dryfly

Very nice. Great inspiration. Wednesday .. we hope.

Speaking of crack!

Don Don't know answer. It is about money and attitude and I think pressures of health care, eduction and social services simply overwhelms the other things. Our gov't seems to not want to offend people by charging for some services, the money from which could toward environmental protection. We all know what an extra five bucks from fishing licenses could do for F&W enforcement. Maybe we should have a 3 percent sales tax IF (IF IF IF...) the money went to designated areas such as environmental protection. There is a large component of "attitude" with the current gov't. Every letter I've written to ministers about raising license fees all get the same reply, "...we don't want to raise fishing license fees because was want all to enjoy the [once] great outdoors." Fluff. What is the answer? No matter which political party gets in there will be reasons why the rivers of which you spoke and many other environmental things will be ignored. Despite the promises of "enviro protection" by the NDs you can bet that they spend so much on social services that they'd spend us into oblivion. The "left" has never had any sense of practical and economic realities. (The first huge cuts to occur in California two years ago was Arnold's pet enviro projects...) The Conservatives ignored things like rivers and public lands even when they had money...near as I could tell they did not want to piss off the rural vote (by say charging more for licenses and charging for random camping) and the city vote largely could not give a *hit about rivers and fish. We spent some time in February in Sedona Arizona. Large parts of the region is Red Rock "forestry reserve" and in that reserve you cannot park in public parking areas or on the side of the road without a "pass." Not even park for a few minute unless you have a pass. I think the fee was $5/day or a mere $20 for the entire year. A nice concept and similar to one we have asked for in the forestry reserve on the Eastern Slopes....politicians won't consider such a fee for service for fear to pissing off people. Yet they don't have resources to protect F&W and lands in the forestry areas. They will do nothing about the abuse of public lands by squatters who set up camps for 4 months all along the Eastern Slopes....even tough the regs once said "Max 14-day stay." Why not a similar system in Alberta as in Arizona and the money goes to environmental protection? (The Red Rock Reserve pass money went to protecting the very area..) How about an annual vehicle pass for the forestry area of $50 per vehicle and (what?) $100 to $200 per vehicle if staying overnight...with max stay of 14 days. But the gov't is scared of charging these fees. Bullshit. (Fifty bucks is just a bit of gas money these days.) Dunno Don ... it is complex. And as our population grows to 5 million ... well, it won't get better under any political regime unless there is a wholesale by in for increased fees and taxes. (Where else is the money to come from??) We have to start charging more somewhere, BUT also have to support enviro protection budgets and not have increased fees eaten up by hospitals and schools...obviously critically important. Probably time for a sales tax in Alberta. (Can't wait for the feedback on this... ) Happy daylight savings time. Clive

midgetwaiter ... agree 100% ... Here in the small burg of Coaldale, we sometimes get two and three copies of some fliers....first in the newspaper...then in with "Prairie Post" and sometimes in a flier drop....recently we got three from XYZ Corp (Home Depot I think) promoting their new line of green products. What a joke. My point was that weenies make such a big deal about plastic bags and water bottles while our whole society is awash in waste be it from fossil fuel or from other resources like trees ... but weenies have a compulsive need to have a "cause" and water bottles and plastic bags are a good target. Like everyone here, I am all for conservation and reduction..just a little sick of "green this" and "green that" .. meaningless drivel these days. We need to live and let live while reducing and conserving ... and forget about the green finger pointing.

