You can feel the love for United Airlines

Rather than detail all the comedic highlights (more delays the second day, no food on the plane, a pilot miffed because passengers were cranky, etc), I’ll simply say that almost everything United Airlines did either made things worse or really made things worse, and they give every impression of an airline collapsing under the weight of massive incompetenceat the upper levels.

Now I’m back in Mt. Shasta, and unhappily, it’s almost exactly the same Mt. Shasta I left.

That sounds odd, but at this point in the year, some snow should have fallen.

It hasn’t.

Instead, the ski park remains closed. The mountain looks like it’s August.

And nothing is forecast for at least the next week.

That’s OK for the fly fishermen — the Upper Sac remains in fishable shape — but suddenly, the “D” word is rearing its head (drought).

Which isn’t all that great for fly fishermen (especially the small stream fiends).

And while I’ve got a yearlong media plan to build and other work, I’m also feeling pretty done with obligations, and I’m going fishing.

And soon.

Life intrudes and all, but there comes a times when too much is too long.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

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I kinda wish I hadn’t looked.

Over here in Paradise, the wind has been blowing pretty damned hard every day, and even the sailboats moving along the beach haven’t bothered to raise their sails.

Pretty clearly, this part of Hawaii is not a fly fishing hot spot (you’ll never be confronted with one of those giant schools of bonefish as in the Bahamas), but equally clearly, there’s more here than meets the eye.

During yesterday’s trip to the local kid-friendly beach, I saw a lot of baitfish and what appeared to be a couple of Jack Crevalle hovering along some offshore rocks at yesterday’s beach.

(Little M went face-to-face with an unafraid-of-humans sea turtle, forever sealing her love of the great shelled beasts).

Later, the Registered Maine Guide — whose judgment you really don’t question unless you’re an arrogant fool — suggested a couple of bonefish moved through the area while he was snorkeling another pile of offshore rocks.

The beach was crowded with people and it is manifestly not a bonefish flat, but it’s proof of what I’ve long said; given enough time and a little willingness to look beyond the obvious you probably can scrape up some decent fishing almost anywhere.

When I lived in the Bay Area, I fished a small dam outlet for carp, fished the lake above the dam for crappie, fished the tiny creek below the dam for trout, fished a nearby small lake for bluegill, float tubed a couple slightly bigger lakes for bass, and was even thrown out of an apartment complex after fishing the “decorative” pond for carp.

In most cases you won’t be selling articles about apartment pond carp to the larger fly fishing media, but to let that dampen your enthusiasm is to make the mistake of conflating the health of the sport with the health of the industry.

Just because it’s not cover material doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

One of my regrets about naming this blog The Trout Underground has been the exclusivity of the title; I moved to a place where 95% of my fishing is for trout (smallmouth bass can be found at a local lake), and while I’m happy with that that life-altering decision, the name has always felt a little exclusionary — a little too highbrow for the kind of reader I’m hoping to attract.

Trout are great fish and they’re usually found in gorgeous places, but they’re far from the only reason to pick up a fly rod.

I know (and so do you) fly fishermen who bemoan the lack of fly fishing available to them because they don’t live in a mecca like Montana, and I always wondered how much of a role fly fishing’s magazines — and yes, blogs named “The Trout Underground” — play in that perception.

Are these people whining because they’re elitists, and therefore uninterested in crappie or bass or bluegills (a perception helped along by exotic destination stories and living-in-the-mountains bloggers)?

Or have they simply never looked at the nearby browlines, or read Singlebarbed’s posts about the joys of Pikeminnows?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know it’s one of the questions worth asking, especially because others — noting the lack of commercial potential — aren’t going to.

As always, the floor belongs to the Undergrounders. My availability is limited until my return, but being grownups and all, that’s never stopped you.

I’d rather be home.

And for a few very good reasons.

1. I need some time to fish, and there’s still hope I could catch the tail end of the Dying October Caddis bite
2. I am the walking, talking embodiment of the Pasty White Guy, and me on a tropical beach is like a metal dish in a microwave (it’s mostly ugly noises and sparks and suffering)
3. Any time you leave the mountains in winter, you risk coming home to a six-foot high ice wall where your driveway used to be
4. I need a vacation

This last bullet might confuse some of you. For clarity, I’ll ask you this: when’s the last time you arrived home after a trip with a three year-old less tired than when you left?

