loviatt

My cloudveil waders sprung a leak on the weekend. I understand that the company recently changed hands, and is still honoring lifetime warranties on the products purchased before the sale. Does anyone have any experience contacting them, as their toll free number is not available for use in canada, and no local number is available on the site. I have e-mailed, but got nothing back after a few days. As it gets colder, my wader needs are getting greater and greater... maybe should have bought the simms ones instead, but i really do love the waders...

Thanks Taco - more chat there for sure.

I'm not looking for anyone to tell me secret locations or anything of the sort, but if anyone who could PM me anything I would be most grateful. Heading down to Montana with wife and 9 month old son in tow, and have the green light to head to the upper end of the Hungry Horse for a day or two of fishing. Does anyone have experience in this area on the S fork and could point me in the right direction (other than go upstream from the reservoir)? Is spotted bear river worth fishing? Will foot access from the camp area at the head of HH reservoir be sufficient to get into reasonable fishing? Many thanks in advance.

I just went through the whole finding a new 5 weight casting fiesta, and the helios won hands down for me. I realize that everyone's casting stroke is different, so casting a rod is far more valuable than reading about posts of who likes what. But, having said that, I was fervently anti-orvis (i thought it was the brand of choice for snooty lawyer type folks - no offense to any of the members who might be involved in that noble profession) before, but couldn't deny the fact that they're making one hell of a good fly rod these days. And now i am several hundred dollars poorer, but a quality rod is a quality rod. I didn't actually get to cast a new hydros, but the blanks use the same lightweight technology that made the helios feel so fine when i cast it. If it fits your casting style, i would say do it for sure.

Just caved and bought a new Helios 9 foot 5 weight tip flex. Any suggestions for a reel to go with this rod? I did get a battenkill large arbor 2 with it, but it doesn't seat too well, and wondered if anyone had a magic recipe for just the right reel. Thanks in advance.

OH! It was KD LANG... I had thought it was either fat Toby Maguire, or fat Joaquin Phoenix, and I couldn't really connect either to vancouver apart from possibly being in town to score some marijuana.

I too got a Lumix TS1 at christmas - awesome HD video and good photo quality in the air, but haven't tested the underwater yet. Looking forward to the summer!

rehsifylf, make no mistake about my comments regarding the age of the patients dying. My comments are expressing the fact that this year's flu is not like the typical seasonal flu which does wipe out hundreds of people yearly, most of them elderly with numerous comorbid conditions like emphysema, congestive heart failure etc. The flu this year isn't affecting those elderly patients with little physiologic reserve, rather, it is hitting the young and healthy population very severely - those which in regular seasonal flu years would stay home from school or work for 5 days and then be back at full strength thereafter. But thanks for misinterpreting my provision of information to those on the forum as a suggestion that i am ageist. 90% of my patient population is over age 60, and I do my darndest to provide the best medical care that your tax money can provide to each of them. Even the misinformed ones.

I can't wait to see the fishing next season, after a large number of regular users of our rivers are decimated by the swine flu! Should lead to lots less pressure and better action everywhere. The reasons that swine flu is so dangerous is that it is affecting young and typically healthy indiviuals with severe and possibly fatal lung injury. It is spread person to person, not by bugs or mouse feces like west nile or hanta. Unless you are a complete shut in, you probably come into contact with people, or things that people touch after any of the following: coughing sneezing wiping nose/mouth/eyes By you not getting the shot, you can become ill. Of course the vast majority of individuals will not require the ICU or hospitalization. But, by becoming ill, you then become the sneezer/cougher and spread it to others who may not be so fortunate and could potentially develop one of the severe reactions. There are all sorts of mathematic models which explain the concept of herd immunity, but basically, by enough of the population having developed immunity to an infection, the chances that non-immune individuals meet and propagate the infection become lower and lower. Most individuals exposed to a possible infectious element have immunity, so will not develop the infection themselves and cannot then pass it along if they have been immunized. Without this, the cascade of person to person infection can persist until basically all of the non-immune population have either experienced the disease and developed immunity, succumbed to the disease and died, or some combination of the same. That is my public health lecture for the evening. I just got finished from the ICU where there are several patients on ventilators at present - a very rare event in any given year, let alone for the age group of patients (none have grey hair). I hope that the whole thing is over-hyped by the government (which admittedly is doing a poor job of effectively providing the vaccine to the public - my wife had to wait 6 hours for hers...and she is 38 weeks pregnant). But, current experience at my workplace and speaking with colleagues in other parts of the province suggests that the hype is based on some pretty sobering realities. Good luck to all in this difficult time of long waits, recessions, and poor dry-fly fishing.

