Things You Should Check Out, Japan Outdoors

     Having begun a Japanese language version of ASO I think it's time to feature a little bit of the Japanese outdoors. Here are a few links to some hunting, fishing, and dog trialling pages I've come across. Take a peek at at what Japan has to offer the outdoorsman.

     There are quite a few retriever enthusiasts in Japan. Here is a link to the Gundog retriever Trial Association.

     Like big game hunting? Lots of deer, bear, and boar in Japan, as well as pheasant, and ducks. Take a look at the Hokkaido Hunting Guide Facebook group. I think you'll be impressed.

     There are plenty of trout streams in japan, too. Flyfishing Club is a Facebook group that I think you'll enjoy. It's made me want to fish again.

     For you foodies, the Hunting, Butchering, and Enjoying Delicious Meat Group Facebook page will have your mouth watering in minutes.

     You can also check out the Virtuovice YouTube channel. This channel has a many knife reviews, sharpening tips, field dressing and butchering tips, and some real good deer hunting footage. Oh yeah, much of it is in English, too.

So, if you're interested in learning a bit about the outdoors in Japan, Check them out.

日本語版はこちら

Ahab, You Complete Me.

     At the risk of getting all highbrow, I recently tapped into some really instinctual parts of myself while putting my entire life behind me and setting my priorities on the Rangeley Lakes region of Maine.  In the end, I couldn’t help my mind from steering its way toward a book, more so to the ideas it was created to give voice to, that once kept me holed up in a hotel room reading it for the first time while I should have been immersing myself in everything a wedding in Las Vegas means.  Some passages from that book kept popping into my head while I was in the car for hours on-end driving back to the rat-race accounting for a goal well met, a few things that suddenly made more sense than they used to, and some unfinished business.

     “Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

     Yep, Melville, thou art quite right, at least when it comes to this crusty Bostonian who gets his back up every time his car is towed or ticketed, and he  endures every imaginable SNAFU that city-folk have mythologized the way apple pie is to normal people.  In deference to a deeply ingrained part of myself that gets just as annoyed as everybody else when people start quoting classics, I’ll just leave that one bread-crumb behind and let you figure out what book has laid more metaphysical eggs than I thought it had in my soul if you care.

     As I closed in on my destination, the Kennebago River was pointing the way alongside the road.  I had never seen it for myself and when there was a nice stretch of pavement without curves or other cars, I would undress it with my eyes for way longer than was safe at high speed.  In the fall, this is some hallowed ground, I would learn in only a few short hours, but my innocent heart was already thinking, “Fuck the hotel, I can sleep in my car tonight, there’s got to be some absolute pigs holding alongside these undercut banks, in these spacious nests of boulders, and where all of these riffles lay their tongues out into languid reaches of calm, deep, dark water.”

     Another voice won out (pretty sure it wore an eye-patch), though, and I held tight to the keel until I hit Rangeley, checked myself in, ditched a few things in the room, and set out for an evening hatch, somewhere, anywhere.  Mishaps, misunderstandings, some stand-offish natives, and possible car-stranding-ruin-your-trip dirt-roads landed me on some pretty famous trout water a couple hours before dusk.  I fished angrily, so the catches were small, naïve brookies and salmon, but once I chilled out, and actually pulled my head out of my behind mayflies were swarming/mating in the air all around me.  If I had more than a slim chance of finding my way out of there in the dark, I’d have gotten up on a classic March-Brown spinner fall!

     At what felt like zero-dark-thirty the next day, I met up with the first guide I have ever hired in my entire life. Gone forever are the days where I fritter away the first few days on a new watershed feeling around in the dark if I have anything to do with it. Normal reality involves long, unpredictable hours of stressful work with only my wits to ensure that the wallet stays fat, so I’m happy to line the pockets of somebody whose daily bread depends on how well attuned they are to their ecosystem.  Shit, at the end of the day, I want people like my guide to exist in every ecosystem everywhere in the world, because they are the first line of defense when some possible-bad-actor-of-the-future decides to turn an ecosystem into cash. I want stake-holders, vigilant and invested, armed with the required resources to stop it while the rest of the world merrily ruins everything else where it’s already too late.