Don More statistics * North America produced 7,000,000,000 kg (7 billion kg) of newsprint last year (This is a fact.) Maybe we should ban books and newspapers perhaps..use is declining for sure. * There are 200,000,000,000 kg (200 billion kg) of sea water for every person on earth (This is a fact....just a fun number.) * The average member of the Rocky Sustainability Committee drinks 13.74 cups of Tim Horton's coffee per year..in paper cups so they can Roll up the Rim to Win. * 79.873 percent of all statistics are made up ... a Spoonerism with no basis in fact. If the Rocky Sustainability Committee says only 13 percent of plastic water bottles are recycled, they sure as hell are doing a piss poor job and should disband. Don ... a bit more seriously ... actually I am serious...do a survey of the Rocky Sustainability Committee and find out the average size of house that the committee members live in...square feet per person. If it is more than about 500 square feet per person .. well they need to rethink their lifestyles perhaps and not worry so much about plastic water bottles. They are not living a sustainable or green lifestyle if living in houses larger than their real needs. (There is a local green-weenie here who loves to extol the virtues of a green lifestyle. Her and her hubby own two [count 'em TWO] homes that total at least 4,000 sq ft. .. that's about 2,000 sq feet each...way too big for anyone who professes to lead a green lifestyle. One of their homes is a cottage some 140 km away and they burn perhaps 20 tanks of gasoline each year to drive to their solar heated summer place. Huh?! I am most happy for them, but it seems they ain't livin' the green mantra they espouse.) BTW we use plastic water bottles sparingly (they are damn handy when you are on the road) and recycle 100% of the ones we do buy. Clive

Hats off to you guys for taking action! Excellent story and photos. Clive

monger...The fish we caught last year were fat..no indication of lack of food at all. There seems to be huge midge population..they probably have lots of feed. BUT ... we agree with you .. .I have suggested no stocking on 2011. We will discuss this more with TC. Last October, I wrote this to adc ... "MAYBE there should be no stocking in 2011 or at least another reduction to say 10,000 or so...." Shall see. Unfortunately growth rates have probably been affected by the colder-than-average temps the past two summers....maybe if we get a half-decent summer and another year of growth we will see more and more >50-cm fish in Police. We can only hope. Nice letter Neil! Thanks. Clive

Don .. nah .. had to have a whack at it... flytyer...aha! Maurice Strong ... a blight to humanity and unfortunately he's a Canuck. “Isn’t it the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Maurice Strong Perhaps the poster boy for WWF, DS and the Sierra Club. BBT ..what did you pay for your Jetta? Saw an ad recently...seems to be less expensive than before the economy went South. They sure look rugged. One day we will have to get a new sedan. (I have an aversion to them because I know someone with a Jetta and well ... this person has SDS and I wrongly equate the car with the owner. I am bad.

Very nice. Looks great. How durable are the legs? You tried old-fashioned rubber?

Agree with Don .. be careful. My experience with these things is that hiring a guy at $100 is often less expensive than DIY. Ask me about the front door window I was checking for leaks in January.... Ooops....crash ... $210 later..replaced window...

