Trenches? What "trenches?"

Conservation in this day and age is tough. I use the war metaphor at times, but that's pretty obviously over the top. Sometimes the "trenches" of conservation are found in places like middle school classrooms.

I'm proud to work with Jake Duplessie in my local TU chapter. He runs our Trout in the Classroom Project which is a huge success.

Jake got a little recognition for his hard work. Well-deserved recognition for a man who, year after year, organizes meetings, teachers, biologists, fish eggs and much more to ensure that the next generation has a chance at understanding the wonders of piscatorial life.

This is what happens when stop talking and start doing. Nice work, Jake.

Get off thy ass.

A pissing match may be in the offing. Thee antagonist is a good guy, your protagonist the better (it’s my blog, I’m allowed). Your protagonist, however, is a good writer (see previous parenthetical), but thee antagonist is better. All of it raises, for me, a set of questions I’ve struggled with a long time which fall under the heading “The contemplative versus the activist life.”

Others have addressed the subject far more eloquently. Here’s an interview with David James Duncan where he addresses the problem. http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20D%20Vol.%2018.2-21.1/Vol.%2019.2/SumnerDuncan.htm

Mr. Duncan discusses it in more depth in one of his esssays published in “My Life as Told by Water.” If you haven’t read it, shame on you.

I hope thee antagonist reads it and discovers where writing fits. He could follow Mr. Duncan’s example and if he was a quarter as effective, I’d grovel at his feet and sing his praises.

The problem is that, as discussed elsewhere on this blog, I am a flyfisher, a rodmaker, a furniture maker, a father, a soccer coach, and a river activist. In all these endeavors I look for the opportunity to recharge. Fishing fits that bill quite well. When was the last time I was fishing? Can’t really remember. Why is that? Because I’m worried if I don’t choose to live as an activist the fishing won’t exist for long. On the other hand, I worry if I don’t fish, the fishing won’t exist for long and I’ll flat out miss it. How do I resolve these quandaries? Actions speak, I haven’t fished in the state of Idaho since January 1.

Ultimately, working as a river advocate brings its own rewards. I can be righteously indignant at those who don’t do it. I get great information from folks who know I can be trusted with it. I hang out with folks who not only share my passion, but who act on it, day after day (these are good folks). And I go to sleep at night knowing that I’ve at least tried to make my world a better place.

Really, though, it’s the righteous indignation thing.

Get off thy ass and get to work. Our rivers need you.

On Bourbon, Again

I will return to cane rod making shortly. At the moment I am on the road, a few days without the responsibilities of child rearing. This means I can review some more bourbons. Almost all of these that I will discuss are bourbons I've drunk before, but have never before taken the time to try to discuss in detail.

This evening's libation was the venerable Knob Creek. I must have had my first Knob Creek 15 or 20 years ago. I've drunk a glass now and then on many occasions, and I've gotten drunk on a few too many glasses on one or two occasions. I've concluded this Knob Creek will ned a few more tastes over the next couple of days.

For now, I have to describe it as a dry, oaky bourbon. None of the sweet tones I find in the Woodford, but certainly none of the harshness of a Beam or a Tennessee sour mash. More to follow.

In Which I Digress

I need to digress. Call it a bamboo tangent, or perhaps a bambo cosyne, I don’t know what the hell it is, but I've got issues and they involve bamboo.

There’s a shitload of bamboo out there. I mean that. I once filled the back of my full-size chevy truck with cow manure. I know precisely what a shitload is. And there is a shitload of bamboo out there. There are so many species, subspecies, and cultivars of bamboo that I can’t even get an accurate number of just how many there are. The American Bamboo Society lists 420 that are available in the US and Canada. Here’s a little groundtruth, the US and Canada don’t know dick about bamboo. Somebody has written a Wikipedia entry which claims there are 91 genera and over 1,000 species. There are still parts of China, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and other nearby nations where cell phones, satellite TV and the communist government haven’t reached. You won’t convince me that there aren’t even more species of bamboo out there.

So there’s a shitload of different kinds of bamboo out there.