     He led me across a river that isn’t exactly a secret, but I’m not about to be “that guy” either.  We got some nice face-full-o-spider-webs along a path that was travelled, but not daily, and not exclusively by people.  He put me on one of the few places the river flattens out, and we had a heart-breaking stretch of highly-oxygenated, cold water, with a strong flow filled with fish all to ourselves.  He rigged me up the way he wanted, and I was, literally, a good sport about it.  I got a nice brookie in comparison to what I was used to right away.  Once that fish was happily home (this river is fly-fishing only, barbless-hooks, catch-and-release regulated) I had another on.  Soon we had one in the net that I felt required photographic representation.  A few minutes later we had one in the net that dwarfed it.  The fishing just kept on being awesome, then we got hungry, fished more, bounced around some, then we got tired, and the day was over.  That dude was Santa!

     I could go on forever, but in the interest of brevity:

     When you straddle a rotting deer corpse to hook a fish that just does what it pleases, rips off line over-and-over like you aren’t even there, wraps you around a boulder, and leaves you cursing yourself chest-deep in rapids while you demolish the loop-connector on your fly-line ripping the rig loose, that’s actually a fantastic series of bad events to have experienced.  You will wonder until the day you die why it didn’t even occur to you to tighten your drag down a few clicks, but then you will remember that you’re basically a chimpanzee and sometimes life puts you in a place where reason is subject to more fundamental urges.

     You may think of yourself as overweight and washed-up from day-to-day, but when you hook a giant salmon, and it leaps four feet out the water to show you how big and strong it is before it zips off with your 5x tippet downstream into a quarter-mile of uninterrupted rapids, you’ll figure out 200 yards later, when it’s all done in a patch of calm water the size of your desk, that you can still hop across raging torrents only touching the exposed tips of boulders with yesteryear’s agility, you can fall flat on your face against piles of granite and still keep the fish hooked, you can shove the badass prima-donna of a fly-rod that nobody else gets to touch under the sweeping boughs of streamside trees, and emerge bloody, bruised, but victorious!  After all of that commotion you carefully nurse the fish in slow water until it is strong and ready, then set it free….

     Back at the ponderosa with moths swarming about the few bulbs, bullfrogs crying into the void for love, geese, foxes, and god know what else making a song in the night the same as it ever was, it’s a place you can go to sleep and not care too much whether you ever wake up.

     I’m going back.  If you happen to see the remains of a fisherman lashed by the tangle of a million broken-off flies to the side of a giant brookie right before it crushes your dreams and swims away into the darkness, those are mine, and you found your way to my spot.

 

 

** ASO Prostaffer GW , our resident trout bum, lost his mind in the Rangeley area. And I'm happy for him



Trout camp '14

      "Freeze your knees" is what they call it up north. I'm talking about trout fishing the northern reaches of the Connecticut river where it flows out of Lake francis, and the areas between the lakes. The wilderness is pristine, and the water sufficiently cold. Brook Trout were the main course, a pleasant departure from the many local rainbows. Pretty, adult sized Brookies, not the little pint sized Brookies found around here. The fishing, quite honestly, wasn't very good. But when you're as far north as we were, nothing really suckes, either. We'll be back, and BK and I even had a little chat about heading up for a little cast-n-blast in early October when the beginning of grouse season overlaps the end of trout season.

英語版はこちら

Complimentary Catch and Release Tips; GW Speaks Out.

 Complimentary Catch and Release Tips:

I took a trip to the headwaters of the Connecticut River recently. I naively yearn for fishing locations where I have to bushwhack my way to the water with a machete, but I’m not alone in my love for fishing, and the world is such an overpopulated mess that I can walk up and down well-worn paths along both sides of any river that still has fish in it and be happy while my idealism slowly dies.

One morning I got down to the stretch of river between Lake Francis and Third CT Lake.  It was pretty crowded… Every one of the real fishy spots had a guy in waders standing in it.  This is not a big whoop, by the way, those other hearty souls have every bit as much of a right to be on that river as I do.  I should have gotten my ass over there earlier if I didn’t want to hike farther into the river system than anybody with any sense wanted to in order to find myself a nice patch of fish-holding sweetness that hadn’t had 50 years of daily beatings.

I got down to a nice hole that I’ve had success and failure in before, but there was a guy there already.  As I made my feet fall softly and moved slowly among the ferns by his pool, he hooked a fish and had it ready to net.  This is where the shit-show started and a lifetime of sadness and anger boiled up inside me.  Instead of bending down and netting the fish while it remained in the water, he lifted it out of the water with his line and started trying to catch a bouncing fish in the net from mid-air like it was a toy.  The fish was wiggling like crazy and his first few attempts failed to catch the fish in the net, but he did give the suffocating, horrified fish a good beating with his net.  Once he grabbed the fish against his chest with a dry hand and tore the hook out of its mouth by yanking on the tippet and he squirted the fish back into the water like you would a bar of soap in the shower if you were seven years old and having a bit of fun.

