Rumor is Daddy has a brief cameo

The only thing that can get Baby J to break away from her steelhead reading is the arrival of Hustle & Fish.

Salmon and Culverts

19 tribes are suing Washington State over the slow pace of repairing culverts that block salmon from reachhing their spawning grounds.

By the state’s count, more than 1,800 fish barriers associated with state highways block more than 3,000 miles of potential stream habitat. The Legislature has funded culvert replacement since 1991, but the pace of construction is such that it could take up to 100 years to fix the problems. And that does not include county roads, which are not part of the lawsuit.

LINK (Via:The Kitsap Sun)

New Rule

When your monster Kispiox steelie goes viral, then lands on the cover of Fly Fisherman, you should make the Picassa gallery of the other 60 shots of you manhandling the fish private.

The gallery has recently been edited but not before someone grabbed some screen shots.

Some of the deleted images were posted on the forum pages of Piscatorial Pursuits back in February. According to the forum post there were 61 images of the fish out of water.

Here at the Chum we've never met a big fish picture we didn't like, but we do our very best to minimize the amount of time a fish is out of water for photography. The excitement of the moment probably contributed to the excessive documentation but it's no excuse for not handling fish responsibly.

The World's Best?

I came across this link to a 1974 Russell Chatham Sports Illustrated story on the legendary Bill Schaadt via a forum post response on Washington Fly Fishing by someone associated with River of a Lost Coast.

LINK (Via: Sports Illustrated)

The intial forum poster, who gave a shout out to the film, but who had never heard of Schaadt, could not get their head around the fact that a Californian is considered by many to be the world's greatest steelheader. What followed was six pages of forum responses including many from some other well known names in steelhead angling.

The forum thread. Greatest steelheader ever a Californian?

Vintage Fish - April Fool's Edition

The most popular theory about the origin of April Fool’s Day involves the French calendar reform of the sixteenth century.

The theory goes like this: In 1564 France reformed its calendar, moving the start of the year from the end of March to January 1. Those who failed to keep up with the change, who stubbornly clung to the old calendar system and continued to celebrate the New Year during the week that fell between March 25th and April 1st, had jokes played on them. Pranksters would surreptitiously stick paper fish to their backs. The victims of this prank were thus called Poisson d’Avril, or April Fish—which, to this day, remains the French term for April Fools—and so the tradition was born.

There is another theory that traces the origin of the custom back to the abundance of fish to be found in French streams and rivers during early April when the young fish had just hatched. These young fish were easy to fool with a hook and lure. Therefore, the French called them "Poisson d'Avril" or "April Fish." It became customary (according to this theory of its origin) to fool people on April 1st as a way of celebrating the abundance of foolish fish.

It's interesting to point out that Napoleon earned the Poisson d'Avril monicker when he married Marie-Louise of Austria on April 1, 1810.

Some homegrown vintage April Fool's imagery.

Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post cover from March 31st 1945.

Federal agency won't defend Bush's bull trout cuts

The Obama administration won't defend the Bush administration's cuts to habitat protections for the threatened bull trout, whose need for cold, clean water can stand in the way of logging and mining on national forests.

LINK (Via: The Seattle PI)