The Sun Cove Chronicles: Praise for the Olive Woolybugger

I am a cook and my interest in fish is limited to whether they should be pan-seared or prepared sous vide.  But I was told to keep those kind of unpure thoughts to myself, if I wanted to come along on this fishing trip.  So I tried my best to do this, while observing and asking questions to try to improve my knowledge and understanding of this timeless sport.

Some observations:

One of Jack's Lahonton Cutthroats.  I think this would
taste good smoked.  I admit it. I'm only here for the food :)

1. Limits.  Although you are allowed to bring home some fish which you catch, no one ever did.  The reason: If you catch your limit (which ranged from one to five, depending on the lake), you must stop fishing and come in to shore. No one ever wants to stop fishing so it never made sense to keep any that you caught, in case you might catch your limit and have to stop.  Also sometimes the fish you catch aren't the kind that taste good. Lahontons, for example. They are big and impressive but they are not good-tasting.  (Now, Hans, don't go making any crude comments about that).

2. Woolyburgers.  These are not fuzzy hamburgers for fish.  Apparently the correct spelling is woolybugger, and on this trip there was much discussion at dinner about Olive Woolybuggers in particular.  From what I could gather, this type of fly is a good choice for use in generic situations if you don't have any flies that match the current hatch.  As for me, I was more interested in olive martinis, but I kept my mouth closed and pretended to be interested.

Paula prepares her line with a specially selected fly

3. Flies.  Fly-Fishing is not fishing while flying nor is it fishing for flies.  It is an artistic form of flicking your rod and string line back and forth with a fly on the end of the line to attract the fish. And flies are not really flies, they are little tied up knots of colored strings, feathers, and other stuff made to look like insects that might naturally appear on the lake or stream.  You want to MATCH the HATCH (don't I sound so official?) selecting a fly that resembles the insects hatching or living in the lake or stream you are fishing.  Apparently in some killjoy fashion, the regulators have decided real flies and insects would be illegal to use - too easy to catch the fish, and then what's the fun in that? The famous Ed (see my blog on Ode to Ed) gave Jack some pheasant feathers from a bird he hunted to use for fly-tying. Jack informs me that some people will even harvest road kill to get bits of fur and other treasures for their fly tying kits.  I think once I felt Jack tug out one of my longer hairs, although he denied this.  Now I know why he did it, and Jack, I forgive you.

German Brown.  Jack caught this one, which pleased me because
I was cooking an Octoberfest dinner that night and the stories went
nicely with my dinner theme.

4.  All trout are not the same.  On this trip, the team caught brook trout (the prettiest, in my opinion), rainbow trout, German brown trout, and the aforementioned Lahonton.  There might have been others too but those are the few that came with actual proof in the form of pictures.

Brook Trout

5.  Waders can be creepy.  The residents of Room 4 confessed that they were scared out of their wits one night when they exited their room to see these dead men hanging from the rafters outside Jack and Dad's rooms.

I swear Officer! He just leaped out of the brush at me!

6.  Fishing is action packed.  Really!  So much so that they even have a whole channel on TV devoted to it, if you buy the right kind of cable package.

Honest. He's not asleep! He's trolling!

Check out the whitewater as Paula knabs one!

 7.  Fishing is scenic.  This is very true, especially in the area of Washington where we were.  I have been sworn to secrecy not to mention the names of the lakes, where Hans purportedly caught 30 fish one day, and Jack snagged another 18 on a different day.

8. Fishing is competitive.  You never heard anyone at the dinner table say "I caught the least number of fish today!".  But we always knew who caught the most!  But that's the thing about fishing.  You could be in last place one day, and first place the next.  And everyone was always ready to offer advice on how to select better flies next time, or hold your line differently, or select a deeper pool or one closer to shore next time. 

She looks so beautiful, but all the while the wheels are turning....
"I am going to be #1 today! Even if I have to pop those float tubes!"

Hurry up and take the @#%*! picture so I can get back to it! Since Hans caught 30 fish yesterday, I think he is tied up to a tree somewhere today, explaining his absence from this picture.

9.  Fishing makes you hungry at the end of a long day.  Especially for wine.  14 bottles, to be exact. Plus a bottle of schnapps but who's counting?  

Bavarian soft pretzels and apple torte

Cioppino

Lemon Ricotta Cake and two types of
Foccacia Bread (but alas, no salami!)

So in closing, my advice to you is:  If  you want to relax, enjoy great company, bask in the beauty of the Great Outdoors, and come away with some great fish stories and pictures, then study up and when you're smarter than the average fish, befriend my brother Jack and beg your way onto the next Sun Cove trip! 

The Sun Cove Chronicles: Ode to Ed

Where's Ed to help carry the float tubes?

Ten years. That's how long Ed Jones has been taking trips to Sun Cove Resort with Jack and my Dad, and in later years, with Larysa, Paula, and Hans.  Ed is both an outdoorsman and a great cook, so he usually had the job of Camp Chef, a role I assumed this year when Ed could not make the trip.  But even in his absence Ed was present. 

What? No salami?

