Days 8 thru 10 - May 28-30 - St. Simons Island GA

Memorial Day weekend arrived May 28.  I had loosely planned to go to the coast of Georgia but when I called ahead to the campgrounds I found they were full.  I decided to check out St. Simons Island anyway, and coasted into the Bedford Sportsman South, an Orvis dealer, around noon.  There I found Larry Kennedy, a fly fisherman of considerable fame and an expert on inshore fishing in the area.  Larry was kind enough to give me some detailed maps and information about the fly fishing in the tidal marshes.  His tida lchart showed me that the tide was coming in, meaning that it was prime time to head out on the water, so that's what I decided to do despite not knowing where I was going to spend the night.

Guinevere, my Heritage Redfish kayak, proved to be a performer - just ask Lancelot.  I was concerned about the crowds at the boat dock, but once I got back in the marshes around Village Creek I found that the motor boats were elsewhere.  I wandered around for several hours and saw lots of baitfish, crabs, and and an abundance of birdlife.  I also saw a few large wakes in the calm waters of the smaller creeks, which indicated the presence of my primary quarry - redfish (also called red drum) - or some other larger species haunting the shallows and oyster beds for shrimp, crabs and glass minnows.  I was able to cast my flies into the areas of those wakes a couple of times, but to no avail.  Here's a two-minute video showing what it was like to paddle up one of the small tidal creeks and throw a fly:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d1tTrIASXY.

With darkness approaching I paddled back out of this little creek about an hour after I shot the video.  At the mouth of the creek I found two young guys scrambling to get back in their canoe, which they had just dumped while pulling up a crab pot.  You can see the milk jug marking their pot at the beginning of the video.  They were soaked but in good humor, and didn't see me as I eased toward them.  They were laughing about their misfortune and were checking the contents of the canoe to see if their gear was intact.  I had to chuckle when I heard them shouting out their priorities for salvage - number one was "the cigarettes and the bowl."  I had a feeling "the bowl" might have played a role in their misadventure.  When they finally saw me I stopped to chat.  They had caught several blue crabs, which I got a good look at later back on the dock.  All was well.  We all headed in for the night.

The silver lining in the Florida real estate crash is that motel rooms are really cheap because there are simply too many motels, even for the Memorial Day crowds.  So I checked into a Quality Inn in Brunswick for two nights.  After showering I walked to the Toucan Ale House next door and enjoyed a nice dinner, which I devoured with relish since I hadn't eaten anything all day except a bowl of cereal early in the morning.

The next morning, while the tide was low, I disassembled Elaine, my pontoon boat, since I knew I wouldn't be using her for the next few weeks and she was encumbering my ability to easily unload and load Guinevere.  Early in the afternoon I was back in the tidal creeks, this time paddling further out to an area Larry Kennedy calls "the ballfield."  Once again I was blessed with solitude and calm, and views of lots of wildlife.  Spotting the sportsfish proved to be difficult, and again I was shut out.  But no worries.  It was the kind of day you dream of if you love nature.  I have never experienced anything like the tidal marshes before, and I'm glad I didn't let the Memorial Day crowds deter me.  Someday I hope to return with someone who actually knows how to fish there.  This is a good time to remind you to check out the link to OAFF's Spot Shared Page at the bottom of my blog page.  When you get into the site, click on the map view icon and you can see all the places I've been so far (or at least those where I had the Spot turned on).  I turned on the Spot while I was in the marsh, so if you choose satellite view on the Google map and zoom in, you can see what the marsh looks like from above.

Back to the Toucan for dinner Sunday night.  I chatted for an hour or so with a man from northwest Georgia who was travelling in the area for business.  We talked about the Phillies (my team) and the Braves (his team), the Indianapolis 500, and many of the beautiful places we had both been.  Like me, he has been in almost every state in his life - Alaska being the exception for both of us.  I told him I was planning to cure that soon.  I'm finding that one of the great pleasures of this trip is meeting strangers of various stripes.  At least three or four times a day I'm asked about Camelot.  I should get a commission from Northstar campers for all the testimonials I've given.