Don .. good luck. Ah! I forgot it is ONLY about color with the ladies, eh? (Just kidding.) If you do not like Ford I am sure that are many compact to mid-sized vehicles that get 35+ mpg. Good luck. With apologies to Don and the FFC board for this ongoing hijack... mods can snip it of they want... (Man, I gotta get out fishing or picture taking.....ugh!) Smitty. I am all over conservation. Conserving somewhat finite resources is important—as the earth’s population grows it is getting more difficult. My wife and I try to do our small part. We live in a small bungalow (could be smaller)...we use a push mower (okay only at our summer trailer place) ...we drive a 6-cylinder vehicle for 80 percent of our casual driving (yes we could drive a four-banger if we had to)..we rarely eat in restaurants and cook fresh veggies at home… I walk downtown for errands and groceries when feasible…we compost. But still, we live in a house that is too large and probably drive too much. But I ain't pretending that we are saving the environment like many green weenies claim to be doing. Conservation is indeed important but we also need to put energy use and lifestyle in perspective. What irritates me no end is the "pious" attitude of the "eco weenies" and how they single-handily are saving the universe with (frankly) rather silly concepts or old concepts and often concepts that have a larger "footprint" (whatever THAT is) that what they are trying to replace. And they are passing much misinformation along to our youth. THAT is the shame. Let’s see: — Green housing subdivisions in which "green" methods and supplies are used to build 3,000-sq-ft homes ?? — Hybrid Escalades — production of bio fuels that take land out of food production and drive up food prices — wasting billions on expensive and ineffective wind farms and claiming to reduce emissions (the BIG wind lie that claims to be emissions free..far from it!) The couple of billion $$ we have spent in Alberta on ineffective wind turbines would have been better spend on conservation in our homes and businesses. And let’s not kid ourselves, you and I and all individual consumers pay every nickel of the cost of wind farms and transmission...whether or not you got sucked in to buying Bullfrog power....THAT is a huge scam...we all pay for wind! It is all the same grid. The turbines do not shut down when the wind blows..Smitty as I write this post, wind is generating ZERO electricity in Alberta...zero....last night it was working at 1 percent of its capacity..NOT 1% of demand ... one percent of wind capacity..today it is producing zero electricity...all backed up with coal and gas power...as IF wind is emissions free...such a shameful waste promoted by capitalists and egged on by weenies. Such strange bedfellows and we all pay for this waste.) — vilifying the tar sands because birds die (such a shame) while turning a blind eye to wind-turbine bird and bat morts — the 100-mile diet ( I spent many years working with market gardeners and vegetable producers in order to increase local production, but to feed the masses it is ineffective nonsense. In most cases it is cheaper to produce in a warmer southern climate and transport—but that too has limits—see pepper photo below. ☺) Pretending to do stuff to make us feel good while having no overt effect on the environment is misguided. The big shame of many green efforts is wasting time and money in ineffective green things that have no effect on the environment while ignoring the plight of millions who don’t have clean water and a decent health services. We are wasting billions pretending we can change climate while ignoring the plight of millions. Environmentalism is detracting from the REAL needs of the earth! I am all for teaching about the environment but teaching scientific untruths and misleading our youth appears to be rampant in our society. Such a shame. We need sanity in our educational system and it is not there....we are not teaching our children the truth about environmental protection .... just misguided Suzukian platitudes not based on science with no conceivable positive outcome. Regards Clive PS: Maye it is the drinking water in Lethbridge... :P These are all Lethbridge events... FAIL ... what makes this so unacceptable is that the teacher can't understand basic engineering and scientific facts and acts as if he invented landscaping. (There are several fallacies in this teacher's woefully misguided effort.) FAIL .. organic peppers flown from Israel... (efficient truck transport of veggies 2,000 or 3,000 km is one thing...flying peppers around the world in the name of misguided environmental protection....utter nonsense.) It works both ways as well… this Lethbridge fencing contractor wants us to “save a tree” by building a plastic fence?!? You can’t make up this crap. FAIL!

Don .. my apologies for the hijack!! There are a lot of options for you, none of which involve getting a hybrid IMHO. You can get Sandy a great well-appointed, mid-sized sedan that gets good mileage and won't break you stock options to maintain. In the long haul (say over 200,000 km) you will save a lot of money sticking with conventional AND get good mileage. Clive

Mike "A Cadillac SUV Hybrid HAS to be earth friendly- Right? Right?" Well .. er ... well .. maybe .. then again, maybe not, eh? To quote someone here about 2 years ago... "Pretending to give a *hit." (One of the great quotes here...) Pretending to give a *hit is the ONLY reason to drive a Caddy hybrid. Makes no economic or physical sense. Just window dressing. And if an owner of one of these thinks they are portraying "greenness" I have news for them. It is right up there with buying electricity from the grid from Bullfrog ... the same electrons as the rest of us 98 percent of which are coal generated.

