Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! It was awesome to see so many Kiap-TU-Wish members at the Holiday banquet, last year we had 64 people attending and this year we topped 100! It reminded me of an Olson family Christmas, where I would see some faces that I hadn’t since the previous year. It was the only day all my uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmother were together in the same house and what a full house it was, with my father being one of ten kids! The only downside was that the house reeked of lutefisk. The swedish meatballs, lefse, rommegrot, krumkake, and rosettes made up for the smell though. If you have any feedback about what you liked about the banquet and ideas to improve it, please let me know. No worries, we will never be offering lutefisk at Juniors!
I’m looking forward to the Wisconsin early trout fishing season opening up on Saturday, January 6th. If the temps get above freezing, winter can be fun to scratch that itch and get a little fishing in. The way this winter is going, there could be a lot of January and February days above freezing. I supposed I just jinxed that…. I believe I have mentioned it before, but a pair of insulated, boot foot waders has really made winter fishing much more enjoyable for me. I had tried my stocking foot waders with bigger boots, different combinations of wool socks, foot warmers, etc., but regardless it would not take long for my feet to turn to blocks of ice. However, that has all changed with the insulated boot foot waders. I have spent time at the vice, cranking out midge patterns that dominate the winter hatches and I am ready to go! Don’t forget to volunteer for some of Randy’s work days! Those always make the winter go by faster.
I’m really looking forward to our chapter meetings in the new year as well. I can’t wait to see what Sarah Sanford and her friends the Gillespies come up with in January. Then we have the Dick Frantes fly tying meeting where we are thinking of offering some fly tying challenges to those that want to participate. March brings renowned artist and guide Bob White to Juniors. In April, we have the usual chapter business to attend to and then Kent Johnson and Dr. Clarke Gary will present some of their recent aquatic bug sampling findings on the Kinni compared to findings at the same sites decades ago. Carl Nelson will also report on sampling he and his team did on the Rush. In May we will have Kasey and Nate back!
Our on-line auction and 3 x 100 chance drawing will be starting in January. The auction is shaping up to be bigger and better than before. If you have any items to donate, you can bring them to the January chapter meeting or any of the area fly shops: Lunds, Mend, or Bob Mitchells. For the 3 x 100 chance drawing, we again will have a Joshua Cunningham painting, this one titled “May on the Rush”, a Norling bamboo rod, and a Sage 4wt graphite rod. Last year the tickets sold out quickly, so be sure to get yours while they last!
When Sarah Sanford accepted my invitation to be our January speaker, I knew we were going to be in for something wonderful; perhaps wild, probably wacky, but certainly wonderful. I told her the topic was up to her…. just make it related to fish (please!) and waited and wondered. When she finally gave me her idea at the Holiday Banquet, I had to check with her the next day to make sure I heard right. I had! So without further adieu, KIAP-TU-WISH brings you…….!
An Evening with Eben, Barbara, and Sarah Hear music, see fish photos (narrated by Sarah), meet the Uninvited Mermaid!
Barbara and Eben Gillespie are lovely Minneapolis residents who make beautiful music together. They once invited strangers from the internet to a 60’s music jam in their north Minneapolis basement. Sarah Sanford went to sing and learned they weren’t axe murderers at all! Eb and Barb will share from their enormous repertoire of acoustic music from the 60’s to the present. Sarah has promised that the songs will all be about fishing.
Here is the lowdown!
Join us, January 2nd at Juniors (Radisson Hotel) in downtown River Falls (414 S. Main St.), for Sarah, Eben and Barbara.
Dinner menu will be available at 6 pm, with the program starting at 7 pm.
We are not even going to attempt this with ZOOM, but hey, you are going to want to be there in person! We have never done anything like this before, don’t miss out! This is going to be too fun!!!
Also the book swap will return! You know the drill by now. Bring your fishing/outdoor books you wish to swap out. If you don’t have any to bring, you can still pick from other members offerings. If you brought a book that was not picked up, please bring it back home with you.
Also, this is one of the last chances to bring in items for our February Auction. We would appreciate your help!
Thanks and hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
CHAPTER MEETING: November 7th, Juniors in River Falls. 6:00 pm.Tim Stieber and Josh O’Neil will be speaking to us. Tim is the Land and Water Conservation Administrator and Josh the Conservation Planner for St. Croix County. They will be talking about their stream improvement projects and ways we can help. Watch for an upcoming announcement of the Kiap-TU-Wish annual Christmas event, on December 5th.
Hello, fellow KIAP-TU-WISHers! Hope everyone is doing well. As for myself, I am still in mourning over the events that happened on October 16th. I awoke that day knowing the inland trout season was now closed – the saddest day of the year. The trout season again went by too quickly! I found myself in River Falls on October 23rd, perhaps the warmest day we will see until May 2024 and I stopped by the upper Kinni. I sat beside a favorite fishing hole and watched and listened to the water flowing past. Suddenly there was a smattering of BWOs coming off and I spent an enjoyable 20 minutes watching a pod of trout sipping them off the surface. So fear not, the trout are still there! We will give them a break to go about their spawning business and we can all get some streambank time during Randy’s work days which have now begun! Come on out, it is a good time!
