Adventure Fly Fishing Blog

My brother just launched Stansberry Sportfishing. It's a blog about his travels fly fishing across the country, from the Pacific Northwest, to the NYC nearshore, to the Great Lakes steelhead scene. Check it out: Stansberry Sportfishing.

New Oregon fly fishing blog

OregonFlyFishingBlog.comThis week The Caddis Fly shop in Eugene and the geniuses behind Oregon Outdoor Journal and One Mule Team joined forces to create an Oregon Fly Fishing Blog with river reports, fly tying tips and fly fishing adventure and disaster stories. Check it out and let me know what you think.

New Site + Archiving Oregon Outdoor Journal

Well, I'm all jazzed up about the new version of this site. Against all better judgement from readers, I'm giving up the Oregon Outdoor Journal Google Juice and nice number of monthly visits to continue my Wordpress blog.

I'm not shutting the doors on this site, since there's a lot of work here. But give Upstream in Oregon a shot. You won't be disappointed if you liked this site.

-Matt

Blogger versus Wordpress

My blogger account has been jammed up for a couple weeks. I could post content, but it wasn't moving on to the home page. I got pretty frustrated so I started an experiment on Wordpress. Now I'm considering switching over fulltime. I'd like to get some votes on moving readers over to the new site versus keeping this Blogger account running.

PROS of moving over to WordPress:

Some of my favorite blogs recently moved from Blogger to Wordpress and they look really good. I think the new "test" blog looks better than this one already, and I haven't done much to it yet.

I've been more happy with Flickr than Picassa as a photo site, and Flickr (owned by Yahoo) and Blogger (owned by Google)don't get along. The Flickr photos don't size right. Flickr photos fit correctly on Wordpress.

I'm familiar enough with the Wordpress dashboard and I can get moving pretty quickly on it. I'm also inspired to most more often in the new deal.

CONS of moving from Blogger to Wordpress:

I lose all of the search engine goodwill I've built up so far.

Everybody has to update their Oregon Outdoor Journal URLs to the new site.

I'd still have to keep my blogger account for a couple other blogs I maintain.

I might shift my focus on the new blog to more personal/navel gazing style, rather than trying to keep up with Oregon Outdoor news and controversies. I'd still talk about fishing, environmental news -- but I'd also post more about what I'm reading, what I'm doing at work, etc.

Looking for feedback. What do you think?

PS: Special thanks to Ron Southern for helping me kickstart this thing and get it displaying again.

Stop credit card offers from wasting paper

As I was cleaning my office today, I emptied my shredder and started thinking about all the literally TONS of paper I throw away thanks to credit card companies sending me pre-approved offers every day. Think of the paper, ink, gas used to deliver this garbage... let alone the annoyance of having to deal with it. So I just googled my way out of the problem and came up with OptOutPreScreen.com, a site that got the thumbs up from both Lifehacker and the NY Times. OptOutPreScreen is a service provided by the consumer credit reporting companies to allow you to get off the mailing lists of hundreds of banks sending offers in the mail. It takes 2 minutes to avoid this flood of crap for five years. I can't believe more people don't do this.

Funny sidenote: I looked at Lifehacker first -- before the NY Times article. Says something about the power/influence of blogs.

Sort of related: Thanks for the comment! The Green-e program director commented on my post about EWEB going green. I've seen this kind of interaction on the bigger, techie blogs but not in the "fish scales and snails" corner of the Web that OOJ calls home.

Zumbo anti-assault rifle blog fuels gun nut hysteria

Zumbomania is causing a shitstorm. Former Outdoor Life columnist Jim Zumbo was unceremoniously canned this week for writing negatively about assault rifles in hunting situations.

I’m not a gun nut, but I own three that I hunt with -- 12 gage shotgun, .22 and a bolt action 7mm. I’m probably buying a handgun before I start doing much more predator calling in cougar country. And I tend to agree with Zumbo and Field & Stream’s David Petzl (more or less), that the AK-class rifle doesn’t have a place in the hunting community.