Din, I respectfully disagree with your comments about training duration and expertise. I have a brother who is a chiropractor as well - canadian trained and well trained at that. I have a further 5 years of education beyond his training, as would nearly all specialist physicians in Canada. Even family doctors have an additional 2 years beyond what chiropractors have. The focus on immunology and population health was entirely lacking in his education. He is far better than me about neurologic issues pertaining to the spine, so of course I must bow to his superior knowledge of the central nervous system. He does not try to lecture me about infectious diseases of the lung, nor should any chiropractor without getting the appropriate training first (ie going to medical school then becoming a specialist in pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases, or critical care medicine). Cheers.

I didn't live through the polio epidemic either, but there's lots of similarities between the two from an epidemiology standpoint (young affected, serious consequences not in everyone but dire in the few that are seriously affected, and person to person contact spread). They don't have great population studies for the polio vaccine, but that was the 1950's, so a bit of the wild west era of population medicine. And the polio vaccine has virtually eliminated polio as a modern threat. In a similar way, H1N1 is largely human to human spread now that it left its porcine host. So, herd immunity (stopping the transmission of the virus by having large numbers of immunized individuals that do not become infected hosts and cannot therefore spread the virus) is paramount in drawing a close to the pandemic. The H1N1 vaccine isn't so much different from the seasonal flu vaccine, in term of mechanism of inducing immunity. In fact, were I to have to comment of the efficacy of the seasonal flu vaccine, it is just as likely to not confer immunity of a given strain of influenza, as the vaccine is prepared months ahead of flu season with aims to cover certain strains that epidemiologists feel will be important that particular year. I think they probably miss as ften as they hit the important strains. Given the fact that a) we know that H1N1 is out there and can be extremely serious and fatal in SOME cases, it is spread by droplets from person to person, and c) that we have a vaccine prepared which induces an immune protective response specifically against H1N1, I cannot understand why the public has such a hard time going along with a simple intervention (other than the long waits to get the vaccine - Thanks Alberta Health Services!). but then again, everyone is free to choose for themselves i guess. Just my 2 cents as a person seeing these patients on a daily basis.

Oh, and I would have posted the last post much earlier, if I had not been kept at work so long over the past week with a rising number of EXTREMELY sick patients with H1N1. Cheers.

As a specialist in Respirology (ie lung medicine), I would heartily disagree with many of the anti-flu shot comments posted. I am presently working in one of the province's ICUs, and can attest firsthand to the severity and rapidity of progression of illness seen in the H1N1 outbreak. The points of concern are that medical professionals are not able to predict which persons with the infection will develop rapidly into respiratory failure, nor do we have terribly effective treatment for the patients needing the highest levels of treatment. The antiviral medications don't get people off ventilators either. When severe lung reactions occur, people need vents for long periods, and they are dying on the vents as well. We are at the crest of the wave of H1N1, and there will not be sufficient medical providers or hospital beds to meet the demands of the very sick if correct public health measures (like vaccinations) are not used by the population. Let me pose a question to naysayers - when was the last time you saw a really good case of polio? You can thank vaccinations.

I echo the poop sentiment of the cuttie season this year - one thing that i didn't notice that i have seen in years past is the sporadic mid-summer stonefly adult. I saw lots at the start of july, then virtually none mid-summer. Most years past, i'd see a few stragglers mid-July and even into august. I don't think pressure from other anglers was a big player - we've all probably had times where an angler leaves a spot and we are in to fish soon after they're gone. I think a lot of the bug life got generally screwed up by the erratic summer weather (just a guess here, no objective evidence to back that one up). Fish are above all else, opportunists, and will eat whatever they can reliably get. just my $0.02

I usually fish NW calgary bow every year when it re-opens, even during run off. And while I don't slay them like some of the guys on the board do in the downstream sections, it is not by any means a futile endeavor. Doesn't fish that poorly unless completely opaque chocolate milk colored water. Stick to edges and known holes with deep nymphs and streamers and you'll probably do okay.