Our chapter “year” has started off well. It was good to see your familiar faces at our Rush River Brewing kick off in September. In October, we heard from our happy TU campers Ben Hassing and Elazar Haas. Then we had an exciting talk on spey casting from guide Josh Boeser. In November, Tim Stieber and Josh O’Neil will be speaking to us. Tim is the Land and Water Conservation Administrator and Josh the Conservation Planner for St. Croix County. They will be talking about their stream improvement projects and ways we can help. Save the date, December 5th! We will again have our holiday banquet at Juniors and I hope to see everyone there! More details to follow! Finally, our chapter auction will end on February 18th. This is our biggest fundraiser of the year. If you have any items to donate – fishing equipment, gift cards, vacation stays, guided trips, etc. – please contact me. Thanks for your support!
I let out a loud groan and with outstretched arms, threw my head back and looked to the heavens. I don’t know why, perhaps I was asking for some divine intervention. None forthcoming, I just as quickly dropped my head and with slumped shoulders reeled up and slogged back downstream to my car. On this warm, early September morning, I had suffered a beat down of epic proportions. After two months of eating tricos almost every morning, the trout were experts on trico appearance and were not having any of my imitations in the low, clear, slow water. I rose two fish the whole morning. For the first one, I had finally got my fly to float into an eddy under an overhanging bush using a lot of slack in my cast. When the very large head of a brown trout came up to sip my fly, that extra slack and an excited hook set conspired to break the fly off so quick, I wouldn’t think the fish even noticed. It must have, however, as it never came up again.
After another hour of putting dozens of fish down while trying upstream, downstream, across stream presentations on 7X tippet, I emitted the groan, eluded to at the start of this story. Another large fish, sipping trico spinners under a tunnel of streamside grass, slid downstream with my fly just under its nose, then let it go by. My heart sank. Suddenly it turned, chased my fly down and sucked it in. I tried so hard to wait. I didn’t quite get to the end of the sentence,”God save the Queen”, but I got close. My forearm started to come up. Wait! The fish had dropped to the stream bottom, but had not turned back upstream! In my head I screamed at my right arm to stop! I did slow it down, I think, but you know – physics; an object set in motion, tends to stay in motion. With the fish facing me, I pulled the fly right out of its mouth, eliciting the groan. It amazes me that I could have so many thoughts in an event that took a few seconds.
I was beating myself up pretty good on the way home. All these years fly fishing and hundreds of trout later and I was still breaking off flies and striking too soon. I had switched primarily to slower/softer bamboo and fiberglass rods to off-set my over exuberance, which helped some, but shouldn’t I be one cool customer by now, instead of a 5 year old on Christmas morn? Before I got home, I recalled a story my high school best friend’s father, Jack, told me.
With my friend, Erich, graduated, Jack and his wife, both Green Bay natives, had moved back home. After a high pressure career of getting 3M out of multi-million dollar lawsuits, he took a job with a small law practice. One of his clients was none other than Ray Nitschke, a 15 year veteran of the Green Bay Packers, a fearsome linebacker on Lombardi’s championship teams, and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. This was quite the thrill for Jack, a long time Packer season ticket holder, who grew up watching Ray and the Packers. In fact, he was unable to play his trumpet as his high school marching band paraded around Lambeau Field for its dedication. He couldn’t stop staring at the magnificent structure, the greatest he had seen, save for a field trip to Madison to see the capital.
In retirement, Ray had many business deals that needed tending to and Ray always insisted on meeting at a small café for breakfast for their meetings. Even in the late 80s, Ray drew a crowd and the meeting was always interrupted for autograph requests. Ray would even get up, run to his Cadillac, and retrieve 8 x 12” photos of himself to sign. One day, Jack asked, “Ray, you know I have to charge you $100 an hour for these meetings, including all these interruptions. Wouldn’t you rather meet at my office?” Ray waved him off, saying he would rather meet at the cafe. Jack then asked, “Ray, don’t you ever get tired of always being pestered for autographs, photos, and the chitchat that goes with it.” Ray responded that he still got excited when people asked for an autograph and it would it would be a sad day when that thrill was gone or folks forgot who he was. I consoled myself with Ray’s words. Yeah, I get too excited with dry fly fishing for trout. I wish I could be more calm, cool, and collected at times, but it would be a sad day if it became so old hat that the excitement and thrill was gone. If that meant losing some fish and flies, so be it.
Jack gave Erich and me his Packer tickets for below freezing December games (even die-heard Packer fans have their temperature limits). In fact, we were there when the Lambeau Leap was invented by safety LeRoy Butler on what was then the coldest game other than the famous Ice Bowl. Before that game, Jack presented me with a photo. Ray had spent a minute at $100 an hour signing a photo for me. He wrote, “To Hudson High’s finest defense back [an exaggeration, I assure you]. Keep hit ‘em hard! Your friend, ol’ 66, Ray Nitschke.”
