The Drift – April 2019

by | Mar 13, 2019 | Message from the President

Welcome to the Drift   | A message from our Chapter President

Every month we’ll be posting current information as it relates to our chapter from a local, regional, and national perspective. If there are items that you would like discussed or particular questions relating to our chapter, please contact me. Regards,
Scott Wagner
President, Kiap-TU-Wish Chapter of Trout Unlimited

The young guns seem to have it. Two months ago I wrote about fishing with RipRap’s Contributing Editor, Joseph Duncan, who had cat-like reflexes and an ability to sling nymphs into faraway tight places. This month I need to tell you about another young gun who, like Joseph, is 18 years old. Will and his father, Paul, took me spinner fishing in a couple of local spots in western Wisconsin. But while those spots were familiar to me, I had never fished them with spinners. I was about to, but only after knocking down the barbs on our Panther Martin spinners, rigging our short, ultralight spinning rods and then hiking through thigh-deep snow down to the river.

My memory of casting 1/8-ounce spinners is that you launch them with all the wrist power you can muster at about a 45-degree angle to get maximum distance. The spinner then travels in a high, broad rainbow arch and, after all that effort, lands about 20 feet from you. Maybe far enough for panfish, but not for trout. Not so with young guns like Will. While I was trying to remove my spinner from an overhead branch which had snagged on my first rainbow arch cast, Will calmly walked up the river slinging his spinner horizontally across the water. Will could sling them sideways, underhand and backhand, nearly always with the same result: the spinner traveling horizontally across the water would land 30-40 feet away in the spot he had chosen.

I tried but couldn’t do it. The only difference I experienced in my efforts was that instead of getting stuck in overhanging trees, I was getting stuck in streamside bushes. I asked his dad, Paul, about this and he said that it was a unique skill Will had taught himself over the years. Finally, I asked Will how he did it, especially with such light spinners. Will was a little bit surprised and simply said it was a combination of a soft rod tip, an open-faced reel and a lot of wrist action. Typical young gun behavior. They do something they technically shouldn’t be able to do and then humbly think nothing of it.

I’m starting to think there’s a lot we can learn from younger anglers. For starters, they don’t always know that some things just can’t be done. Rather, they keep trying new ways of doing them until they can be done. As these young anglers turn their attention toward trout fishing, they don’t have all the preconceived notions of how to “properly fish” as say the over-50 angler does. Young anglers are much more willing to innovate and experiment with new techniques. They catch fish in ways and places that haven’t occurred to the rest of us. Sure, there’s a lot we can and should teach younger anglers, but there’s a lot they can teach us too—in particular, the fresh way they look at each new fishing challenge. They look at these challenges as being exciting, conquerable and full of life and fun. Then they set about doing them. That’s why we call them young guns.

And speaking of young anglers innovating and experimenting, young fly tyers are much the same way. They use a wide variety of new materials, approaches and techniques that many, if not most, of us have never heard of. That’s why we’re giving the young the fly tyers the floor at our Chapter’s annual fly tying meeting in April. Come and enjoy the fun as our Chapter’s young guns show how they combine both the new and the old to tie trout, smallmouth and musky flies that really work!

Until then, Happy Fishing! —Scott

The Drift – Mar 2019

by | Feb 25, 2019 | Message from the President

Clean, cold, freely-flowing freshwater. I haven’t seen a lot of it these past few days. We’re in Los Angeles visiting our oldest son and while it’s been a pleasure to visit him—the sunny weather has been a welcome reprieve from home—each day I’ve become more aware of how little surface water there is here, and there certainly isn’t anything that would qualify as clean, or cold, or fresh. Compared with the freshwater resources available to LA’s metropolitan area of nearly 20 million people, most of us in Wisconsin and Minnesota don’t know how good we’ve got it.

It’s not really our fault. Just like one can’t truly appreciate the value of a glass of cold water unless one has been parched with thirst, we’ve all grown up surrounded by an abundance of clean fresh water. We grew up playing in the rain until we got chased inside by thunder and lightning. We went to the lake on weekends, boated, fished and waterskied. We went to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and canoed for days over seemingly endless lakes and rivers. And at some point we drove to the shore of Lake Superior (now that’s clean, fresh and COLD!) where we strained, and failed, to see the opposite shore. How much freshwater does that vast, deep lake hold? It’s mind boggling. It’s incomprehensible.