On the first night, I'd prepared appetizers of home-smoked trout, oysters, cheese, crackers, and sliced onions.  "Where's the salami?  Ed usually brings salami, we usually have that every night." Oops. My bad. The next day I checked the tiny Sun Cove Resort market, but no luck. Not even a Slim Jim.  I made a point to drive to Oroville to get some salami, in memory of Ed.  "Ed always has a steak night," I'm told as I serve a lamb dish, the only red meat meal I've planned. One day at lunch, sandwiches consisted of bread and lunch meat, and that's it. Jack forgot to set out the avocado, onions, tomatoes and lettuce.  Someone quips, "Ed would never have made that mistake. No way."  Where's Ed when you need him? 

And then there's the table conversation.  "The nice thing about having Ed here," Jack says, "is that he's the only non-Castro, so he always has something interesting to talk about that doesn't involve family gossip, our jobs, or those same old family stories that get drug out year after year." Someone jokes in a disgusting way about diarrhea in their waders.  "Too much information!! That's what Ed would say!", Paula comments.  And if Hans had popped his float tube again this year, Ed would be all over it, "That Hans is a piece of work!" So Ed, you were missed.  If a Sun Cove trip is in the cards for next year, I hope you don't let them down again.  

I can only imagine what Ed would say about this atrocity!

The Sun Cove Chronicles: From Unhinged to Unplugged

A week ago I was sitting in my office in front of my dual screen monitor working on an SEC compliance project while simultaneously monitoring the email action from one client on a laptop that was connected to their internal network, and using a second laptop to link into another client's servers to gather info for the compliance audit.  I had my iPad propped up to Skype chat with Bob on and off during the day, and my phone was also close by to easily check my company email and frequent IMs  from friends and family.  

I am a very social person and I love the internet, so as I prepared for my first trip to Sun Cove Resort in Eastern Washington State, just below the Canadian border, I was apprehensive about being out of contact for five days.  No cell phone coverage, I was told.  Wireless internet available only at the resort store, if you could get the owners to give you the password.  Jack had obtained the password years before and his phone had stored and used it, but he was unable to determine what the actual password was to give to me, so I had to ask.  The owners, Brian and Gail, told me that yes, they did now have wireless Internet, got it just this year. It was a hard decision to offer it, they said, because Sun Cove is the kind of old fashioned place where kids should spend their time jumping from the boat dock, swimming in the lake, and playing checkers on the patio, not huddled over their cell phones playing the latest shooter game.  I kind of liked that approach, except when it comes to me.  I was special (yeah - special ed my kids would always say). I wanted internet in my room so I could spend lazy days working, surfing, and chatting.  Not only did this place not offer that, there were not even any televisions or telephones that I could see.

Brian and Gail are the kind of friendly down home people you expect to see at a place like this.  But they do have their idiosynchrosies.  Like our room assignments.  There is a three bedroom cabin that Paula, Hans and I wanted to rent, from Monday to Monday.  "Sorry, we only rent from Saturday to Saturday."  No matter that the family has been coming here for twenty years and at least for the last ten, no one has ever been renting the house before. No amount of pleading or bribing could get them to change their minds. Rules are rules, and at Sun Cove, they are apparently not meant to be broken.  As a result, our party purveyed four rooms in the ten room main building.  Paula and Hans, Dad and Larysa, and Jack had rooms 1, 2, and 3.  I had room 9.  When I checked in, Brian said rooms are allocated based upon when you call and reserve.  It didn't matter that all the rooms were identical or that the other guests were arriving after I checked in - my name was written in the blotter next to #9 so that was the room I was slated for.  To change the system would just invite trouble.

1960's kitchen - with lemon cake and fresh foccaccia bread

The resort was a throwback to the early sixties, with the only major improvements appearing to be new wood-like floors and mattresses.  The coordinated turquoise Hotpoint refrigerator and electric range went well with the four person dinette set and classic ceramic dishware complete with coordinated, thick and heavy 4 oz coffee mugs, white with turquoise diamond patterns. The walls had a log cabin-style wood paneling in warm tones and the light switches were heavy and made an old fashioned loud click when you turned them on and off.  The closet emitted a slightly musty smell that reminded me of my Grandma Emma's house. The room was charming without being cheesy, old but welcoming.  It had a door on either end, and the back entrance had a screen door which opened to a covered walkway connecting all the rooms.  The screen door invited company to walk past and stop in for a chat.  This is how I met Carol, Barbara, Ted and Mike, who sat in their lawn chairs in the walkway each afternoon, sipping margaritas and watching the sun set over Lake Wannacutt.  

After a couple of days I stopped carrying around my cellphone as I walked about in futile attempts to find a signal. The phone's once urgent purpose was replaced by its mere use as a camera to record deer and sunsets.  Every time I set out from Room 9 for the for the store to use the internet, walking down the corridor past all the other rooms with their open screen doors and back porch benches, I'd meet someone and start talking and forget that I had to make a Facebook post or check some email.  After a shared glass of wine and conversations ranging from college to kitchen remodels, nothing else seemed all that important.  And somehow, my assignment to Room 9 made sense.