Sure, you should be able to have them, shoot them, store a bunch in the armory at your compound -- be ready for the rapture! But I don’t think they have a place in fair chase hunting.

I lived in Massachusetts for a year; I know excessive gun control is a problem. But the people arguing for my second amendment rights don’t speak for me.

Petzl has tried to address Zumbomania on his blog. And he has been smothered in negative comments. The people commenting on this post don’t understand. Petzl hit the nail on the head when said the lunatics are making themselves look like bigger morons. 741 comments so far, including this gem:

A man in good service to his country for 20 years that sells information to our enemy is still a TRAITOR. It doesn't matter who he is or what he has done. He betrayed us and is a TRAITOR.

This situation is no different. We are at WAR with the anti's. Every day, every night. If you think of it in any other fassion (sic), you have my pitty (sic).

We are many... and we are watching you.

Yeah... that's the kind of guy I want to see armed to the teeth.

Oddly enough, I was just getting ready to write a post about why Outdoor Life is a terrible publication and is bad for the outdoors community. Looks like that project just got a bit timelier. Funny thing: I had Zumbo listed as one of the magazine’s few redeeming qualities.

Update: I wrote this post last night, but was waiting to post it until today. Since that time, Zumbo's own Web site has been shut down either through too much traffic or malicious intent. This thing has gone crazy.

All this does is continue to separate gun nuts from sportsmen -- forking a larger group into two separate camps. And judging by the response, that's ok with me.

CJ Chivers on outdoors writing

CJ Chivers interview: Here is the first of a couple interviews and recipes I'm salvaging from FindFish101.com. For those of you just tuning in, check here for the background.

This is an interview I did in late 2005 if I remember correctly. It was a Saturday morning and I was calling Chivers in Russia to talk about fishing, writing, beer and perserverence. It was incredibly generous of him to give me an inteview and he opened some doors for me down the road -- the conversation stands out as one of the formative experiences in my adult life.

CJ Chivers on fishing and journalism

Recreational angler CJ Chivers, a 40-year old Moscow correspondent for the NY Times, is shaping the way America thinks about fishing.

Chivers honed his fishing skills on the Susquehanna River and Cayuga Lake in upstate New York growing up. Following a stint as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer, Chivers went on to write for the Providence Journal and then the Times, where he covered the 9/11 collapse from the front lines.

Lately, when he's not running ragged through the former Soviet Union, Chivers has been publishing fishing articles in some of the most influential magazines in the country.

The first time I read a Chivers fishing piece was the November, 2004 issue of Esquire, "Cult of the Striper". Then I saw his byline again on one of the most interesting fishing stories I'd ever read -- Fishing For Dinosaurs, an article about land-based fishing for giant alligator gar, in Field & Stream.

In an industry often overshadowed by glamour travel, boat fishing and gear, Chivers offers the simple voice of a fisherman connecting with his quarry. He gave FindFish101.com some insight into his fishing experiences during a recent phone interview from Moscow.



Can you tell me about the changes you've seen in outdoors writing in the past few years?

Most of what you'd call the outdoor writing circuit had gone in the wrong direction over the last twenty years. The writing was not that fresh. There were exceptions, but I think a lot of the readership got turned off to the perpetual sameness and transparent shilling that was going on with some of the magazines, and still goes on with some of them.

There had been some upstart magazines, like On The Water out of New England, which is a terrifically fresh and insightful magazine. It just crackles with local knowledge and enthusiasm.

When Sid Evans [editor] came over to Field & Stream, he wanted to bring back some of the Field & Stream legacy. I think he understood some of the ailments that afflicted the industry and he's been trying to undo it on his property. He did a redesign, tried to bring in new writers, fresher layouts. He's really looking to elevate the magazine back to its old stature with an updated look. And it's been really fun to be a part of it.

