Oak Creek 8/27/17

Oak Creek 8/13/17

It usually starts with a phone call or a text, we don't decide too much, just who is going and what time. This trip started like any other except maybe not exactly true, we were stoked up on fishing Oak Creek 2 weeks ago, we killed it, pegged the fun meter, we wanted to do it again.

Jim and I work hard, we have jobs where we take care of people but in different ways. We care and at the same time, we are very sarcastic towards each other, cursing, lying, it's all done to see who is going to do the best at coming up with the most ridiculous thing to say.

It's just another way we have fun.

Sarcasm, lying and making fun of each other.

We are compatible this way.

So I set the alarm as I always do, wake up, go to the bathroom and do all that, pull on my pants, grab my stuff, this time, I didn't pack the night before, that's ok, I can get ready quick. Grab a bag, a rod, this time I chose the Sato and that was a mistake (Oak Creek is Ito water) but it still worked out. Pick up my boots, neoprene and liner socks and my new net. Done, throw it in the back of my Nissan Cube.

I'm excited, I want to use my new net and get some pictures.

I also brought along my fly tying kit, I didn't have the new bead head kebari I designed, figured I would tye it up on the drive.

Press the button to start the car, back out, plug in the phone and select some music, this time, Benjamin Clementine, such a beautiful voice, check him out.

And I drive the 2 minutes to meet Jim at his house.

"Hey, good morning."

"Yeah, good morning."

I open the back of the Cube and get ready to grab my stuff. Jim already has his bag in hand and is walking to my car looking like he is going to put it in the back. 

"You want me to drive?"

I'm thinking to myself, if he wanted to drive... Nevermind, he will be reading this.

"Put your crap in the car, I'll drive"

"Ok"

And the next thing, we are driving North in the gentle rain of the monsoon.

"This is going to be a good trip you know, starting off raining."

"Yeah, it's going to clear up when we get there. That's what Accu Weather says, it was only 10 minutes off last time."

"I know"

We get to be kids again when we are together. Two old men, new friends, we spend lots of hours together behind the wheel and now on the stream. We have families, our kids play together, our wives are friends, it's all good and the two of us together?

We like to drink a little.

Why not? We are professionals, steady jobs, we grind it out, taking care of all the things we do.

But some of you don't drink so we won't go there, never mind that stuff, you wouldn't understand it.

Each of us is like a needle, a pin and we are looking to pop the balloon that is our ego. I like to take the pin and poke at his, he does the same. Girls will not understand it, it's what men do, sarcastic old men, they make movies about this stuff, again, never mind.

The drive goes quickly, through the crystal town of Sedona, no chocolate milk stream this time. The creek is high but nothing to worry about.

Each of us is cripple in some way, Jim's back, my ankle, we hobble and sway down the wire rock boxes that control the erosion and drop into the school yard. 

And we are kids again.

It's a formula for me, except this time, I've added in a friend or two. For so many years I've fished alone. I've tried to invite others, too different, schedules different, not enough in common to do the hours behind the glass.

I have two old and new friends that I've shown tenkara and they now know my madness. It's like a virus, can't get rid of it. Only hanging out with each other will help alleviate the symptoms.

So we did it again this morning and it was good.

Less than twelve hours ago.

We were dreaming.

Now it is a memory.

...and we will do it again.

Oak Creek 7/30/17

It can be tough fishing this time of year. It's summer and the monsoon season is upon us. The storms and summer rain in the mountains of Arizona create lots of muddy run off and lighting, tough fishing conditions at times. Lots of moisture from the interior of Mexico blows up into the desert southwest and this moisture turns into summer storms that can be violent.

Cloud tops build to 30,000' and beyond, massive walls of dust blow out from the mega scale downdrafts while rain follows behind. In the mountains, the storms unleash their downpours and fill the streams, flash flooding, dirty water, humid, sticky and sometimes dangerous. Recently, we had a family of 10 people die in a popular fishing and swimming hole from violent monsoon flash floods. I do not take this time of year lightly but we know the conditions, what each watershed can handle and we are careful.

Earlier in the week, I spoke with my friend Jim, asking him if he wanted me to introduce him to Oak Creek. He is a long time fly fisherman but relatively new to tenkara. I helped him get quivered up with rods from Tenkara USA (Iwana, Ito, Sato and Rhodo) and have brought him fishing a few times starting at the #untenkara fishing last winter in the ponds in town and on to the local streams around the Mogollon Rim, a hundred miles or so in the mountains near Payson.  Jim has heard about Oak Creek from John and I, our adventures up there and before we knew it, we decided to leave at 4a this Sunday to give it a shot.