Today I cruised a little further down the coast and registered at the Crooked River State Park campground, which is wide open now that the holiday campers have departed.  The park is very near Cumberland Island National Park.  I took my Cannondale bike for a spin around the area.  A while back I asked for your input on a proper name for the bike and I received many good suggestions.  It was a difficult decision but my choice of your nominations was a name submitted by Jeff Landis - Llamrei, a mare reputed to be King Arthur's favorite horse.  I discovered on the internet that Llamrei is a popular subject of artists who like to render legendary beings.  Here's a nice painting by Chloe Johnson so you can get an idea:

Days 5 thru 7 - May 25 thru 27 - New River

On Day 5 I spent some time looking around the area from Blacksburg, VA (home of Virginia Tech) north to Pembroke for a place to camp and fish.  By noon I found a nice campground with electrical and water hookups.  A friendly young lady with lots of facial piercings gave me a prime spot in the campground and a free can of coke "from her own stash."  There weren't many campers and they were spread out, but a guy mowing the lawns told me that he was preparing for a full house starting Friday.  He mentioned that Memorial Day weekend was always a busy time.  I had forgotten Memorial Day weekend was coming up - that may cramp my style later in the week.  But for now the setup was perfect.  Camelot's door was situated only fifteen feet or so up the east bank of the New River with long views upstream and downstream.

An elderly gentleman who was camped nearby saw my fishing boats and sauntered over to find out what my plan was.  I told him I was going to throw some tubes (a type of soft plastic lure) using my spinning rod, and he kindly offered me a lure he thought I should try - a type of chartreuse salamander.  I took Elaine (my pontoon boat) for a short float-and-fish jaunt past the campground and tried out the old fellow's gift and several other lures, all to no avail.  The New River is a broad river with lots of structure, but the part of the river close to the campground was featureless in terms of good fish lies, and smallmouth weren't to be found there.

I soon discovered an interesting thing about the land surrounding the New.  Over the millenia, as the Appalachians were crumbling, the river sliced a gently falling south-to-north course through a wide set of ridges, so its banks made a logical place for Americans to build railroad tracks without having to dig long tunnels, and they did.  Frequently throughout the evening long freight trains thundered by the campground, sometimes on both sides of the river at the same time.  The trains were loud, to be sure, but I had reached such a state of relaxation that I quickly fell asleep, and was barely disturbed until early the next morning.

I got off to an early start on Day 6, driving Excalibur back up to Pembroke to the HQ of New River Outdoor Company, where I met up with guide Steve Journell.  Steve hasn't done a lot of fly-fish guiding, but he's fished the river extensively for over 30 years, and we figured that between his knowledge of the river and my experience fly fishing, we'd manage just fine.  And we did.  Although Steve reported that his group had gotten off to a slow start the previous day, we were into fish within the first 15 minutes, and continued to catch them all day behind current breaks, in eddies and along seams.  Smallmouth behave a lot like trout in similar-looking rivers, I soon learned.  They were in the same places eating the same kinds of food.  I tried Steve's spinning rods from time to time, but never had as much success with them as I did with the fly rod - a Sage Smallmouth special.  That's probably a testament to my greater experience fly fishing rather than a comment on the best way to catch fish on the New River.  Here's an example of the kind of quality smallmouth bass that inhabit the New:

If you want to see more, check out this very short (less than one minute) video, which offers a fisherman's-eye view of a smallmouth hook-up in an area where we caught a half dozen or more:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lj-iUxe038.  In this video you can also hear a train whistle - a sound I became very accustomed to.

I was dead tired by the time we got off the river after 7 pm and I drove back to the campground.  I arrived there not a minute too soon because a thunderstorm rolled in.  With lightning crackling all around, often very close, I had little option but to remain inside Camelot.  For a short time I read "Blue Highways," by William Least Heat-Moon, but soon my eyelids were heavy.  The train whistles and the thunder that continued upabated for a few hours were like lullabies to me.  I slept hard until the rain picked up again the next morning.