And they're now doing the same thing at Saltwater Sportsman, another magazine with an incredible legacy that ran aground.

That's something I'd noticed. Are saltwater magazines starting to take another look at surf fishing? The money has to be in advertising for boats.

If you go back and look at the history of Saltwater Sportsman, when Frank Woolner and his fishing buddies were putting this thing out... If you can get your hands on an old copy at a garage sale from the 1960s and 1970s... what a magazine. It really spoke to fishing in all of its aspects and was written by people who were fishing all the time. They loved their sport and knew a lot about it and were trying to tell the readers all about it.

I didn't read it regularly through the 1980s, so I don't know exactly where the turn came. But by the time I really took a close look at it again in the late 1990s, it had become a "how to catch fish out of boats" magazine. It was almost unreadable.

Fishing on foot is back in at the magazine. They still do a lot of fishing on the boats and they cover both offshore and inshore. But they cover fishing in all of its aspects again.

You cover the conservation issues, as well as tactics and point of view pieces. What do you like writing best?

I don't write a lot of how-to articles. I've written a few. There are people out there who do a better job than me at how-to articles, and there are a lot of better fishermen than me at certain techniques.

If I'm on to something that I think is a little different or unusual that I don't see other people doing, I'll lay out an article. Sometimes they're really offbeat. A few years ago I wrote a short piece on how to catch hickory shad on light tackle. I just wrote a piece in Saltwater Sportsman that they'll probably run next year on how to catch false albacore off the beach using steelhead tackle to throw really light jigs at these fish. There are very few people doing it, and if you become one of them you'll have some success and stop being skunked on these fish.

I prefer writing conservation articles because it's not as covered and I enjoy writing essays on fishing, which is something else altogether.

You wrote an article on catching giant alligator gar in Texas that I really liked. Would you consider those fish dangerous quarry?

Fishing is dangerous to me in the sense that you can have a bad accident on your boat or bust your head open jumping around on wet rocks at night. But I don't think the quarry itself is dangerous.

Maybe a bluefish is dangerous. You might need a few stitches if you're not careful around the hot end. But to me, it's the conditions that can get you more than the fish.

It just seems like predator species have a certain glamour attached to them.

Yeah, but we're the predators. Let's be serious. How many people do you know that have been killed by a fish? It's a boating accident in a storm or drowning by any number of means... taking the wrong step in a walleye river, flipping a canoe in a cold pond. That's where we die. We don't die at the hands of fish.

I didn't think the gar were dangerous. You just needed to be careful handling them. That's all. I'm careful around my neighbor's dog.

You cover such serious topics in your day job. How do you contrast such serious journalism with your fishing writing?

I take fishing very seriously. I don't remember not fishing. My dad taught me to fish really young. I went fishing through the ice, just beyond being a toddler, with my dad. I approach it with the same seriousness of my day job.

I try to research the topic. I try to connect to the people that I spend time with. I try to ask myself why I'm there and what it means that I'm there. Sometimes a fishing story isn't going to have the same self-evident energy that covering the 9/11 collapses would. Of course not. And for that reason, some of the [fishing] stories aren't as resonant as the stuff I do in the New York Times to the general reader. But to me, they are every bit personally as important as some of the stories I've done on the job.

Fishing makes me happy. So fishing writing is a way I can combine my day job - which can be extraordinarily emotionally and physically draining -- fishing writing is a way to combine it with something I love to do. It's a way to restore some joy to the keyboard.

In most of my fishing stories for instance, I can do a story where nobody dies and nothing gets stolen. We cover a lot of grim stuff out here.

Speaking of your current location, do you get to do any fishing in Russia? I understand there are some really great fisheries on that East Coast.

I'm planning to go. I'm planning two really exciting fishing trips for next year, not counting the ice fishing. I'm going to try to do some ice fishing this winter. I grew up ice fishing and I love the sport.