I rest my case.

Enjoy Your Inflight Enema

Let’s move along to the airlines, and although I usually wait until after they’ve lost my luggage or stolen my camera or stranded us in Salt Lake City for 48 hours to complain, this time I won’t have to.

The L&T spent the extra bucks to put us all in one row in the “Economy Plus” section. Weeks later, she want back to United Airline’s website to confirm, and discovered they had moved us to three scattered seats around the airplane.

Hardly ideal for people traveling with a three year-old, and a little confusing since we had spent the extra money to sit in the Plus section.

Now the L&T won't even let me take up surfing

We never did get a cogent explanation, but after an strongly worded inquiry by someone with more frequent flier miles than the New York Yankees (put together), we got — and great big tears of gratitude are welling up in my eyes as I type this — two of the three seats we originally paid for.

And they say customer service is dead.

Apparently the airlines are willing to charge you extra for the Plus section, but because they’re greedy bastards they’ll happily repossess the seats we’d already paid for (they get a few extra dollars for the aisle).

This means they’re perfectly fine sitting my three year-old next to strangers who may not have an affinity for two-legged hummingbird types who announce their need to “make poopy” only seconds before the act actually occurs.

Thus do we redefine “family friendly.”

At least there is some good news.

Well, OK. There really isn’t.

The airlines pretty comprehensively suck, and terminal security mostly sucks, Donald Trump (unrelated, but fun) wholly sucks, and my solution to all that is…

Stay here.

Death Before Disembarking

Sadly, visionaries like myself are rarely appreciated while alive (between the beach and the airline, death could strike as early as next week), so we’re going to Hawaii.

We’ve got a house sitter who is aware of Wally the Wonderdog’s recent trials (we haven’t seen a repeat of the seizure), and I’m supposed to have Internet access (let’s hope it’s not provided by a subsidiary of United Airlines), and we’ll see.

Just in case I lose touch with the outside world, Happy Christmas and New Years to all the Undergrounders.

Given the trials we’ve enjoyed this December, it’s likely the Undergrounders represent my only real connection to sanity, and while that thought should send you stampeding for the exits, rest assured we’re looking for a return to normalcy by the second week in January.

Assuming, of course, United doesn’t sell our seats to someone else while we’re still over the Pacific.

Which means I can leave the waders, wading boots and a lot of other gear at home (nobody who travels with a 2.75 year-old argues against traveling light).

It also means digging out (and re-lining) a few of my (ahem) vintage Abu-Garcia casting reels and Cardinal spinning reels — old reels that work as well as the day they came from the factory, and this despite a lot of use back in my Bay Area days.

It also means an online trip to Bass Pro Shops (finesse worms, hooks, line — and a pair of those topwater poppers that turn smallmouth bass fishing into a spectator sport).

A visit to Bass Pro Shops is like a day at a carnival; everything’s larger (and louder) than life, and the copy is brazenly over-the-top — yet somehow lacking in pretension, which makes it entertaining rather than irritating.

After all, everyone in fly fishing “reveres” the Adams dry fly, but if Kevin Van Dam used one to win a tournament, it would be “Guaranteed to attract bone-crushing strikes via its exclusive “multi-hacklepoint” design that in lab experiments generated a feeding frenzy every time.”

The Fishing Grounds

Check out those dropoffs (I sometimes launch from the little dock in the bottom cutout)

We’ll be staying on the little peninsula in the satellite photo — in rustic old cabins lounging beneath the trees — and every good stillwater fisherman has already noted the shallow water areas and the dropoffs to deeper water.

Some days I’ll simply rig a drop shot worm or a topwater on a casting rod, push one of the small kayaks into the water, and fish my way along the dropoff which runs off the bottom of the photo.

It fishes every bit as good as it looks — especially in those places where big rocks can be found at the bottom of the dropoff (yes, I know where those rocks are).

It’s lazy fishing made all the sweeter by a steady stream of smallmouth bass, who are cranky enough to turn the kayak around, then glare at you with those red eyes once you’ve landed them.