Day 7 was a travel day.  I decided to aim for the coast of Georgia.  Since I wanted to cover a fair piece of ground and the continuous rain made the side roads sloppy, I used the interstates until I got to Columbia, South Carolina.  The interstate traffic was irritating, as usual, but The Byrds channel on Pandora radio provided relief unil I was about five miles from my exit near the intersection of I-77 and I-26.  I made the mistake of arriving there about 5:30 in the evening.  Apparently half the population of Columbia was headed for the shore to enjoy Memorial Day weekend with all the other Columbians they had thought to escape.  After driving for an hour to complete those torturous last five miles, I saw that eastbound I-26 towards Charleston was backed up as far as the eye could see in both directions.  Fortunately I had already elected to exit on Highway 321, passing through little towns like Gaston and Swansea on the north end, and later Norway and Denmark to the south.  Gaston (or maybe it was Swansea) reminded me to what Tunica, Mississippi looked like when I was child.  A raised railroad track ran through the center of town from end to end, sandwiched between roads paralleling it on both sides (including the one I was on) and long rows of weathered store fronts stretched out along the roads.  Most of the stores were abandoned but I saw one that appeared to be open.  The signs on its windows offered job counseling, job training, and so forth.  I looked around and couldn't see where anyone would find work no matter how well trained he or she was, but maybe the advice being dispensed was to get out of town.  If that were it, I hope the job seekers weren't being pointed at Norway or Denmark, because those towns had also seen better days, and probably never resembled the countries from which their names were derived in any way at any time.

Later, pointed east on another highway, I passed through Bamberg, a much prettier and more prosperous village.  Bamberg had the same basic layout as Gaston, but its railroad track had been replaced by a long, paved path through a narrow park graced with palm trees.  Large, freshly-painted houses stood on well-groomed lawns.  The only thing that marred Bamberg's beauty were the inevitable strip malls and fast food chain restaurants on its outskirts.  I was getting hungry by this time and, failing to see a local joint with any sign of customers, I dropped into a Hardees.  While there I witnessed a black man and a white man, both well past 70, chatting with one another in the manner of long-time friends.  After recently reading troubling depictions of southern bigotry in Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley" and in the aforementioned "Blue Highways," both of which were written decades ago, I was pleased to see the other side of the dichotomy that "yankees" rarely understand or acknowledge.

Tiring of looking for a campground in the rain and descending darkness, I finally stopped at a Super 8 motel a little north of Savannah and checked in.  After the desk clerk looked at my drivers license she advised me I was a "senior" and therefore qualified for a discount, which I happily accepted.  I'm writing this in the Super 8.  I'm about ready to retire for the evening, but I had one last thought about today.  For the entire drive I had a little companion riding on my dash, or sometimes clinging to the inside of my windshield, parading back and forth.  It was a yellow stonefly, and I named him Percival, one of Arthur's knights who sought the Holy Grail.  My little Percival's holy grail is a patch of the New River.  Like the knight Percival, he'll never find it, because now he's in South Carolina.  If he lives until tomorrow, he may finally escape in Georgia.  Looking around at the palmettos and smelling the salty tidal marshes, what will he think?  What will he dream?

Days 4 & 5 - May 23 & 24 - Blue Ridge

In my last post I reported on the fine brook trout fishing on the Robinson River Day 2.  On Day 4 I was able to get an early start, so I decided to tackle the longer, steeper hike to the Hughes River, which is also in Shenandoah National Park.  Good choice.  The small parking area at the Corbin Cutoff trailhead had been jammed with cars over the weekend, but on Monday morning it was empty. I was concerned about the trail conditions because a thunderstorm had marched through during the night.  Cozy and dry inside Camelot, I was fascinated by the storm.  Like the sound of a huge piece of tin being shaken by giants, each thunderclap pulsed down the long ridges and deep hollers for half a minute, only to be superseded by the next roiling boomer before it had a chance to die out.  Apparently the storm's bark was worse than its bite, because the trail to the Hughes was only a little damp.

