Pat Neal meets the Manis mastodon at the Museum and Arts Center of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley on West Cedar Street.

Thank you for reading this. If you don’t, no one will and we would be deprived of the luxury of your criticism.

I think it was the famous Greek philosopher, “What’s His Name,” who said, “Criticism is easier than craftsmanship.” I should have known better than to criticize the biologists.

I can offer no excuse for saying that these brave scientists would profit from the extinction of the fish, whales, birds or any other organism they happen to be studying.

I’m probably just bitter for not being a biologist myself. I could have been a crackerjack biologist except for one thing: the 4th grade. That’s when they hit us with the new math, which I didn’t get. The math teacher said pie are square when anyone knows pies are round. Blackberry cobblers and apple crisps are square.

Math is the language of science.  I had to take off my shoes and use my toes to count beyond 10. So I became a fishing guide where each number is divided or multiplied by a factor of two, depending on who you are talking to.

It was only by accident I became a wilderness gossip columnist, a bottom feeder in the shady underworld of print journalism, spewing misanthropic venom in a crude attempt at humor. That was no excuse to tar all biologists with the same wide brush when it’s really just the 90 percent of them that give the rest a bad name.

Just because I am a fishing guide is no excuse for me to be angry about the fish going extinct. The worse fishing gets, the more you need a guide. And besides, why should we care about fishing for salmon for our own food when there’s canned tuna at the food bank.

It’s an historical fact that extinction is a way of life on the North Olympic Peninsula.

It began shortly after the last ice age near Sequim, where archeologists discovered the remains of a mastodon with a spear point in its rib. One theory suggests that an exploding population of Stone Age hunters in the new world was responsible for the extinction of the pleistocene mega-fauna, the mammoths, giant bison caribou and other species that once roamed this place.

Doesn’t matter, they are gone now.

Our next big extinction occurred when the American Capt. Gray traded some iron chisels for sea otter skins at the mouth of a river he named after his ship, the Columbia. This set off the treachery and slaughter of the fur trade that wiped out the otters and many of the Native Americans who hunted them.

Spanish explorers were sure the Strait of Juan de Fuca was the Northwest Passage connecting to the Atlantic Ocean because of the abundance of all types of whales, including blue, sperm and humpbacked.

James Swan visited the Strait of Juan de Fuca with an eye to build a whaling station but Victoria, British Columbia, beat him to it.

As man moved inland the larger land animals went extinct.

In 1885 Lt. Joseph P. O’Neil reported large herds of tame elk in the high Olympics.

They had never seen man. By the 1900s the elk had been wiped out by market hunting, thrill seekers who massacred entire herds and the trade in ivory elk teeth for a gentleman’s watch fob.

To preserve what was left of the elk, the wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1930s.

Meanwhile, with the invention of the soldered tin can, the fishing industry took off.

The question isn’t why are the salmon going extinct on the Peninsula but, why did it take this long?

Engineered log jam on Salt Creek

It was another tough week in the news. The dreaded emergency closure reared its ugly head and stopped us from fishing many of our beloved rivers flowing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Emergency closures are not a new thing. The way our fisheries are managed there is always an emergency somewhere.
While emergency closures because of low numbers of fish have become a common management tactic, it’s interesting to note that there is never an emergency opening of a fishing season because of a sudden abundance of fish.
Rumors of the current emergency closure were first heard back in December when government biologists said there were low returns of native steelhead in rivers running into Puget Sound.
How the biologists knew there were low returns in December when the native steelhead don’t generally return until February is anyone’s guess.
Predicting the numbers of returning fish is an inexact science based upon a number of factors like smolt traps where the baby fish migrating downriver and out to sea are counted. This is a lot like counting your chickens before they are hatched, except an unknown number of smolts are killed in the smolt traps, but as they say you can’t make an omellette without breaking a few eggs.
With the recent budget cuts, shutting down the fishing season just seemed to make sense to people who don’t fish. After all, if no one is fishing, you don’t need fish cops or fish checkers or anyone to sell the licenses or count the punch cards.
The emergency closure worked so well on the Puget Sound Streams that it was decided to try it on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In addition there are rumors of more emergency closures on the Chehalis River system. This of course has all been decided before one fish was actually counted.
The actual numbers of fish don’t really matter. All that is required is to have the fish declared threatened and or endangered.
Then the gravy train of federal funds will flow and the fish restoration industry can work its magic.
I can think of no finer example of this phenomenon than the Dungeness River. Once called the finest spring steelhead river in the state, the Dungeness had huge runs of humpies, spring Chinook, chums and silvers.
Now, after 20 years of Dungeness salmon restoration, these same fish are rare, endangered or just plain gone. Today the Dungeness, a river with two fish hatcheries, is closed to fishing most of the year.
It all began with the simple emergency closure.
Then it was decided to cut the fish hatcheries’ budget. The money was used to buy property from “willing sellers.” The phrase is defined by the current Wild Olympics campaign not as a land-owning citizen, but as a “mechanism by which land can be acquired.”
Anyone who was not a willing seller risked having a biologist knock on their door to declare their home as bull trout habitat. Many then quickly became willing sellers.
Their homes were then bulldozed, thrown in the landfill and replaced with native vegetation. The river was then landscaped with engineered log jams tied together with steel cables, which made it impossible to fish even if the season was open.
The Dungeness is not unique. Coincidentally, all of the other streams that were just closed to fishing because of the “emergency” have been “restored” in much the same manner with the same dismal results.
The endless repetition of a failed experiment has been called a form of insanity.
I call it salmon restoration.