There’s also a shitload of rodmakers. In the last decade or so rodmaking in the U.S. has gone from a relative handful of dudes to 1,000’s. There are even more rodmakers than there are species of bamboo. And we’ve already established there is a shitload of bamboo out there.

All those rodmakers agree on one thing, and probably only one thing. They won’t agree on the best way to split a culm, the best plane (or even the best steel from which to make plane irons), the best finishing method (or finish), whether heat-treating tempers or merely dries the bamboo and son. I can tell you they sure as hell won’t agree on the best music to listen to while working on a rod. But they will agree on one thing, an important thing, one might say the MOST important thing.

They will agree that Arundinaria Amabilis is the only bamboo from which to build a fine cane rod. Read Garrison/Carmichael, Mauer & Elser, Cattanach, Gould, Kreider, anyone you dam well please, and they’ll tell you to build your rod from Arundinaria Amabilis. This piece of wisdom is so well-established that the novice rodmaker assumes it must be the result of extensive testing, years of hard won experience by hundreds of rodmakers who came before us, who experimented, tried different materials, compared the results and ended up at this one, single, universal truth among rodmakers: that only Arundinaria Amabilis will do for your bamboo rod.

When you receive your bamboo from one of the handful of US sources from which it is available, it feels right. The Tonkin Cane or Teastick Cane (two common names for Arundinaria Amabilis) is thick-walled, sturdy, but flexible. When you heft the culm you think “Yes, this is the material that will make me a fine rod.” And you are satisfied that this is so because it feels right, and because everyone you ask will tell you so.

Here’s the dirty little secret of bamboo rodmaking. With the exception of a handful of individual, one-off, totally non-scientific experiments, rodmakers over the decades have engaged in that extensive testing and comparison of exactly TWO of those thousand-plus species of bamboo. And from those extensive tests on TWO species of bamboo they have declared that only the Tonkin cane is suitable for the making of bamboo rods.

In fairness, I must admit that the vast majority of those thousand-plus species are clearly and unquestionably unsuited for the making of split-cane fly rods. Their walls are too thin, or too flexible, or too brittle, or what have you. But even if you assume this is true for 80% of the known species, you have still over 200 species of bamboo to test.

It takes me about 60 hours to build a bamboo fly rod. I don’t have much spare time. The result is that in approximately 6 years I have built 2-1/2 fly rods. I’m not going to experiment with different bamboos. Doing so would take the rest of my life.

This bothers me. I don't know why. Like I said, I have issues, and they involve bamboo.

My name is James. I'm a rodmaker.

I am a rodmaker. That ought to be the opening line at some kind of twelve-step meeting. Let me admit something right up front: there is no good reason to make cane rods. If you value your time at even the lowest rate (let’s say minimum wage), then you can buy exceptional cane rods for less than you can make a mediocre one. When you’re done, you’ll have a rod that is truly unspectacular in all ways but one. That one way in which it is better than any rod you can buy, at any price, is that you built it.

It’s not easy either. If you decide you want to build cane rods you have choices to make. The first is whether to build your tools or buy them. That’s actually kind of a lie, you WILL buy tools. Lots of them. And hard to find ones, too, if, like me, you live in a place where some things are not so easy to find.

I am also a woodworker so I started with a set of substantial tools that made the rest of the process a lot easier. I own a tablesaw, some handplanes, router and bits. So when I made my first rodmaking tools, roughing forms, I was well ahead of the curve. You need two roughing forms, one with a compound angle. That one’s a little tricky. The other with two sides of an equilateral triangle (60 degrees at the bottom). That one is pretty simple on a good tablesaw. Actually they were both pretty simple since I’m pretty decent with a tablesaw.

Then you need a tapered planing form. There is no easy way to build one of these. I jacked around trying to make metal forms before giving up, and building a set from maple. Once this was done I was ready to start planing bamboo.

But the bamboo wasn’t ready to be planed.