If the Robinson is a pretty little rill, the Hughes is a Miss America stream.  The holes are deeper, the streamside flora is brighter and the brookies are bigger.  At least that was true on this day.  I caught 15 or so brook trout on dry flies in a few hours and didn't see another fisherman.  The variety of flora was infinite.  Here and there were remnants of old mountain cabins that predated creation of the national park.  Crumbled foundations, mostly, but one old cabin has been maintained - the Corbin Cabin, which gave the trail I descended its name:

 
The hike back up the ridge was challenging, but along the way I stopped to chat with a photographer who was taking pictures of a strange little flower.  I had seen a few others like it along the trail.  It was a pink lady slipper, the photographer informed me, and this was the only place he had been able to find one.  It looked like a hot pink clam stuck to a thick green stalk.  Or like fairy slippers with their soles stuck together, if you looked closely.  It was a shy little flower.  The photographer was quite thrilled to have discovered it.  I thought his excitement was a little strange until I considered what most people would think of me tripping around in cold streams enticing tiny trout to impale themselves on artificial mayflies.

Day 5 was a travel day.  I packed up Tuesday morning and started south down Skyline Drive without a clear plan or precise destination.  A brief study of my highway map showed the green dots designating a "scenic route" on a stretch of highway south of the national park, so I aimed Excalibur in that direction, only to discover that I was traveling on the famous Blue Ridge Parkway.  The Parkway is very much like Skyline Drive (they are extensions of one another), and perhaps even less developed.  There is not a single gas station along the Parkway, whereas the Drive sports at least four.  Both the Drive and the Parkway snake in and out of the gaps between the tall caps of the Blue Ridge, sometimes curling around the eastern slopes and sometimes around the western slopes.  The Drive offers dramatic views of long, broad river valleys dotted with towns and farms.  But the mountains fan out south of the park, so the vistas from the Parkway contain more and more mountains and hollows folding and unfolding in every direction, festooned in high places with gray outcroppings and patches of scree.  Laurel and azaleas and Virginia creeper add color to the roadsides along the Parkway, and there are a couple of small impoundments near the crossing of the James River.

Just above one of those impoundments, I stopped Excalibur at a picnic area on the banks of a small, ultra-clear stream that paralleled the Parkway.  Since I hadn't yet unstrung my Murray Mountain Rod, I decided to make a few casts to prospect for a brookie.  Three casts into Otter Creek and I indeed found a taker, but when I brought it to hand I discovered it was not a brookie but a rotund little sunfish.  Ordinarily I would have considered that fish the most modest of all of possible catches, but considering it had selected my self-tied parachute emerger out of a flotilla of cracked leaves and fallen petals in a rill offering no expectations, I took outsized pride in my achievement, and resumed my drive south.  Here's a two-minute video featuring a sample of the road I traveled - this is the view from my charging steed Excalibur:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEaZ9AhcDbw

Because I was in serious need of a place where I could charge up the batteries in my computer and cameras, I decided to check into a motel for the night, and opted for a Quality Inn near Roanoke, VA.  As I was backing my boat trailer into a slot in the parking lot, I noticed four guys sitting on the curb drinking beer.  They had noticed my Pennsylvania license plate and asked me what part of the state I was from.  They are also from PA and are working on a construction project in the Blacksburg area.  They are blasters.  That's how they described their occupation.  Apparently they dynamite stuff.  When I told them what my home town was, one of them recalled blasting some stuff at an airport that's a few miles from my home.  Must have been true because he knew all the local highway numbers, names of diners, etc.  So I sat down to have a beer with them and to get the rest of the story about the airport.  Apparently my new blaster friend (who is also an avid fisherman, with big fish pictures on his cell phone to prove it) witnessed the aerial descent of several women who stripped while in their plane and parachuted down to the airport buck naked.  I've lived in that area for five years and I can say definitively I've not observed anything that interesting.  I have a few pilot friends who frequent that airport - I think I now know the reason.

