients really, really wanted to fish, so we loaded up and made a 3-hour drive straight from there down to the Delta. Before we left the mountains, however, I shot a couple more photos…
You can read the entire account of this encounter with a sea serpent and see more photos@ www.bloodydecks.com
As you know, I’ve been working with KDH Environmental over the past several weeks to help restore gravel spawning beds for chinook salmon on the Stanislaus River. Things have been going exceptionally well and the 2-mile stretch of river we’ve been on has undergone an amazing transformation. We’re getting close to being finished…here’s a little sneak peak at some of the stuff we’ve been up to.
Here’s a picture of a side channel on the backside of an island before we started cleaning it up:
And here’s what it’s looking like now:
Okay, so it’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of the popular salmon fishing “method” of lining or beading, in which long (10 to 15 feet long) leaders are employed and a small plastic is slid down the leader as a “lure.”
The rig is drifted along the bottom, with just enough lead to keep it moving along with the current. The basic concept here is to drift the leader through the jaws of a salmon and “floss” or snare them.
Lining is legal (legalized snagging) but my big problem with it is that the fish don’t actually bite the bead. They “eat” a liner’s bead the same way you “eat” a bug while riding a motorcycle…in other words, it’s a forced feeding type of situation. To me, that is a direct contradiction of the very essence, the definition, of fishing. In fact, if you look up the official definition of “Angling” in the California Department of Fish & Game’s freshwater fishing regulations booklet, it says that a fish has “to willingly take the lure or bait.”
In addition to the fact that snaring salmon without them having a say in the matter is, to me, unsporting, the long leaders also pose a threat to the river. In high traffic areas, the amount of lost leader line in the river is staggering. All types of critters get snared in this discarded line — otters, birds, fish, and even props.
Take a close look at this little beauty I picked up in my kicker prop. Check out all the beads!
I’m just saying…
As I noted earlier, I’m currently working as a consultant with KDH Environmental on a salmon spawning riffle restoration project.
You can go back and read earlier posts, but in a nutshell here’s the deal: The Stanislaus, because of New Melones, Goodwin and Tulloch dams, doesn’t receive new gravel every winter to replace the stuff that washes out in high water. Because of that, the river’s turned into a gravel-free ditch with little suitable spawning habitat for the river’s wild chinook salmon population, which dwindled down to just a couple hundred fish in the 1990’s.