He was a friendly enough guy.  I talked to him for a little while even though in my heart-of-hearts I kind of wanted to beat him with my net, but I kept an eye on the water close to us while pleasantries passed between us.  There was a little eddy about 5 feet away, and sure enough, belly-up for the entire world to see, our recently deceased trout was swirling around in there.  I pointed with my rod-tip and said, “Hey look, there’s a dead fish, I wonder what happened.”

He said, “Whoa, he looks like a good fish too!”

I just wanted to fish, so even though my innards, on every level, coiled like a snake, I blew it off and didn’t press the issue any further because the river already had its corpse for one day. There was nothing I could do to help the fish, and I figure crayfish have got to eat too, so I just hopped from boulder to boulder downstream thinking about the great circle of life and all of that.  One thing I can do after the fact though is contemplate a few finer points of releasing a fish that you don’t intend to kill, bring home, and share from a generous heart.

1.       A trout that’s out of the water for more than 30-45 seconds is going to croak whether you put it back in the water or not.  Scientists have studied this shit.  Science is not a vast political conspiracy. This is going to vary from species to species and between individual fish, but that’s roughly how long you’ve got to free the hook, get the trout back underwater, and hold it there until it swims off under its own power to go be a trout in peace.  I have gotten into the habit of holding my breath while I take a fish off the hook.  While I’m doing my best to free the terrified creature, if I feel like I need to breathe, odds are that the fish does too, so I’ll give up if I haven’t gotten the hook out and submerge the fish for a little while so it can regain its strength before I try again.  Oh, and the clock started ticking while you were swinging the fish around trying to net it in midair, you fucking retard.

2.       If you had your fun catching the fish and want to let it live to fight another day, wet your hands before you touch it for the love of all things holy.  The slime that coats a trout’s entire body, the one that’s a total pain to clean off when you are preparing a fish you want to cook… it’s part and parcel of the fish’s immune system.  That slimy coating keeps molds and other infections from taking root on the fish’s skin, considering that it occupies a rather moist environment, and it will replenish itself if only a small amount is wiped off.  If your net has a giant slimy spot left in it once you let the fish go because you were squeezing the fuck out of it with a dry hand, that fish is going get sick and die a prolonged, agonizing death that you bear responsibility for.

3.       That beautiful trout that you have decided to benevolently release into the stream just spent the last few minutes fighting for its life.  It had no way of knowing that you weren’t going to kill it, so it just spent every, last molecule of its being trying to escape from the alien abduction we call catch-and-release fishing. You were able to net it in the first place because it gave everything it had and is near death.  What you are supposed to do is hold the fish’s tail in one hand and cradle its belly in the other. .. Holding it right-side-up, you move it gently back and forth in the water until it regains its strength and swims off on its own once it has recuperated.  If you are particularly attentive, you will observe bubbles escaping from its gill-plates which means that said gills are finally covered in water again and the fish is breathing healthily. I don’t give a fuck if the water’s cold and it makes your hands numb, which is going to happen because trout tend toward cold-water environments, wait for the fish to leave on its own.  If you just toss it in the water like some piece of shit you don’t care about, it’s too tired to swim and it’s going to drown, which will fuck your holistic idea of harmless fun into a thousand pieces as the trout suffocates in the very environment it is meant be breathe comfortably in.

If you fuck one of these basics up, the fish will be lucky to survive, but if you fuck all three of them up the fish will be dead before the next piss you take, and some stranger might happen by to know you for the asshole you don’t think of yourself as.

 I have no problem with taking a fish, by the way, when it is done with purpose.  This isn’t one of those elitist rants that fly back and forth between fly-fishermen, power-bait people, and live-bait sportsmen that makes by behind pucker up.  The only people on this stretch of river are fly-fisherman per-regulation…  A fisherman can keep fish within clearly defined limits, if they so desire. When I imagine myself as a man who is two inches long swimming across a clear pool of water, I doubt a trout would think too hard before it swallowed me entirely so they and I are in a karmic balance. Fair is fair, that’s the entire idea of catch-and-release, but it’s a twist on nature’s eternal conflict because human’s can show compassion in a way that is rare in other animals when we feel like it.  If you intend to bring game home from the out-set and survive based on the product of your hard work, I commend you; you have struck a blow against all of the forces in society trying to control you and mutating your food supply while they’re at it.