After a while one of the young ladies who works at the motel came by, smoking a cigarette.  She was well-acquainted with the blasters.  They've been staying at the Quality Inn for several months.  One of the guys mentioned to her that I was on a long fishing trip and bemoaned the lack of good fishing spots in this area of Virginia. "There's good fishing around here," she said. "I got a friend with a private pond. We go down there and throw a bucket of fish food in the water and just scoop up the fish with a net." I remarked that some people might consider that cheating. "I call it 'city fishing,'" she replied flatly. Makes sense. No doubt her approach is much more efficient and cost-effective than hiking three miles down a steep, stubbled trail to catch a six-inch trout on a $500 rod and then have to scramble back up the mountain in the heat of the afternoon. On the other hand, I bet she doesn't get to see pink lady slippers, or mushrooms like these:

Days 2 & 3 - May 21 & 22 - Shenandoah National Park

Before this blog post is over I’ll get around to the subject of fly fishing, but as I often do, I’ll come at it askew.  First I want to say something about Virginia, home of Shenandoah National Park, in which Camelot (my Northstar truck camper) has been parked for the last couple of nights and will remain for another couple of nights.  But I’ll have to come to the subject of Virginia in a roundabout way also.

My father, Eldred, is the eleventh and youngest child  of his father, John, who was the eleventh and youngest child of his father, who was the eleventh and youngest child of his father, whose name was Isaac.  I’m the youngest child of my father, but only the second one.  Our family is an example of how U.S. population trends changed during the twentieth century.  In times past, rural families, which constituted a much greater portion of the population than they do today, tended to have large families.  Each family had to create its own little economy and it needed workers to do that.  That’s not typically the case today, although folks like the Gosselins (8 kids) and the Duggars (19 kids!) have found modern ways to capitalize on having lots of children.  But I digress.

Isaac Wolfe (or Wolf) was born at the turn of the 19^th century in Virginia, in 1802, so we only have to look back a few generations in our line of the family and we’re in the infancy of the United States.  We don’t know who Isaac’s father was, or if he was born in America or immigrated from Europe.  If the latter, he probably came from Germany, or possibly from England. Wolfe is a English spelling of the name, but most likely it was transformed from the original Wolf, which is the typical German spelling.  I’ve seen many places in the Shenandoah Valley named “Wolf” – for example, “Wolf Gap,” which is a minor pass on the front range of the Allegheny mountains leading from Virginia into West Virginia.  It’s not far from Columbia Furnace, which saw its heyday in the Civil War as a manufacturer of cannon and shot.  Legend has it that Wolf Gap was named for a fellow called Isaac Wolf.  It’s unlikely he was my great-great grandfather, but who knows?  It’s fun to contemplate the possibility.

Over the course of the 19^th century Isaac and his youngest sons and their youngest sons gradually migrated south through Tennessee, eventually settling in northern Mississippi.    The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are iconic symbols of the great European immigration wave of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, obscuring the fact that earlier in the history of the U.S., Virginia, not New York, was immigration central on the eastern seaboard.  Virginia has a relatively small land mass and that land is mostly marginal for agriculture, so when the younger sons of the first generations of land-owners and recent immigrants came of age, their prospects for staying in Virginia were poor.  Consequently, they migrated west in great hordes, first into Kentucky and Ohio and Tennessee, and soon into points further south and west.  The song "O Shenandoah" is a melancholy reminder of the mass exodus from Virginia  that did so much to shape how America looks today.  The interpretation of the song by Sissel, which is conveniently available on YouTube with captioned lyrics, is one of my favorite interpretations:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1EG_4IBzbA

By the turn of the 20th century, Isaac's grandson and my grandfather, John, was a sharecropper in northern Mississippi, married to Daisy, who already had two children from a previous marriage.  My father grew up with his sprawling family in the Mississippi Delta, picking cotton for a quarter a day, or so he used to tell my brother and me.  His childhood spanned the Great Depression, an era when a ripe watermelon or a slice of pig from the smokehouse were the closest things to luxuries he could reasonably hope to enjoy.  At a tender age he married my mother, Topsy, sired my brother, Dave, and promptly went into the Army to serve in the European theatre during World War II.  When he was discharged he obtained his high school equivalency certificate.  Against all odds he was able to use those experiences and his meager education to build a lucrative career as an executive with a prominent international farm equipment manufacturer.  A remarkable story, though not entirely uncommon in its time.  Tom Brokaw wrote a book about my father’s peer group called “the Greatest Generation.”  That title is not hyperbole, it’s a fact.