I had big plans to go fishing last year, but the past fifteen months in Russia turned out to be crazy. From [the school massacre] in Beslan to the Ukrainian Revolution, to the Kyrgyz revolution, the massacre in Andijon in Uzbekistan... we never had time to get out of position. You risk traveling eight time zones to get to good fishing water and your beat blows up back here in the western part of the former Soviet Union, and then you're dead. You're at the wrong end of the field.

If next year is quieter I have two really exciting fishing trips planned. One is up in the Tajikistan Mountains along the Chinese and Afghan border, fishing for snow trout. The other is in the Russian far east in Kamchatka. fishing the salmon rivers. Knock on wood, I'll actually get to do these trips.

What's your favorite type of fishing?

For me, it's striped bass fishing at night in the surf on Block Island or on the Rhode Island shore. Because you're out there all alone, there's a good number of fish and it's a huge technical challenge to reach them and also get them in, balancing tackle fine enough to make a good presentation, but strong enough to handle them.

Night fishing seems like the biggest pain in the ass. I've been out there.

No, no. It's the most fun of all. Everything drops away. There's no distraction. You're all alone, the crowded beach is empty. The fish are running twenty times as thick as they run in the day. The fish are large, tasty. And when you're out there at night it completely centers you on what you're doing.

It's very hard to be very good at a lot of things in life. You've got your job, and it's going to be something you want to figure out. That consumes your days. You can get good at being with your family, and that consumes your spare time. What does that leave you for fishing? Well, take up night fishing then. If you're willing to throw your sleep away, you can get really good at night fishing. And if you're going after striped bass and bluefish, you can catch a hell of a lot of fish.

It's really possible to hold down a job and become a very savvy night fisherman if you put in a couple hundred nights. If you've got a demanding day job, you're never going to be a good offshore fisherman. How are you going to get out there? But if you're lucky enough to live within an hour, hour and a half of a fishing spot, you can be down on the water, fish a few hours, get back and get four or five hours sleep and go back to work. You can catch a hell of a lot of fish and figure this thing out.

Where fishing web sites go to die

Waaaay back in 2005, one of my good buddies and I decided we were going to get rich spinning fish tales. I was an aspiring outdoors writer, just breaking into some of the regional fishing magazines on the east coast. My partner Tanklin, well, he was a man of many trades, see below:

A few words about Tank: He wasn’t a Web designer, nor a writer by trade. He wasn’t even an angler, really. But he liked to eat fish and that was good enough. Tank went out and built a beautiful online fishing magazine out of Blogger tools, Photoshop and my hubris.

See, I had a vision. Think: New Yorker meets In-Fisherman. I wanted an online, literary fishing magazine full of great photos. Simple design. No crappy moving ads, no five different fonts on the page, no extraneous bullshit. Just good writing, fish and great photos. If we built it, they would come.

I didn’t see anybody coming close to this “ideal” online publication -- and I set off to fill that void. Now mind you, I’d only written a handful of fishing articles, I’d hired my goofball fishing buddies as associate editors (see below), and my man Tank was volunteering until the bucks started pouring in.

Nonetheless, I fancied myself a publisher. I landed some HUGE interviews, just calling famous people up and matter-of-factly asking for an interview for the Online Fishing Magazine, FindFish101.com. You haven’t heard of it?

I’m not sure where it all fell apart. I guess the beginning of the end was when I realized that I couldn’t make people who weren’t outdoors writers into great outdoors writers. My buddy Matt Z and my little brother turned in a good article or two over the first few months, but it got harder and harder to make them do it. They didn’t really want to write, they wanted to fish.

The nail in the coffin was when I went on Craigslist looking for writers. I put up ads in fishy towns throughout the U.S., asking for fishing-minded young journalists to please email me about a great new online fishing magazine. And then almost every one of them told me to eat shit when I mentioned that I couldn’t pay them.