Well, there is a mind boggling amount of freshwater in Lake Superior and in the many thousands of freshwater lakes and streams in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but there isn’t in Southern California. There really isn’t. I’m not smart enough to start a discussion on the effects of climate change, or on the ethics of one geographic area using the natural resources (in this case, freshwater) from another, but I am smart enough to know that our area’s most abundant natural resource, and one that we probably take for granted, is an extremely valuable natural resource indeed.

Just like the air we breathe, freshwater is necessary for survival. Unlike the air we breathe, freshwater is not spread evenly across our country or our world. For some unknown reason, we in the Upper Midwest have been given a disproportionately large share of the world’s fresh water. I don’t know what this means for our area in the future, but I do know that we need to treat this resource with the respect that it deserves and that we need to become better and better stewards of it.

That’s about it for this month. I just can’t wait for spring when I’ll start wading through some of our clean, cold, freely-flowing freshwater searching for wily trout, and probably doing so with more respect for the freshwater resource that makes trout fishing possible. Happy Fishing and Conserving. — Scott Wagner

The Drift – Feb 2019

by | Jan 23, 2019 | Message from the President

Cat-like reflexes. It’s just gotta be his cat-like reflexes. He can cast a bit farther than I can, but I think I make up for it with my stealth. I’m shorter than he is, which definitely helps when you’re trying to put on the sneak. We’re both using Pink Squirrel anchor nymphs with small dark midge droppers. We’re both getting strikes, but he’s catching twice as many fish as I am. I keep missing most of mine, but he seems to connect almost every single time! It’s just gotta be his catlike reflexes.

Scott Wagner

It’s the second Sunday of the open season and I am fishing with Joseph Duncan, one of our younger members. Joseph and his siblings grew up fishing with their father, Dan Duncan, in Wyoming, where Dan grew up. Dan brought Joseph to a couple of chapter meetings a few years ago, where Joseph learned about trout camp. Joseph applied for a Kiap-TU-Wish scholarship to the camp and attended the following summer. He came back from camp, fished more and attended some chapter meetings. Then he applied to be a youth counselor at trout camp the next summer. Now, Joseph is mentoring other young trout fishers, writing articles for RipRap and politely putting some of his “elder” chapter members to shame on certain unnamed tributaries to certain unnamed rivers in Western Wisconsin. All this started with an adult—in this case Joseph’s father—sharing a love for the outdoors with a young person, and then other adults sharing their experiences at places like Trout Camp, until an interest and love for the outdoors ignited itself within the young person and it became their own.

Other Kiap-TU-Wish participants from Trout Camp, like Grady McAbee, Anna Kuehn, Eloise Olson, or Dahlia Olson, could share similar stories of learning new skills, growing in self confidence and coming back from Trout Camp with more enthusiasm for trout fishing, coldwater conservation and spending time with other young people who enjoy the outdoors. All of our campers have come back and shared about their camp experience at a chapter meeting, which is impressive in itself. Many have taken on active roles, sharing their skills and youthful energy with our chapter. All have seemed comfortable interacting with adults at our meetings. In my opinion, our campers are a pretty impressive group.

I haven’t been to Trout Camp yet, but it sounds like a pretty neat experience. If you would like to volunteer at camp this summer, or better yet, if you know of a young person who might enjoy attending Trout Camp this summer, contact me at (715) 781-6874, or jswagner@bremer.com. There are a limited number of youth we are allowed to send to camp each summer. We ask interested youth to complete a short application to apply for these spots. Normally, campers need to be 12-16 years of age and be interested in learning more about bait, spinner and fly fishing for trout. Parents or guardians are responsible for transportation to and from Trout Camp. Kiap-TU-Wish pays the $250.00 cost for the applicant(s) we send to Trout Camp each year.

Oh, and one more thing. If you happen to be out fishing with one of our younger members, and he innocently asks to take a picture of you with a puny, but colorful trout you just caught, beware! That picture could be posted all over social media before you’re even half-way home.

Happy Fishing! —Scott Wagner