Red

That is exactly why I don't ever shop there. Sure I might save a couple bucks but it's not worth it. I know it means nothing to Walmart that they won't get my money but it means something to me.

I'll have to take a pass this year. Flames - Oilers starts at 8 pm. Should have the first scrap out of the was by 8:05.

Isn't that the Leafs motto? 'Next Year'? Or is it 'Sucked since 67'?

And I see that the drawing of Max and his big bull has made its way into the mag. Nice work!

Scratch that, it just showed up in the mail today.

If I was hiking and saw that cruising through the woods, I would flat out $hit myself.

I won December's draw and I haven't got mine yet either.

Hire Max. I went out with him last fall, I had never nymphed before and he taught me a ton. I was into fish within a half hour and ever since I haven't been skunked nymphing. He makes it very logical, you won't be sorry.

Sadly no, they went missing after a move. I wish I had them, it would be cool to catch a fish on my Great Grandpa's reel. I still remember the line on it, it was brown and kind of rough.

Is it wrong that I was hoping they would roll their truck on the way in?

My Dad took me along fishing since I was too young to remember. Caught my first fish at Spray Lakes, a nice rainbow, when I was about 5. I spin casted until about 4 years ago when I finally jumped into fly fishing. I've always been intrigued by fly fishing since I was a little kid when I found a couple of old fly reels under the stairs of our house. I asked what they were and my Dad said they were his Grandpa's fly fishing reels. My Dad never fly fished but I've been intrigued ever since.

Alrighty. I know nothing about spey casting but would like to learn so can you sign me up for the Saturday course? Thanks.

Will spey rods be provided to use or do I need my own or would I just use my single hander?

You can't vote for a guy named Alice. I voted for Iggy but Neely & Clark would be up there. I think my favorite was Gary Roberts when he was with the Flames, I loved watching him go. He'd hit, fight, score. What more could you want?

I just bought a signed hard cover copy of Blue Ribbon Bow at Wholesale Sports. It was the last hard cover though.

I like it best when the playoffs are on (they happen after the regular season to determine the league champion - the Leafs don't usually take part) and the old farts on CBC keep talking about the Leafs, even though they've been on the golf course for over a month. That's my favorite.

Wendel was great. He is the only thing about the Leafs I've ever had respect for. Maybe if he still played there would be some justification for having them on TV all the time.

The nylon part has and is ripping on the upper sections, but the shock-cord laces are still fine. The leather is still good too. I'm guessing that leaving them on the back deck to dry out may have been the problem, with the UV rays weakening the nylon. Thanks for tip about the grommet, I didn't think of that.

I also have the Chota SLT's. I like them and after two years the still look new but the one problem I have now is that they have torn where the laces go through. I'm not sure what to do now, I'm thinking of punching holes through the leather and using normal laces. I've got a few months to figure it out I guess.

I received this reply from CP Rail today, says their Senior Manager checked it out and said it's okay. I'm sure glad they checked it out though, I just hope he's right. I'm quite impressed by their response so far, they seemed to get on it right away. Thank you for writing to Canadian Pacific about our tracks in the Crowsnest area. As track safety is of primary importance to our company, the senior manager in this region responsible for track inspection and maintenance did undertake an immediate and thorough inspection of the track conditions along this corridor, and determined that the track meets all federal regulations for operation and is safe for use. For your information, the photos taken reveal some minor, what we refer to as, rail head spalling and head checking, which is confined to the rail surface and does not penetrate the core of the rail. The rail " gap " shown in the one photo is located at a rail joint (the joint bars and bolts are visible in the photo) . Although the rail ends have some spalling which reveals some surface steel , it is not in a state that would make it unsafe for operations. It is a condition that is reviewed as part of our extensive track maintenance and inspection protocols that will be adjusted in our regular maintenance program. Across our system, there are twice - weekly track inspections by our track maintenance personnel that include visual inspections of rail, tie conditions, and fastenings. In addition , and more specifically, the Crowsnest Subdivision undergoes at minimum two rail joint inspections per year, a Sperry test (rail flaw detection) 4 - 5 times per year (5 scheduled for 2007), along with bi-annual rail grinding. The Track Evaluation Car, which evaluates, among other parameters, the cross tie and fastening integrity, is also run 3 - 4 times per year, most recently at the end of October, 2007. These inspection practices meet or exceed all federally regulated standards. CP is intensely focused on safety and accident prevention in all aspects of our operations. The safe transportation of goods across the rail network, and the safety of the public and employees are CP’s top priorities. We value the input of interested citizens, and again thank you for contacting us regarding this matter. Should you have any further concerns, please contact CP at the Community Connect desk. Kind regards, Christine Brown Community Relations Advisor Canadian Pacific Railway 1-800-766-7912 Community_Connect@cpr.ca

I group Realtors and Lawyers together. Both are just middlemen and neither are worth what you have to pay them. We're selling our house now as well, and I'm having a real hard time seeing the justification for the $20,000 fee we'll be paying them. What was that Taco said about Leeches?

