Wade's Anglin' CV

“Perfect” loses meaning when paired with a subjective instance. A book can always have been written better, a better cooked pasta, etc.,.

This fish bucked the precedent, however, existing as a better example of Perfect than I could have previously entertained.

Annual fires turned the summer evening hazel, then pink, then crimson. Fifteen minutes later I’d witness a Bull trout, pushing three honest feet, meander upstream while sipping midges.

A few weeks later I watched a Chinook anxiously spend a few hours running to an impregnable log-jam a football field upstream, then return to the deepest pool to rest beneath a rock. Eventually instinct commanded that he should move downstream in an attempt to find another route. His wake halved the river.

I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of husks lining slate walls and knew I'd just missed something spectacular.

No fish has any business being this resplendent. Spawning Brook trout look as though they’re carved from bone and sunlight.

Having felt their energetic takes and dogged fight, I better understand Lee Wulff's pilgrimages to Labrador.

A planted species in a man-made lake: normally I'd find this situation unappealing but sightfishing with leeches for 18 inch cutthroat is a rare treat.

Kool-aid, unforunately, comes in attractor or coastal colors only (lime greens, pinks, oranges,etc.,..). I've been unable to mix a decent olive or tan from "Sharkleberry Fin" or "Aguas Frescas Kamaica Drink."

A beaver-pond is the perfect place in which to rinse off skunk. These fish rarely broached a foot, a select few broke 8 inches, yet would always rise to a beetle, even when snow melted across their pond.

Without the possibility of a large fish the act of fishing adopts a calmer identity.

"Ah, so you’re a 'Bull Guy'" the employee said with equal measure of amusement and surprise. "Bull Guy" is a burgeoning sub-genre of good-fer-nuthin' made possible by decades of conservation work which has boosted the Bull trout’s numbers. Spend enough time on the water and you're bound to develop a few favorite species, even if the affair is fleeting; these favorites need not necessarily be a product of the particulars of the fish but may be informed by the environment harboring it.

Trout bums take to solitude and mountains better than their bass chasing cousins. The subspecies "Cutthroat Bums" are at home in high altitudes and are spurned on by the hikes required to reach those high places. Whereas “Steelie Bums” have a penchant for the smell of salt and sense of eternity flowing around their legs. "Bull Guys," as best as I can yet describe, are motivated by the possibility that they may be the first to see a three foot charr in a particular river for over a century.

Headwaters: the great equalizer.

Fishing headwaters, perhaps and hopefully miles from the nearest person, is the only way for a non-commital bum to escape the grasp of the Anthropocene.

A Missouri- Fly Fishing-Theme Park brown. The river was made for trout-spey.

A mountain fish recovers and poses.

I've never been fond of Hero shots, taken with a wide angle lens that distorts the fish beyond a design that could ever function in nature. However, while this portly Brook trout flailed in my net, and as my attention focused down further the level of scales, I was compelled by its gruesome maw. Pins to me, the teeth that lined its lips had eviscerated thousands of smaller fish. I wanted to capture its monstrous role in this small, channel ecosystem.

The salmon hadn’t been stocked for about eight years when this shot was taken.
I’ve met anglers in three states who’ve claimed the fish could reach three feet in length. Only one angler claimed to have landed one, a feat he claimed necessitated the use of a wooden canoe.

The poor, old man. I would catch him again having hooked him once before.

There's a town at the end of a western highway; an hour's drive through canyon-land ends at a trailhead, whose trail snakes in parallel to a shallow, freestone river that lacks soft-water; ten miles upriver alongside this river that holds no trout the water has cleaved hundred foot tall boulders.

The pools created by these fissures house some whitefish and many impressively sized charr.

These fish were the apex predators of such rivers, spanning the pacific drainages, inland as far as western Montana, through Nevada to California's Bay Area where they were given the name "Dolly Varden." They were exterminated in 90% of their historical territory.

However, unlike the disappearance of the terrestrial charismatic mega-fauna, when these fish were extirpated they were erased in the collective consciousness, too.

The Bull trout's caricature isn't found on ball caps or bumper stickers. They're the U.S.'s lost, great beast. Considering their continuous, tenuous existence seems dependent on their forgotten status, one hopes they remain the local and purist's best kept secret.

"Beluga Joe" was a third larger than his pod-mates. And though my jig-headed streamer's outline was apparent in the depths, I'd missed an exploratory bite from a 30 incher the previous morning. I set the hook hard when I saw Joe turn toward my fly. He reacted little and then ambled upstream to the depths, where he broke the line off on a cavern wall.

A week later I hooked him on a stonefly pattern. After netting him, I saw what looked like fungal growth but turned out to be my zonker streamer lodged in his left pectoral fin. Two weeks later I caught him for a third time while fishing during a rare July rain. He'd just begun spawning and began to show wear.

I'll wait a few years before casting into Joe's stretch again.

As beautiful of a sight this is, the lake holds brook trout only and sits 10k above the sea. It's not a hike I'm eager to make again.

“Nature meets all of creation with a level stare.”

-Thomas McGuane

A Portuguese carp, 3 hours outside of Lisbon. The trip was taken on a lark. Spurned by north European winter winds, a friend and I thought it best to ship off for largemouth bass and port wine. The bass remained unseen but the port wine paired well with carp (caught but not eaten).

My first steelhead and the last I’ll catch far from salt.

Hitler’s grave is a car-park near the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, both of which are a few blocks from the Reichstag. It was explained to me that the powers-that-be didn’t want to dignify the grave with a prominent edifice, something that could act as a memorial. Many ex-Nazi and GDR buildings have been retrofitted to accommodate Burger Kings and office buildings, etc.,.

Now, bucolic forest-land once used to train dictators’ armies has been returned to the trout and the dilettantes who chase them.

My last German pike.

The fun had tying for pike is rivaled only by tying for steelhead.

Even when photographing, my focus isn't photography; this shot was afforded by an overheating engine and approaching storm.

If I were heading a stocking program, this fish would be my prize buck.
I’d never seen a non- spawning rainbow brandish such color nor be so muscled. This fish, caught near the hinterland on a stretch too far from any lake for this fish to have hailed, had likely grown to such a size picking off the flourishing Brook trout.

I consider him an honorary Steelhead.

This is the essence of the “poetical bullshit” anglers gawk at when the fishin’s slow.

I learnt to cast and set a hook via panfish, and am forever grateful to these fish for the education.

A McCloud river rainbow in Montana. The river, according to a biologist whose opinion I’m inclined to believe, houses two strains of Rainbow trout. The darker, well muscled fish with large heads hail from the Lost Coast, who, if given the chance, would run and return sometimes in excess of twenty pounds.

This is the first stretch in which I wet a line in Oregon. Moments after hiking in and peering into the water, a flash belonging to a fish no less than 30 inches long erupted from below. Hope prompted thoughts of steelhead but this was November and so likely belonged to a chinook who, by this point in their journey, were unlikely to take a fly.