April 4th column

[Pete Heley]

With the long stretch of absolutely miserable weather, I decided to leave out the usual fishing reports in an attempt to avoid depressing people. Saunders and Loon lakes are slated to receive 3,000 and 1,500 small rainbows respectively this week, but other fishing opportunities are definitely at a reduced level due to the weather and water conditions.

As someone who did not bother buying a lottery ticket, I probably should not be writing this - but if an outdoorsy Oregonian has won last week’s lottery, they would have an incredible range of ways to improve Oregon’s fishing opportunities. For instance, they could single-handedly fund a hatchery for sturgeon - something that would allow the Oregon coastal rivers to not be completely dependent upon sturgeon migrating out of the Columbia River. Of course, if anybody actually approached the ODFW with any such proposal, they would be encouraged to just donate the money to their general fund. However, if the lottery winner held firm, they could so many things that are now unfunded. They could institute a program to imitate Washington’s wildly successsful tiger musky program, they could increase Oregon’s new tiger trout program, they could pay for a seal and sea lion hazing program on their favorite river system, they could set up a catfish hatchery for jumbo catfish like channels and blues (sterilized or otherwise), or establish brown trout in western Oregon waters where fall spawning conditions are poor to the point that the populations would be easily controllable. There are so many options to a person with a whole lot of money.

Of course, they same opportunities would be available to the person who owned a large company or was in control of its donation program. In fact, a smaller company could have a noticeable (and much publicized) effect on a local scale. Let’s say a Reedsport-area company decided to ensure that Lake Marie’s spring break trout stock of 2,000 barely legal rainbows was enhanced by 20 brookstock rainbows weighing at least eight pounds or the same number of surplus steelhead. The fishing that followed the March trout planting would be far more exciting and much easier to publicize and because of fishing access available to Lake Marie’s entire shoreline, virtually every jumbo rainbow would end up being caught. As for the generous company that made it happen, they would receive more publicity than they would for almost anyother donation they made.-

Local business owner Sherri Elliott, of “Kopy Kat” fame, recently authored a book through Blurb.com about the Decorah eagles which with help from a webcam and the internet became the most viewed live video of all time. A total of over 200 million views were achieved of the nest with parent eagles, eggs and eventually eaglets. Sherri’s softcover book has 152 pages and contains 586 full color photographs. The five Decorah eagles, two parents and three offspring are often referred to as “The EEeee’s” and the book is available online at: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2778670" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and proceeds from the book benefit the Raptor Resource Project based in Decorah, Iowa. It would surprise me if at some point Sherri doesn’t have a few copies of the book available for sale at her Reedsport business.

In the March 24th issue of Science News, Bruce Bower wrote a couple of interesting articles that may be of some interest to outdoor recreationists. The first article details how infants as young as six months of age are able to recognize the names for different objects. In other words, an angler could train their infant to recognize different objects to fetch well before the infant was able to actually crawl or walk well enough to actually fetch them. They could also make sure that their infant could recognize different fish species well before the toddler could verbally name them. Feel free to use your imagination as to how best take advantage of this newly revealed information.

My comments on Bower’s next article needs a disclaimer and it is: “I am in no way encouraging anybody to drink alcoholic beverages.” That said, it appears that studies conducted by Andrew Jarosz, a University of Illinois graduate student, seem to indicate that people are better at creative thinking after reaching a blood-alcohol level just below the .08 percent level generally considered to be legally intoxicated than are people who have not imbibed any alcoholic beverages at all. The study involved two sets of 20 social drinkers and the almost drunk group solved word association questions more often and much quicker than the completely sober group.

So how can an outdoor sportsman take advantage of this creative thinking boost? Perhaps the best way is to lock himself in a confined, not easily espable place, well away from his automobile or any other potentially harmful device, achieve the desired nearly-drunk state and then think about fishing or hunting. If or when he or she comes up with some creative solutions to any problems faced by outdoorsy people, it should be written down. Enhanced creative thinking, or not, when nearly drunk, one’s physical capacity to actually make any problem-solving device or physically perform any improved technique is definitely impaired. After sobering up, look at the written down solution and then actively attempt to create the needed device or practice the improved technique. I suppose if someone miscalculated the amount of alcohol consumed and then compounded that error by driving around legally drunk, the best chance at coming up with an effective, creative, hopefully believable, explanation would be to wait until his blood-alcohol level dropped to a level below the .08 percentage before he began working on his “excuse”.

Once again, one needs to remember that it does little good to come up with an improved casting technique, a more effective retrieve, or other outdoor-related idea or technique if one is physically not able to follow through on it.