So where does that leave FindFish101.com today? Tank and I tried to get the band back together about a year ago, but the magic was gone. I was jaded. We cleaned it up as best we could, took out most of the references to specific dates, and left it to rot in the Web ghetto. But I recently paid another year on my URL and hosting, just in case…

The great interviews I mentioned, I’m not letting those go. I’m going to repost a couple of them here over the next couple days.

Also, I’m looking for advice on what to do with the bandwidth and the URL. If any of you can think of a good use for the URL FindFish101.com, I’ll keep supporting the hosting and help out with it. I was kind of thinking about starting a fishing Wiki. Dumb term. I know.

Oregon natural history blog

I usually just rely on my Links list to the right hand side of the page there to guide people to sites I like, but this site deserves special recommendation. If you are at all interested in Oregon natural history or great outdoor photography, you need to check out Dzonoqua's Whistle.

Meet the cougar tree while you're there:

Oregon feature photo: Mount McLoughlin

Mount McGloughlin, Oregon, originally uploaded by Steve Byland.

Today's Oregon feature photo comes from Steve Byland, who said: On a recent trip through southern Oregon, I glanced out of the car window and saw this sight. I pulled over and took a few photos - amazed that other people in passing cars barely gave this mountain a second look. I had to get out a map to even find it's name.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Mount McLoughlin (aka Mount Pit or Pitt) rises 1,200 meters as a steep-sided, dominantly basaltic andesite lava cone. Mount McLoughlin is a young volcano, according to experts.

You can check out Mt. McLoughlin yourself on the 5.5 mile long trail to the summit (11 miles round trip) through the Winema National Forest.

Oregon Outdoors feature photo: Upper Proxy Falls

076-Upper Proxy Falls I, originally uploaded by bookgrl.

This photo of Upper Proxy Falls was taken in the Willamette National Forest, in Lane County Oregon. If you would like more info on Upper Proxy Falls, check out Waterfalls West. This is the first entry of a new feature on Oregon Outdoor Journal; I will be posting some of the best Oregon outdoors photos from random photo-bloggers at Flickr. If you have a photo you would like to submit, let me know. Thanks to bookgrl for stepping up to the plate to be the first one.

Fishing bloggers taking action

Fishing bloggers are taking action on issues that impact our sport. I've been going out and reading a lot of outdoors blogs lately, and I've been really impressed. One of the bloggers I'm reading hits close to home, Greg Lum from Rotten spawn sacs, tattered flies and leaky waders wrote about a private club owner that is moving in on Ohio steelhead streams, trying to lease the crown jewels of the Great Lakes run. I lived 25 years of my life in Ohio and I'm glad somebody like Greg is watching over the home range. Plus, I love fishing Midwest steelhead with my dad and brother when I'm back east, see below:

From MattStansberry

Then there is the Trout Underground, who wrote one of the most persuasive posts to take action to save trout I've ever read. This guy should be working for Trout Unlimited.

From the Trout Underground:

As if surviving another work week wasn’t accomplishment enough for a Friday, it turns out we need to stop a Canadian mining company from building an open pit coal mine. Seems they want to build it smack dab atop the headwaters of the Flathead River in British Columbia.

I myself think that you simply haven’t truly enjoyed a quality outdoor experience until you’ve seen a couple dozen trout go belly up from toxins while taking in gorgeous scenery like mountains with their tops removed.

If it’s one thing the Trout Underground stands for, it’s Trout Protection. We worship trout. We got their backs.

Here’s the part where you walk the walk: invest 18 seconds (I timed myself, honest) convincing the British Columbia government to reject the Cline coal mine and protect the trout fishery of the Flathead River. Eighteen Seconds. That’s all it takes. Eighteen (I timed myself). Do it. Now. Right now. Now. And then let us know you did.

Well, what are you waiting for? Fill out a letter.

Lastly, special thanks to Fishing Jones for the link today. I've been blogging in various forms since '03, but I always existed in a vacuum. What I'm finding now is a real community. It makes me feel like I might not be crazy.