Don This is a "no brainer." Ford Focus or similar model. Let me see ... mileage is a bit less than the Toyota Pious ... for the same (what?) $36K you can buy two (count 'em two) Fords and easily get (what?) 500K kms on them...they will outlast the little woman. Or you can get one Pious and save a few $$ on petrol that will be pissed away when you need to service the batteries at 100K or whatever it is these days. Ka-Ching! I dunno about that VW Green car of the year BBT ... there was one parked outside of dad's last spring ... was around freezing and the diesel Jetta ran all day long ... green as grass. Don ... buy her a Ford Focus and buy a chrome "Hybrid" insignia for it it that makes Sandy feel better. If you get her the hybrid you can move to Lethbridge so she can get priority parking at the Park Place Mall. Green madness. BTW .. this is real ... there are hybrid stalls at PPM. You can't make up stoodip eco-weenie *hit like this. Regards Clive

Remember to "save for web" when posting images (from this GPS-enabled camera) on the internet. Or we will all know exactly where the pictures of HUGE fish were taken. Looks like a nice fishing camera.

How you keep track Terry? Carbon dating or counting rings? Happy Birthday! Clive

"After You" When someone asks the name of your boat, you can say, "I named it After You."

Hey beed! I think you can get about 4 years in PA for: 1) Handling a leopard frog and placing on a fishing reel 2) Taking an endangered species out of its natural environment 3) Failing to report the GPS coordinates of said LF to the Department of Something or Other. Man oh man, yer in big doo. Just kidding. Great shots and the leopard frog on the reel is my fave. Great stuff. Have a happy winter. Cheers! Clive

Come on gang! Pony up a few bucks for Ryan, Darrin, Jared and Smitty! There are few here who can't afford twenty five or fifty bucks to help manage a disease that will hit 10 percent of you before you "shuffle off this mortal coil." Here are Ryan's and Darrin's Movemebr webpages: http://ca.movember.com/mospace/918464/ http://ca.movember.com/mospace/1159394/