So far the weather has been cold, dark and wet. Causing inquiring minds to ask, “What will it do to the fishing?”

Plenty, that’s what.

The November rains swelled the rivers up into the flood stage. There’s a popular misconception that floods are bad for fish but that is not true. The high water gives the fish a chance to escape the nylon pollution. Nylon pollution is a term I use for the increasing amounts of nylon fishing gear that clogs up our waters to the point where fish can no longer make it up the rivers.

Once the autumn rains start and the river gets high enough, it levels the playing field so no one can fish. This gives the fish a chance to swim high into the watershed to fill the creeks with spawners.

The high water cleans the summer’s growth of slime and algae from the rocks on the bottom of the river and loosens the gravel, making it easier for fish to dig their nests and spawn.

Floods landscape the rivers with backwaters, log jams, deep pools and shallow runs while flushing the spawned out salmon back to sea where they feed a new generation of life on the ocean floor.

After the floods of autumn we start fishing for the winter run steelhead. If you don’t know what a steelhead is, you probably aren’t from around here.

Steelhead are a type of rainbow trout that are born in a river then migrate out to the ocean. Just like the salmon the steelhead return to the rivers to spawn.

Unlike the salmon, steelhead don’t die after they spawn. They can return to the ocean and grow larger.

The fact is if you have lived your life so far without knowing what a steelhead is, you’re better off not knowing. Fishing for steelhead has been described as a form of frost-bit insanity with no known cure. There is a only a palliative therapy that can be as bad as the disease.

Ironically, some people begin steelhead fishing as the result of another winter malady — cabin fever. This is a debilitating condition that can cause people to sit on the couch and change the channels on the TV until their thumbs bleed.  It is at this point some cabin fever sufferers decide to go winter steelhead fishing.

While it is possible to fish here in the summer in shorts and tennis shoes, fishing in winter can require layers of rubber, neoprene, goose down, wool and fleece for survival.

Chances are by the time you put on enough clothes to stay warm while steelhead fishing you won’t be able to move.

That’s OK.

You may have what it takes to be a plunker. These are people who sit and wait for the fish to come to them. All you need is a large fire, patience and more patience. Others prefer casting their gear out into the river and bouncing it downstream until it snags on something.

Then you have break off your line and tie on something else. Typically, this will happen about every second or third cast.

This means you may need a large tackle box to go steelhead fishing. Buying steelhead tackle is a road to financial ruin made worse by the certain knowledge that you are just going to throw it in the river and lose it all anyway.

The fact is I wouldn’t recommend steelhead fishing to anyone.

Have to go now. It’s time for my steelhead therapy session.

Eighteen dollars and fifty cents. That was all. Most of it was in quarters and dimes, saved one at a time by bargain hunting the tackle stores for hooks, and fishing line and the other essentials for life on the river. Bella and her husband, Raybob lived on a plunking bar along the lower river.  They had moved there to go fishing but it was snowing too hard. Bella looked out onto the gray river under a gray sky and knew that they’d be broke for Christmas. RayBob was a fishing guide and nobody was going to pay to go fishing in a blizzard. Bella counted the money three times, had a good cry, and then powdered her cheeks with some egg cure Raybob had left on the kitchen table. They had met while fishing on the river. Raybob had given Bella a fly he tied himself.
She cast the Dungeness Special as smooth as maple syrup, clear across the river without a ripple on the water and snagged a big spawned out Bull trout right in the pectoral fin. The enraged Bull trout tore off downriver like a runaway shopping cart. It bent Bella’s fine bamboo rod nearly double, and stripped the drag washers off her reel. If there was one possession in which Bella took pride, it was her fine bamboo fly rod made from Tonkin cane her daddy brought back from the war. It was such a fine rod that if Bella and the Queen of Sheba ever fished on the same river, Bella would out fish her ten to one using dull hooks.
And if King Solomon himself ever showed his face on the river with all his fancy fishing tackle, he’d be humbled by Raybob.  He fished the Ray bobber. Raybob had been named after the Ray bobber. It was the best steelhead lure ever invented.  No longer manufactured, the Ray bobber could only be found out on the river, after it had been lost by another fisherman.
Raybob had the largest collection of Ray bobbers in the country. The trouble was he had no place to put them. What Raybob really needed was a tackle box.
Eighteen dollars and fifty cents, it was all the money Bella had for Raybob’s Christmas present. She took her fine Bamboo rod down to a tackle store with a sign that said “We buy Gear.” She sold her fine bamboo rod and bought a fiberglass tuna pole with a roller tip. With the money left over she bought Raybob a gift, a tackle box for his ray bobbers.
Until now Raybob had kept all his lures in a five gallon bucket. It was humiliating watching him empty it out on the beach every time he wanted to find a lure and tie one on.
By 7 o’clock the hot buttered eggnog was ready. Raybob came through the door. There were holes in his rain gear. He had leaky hip boots. His eyes settled on the tuna pole.
“What happened to your fly rod?” he asked
“I sold it to buy you a present. Here, it’s a tackle box on wheels. It’s big enough to hold all your Ray Bobbers.” Bella said. “It might even help you walk upright.
“That’s a nice present,” RayBob said, “but I sold all of my Ray Bobbers so I could buy your present. Here, it’s a brand new fly reel.”
People give gifts at Christmas to commemorate the Magi giving gifts to the Christ child. The Magi were wise men. Nobody ever said fishing guides were wise. But they still give the best gifts they have.