With all of that being said, I’m pleading to my fellows to make a decision about what you’re going to do with your catch before you even go to the river, choose your weapon, and land a fish. Stand by your decision like a man.  If you are going to let your fish go once you have held it in your hands, make sure the thing’s going to survive if you have already decided not use it to further your mortal coil.  Commit.  Take responsibility.   I can guarantee if you’re cutting corners with your catch and release, you’re cutting other corners in your world that damage everything you touch. If you’re going to shine one shoe, shine them both.  If you’re going to make a woman pregnant, be the best father you can be even if it wasn’t what you planned on before you started fucking.  If you bring shit home from the grocery store, eat it before it goes bad.  Don’t be lazy, wasteful, and ignorant while you turn an otherwise good world into shit one act of carelessness at a time.  If you can button things up with whatever your quarry may be and bring reasonable care, commitment, and compassion into the rest of your world, I’m betting things are going to start looking better and better for you across the board. You will be a complete person and the world will be your oyster. I’m doing it, and if you do it too, maybe someday the first thing I see when I get back to Boston won’t be a homeless crack-head begging for change by the highway… Think about it.

 

As I'm sure you can tell, GW is passionate about his fishing. Oh yeah! He's outspoken, too. Salty as GW may be, he's right. Please take a minute and consider your technique when handling fish and other game.

Streamside With GW; Calling It Like It Is.

     I thought I knew this river. Like so many things in life, be they women, wine, authors, or friends, I knew one side of it, and was surprised when I saw something unexpected in front of me later. I have fished it before, upstream a bit where the fishery is heavily managed to the point where pieces of railroad tie divert it and give cover to the fish.  Until recently I considered this river a theme park for trout fisherman, and I have grappled with the identity of the river as a place where old fisherman come to catch fish they have names for and a place where inexperienced people can come to fly-fish, perchance casting their lines across each other. I have plenty of opportunities to punch rude people in Boston, so I have avoided it since the first time I fished there in a pair of rubber clamming waders.

     I soothed the urgency of winter early one spring with a white-knuckle trip during a warming trend that I thought for sure would bring off a hatch.  The pretty day I planned on turned out to be not-so-pretty and climaxed with a light flurry… all but a short stretch of the same river was frozen bank-to-bank except for where I stopped, threw my gear on, and fished anyway.  While I was standing in a river that by all rights should have been skated upon, with dudes whizzing by 100 yards behind me on snow-mobiles, and making fists around my rod-guides to melt away the ice, I caught the finest brown trout of my life that day after ignoring no less than a half-dozen good reasons to bag on the entire trip. Tell your boys not to pass on a girl who isn’t so pretty in high school, she may just turn into a gem later.

     In between the upper part of the river and the lower stretch where I caught that beautiful brown, there is a meandering slither where the water goes by icy and smooth as if it were a melted flow of pure diamond so clear that the wavering clumps of vegetation (green, darker green, and brown) could be waving calmly off the backs of the stones in five feet of water or one. Behind the cobbles and in the feeding lanes, the trout are feeding, resting, or pestering each other.  They can see you, and will often post up right behind you and pick food out the plume your wading makes… Don’t hunt these fish, they’re fucking with you.  Drift something audacious instead through the feeding lanes where the less opportunistic trout have fought to make their bread and butter.  A patch of cobble and waving weeds will change into a flash of light and you can tighten your line well.

     You will catch rainbow trout whose heartiness and beauty will break your heart if you can outsmart them; these are educated fish, for the love of all things holy don’t hurt them; throw some stiff wood, bring them up, and thrash them across the surface, into your net, and release them wiser so that they may grow longer, stronger, and fertile. There are some pretty epic browns lurking in the calmer water too, countless wee brookies combing the riffles, and some landlocks that wash over the dam to break your ass off when you are trying to fish light. I am like you; I call bullshit on people who claim to catch 24-inch salmon in a Massachusetts river…. meet in the middle and fish a 5-weight.

     And remember; respect the river. We may be watching.

**Contributed by ASO Pro-Staffer George W.  George is Boston area artist, real estate professional, and an outspoken trout fanatic.