Excuse the crappy formatting ... here is a list of raffle and auction items...some fine tuning yet. ...but you get the idea.... RAFFLES Outcast 9' Pontoon Boat BUSINESS CARD DRAW 2 btls of wine COFFEE MUG RAFFLE Orvis FF 9' 6wt 7 pc Rod Battenkill Reel & Line Certified Data Netbook Optio Underwater Camera LIVE AUCTION Elk River Float Trip 4 Flames Tickets & 2 Hotel Rooms HD 'All Sport' HeroCam Pkg. "Silent Witness-Waters of Nova Scotia" Framed Print Hurricanes Super Suite Duck Blind; Goose & Mallard Calls Sierra TX2 Large Arbour Saltwater Fly Reel 8/10 Day with Lethbridge Police K9 Unit for 2 people 1 day guided Belize Flats fishing & 3 nights accom. San Pedro Belize Batik Purse Winston 5wt rod/reel/line w/engraving 2 Nites Accom Bed & Bales B&B Half Day FF Lessons 'Best Practises' w/John Bransfield "Alberta Big Skies" Original Oil by Brian Stone 1955 Cockburns Port Heritage Bamboo Rod 1 day 2 People Bow River Float "World-Class Browns" Robert Batement 4 Print Set Framed BUCKET RAFFLE Fly Fisherman Wall Hanging 2 btls of wine Framed Photo "Burmis Tree" Wooden Trout Carving "West Castle Cut" "Call of the Wild" Print Framed "Trout Streams of Alberta" Jim McLennan 7/50 Bradley Portable Smoker Furled Leader Package 1 Dozen Mayflies 24 Flies Flybox & 10 mixed Flies for Local Rivers Dragonfly 8 wt rod, reel & line "Survival Pkg" Walkie Talkies/Compass/Meal Kit 1.5 L. Fonseca 2002 Port 36 "Pre-treed" Flies BBQ Toolset Woods' LED Worklight Southern Alberta Flyfishing Experience Jewellery Set 2 - $25 Gift Cert's Guesthouse Restaurant 2 Green Fees for 2011 @ Paradise Canyon Golf Resort 4 Green Fees for 2011 @ Land O Lakes Golf Club 1 Auto Detailing Certificate for Oil Change SILENT AUCTION Framed Photo "Crowsnest Mountain" 2 or 3 Framed Photos 1 Day Field Photo Lesson for 2 People Original WC "Yellow Sallie" Crowsnest Rainbow "OSO Close" Sculpture Mounted Salmon Flies Framed Fly Fishing Stamp Set Sculpture "Rooster" by Marc Pierce Sculpture "Piling in Mallards" By Marc Pierce Print "Moment of Reflection" by Diane Michelin Framed Print "Stooks" by Fraser Hines 4 Books + Bookends 7 pc. 9 ft. 5 wt. flyrod Orvis Kid's Fly Fishing Outfit Reddington 6wt 4pc rod, reel floating line Orvis Vest (loaded) Orvis Battenkill III 5-wt MidArbour Reel Furled Leader Package 22 Hoppers in a case 27 Dries & Nymphs 21 Wet Flies 20 Flies 25 Dry & Wet Flies 25 Dry & Wet Flies 25 Dry & Wet Flies 25 Dry & Wet Flies 3 Dozen Hand-tied Flies (2 Boxes) Waterton Stones Stones Nymphs, Humpies & Stones Oldman Cutties Caddis, PMD's & Nymphs Chironomids Caddis & Stimulators Caddis Alaska Rainbows Streamers 2 Nites Accom for 4 @ Crowsnest Riverside (Burmis) $50 Voucher for Food & Beverages $25 Gift Certificate 6 Bud Light T-Shirts 2 Nites Accom for 2 @ Country Encounters (CNP) 4 Green Fees @ Crowsnest Pass Golf Course 4 Green Fees and 2 Carts @ Lethbridge Country Club 4 Green Fees for 2011 @ Magrath Golf Club 2 Hour Dry Land Casting Clinic for Four People 3 Dozen Bonefish Flies 4 Lift Tickets for Castle Mountain Resort 8" Fixed Blade Custom-Built Hunting Knife w/Case Turbo Ceramic Styling Iron 4 - $25 Gift Cert's Guesthouse Restaurant Ceramic Serving Set "Posters of the Canadian Pacific" Book Amundson 9ft 4pc 6wt Rod,Reel,Line w/case & equip BBQ Set 4 - $25 Gift Cert's Guesthouse Restaurant Spinning Rod,Reel,Tackle Package "Okotoks Untitled" Original Oil by Brian Stone Wine Basket Columbia Fishing Shirt (Large) Box of 125 Flies 2 Nike Golf Shirts Walk & Wade the Crow 3 Bottles Petrolo Torrione 2007 1 Magnum Bottle Planeta Merlot Sicillia 2005 Coffee Mug w/Bandanas & Huckleberry Jams Knife Set $100 Voucher for Meat/Jerky/Smoked Sausage

Monger...did you ever see this craziness...happened to adc a few years ago...and I was there with my trusty camera. Clive

Hey gang.... DINNER & AUCTION Friday October 29 See details here... We still have some tickets left. The raffle and auction items have never been better. GREAT stuff to be had! Thanks Clive

River Run development is not going as planned... Today's Lethbridge Herald. Mike is a TU member and "retired" journalist. He owns that sweet cabin near the Burmis TU lease.

Well well, Don as another non Calgree-an and not a TV watcher, I had no idea what you were talking about. Had not heard a thing about this. But found this: Staged or not, good on her. I'd guess it was not staged. She was pissed and held it together well.

The Prairie Rattlesnake, is the only subspecies of the Western Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis) found in Alberta. I photographed these snakes on October 9, 2010 near Foremost, Alberta. There are three individual specimens in these photographs. See here... Special thanks to the kind rancher who showed this wintering den to me. I appreciate being allowed access to take these photos. I plan on going back while the warm weather lasts. Clive