My respect for my father has grown by leaps and bounds.  As a boy,  I took it for granted that my life would be comfortable and my education would be supported.  When my father gave me advice, I usually either resented it or was simply bored with it.  One thing he recommended was to get a good job with a good employer and stick it out through thick and thin.  I had no such intention during my youth, but the advice must have stuck in the back of mind because I eventually followed it.  Things turned out just as he intimated they would.  I realize now what I should have understood all along, that the sacrifices my father made for his family and his country and his employer were enormous.  Everything he achieved, he earned.  To this day, as he struggles with declining health and performs the utmost acts of devotion for my mother, his quiet strength remains intact.  I love my father.  I’m just sorry that I didn’t always show it.

Those are things I’ve been thinking about since I’ve been in Virginia, land of my forefathers.

Oh, and I also went fly fishing.  Yesterday I hiked down from the crest of the Blue Ridge to the Robinson River.  As I reported in my last blog post, the streams are running high, and even in the tumbling headwaters of this small river there was a powerful flow.  I crossed numerous rivulets coming down the trail.  Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between the trail and a rivulet, since in fact they were one and the same.  I wasn’t too optimistic about my prospects for catching fish.  Therefore it was a thrill to hook a gorgeous little brook trout in the very first pool I paused to fish in.  He was no match for my short (6’ 10”) Scott “Murray Mountain Rod," a Mr. Rapidan bead-head nymph fly, and my consummate skill as a small stream fisherman.  Here’s a picture of the brookie:

He's diminutive, yes, but actually bigger than the average southern brook trout.  Brookies are the only trout native to America's east coast.  Finding and catching them is not an easy task these days.  But on this day in this place, everything made sense – more scrambling to small, scenic pools of clear mountain water, more feisty brook trout, sunshine filtered through a lacy green canopy, dancing yellow butterflies, a fawn grazing only yards away, a wild turkey, and a shot of Glenlivet from a flask engraved with “Once and Future Fly Fisherman” (gifts from Eric and Jeff – thank you!).  In sum, it was perfect!

To top off Day 2, I made a nice campfire and grilled a T-bone, which I relished with a fire-baked potato, broccoli slaw and a glass of French sauvignon blanc.  The sun went down, the stars came out, and I sat by the diminishing fire for a long time, thinking about my father.  God bless him.

I had to move from one campground to another on Day 3, a Sunday, because the first campground was only open for the weekend.  Because of the move and my desire not to compete with the weekend crowds, I decided to spend most of the day tooling around on my bike, reading and writing.  Early in the evening I met my new campground neighbors from Connecticut - father Steve, daughter Courtney, son Cameron and friend C.J.  They kindly offered me a chair so I could sit by their fire and chat until darkness fell.  When I told them I was making it a point to meet new people along my route, Courtney said, "I'm sure you'll meet plenty of people more colorful than us."  To which I replied, "Maybe you're more colorful than you think."  They weren't sure whether to take that as a compliment, but it was. A frequent theme in the writings of 19th-century transcendalist Ralph Waldo Emerson is that we're all more colorful than we think we are.  Steve works in the financial services industry now, but has the aire of an ex-hippie, which he may or may not have actually been.  He must have given his kids, who are now college-aged, a more liberal upbringing than I had, because they were surprisingly eager to sample my Glenlivet right under their dad's nose.  So was Dad, who has Scottish blood appropriate for drinking Glenlivet.  Steve is originally from Nova Scotia, and informed me of something that should have been obvious to me years ago but wasn't:  Nova Scotia means New Scotland.  Duh.  In any case, the Scottish/Connecticut clan and I enjoyed a very pleasant evening and I discovered the truth in something Steinbeck reported in "Travels with Charley" - a good method of making friends on the road is to ply them with whiskey.

Day One - May 20, Shenandoah National Park

One of the wonderful things about Pandora radio is its serendipitous nature. I’m often surprised by its ability to generate the right song for the right moment. Never was that more true than this morning. I turned on Pandora in Excalibur (you’ll have to view the video at the link below to understand what Excalibur is), and the song that started playing as I pulled out of our drive and began my corner-to-corner odyssey around America was “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,” by Tom Paxton. I know where I’m bound, physically. Psychologically, I’m not so sure. So the song was perfectly appropriate for the moment, brightening my spirits a bit after I had just finished a very tearful parting with my wife, Trish (my tears, not hers). I won’t see Trish again for 40 days.  Coincidentally, 40 days is the same number of days Jesus wandered in the desert and fasted, if I remember my Bible stories correctly. Some people would say there are no coincidences. I don’t know.