Cliche and Contradiction

     The sport of hunting is filled with stereotypes, and cliches. Why wouldn't it be? Life, and everything we do, suffer at the hands of the unimaginative. Just look at the efforts the animal rights/PETA/ anti-hunting crowd go through to smear our image. The image of blood thirsty, half-drunk -on-moonshine redneck may indeed describe someone we've met before. They may even go out and shoot an animal in the woods on occasion, but they are in no way a "hunter". Of course, those who would have us be such, will never openly admit we're not. Within the sportsman community, we too, tend to look upon each other, and presume, with an I-know-something-you-don't-know-attitude, that we've got the other guy figured out. With a glance, the entire story of another hunter can be figured out instantly. We judge your gun, your dog, your footwear, the brand of clothing you wear, your truck, whatever. We stack it all up, using each piece, each clue, to fit you into a shoebox labeled "cliche".

     We've all met the "cliche" before. You know what I'm talking about. The just stepped out of Gray's Sporting Journal sportsman. The first thing you'll notice is the matching Orvis label on his hat, and shirt. Next you're drawn to the $80 leather lanyard around his neck, and it's $6 whistle. "I'll bet he's got a pointer", is what you're thinking, but you quickly forget that thought when you see the beautiful 16 gauge he's been missing all those clays with on the skeet field. But wait, isn't that a Barbour jacket, and an Orvis hat hanging on the hook in the hallway. Why yes it is. That and a few other things I've added to my collection are part of what creates a contradiction in my sporting life. While it's easy to chuckle at the uber-urban sportsman make over, we've got to admit that sometimes it's nice to have good stuff, stuff that works. A WalMart hunting vest is great, for a while, but sooner or later our needs change.

     Contradictions can be fun, but I'm sure they piss people off too. In many ways I'm probably close to being that well-heeled sporting cliche. Except I'm not well-heeled. Maybe some of my sporting contradictions stem from a bit of insecurity about being "that guy", or maybe they stem from the need, like all sportsman, to have a little one up on the next guy. A quick look and you'll see that I fit the mold in an obvious way.  I shoot a 20 gauge double, over an English Setter, at Ruffed Grouse. This alone pays for my club membership, but that I also like fly fishing in the off season too, really seals the deal. Why? It's cliche; This image of the Brahman, blue blood with his double gun, and perfect oil-on-canvas-setter (which, I have).

     It's the contradiction, however, that keep things fresh. Confusion begins at the gun rack. Though I do shoot a nice double, I own both single barrel, and stack barrel guns too. I've got a rather pedestrian appreciation for guns, however.  The gun rack at grouse camp is in no way of museum quality, but I've a fondness for all the guns I've seen there. Perhaps it's a the memories of the many great camps attached to them, or the many Woodcock appetizers they're responsible for. One such gun  is a Browning BPS. This gun is a grouse killing 20 gauge work horse with 24" barrels and a straight stock. I want one, and think the 12 gauge version would make the perfect jump shooting gun. I  doubt this gun gets dreamt about much on Wall Street.

                                                                                   
     When it comes to dogs I've been known to alienate myself too. Not because I train my own dogs, rather than sending them to a trainer, but because I've been rather outspoken about flushing breeds being more suitable for grouse hunting than pointing dogs. And currently I've got a Setter. Pointing dogs are fun to watch, each with their own highlights. A brace of setters coursing through the woods together really is a beautiful sight. Spend enough time shooting grouse though, and eventually you'll end up shooting over a Spaniel or a Lab, and you'll see a different quality to the grouse flush. True, pointers cover more ground, resulting in more finds, but ultimately shooting over a flusher you'll kill more birds. Though many spaniels are capable of maintaining ones state on the social ladder, I seldom see them being walked on Beacon Hill.

     It's probably my inhumane fly fishing practice that ticks people off the most. I'm not talking about keeping my fish; I release, but my obsession with nymphing. Often viewed as not really fly fishing, I view the nymph as the spaniels of the river, while I view the dry fly as the setters of the river. To make matters worse, I use a strike indicator too. A fuzzy version of a bobber. What can I say? I told you I wasn't well-heeled.

     Setting my contradictions aside, the cookie cutter side of me doesn't always struggle with fitting this mold. Socially, hunting is loosing it's popularity, and many areas in the countryside, where I hunt, are being gentrified. The blaze orange hat doesn't always get you a smile and a wave from the farmer hauling hay. Frequently it brings you a sneer from a Volvo driving soccer mom, who doesn't recognize you, and is a gun control nut. If appearing to be something which makes people more comfortable gets me access to the alder grove running along the back of the pasture, then so be it. Once upon a time gentlemen wore ties while hunting, and in some parts of the country(think Massachusetts), this may have to be the norm again, if only to serve as a distraction. I'm also comfortable knowing that should I ever need the services of an attorney, a stock broker, or a podiatrist,  I can no doubt find one who owns a bird dog.