This was on the FishBC forum. I thought it was really interesting. Go to Google NewsOregon Man Back Fishing Pointless By JEFF BARNARD – 4 days ago STEAMBOAT, Ore. (AP) — Back in 1998 Lee Spencer did two things that changed his relationship with the big steelhead of the North Umpqua River. He agreed to become the first full-time FishWatch guardian of the Big Bend Pool on Steamboat Creek, where as many as 400 large steelhead spend the summer in startlingly plain sight after swimming up the North Umpqua to spawn. And he started cutting the points off the hooks on his flies. Even people who know Spencer wonder why he would want to spend summers on Steamboat Creek 12 miles upstream from the nearest pay phone watching fish wait. "No one else would do it," said Joe Howell, owner of the Blue Heron Fly Shop in Idleyld Park. It is even harder to understand why the 57-year-old would cut the points off his hooks and file the wire stump smooth — denying himself the satisfaction of controlling, touching and ultimately setting free something so wild and beautiful. "I was uncomfortable fishing," Spencer said. "I like these fish too much to kill them, even accidentally, or even to stress them out, unduly. "It took me a month or a month and a half to not want to see the fish up close," he added. "I am not proselytizing fishing pointless, but my fishing is as good or better than it ever has been, as far as my own satisfaction." Western writer and gentleman sportsman Zane Grey proclaimed the North Umpqua the America's premier fishing river in a 1935 article in Sports Afield magazine. He landed 64 fish in the summer of 1934, casting down and across with a wet fly on a floating line and allowing it to swing back across the current in the British tradition of fly-fishing for Atlantic Salmon. His son, Loren, landed 100. Still, the author wrote, "It was the steelhead I raised and could not hook, and those that I hooked and could not land, which counted." Spencer's best season was that summer of 1998. A field archaeologist, he had saved enough money from his last dig to spend the summer camped in the fly-fishing-only section of the North Umpqua. It had taken him 10 years of trying to catch his first North Umpqua steelhead on a fly. By 1998 he was good enough to raise 77 steelhead in 102 days of fishing, and land about half of them. He had intended to release every one unharmed, whether wild or hatchery born, but killed three — two were bleeding from the gills and a third got disoriented and went belly-up out of his reach. A fourth left its eyeball on his hook. "I am not a Buddhist, but I read a lot of Buddhism," Spencer said. "It is my impression that the less harming or the more harmless my actions are in the world, the better. It probably comes down to as simple as that. It gets down to the heart of the question, `Why does a person cast flies,' or `Why does a person catch steelhead in the first place?'" He got the idea from reading about Harry Lemire, a steelhead fly fisherman and fly tier from Washington, who started cutting the points off his hooks in about 1975 whenever he would get into a bunch of fish and didn't want to waste time playing them. "Everybody thought I was crazy," Lemire said. "To me the whole peak of everything is the strike or the boil. Everything after that is downhill. Especially if you have to wait a long time to land the fish. "When you get a fish on, you get a run and a jump and at the jump it will throw the hook. That was satisfying enough for me." Spencer also gets a lot of satisfaction from watching the fish in the Big Bend Pool, once known as the Dynamite Pool for the preferred technique of local poachers. He sits at a meditation bench with Sis, his 17-year-old Australian cattle dog, for hours on end, watching the fish and talking to the visitors who stop to see this remote and remarkable place in the Umpqua National Forest. Steelhead are rainbow trout that spend most of their lives in the ocean, where the food and water are more plentiful than in Northwest rivers, before returning to freshwater to spawn. Steamboat Creek accounts for 70 percent of the wild steelhead in the North Umpqua, and the 400 in the pool this year — some up to 20 pounds — account for about 30 percent of the wild fish counted over Winchester Dam. The North Umpqua Foundation, which is dedicated to helping wild steelhead in the North Umpqua Basin, pays Spencer $39 a day from spring to winter, provides the trailer he lives in, and pays a stipend over the winter, when he finds somewhere else to live and compiles his notes on the pool. He drives an old van once owned by Dan Callaghan, the inventor of the green-butt skunk, widely considered the best traditional steelhead fly. Callaghan's widow gave it to him. A rubber turtle hangs from the rearview mirror. Spencer gets his mail and phone messages 12 miles downstream at the Steamboat Lodge, which overlooks the waters Grey once fished. Though he has no religion, Spencer admires the observations on human nature in Buddhist writings from China more than 1,200 years ago, and takes joy in the way the Milky Way runs directly through the crack in the trees that gives him his only view of the night sky. "Something appeals to me about the simplicity of this existence," he said. "Nothing else I have done allows me to take books this thick, that I never had the momentum to read living in an urban setting, and open them up and go through them page by page and read 'em. "I've read `Don Quixote,' that ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, three times since I've been here, and not because I haven't had other things to read, but just because it's a fabulous book." He knows of just one fish poached while he has lived on the pool. He found a splash of blood on the trail and a spool of line. "I felt pretty used and abused, but then realized that one fish in nine years is better than regularly dynamiting and snagging out of the pool, which is what was true before FishWatch started," Spencer said. Based on watching the fish in Big Bend Pool, he has concluded that the conventional wisdom of steelhead angling is wrong. The fish don't hold on the bottom, but a few feet from the surface, closer when the water is cooler. Dawn is not the best time for fishing, because the fish act like they are asleep. He has documented 1,466 items that steelhead have risen to in the pool. They include leaves, mayflies, plant down and even a bat. "Were I trying to tie a fly pattern that represented what was most commonly risen to, it would be a pattern that represented a red dogwood leaf, a stick with stringy lichen attached, or a rolling piece of plant down," Spencer wrote in his latest notes. After the bat swooped down and landed on the river, two steelhead swam out from the pod to investigate. "One of them turned away and the larger of the two accelerated and took it explosively," Spencer said. "There was water everywhere. Then I watched the steelhead go downstream and 10 seconds later that bat bobbed back to the surface in the middle of the rise rings. It swam to the bank, climbed out about 4 feet, and dried off licking its belly for about an hour and flew away." Like Lemire, Spencer became a devotee of the skated dry fly. Unlike dry fly-fishing for trout, where the point is to make the fly look like a natural insect the trout will want to eat, the skated dry fly is dragged across the surface, creating a wake intended to pique the curiosity of the steelhead. Spencer fishes a simple muddler minnow. First he cuts off the hook point with a wire cutter, then carefully smooths the jagged stump with a file. He wraps the shank with synthetic yarn, then spins on a bunch of moose hair that flares to form the head and collar of the fly. He soaks the fly in water and burns the long ends of moose hair off to the length of the hook, leaving a smell in the air that led one of his pals to dub it the Burnt Toast. Without a hook point to keep it in the mouth of a fish, one fly will survive months of fishing. On the North Umpqua, he seeks out runs no one else fishes, starting at the head and making long graceful casts downstream and across the current. That puts a big belly in the floating line as the fly drags across the riffled water, leaving a wake. After a cast, Spencer steps a few feet downstream and casts again, methodically covering the run. "Steelhead," he called out as his rod bowed, then flexed back to straight. "It felt like an engine block," he said reeling in his line and stepping to shore, then invited another angler to take a turn. In nearly the same spot, a steelhead hit a wet fly with a point, and allowed itself to be drawn into view in the shallows before thrashing and spitting the hook. Since Spencer has been fishing without points on his hooks, he has landed five fish. "There was one about a month ago," he said. "It was a little hatchery fish of 5 or 6 pounds. I just stripped it right in. It had its mouth closed firmly on my fly, which was coming out the front of its jaws. I reached down, turned it out of its mouth and the fish swam away. Now tell me why that happened." On the Net: North Umpqua Foundation: http://www.northumpqua.org/index.html