So day one started with a great song and lots of clouds and rain as I scooted through Pennsylvania down I-81, through the narrow neck of Maryland and a slice of West Virginia. The sun popped out a little as I arrived in Virginia, prompting me to exit the interstate and cruise at a slower pace down Highway 11, which was blissfully free of traffic. I passed the Wayside Inn, which touts itself as the oldest continuously operating inn in America. I’ve eaten there a couple of times and have no reason to doubt its claim. I took my time through Strasburg and Tom’s Brook and Woodstock.  The area is rich in Civil War lore and famous battlefields.  I stopped in Edinburg briefly for a fishing report from Harry Murray, a renowned fly fisherman in these parts. Unfortunately, the fishing report wasn’t great. Northern Virginia rivers are experiencing the same high water conditions as Pennsylvania, so a pontoon boat float down the Shenandoah River isn’t going to happen this week. However, Harry offered some hope for the streams in Shenandoah National Park, which are where I was headed anyway. So off I went, passing through Luray and easing Excalibur up the west slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains to Skyline Drive. Here’s a picture I took from the Pass Run Overlook when I arrived:

By the time I backed into a campsite in the Mathew Arm campground mid-afternoon, I was starting to feel like my journey had officially begun. Before I busied myself starting a campfire and getting my fishing gear organized for tomorrow’s hike, I sat down to contemplate the site for a while, and was soon rewarded with the strange sound of a very large owl flying through my campground at close range. I can’t describe the sound of his beating wings except to say it was haunting, in a good way. The sudden appearance and sound of the owl constituted one of those unexpected events one hopes for on a trip like this. I finished up the evening by the fire with a piece of rhubarb pie - one of the last treats from home I’ll get to enjoy for many weeks. I tried to check my e-mail. No connection! I think that was a good thing.  So I don’t know when this blog post will actually be published. I’ll have to get back in range. No hurry.

Check out this video, which contains my bon voyage message to you all. You’ll discover the true identity of Excalibur, and you’ll find out something about Camelot, Guinevere and Elaine as well.   Here's the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMU2_ZQouj0

Tracking My Trip

I mentioned in an earlier post that I will be using a Spot GPS unit to track the places I visit during my long trip commencing day after tomorrow.  The Spot periodically sends satellite signals to record my locations, assuming I have the Spot turned on.  I plan to turn in on whenever I arrive at a significant new location while driving, or when I'm actively fishing in an area that involves significant movement on a river or on any other body of water, either on a boat or when hiking.  If I operate it correctly (big IF), I will create a precise record of all my locations throughout the four months of the trip.  The locations I've visited, including my current or very recent location if the Spot is turned on, are visible on Google Maps.  If you've used Google's mapping application (if you haven't, don't admit it to anyone under the age of 50), you know that you can use it to view maps in a traditional format - i.e., showing towns, roads, parks and other man-made features - or in a satellite view, which visually depicts the natural elements of the land, such as trees and rivers, as well as the man-made structures.  That feature makes it possible to see not only exactly where I was at specific times, but also to see what the environments I was in looked like from an aerial perspective.

You can find a link to Don's Spot Location Tracker at the bottom of my blog page.  Just click on that link and your browser will navigate to a Spot-sponsored shared page.  You'll need a password to enter the site - make a note of it!  The password is OAFF - an acronym for Once and Future Flyfisherman as well as an apt description of me - easy to remember!  Once you're in the site you can plot my locations on a Google map and see a list of the dates and times I was at each location.  So if you read one of my future posts and you're interested to see what (where) I am reporting on, this is the way to do it.   Please note - if you subscribe to my blog and receive new blog posts via e-mail, you'll need to enter the actual blog site (which you can do my clicking on the blog title in the e-mail) to see the Spot link at the bottom of the page.