First you gotta find the right bamboo. There’s a handful of places to do that. Chances are, none of them are anywhere near where you live. Don’t worry about it. We’re talking bamboo here. Some of the anal retentive types who make cane rods will agonize over the quality of their bamboo. I decided to just relax, it’s bamboo for god’s sake, how much does it matter? I’ve decided not much. Lower grade bamboo might have some ink marks, even some slash marks. 95% of these markings will be removed in the rodmaking process. And if they aren’t, well, it’s proof that you worked with a natural product.

So you built your planing forms, you ordered your cane, you’re ready to start planing bamboo, right? Wrong.

This is the point where you discover you can’t build all of the tools you’ll need and it’s time to break open the checkbook once again.

As you do that (and as you try to scheme ways to avoid admitting to your wife or husband that you're about to spend more money so that you can make something) remember this: there is no good reason to make you own cane rods. You could just go buy a much better one.

If you’re like me, you know this, but you still want one that YOU made. If you share that kind of illness, come back for the next installment.

Irony

This is too much not to comment on.

A few of you who know me know that I am a lawyer. A litigator, in fact. A union and employment litigator to be precise. I am supposed to be in the middle of a trial right now. A fairly straightforward, two-day trial for breach of contract. I woke up this morning with laryngitis. That's right, your favorite blogging trial lawyer can barely speak. I had to croak just to ask the judge to continue the trial to another date. I was actually worried he'd say "no." Judges hate it when you screw up their schedules. I had my associate with me, you might know him as "Pancho." The judge could have just said "Have Pancho try it, he's here." The client didn't want that, I was okay with it but wanted my client to be happy, Pancho was okay with it but also wanted the client to be happy.

A fuckin' lawyer who can't talk. There's about a hundred jokes in that. Feel free.

"Rolling Rocks"

Recent disputes within Trout Unlimited have appeared to pit the money raisers against the folks out in the field doing the work. TU deserves a lot of credit for its enormous success in raising money in recent years. Some folks think it has lost some of its focus, though, and that the money folks are forgetting what makes TU a successful organization: field work. I know that I joined TU because I knew it was an organization of local chapters, and that the chapters focused on stream protection, restoration and enhancement in their own backyards. On any given weekend, hundreds or thousands of volunteers, mostly flyfishermen, are out in the field all over the country taking the many small steps it takes to add up to real conservation.

I got to do a little bit of that today, though mainly I stayed behind the camera. This is the lower end of Alta Harris Creek.

Doesn't look like a Creek does it? It isn't, even when it has water in it. It is a constructed side channel to the Boise River, and you can find more of the story here: Harris Ranch Project

This "creek" wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for grassroots TU volunteers. And it is not a creek yet, but give us another year or two, and 10 cfs will be flowing down this thing regularly. As it does, the "Creek" will provide critical spawning and rearing habitat for wild trout in the Boise River. Getting from where this started (an empty plot of overgrazed floodplain) to where it will end up (a beautiful stretch of riparian paradise) has required and will require more work than anybody but a group of committed conservationists could accomplish. We've raised $300,000 (almost all of it locally), and we've put thousands of volunteer hours into planning, design, surveying, excavation, and planting, planting and more planting. Today was not particularly glamorous work. Here are Andy Brunelle (Treasurer and Past President of theTed Trueblood Chapter of Trout Unlimited)

and Rick Prange (Past President of the Trueblood Chapter and Vice President of Idaho TU) moving hay bales into the channel

We expect water in the channel within a few days, and the bales will back some of it up to saturate the area and encourage the riparian plants that have been and will be placed along the channel.

Here's Andy Brunelle and Steve Clayton of the University of Idaho surveying the area and planning additional volunteer outings.


These guys spent a portion of their Saturday in the sun and heat doing what is right for their local river. They've done that dozens or hundreds of times, and they will do it dozens of times more. Their time, when multiplied by the thousands of guys just like them all over the country is worth more than TU's budget several times over. Not just in the hourly value of their labor, but in what it shows to our kids, our neighbors, our politicians, and everyone who sees it. That labor cannot be replaced with any amount of money. I hope nobody forgets that.

Give a hand to guys like Andy, Rick and Steve. Sportsmen of a quality you will rarely meet.