Below is the email reply I received from CP regarding this and they want to know the location so they can assess it. Have you passed the info along Fisher26? Thank you for your email. If possible, could you please forward details on the location of the track in question, and I will ask our Track Maintenance Supervisor to assess for repair. For your reference, CP is part of a heavily regulated industry, and our safety program consists of comprehensive maintenance and inspection protocols for our entire track system and trains. In addition to a visual and computerized track inspection system and strict maintenance procedures for all locomotives and rail cars, CP has an electronic trackside detection system in place, which monitors track conditions and train performance at all times. We have the most modern safety equipment available today, including: hot bearing and hot wheel detectors, wheel impact load detectors, locomotive event recorders (black boxes) and mobile rail-flaw detection equipment with ultrasonic and magnetic resonance scanning technology. CP track maintenance employees regularly perform visual or computerized track inspections throughout our system. Train crews also are trained to report any concerns they may have with track conditions. Additional track inspections are carried out as needed during extremes of heat or cold, or extraordinary environmental conditions such as high water or excessive rainfall. Engineering field personnel conduct walking inspections to check the integrity of all track joint bars. Once I have the information on the location, we will investigate for safety concerns, and address as required to maintain the integrity of the rail network. Canadian Pacific views the safety and security of residents in the communities which we operate as a top priority, and works hard to ensure that we operate as safely as possible. Kind regards, Christine Brown Community Relations Advisor Canadian Pacific Railway 1-800-766-7912 Community_Connect@cpr.ca

Done, thanks Fisher26. I don't know much about railways but that doesn't look great. Especially with their record of dumping trains into BC rivers (or is that CN?). I wonder if CTV or Global would be interested in looking into it? Maybe the Ministers of Environment and Transportation should be informed? But like I said I don't know anything about railways so maybe it's not that bad, but I would like to hear that from CP.