Raving Amicks

The Mom unit and I toured the Powerdale Dam on the Hood River and the fish trap/station that’s located by the dam. The dam has been decomissioned and is in the process of being torn down. The fish trap and station is also being eliminated, so this was our last chance to see the fish trap in operation. They sort and tag ALL steelhead and salmon coming up Hood River and then let the wild fish and a few hatchery fish go above the dam. Here’s some pictures of the dam and the work being done with the fish. Most of the fish pictures show a wild winter steelhead. One shot also shows two (larger) chinook.

With all this rain the Hood River is running high and muddy, so I thought I’d try for smallmouth bass near the mouth. Here’s a picture of a 16″+ bass I caught this afternoon. Thought I was snagged on the bottom and then it started moving!  I let it go.

Anyone having dinner on Saturday nite will have fresh steelhead (caught Thurs. afternon)!

Spent 5 days and 4 nites fly fishing and camping on the Deschutes River in central Oregon. Great food and comaraderie with 5 of my fishing friends.  The fish are rainbow trout and they are all wild.  Released all the fish.  Got rained on and hailed on.  Check out my river rock totems!

Spent 1 week plus a few days fishing for bonefish with 4 of my friends. This is my 5th time to X-mas Island and maybe the best. We stayed at a new place (Ikari House) with air conditioning and separate toilets and showers and great food! Definitely an upgrade from our other visits. Anyway, for years there has been one flight in a week from Hawaii via jet. There are about 8 simple fishing lodges on the island with a fishing capacity of maybe 90 fisherman at any one time. Well, it seems the Kirimati government and Air Pacific had this disagreement on subsidies paid to Air Pacific (tremendous “trickle down” economic value from visiting fisherman). Anyway, a small charter outfit took over the route (once a week) with an 18 person capacity turbo-prop. On our flight in there were only we five fisherman, so we had all the great fishing spots to ourselves for a week! To give you an idea of the isolation, X-mas Island was only inhabited during WWII with permanent residents starting then. Our head guide “English”‘s grandfather was the first person to live permanently on X-mas Island. Give this a hard thought – “English” is married, has 3 children AND HAS NEVER BEEN OFF THIS ISLAND! Not even to the nearby island of Tarawa! Anyway, we fished nearly dawn to dusk everyday, got treated well and had a great time. Here are some pictures. X-mas Island is not for the faint-hearted, no bars, no restaurants, not much of anything except “stayin’ alive!” (for  all the locals) and fishin’ for us visitors. .

‘Twas good stuff. Man, Mindy or I should have posted these a long times ago. As you can see, we went over to the northern Oregon coast to check out this sweet wreck. Mason went with us too, and boy, was he were his clothes stinky.

Yeah, so I’ve told Mindy a bunch of times, that if she ever tricks me into marrying her, it will probably involve using the wreck like a church and having a pirate and ninja party around it. Doesn’t it look like it would be fun?