fishing lesson...

it all happens below the surface.
I prefer the dry fly, I prefer to fish
for trouts that are rising, trouts
that are willing to make that risk
to come out and play.

Sportsmanship,
or something.

I'm not a fan of fishing subsurface,
partially cuz I'm not that good at
it. And also because it feels like
an invasion of their world at times.
(there's a good essay by Lee Wulff
about 'trout sanctuary' out there
that I recently found out about...)

But, if you're jonesin' to feel that
spirited fight at the of the line,
it's sometimes the way to go.

Nyphin' is hard, flows of water are
three dimensional. On the surface
you're basically working on a 2D plane.
And you can see what's going on,
dealing w/ eddies, seams, upwelling
swells and such to put that fly in just
the right spot with just enough puddled
tippet to get a drag free drift across
your quarry's lie. It's such an addictive,
intricate challenge.

But go under the surface and it gets
even tougher. The density of the water
refracts your sightline, top surface
currents flow faster than those below.
Your fly line interacts with the surface
and affects the natural tumbling along
of the nymph down below.

You also just don't know if you're
presenting the fly in the correct lane
since you really can't see shit. At least
until you hook that fish...

So that's my little Friday
evening treatise on the
challenge of flowing water.

Now, think about this catastrophe we've
created down in the Gulf. I just read more
about the oil that is erupting out the seabed.
They say it's like a cone, one mile tall and
two miles in diameter. Really?

~~BULLSHIT~~

There is no fucking way in hell that thing
is a homogenously contained cone shaped
spill. Go Here: The Great Beyond
read about the Plume. The ocean is not
some simple standing body of water,
where the oil will just float up through
this magical public relations cone. It's
three dimensional, just like a stream.


They think there's oil 'settling' in a layer
2-300 meters above the floor of the sea.
They're also finding this other 'plume'
what, 1000m below the surface? And
who knows what the fuck is happening
in between? That nice tidy cone that they
want you to envision is being ripped
apart by those deep currents, shears &
seams, down & upwellings.

HUDGE volumes of oil won't, can't, make it
immediately to the surface. That's just plain
common sense. And those 'dispersents,'
does anybody really know anything about
that shit? So, it's being injected at the source,
which makes it easier to disperse throughout
all of those sub currents?

great.

The question is what path will it take?
How many ecosystems will it destroy
along the way? Will we still be finding
upwellings of oil from this for years
to come in the most unthought of
places? Could we have just totally
fucked the entire Atlantic, if not beyond?

Oil is death. It is because of massive
death that it exists. It's only logical
that by unleashing those energies,
we've fucked ourselves, all of that
ugliness was buried so deep for a
reason. Mother Earth will heal, I have
faith in that, but I doubt anything
that we consider 'human' will be
around to see it. She's probably
had about enough of our shit by now..