For the last week, the monsoon storms have been moving around, doing their dance all over our state bringing flash floods, blowing dust and generally making a mess of things. The storms cool our temps down from the 110's to the 90's but the humidity goes up making it a different type of heat.

Wait wait, let me get back to the fishing...

The alarm goes off at 3:30a and I grab my pre-packed milk crate box of things tenkara. My Montbell boots, liner socks, neoprene socks, Sato and Ito and my Tenkara USA strap pack, easy, minimal and done, all I need. Sticking this in the back of my Cube, I'm off to pick up Jim less than 5 minutes away. I've taught him well, he only has a Patagonia Atom pack, a cheap net (need to get Jim into a tamo from Tenkara USA) and his Sato and Ito, we make a pit stop at McDonalds for coffee and a sausage McMuffin (with cheese) and we are off for the 90 min drive to Sedona and up Oak Creek Canyon to the spot where I take all my friends that I am orienting to this stream.

The whole way up we are running through misting rain, the forecast said it wasn't supposed to rain hard if it did and if it did, it was going to stop at 7a. Driving in Sedona, Oak Creek had a chocolate milk color which essentially means death to a chance at good catching but we continued on. We arrived up the canyon to my spot in light rain, damn it. I got out of the car, looked at the water and it was not brown but slightly off color, our first bit of good news, yes, let's go ahead and see what happens. Sitting there, we both did not grab our rain jackets and we decided to wait it out.

We decided to drive up the canyon and if the rain let up or stopped, we would stop and fish on the way back. The rain stopped, we turned around and drove back to our spot.

It's a simple beat starting with a corner pool, moving upstreams there is a typical run, rock and boulder border, pool, riffle, pool, same thing over and over. Like the two old men we are, we hobbled and grabbed the wire of the gabbions that form the side of the road that leans into the stream. At the bottom, I told Jim I wanted to take him to the pool first where he could stretch out his line.

We quickly rigged and in a couple of casts, I could feel a fish take my fly and wham, fish on.

I released this one, coached Jim a little and caught another and another and then Jim was into fish. I grabbed my phone, took the picture and I knew we where going to have a good day.

I had been thinking about using this one single pattern of fly that I had developed a few weeks before as I sat on the back porch of the beach cottage that we had rented. It was a nice Japanese bait hook that required the addition of a loop for an eye. I tied the kebari with a tungsten bead in at a certain point so that the hook point would ride up. I have been practicing my deep water fishing with bead head flys and had been hanging up with conventionally placed beads and wanted to try my own "wrong kebari" with a tungsten bead positioned to provide a "weedless" fly capable of deep water presentation.

I can cast this fly and feel it on the bottom as it rides up and over rocks, not catching up. I can also "swim" it through the different levels with pulsing or smooth pulling, movement or just about any way that I want, it is a versatile fly based on a proven "one fly" pattern that I have been working on. the tungsten bead position in just the right place to provide a point up ride.

In short, it worked and worked so much better than I thought.

When rigging, I used 5x instead of my usual 6x and I'm glad that I did because as I worked the stream, I was catching larger fish that I usually do and more of them. I also caught a few brown trout which are naturally reproducing vs. the stocked rainbow trout.

At one point we had a double, Jim releasing a nice fish while I was doing the same. The water being slightly off color allowed us to get closer to the fish without them seeing us. We worked our way upstream catching fish the whole way. Oak Creek does not give up this sort of day very often but we were there to meet it.

We fished upstream a couple of hundred yards and finally stopped, this was just a few hours fishing day and we had caught enough fish to know we had fell into quite a good day. We checked the clock and we had only been fishing for an hour and a half. Looking at the temperature, it was 65 degrees, at home it was a hundred.

Driving back down the canyon, both of us exchanging photo's of each other. Down to Nick's bar to have breakfast and coffee, drive the 90 minutes home and waiting for my wife to get home, I scratch out these few paragraphs and done.

John, when you read this, know that you were there with us. You needed to be with Kenta and Jim needed some one on one orientation to Oak Creek which he got and now he is on his own there. We missed you my friend, you were there with us in spirit.