The triangle-shaped offshore shallow area on the left seems hit or miss, though when it’s on, the fish are bigger.

The island at the top hasn’t ever produced anything but small fish, despite the fact the upper shallow area is something of a gateway to a large, shallow (presumably food-filled) bay.

Some mysteries, it seems, aren’t meant to be unraveled.

Other days, we’ll load up one of the Grand Laker canoes and head out for more promising fishing grounds (made so by the distance we have to travel to get there), and no, I’m not producing maps to those.

Clearly, this is an Underground fishing vacation of a wholly different kind, and while this may be the first Maine vacation where I experience anything approaching reliable Internet access, I’m not promising daily reports.

See you in Maine, Tom Chandler.

On this trip to Maine – in addition to all the usual indignities (delays, bad/nonexistent food & water, rude folks, veal-calf seating, the constant marketing barrage, etc…) – some dirtbag stole my old, beat-up, been-everywhere-with-me Pentax Optio digital camera from my checked duffle bag.

It’s even possible that as I shuffled away from the security checkpoint in that semi-humiliated shoeless state every air traveler knows – holding my pants up because I was asked to remove my all-plastic belt – somebody was rifling my “secure” luggage.

(That I paid extra to have my luggage lost and stolen only adds to my extreme sense of customer satisfaction and delight.)

That’s why you won’t be seeing any nostalgia-inducing photographs of handsomely bronzed smallmouth bass, Maine’s hugely appealing sky/cloud/lakescapes, blueberry pies, Little M, gut-busting shore lunches, or Grand Laker canoes.

Or much of anything else.

It’s also why this took a little longer than usual to write.

In simple terms, the travel portions of this trip did not fill my heart with joy, and while a little emotion isn’t bad writer fuel, too much anger leaves your work feeling leaden and accusatory.

Oddly, the Chris Raine experienced the same loss on a recent trip to Colorado Springs – right down to losing almost exactly the same camera.

Which leads us to Today’s Travel Thought:

Modern air travel may be expensive and humiliating, but at least your belongings aren’t safe.

I’m still working on a trip wrapup, but the reality of our hyper-connected work world is that eight largely unconnected days in Maine left me perilously behind in the work department.

In other words, I’m still catching up.

And what you’re reading isn’t a trip report.

It’s more a promise: Once I become Absolute Ruler of the Universe, there will be purges.

Starting with US Airways.

See you at the computer, Tom Chandler.

5. Suddenly posting with a Maine accent
4. Sends more smug, self-satisfied “Taunt Tweets” from his Blackberry than usual
3. As jetliner flies overhead, you actually hear someone whining about travel
2. Maine’s lobster population suddenly (and severely) depleted; state simultaneously experiences blueberry pie shortage
1. Auto-posts lame “Top Five” articles while actually reclining in sun and fishing from wooden canoe

Vacation Stuff

Never fear; in my absence, the Underground’s employing powerful, space-age technology to post powerful, space-age articles – including a pair of frankly thought-provoking pieces that are probably way, way over your head.

And while we’ll be largely disconnected while in Maine, there is the potential – if I stand near the right tree and hold my mouth correctly – for a connection from my smartphone.

But given the painful reality of text entry on its touchscreen, don’t expect War & Peace.

More like the occasional Haiku.

See you in Grand Lake Stream, Tom Chandler.

I’d suggest this holds a comforting familiarity for me; my bag fails to show a good 1/3 of the time.

Everyone who’s wearing chinos on tomorrow’s fishing trip, raise your hand… (no one?)

It’s probably the byproduct of our Thursday small stream bushwhack, and the Wonderdog has basically worried the affected area completely bald (an area the size of a small fly reel). So despite the fact I should have been on the road, it was off to the vet for us.

There the Wonderdog distinguished himself by not requiring any sedation or anesthesia while the vet did some frankly horrifying things to him.

Thankfully, the house/Wonderdog/cat sitter is reliable; he’ll make sure the Wonderdog get his meds, and will get him back to the vet if this thing goes off the rails (if it’s a brown recluse bite, things could get messy).

A while ago I wrote that animals and kids wait for the weekend to get sick, intuitively aware that care is hard to find and way, way more expensive.