If you go to my Spot shared page today, you won't see much.  I was driving in an area near our home when I first experimented with the Spot location tracker feature today - that's what you'll see.  Starting this Friday there will be much more to see.  Hope you enjoy it.

Final Warmup

Less than one week to go before I launch on my big adventure!  So far this year I've fished in the Keys, northwest Wyoming, the eastern Sierras in California, and several places in my home state of Pennsylvania.  For my final warm-up I accompanied my neighbor Tom Brubaker and his friend David Bull to the fabled Upper Delaware River to float on David's drift boat and fly fish for brown and rainbow trout.  The water up there has been very high this spring, but we were fortunate that the past week was dry and the water level dropped dramatically.  The mayfly and caddis hatches were prolific and the trout were plentiful and often visible.

The name of the game on the Upper Delaware (at least the way David and Tom play it) is casting to specific rising fish with dry flies.  Because the fish don't usually rise a lot until late in the afternoon and evening, we didn't launch the boat until about 2 pm, but we fished until it was too dark to see.  From about 5 pm until well into dusk, we saw lots of aggressive risers and had numerous shots at big, healthy trout.  Each of us caught several of them, primarily on emerger patterns.  It was hoot, and a great way for me to loosen up for the big trip and practice my videography.  Click on the following link for a 2.5 minute video that pretty well summarizes our venture:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr49bYLFrT0


I plan to do one more blog post before I leave next week.  It will cover my itinerary and my toys.  I hope you can tune in throughout the summer as I travel all around our great land in pursuit of sportfish on the fly.

Bluebird Days

As the countdown of days to my great American land voyage gets close to single digits, I'm busy with final preparations.  Our weather this spring has been dominanted by frequent rains, but the sun has asserted itself the last few days, giving me an opportunity to be outside most of the time.  These have been bluebird days in the fullest sense. While mowing our fields on my trusty John Deere, I've spotted pairs of bluebirds at each of our three sets of bluebird houses.  That's always a good sign that spring is fully in progress, and if there's any doubt, here's a recent picture from our back yard:

I've also been trying to find opportunities to sharpen my fishing skills after a long winter of few casts .  Yesterday I took the kayak to Giving Pond.  Amazingly I did not see another human being all day.  Having the lake all to myself, I took the time to squeeze the kayak into a large shallow cove thick with dead, flooded trees.  I've always been reluctant to go in that area because casting space is tight, but the breeze was high and the cove was sheltered, so I decided to give it go.  That turned out to be a great decision because that's where the bass and the larger bluegills were, and they were eagerly hitting poppers.  Bird watching was supreme and colorful turtles lined every other log.  A turtle that appeared to be almost three feet long swam by the boat, eyeing me with indifference.  Fluffy clouds dotted the sky.  At one point I just sat back in the kayak, smoked a cigar and let the breeze brush my face.  It was a perfect afternoon.

This morning I climbed back on the Deere and continued to mow the fields.  The bluebirds were still flitting around, along with a couple of purple martins, who seemed to be making a home in one of the bluebird houses.  A large redtailed hawk circled a couple of times, apparently unhappy that I was chasing the mice into the woods with my noisy bushhog.  Listening on headphones to the David Bromberg channel on Pandora, I was pretty much in heaven.  When it was time for a break I ventured over to the Schaffhausens for lunch with Bernadette and Eric - five-onion soup and a very fresh, light chicken salad made a wonderful repast.  Having recently finished assembling my new Colorado XT pontoon boat, I needed to check its seat position and balance, so I had brought it to the Schaffhausens' pond for its maiden voyage.  Also, I was pretty sure I could catch some bass there, which I did.  Here was the scene this afternoon at the Schaffhausen pond:

I've planned one more outing before I start the long trip on May 20.  Next Thursday I'll be floating down the West Delaware River in a drift boat with friends.  They say most of the brown trout in the West Delaware are in the 20"-plus range.  I tied some chartreuse bunny strip streamers the other day and I'm ready to see how they'll fare in the lairs of those big browns.  With luck, Thursday will be another bluebird day.