While the McCloud River is popular enough that the locals sometimes refer to it as the “McCrowd,” there’s no denying the lure of the place. It’s beautiful, and its famous (and gorgeous) trout have been seeded all over the globe, including one of the places I never thought you’d find trout — Costa Rica.
Dave Sherwood writes about catching Central America’s “McCloud” rainbows in the New York Times:
Chacón is a fixture here — and the region’s best source of fishing advice. He discovered the Rio Savegre Valley, and its refreshing climate, on a hunting trip in 1954. A few years later, he came back with his wife and a pig, built a home from hardwood poles and thatched the roof with palm fronds.
With help from a San José fishing club, he later stocked the river with a strain of rainbow trout flown to Costa Rica from the McCloud River in California, hoping to attract fishermen — and provide his family with a self-sustaining source of protein.
Clearly, McCloud redbands travel better than I do, and it’s paradoxical that the fish thrives all around the globe, but is facing real danger in its home range.
In an earlier post I mentioned the CalTrout/Orvis/NFWS program that promises to triple the value of your donation, putting the whole resulting wad of cash behind the McCloud Redband recovery program. If you haven’t yet donated, consider this your kick in the pants for doing so.
See you at the donation page, Tom Chandler.
(BYTHEWAY: CalTrout are looking for a Development Director and Database Administrator in their San Francisco office, which pretty much rules me out. Let me know when they start running ads looking for an “Evil New Media Genius Bent on World Domination and Online Fundraising.” That’d be me.)
(SECONDUPDATE: The author of the article wrote to say there are plenty more pictures from Costa Rica at his site. Pretty stuff!)
[tags]fly fishing, fishing, mccloud, mccloud river, mccloud redband trout, costa rica [/tags]
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