In this case, the Wonderdog’s timing couldn’t have been worse – a fact he’s no doubt sniggering about right now.

The Vacation Cometh

I won’t suggest I’ve undergone vast amounts of suffering these past months, but I’m still willing to enthusiastically embrace the concept of a weeklong vacation in a quiet corner of Maine.

I’m traveling light, and bringing damned little fishing gear. At the camp, I know there’s a 7.5′ 6wt Heddon glass rod, and a handful of spinning rods (ideal for throwing topwater plugs in the evenings).

At the camp, I’ll also find large quantities of peace and quiet – a commodity more valuable than fly fishing gear.

There likely won’t be an Internet connection at camp, though there is a chance for a connection via my smartphone. In other words, you may hear from me or you may not.

And – as always – stand by for reports on the Underground’s always complex travel adventures.

If it involves an airplane and a ticket with my name on it, there’s almost sure to be a delay involved.

See you on a red-eye (with two followup connecting flights), Tom Chandler.

I thought I’d create a photographic travelogue highlighting none other than… me:

Notice the rich, luxurious carpet. This ain’t Motel 6

On the shuttle in from the airport I passed the Wright-McGill/Eagle Claw building, and realized I still harbor a soft spot for Wright-McGill given their connection to Granger bamboo fly rod company.

Today, most all their gear is manufactured offshore, but the company’s still here – housed in a long, low brick building (that looks old enough to have once housed the Granger rod mill).

Sadly, my camera was buried in my luggage, else you lucky bastards you’d be looking at pictures of the Wright-McGill building and my feet in the shuttle bus.

Normally, outdoor “journalists” arrive at these things expecting to be fed, paid off and bribed in return for fawning, non-critical coverage, but I’m saddened to say I’ve been in town for more than an hour, and I have yet to experience a fawned-over moment.

This won’t do.

In fact, things have become so desperate, I’m being forced to go buy my own lunch before heading to the show (oh, the humanity).

See you at FFR, Tom Chandler.

fly fishing, fishing, ffr, fly fishing retailer, denver, wright-mcgill, fly rods

Montana was a little slice of heaven (as if the pictures hadn’t told you that already), and Maine was what Maine always is: rustic, ageless and fun (plus pie and lobster).

The L&T headed to town in a Grand Laker Canoe

Still, I feel like I haven’t been home in months.

I mean, what’s happening on my favorite alpine stream? My alpine brookie lakes? The Upper McCloud? My favorite Upper Sac spots? I’m drawing blanks on all of them.

Time to get to work.

I’m wrapping up my Maine trip with this post, and providing valuable information about how you too can become the Wiffleball Death Match MVP (hint: make a headfirst belly flop onto home plate, craft a triple play, a double play, and an Ozzie-Smith-like nab of a line drive, then whine a lot about damaging yourself for the team, and you’re in).

Plus a few leftover pictures, starting with…

The Canoe You Should Own, But Can’t

First, there’s the cedar lapstrake canoe that one of you is not going to win in a drawing by the Downeast Lakes Land Trust, which is a damned shame.

Want to win this? You can’t (and I didn’t).

If I’d twigged to the drawing sooner, I think a great big bait ball sized school of Undergrounders would have thrown down $10 for a chance to win this gorgeous floating canoe (it’s like a supermodel with thwarts), but alas, there was no warning.

The drawing’s over (and I didn’t win either).

Sorry, wood-loving Undergrounders.

Grand Laker Canoe Redux

My posts about Grand Laker Canoes from two years ago still score a lot of traffic. Clearly, there’s a lot of interest in these great craft, yet when people had questions, I had nowhere to send them.

Until now.

Bill Shamel’s still building Grand Lakers (he’s Pop Moore’s son-in-law).

Bill Shamel’s shop in Grand Lake Stream continues to pump out 5-10 Grand Laker canoes annually, and he takes on interesting restoration projects.

Want to know more? You’ll find contact information for Shamel and a couple other Grand Laker builders here.

The Dark and Moody Underground

What’s left are a few kinda moody photographs that simply don’t fit anywhere else on the Underground’s inevitably sunny pages.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.