Two new Haikus in praise of two events sacred to The Fish Hack: Opening Day of trout season at Howard Prairie Lake and the return of North America’s least appreciated migratory birds.

I know, what does rythmic Japanese poetry and the Dead Indian Plateau have in common? Well, they both have The Fish Hack’s attention and get propped in The Fish Wrap more than just the fourth Saturday in April.

Trout jumps skyward
Teeth chattering. Snowflakes fall.
It’s Opening Day.

Everybody knows it snows on Opening Day at Howard Prairie, even when it doesn’t. At least, it makes for a better story.

And, last week at Emigrant Lake, I spied the first spring return of my favorite migratory bird. We have a lot in common…not pretty and rarely invited over for dinner. Yet we both serve a legit purpose in a society.

We make you people look good.

Bald head combats germs,
Pees down own legs to keep cool:
A turkey vulture.

It’s time again for Fish Heads to join The Fish Hack in putting a little poetry in this here Fish Wrap:
It’s Haiku Monday, Week II. Last week had some pretty good come-back from you Fish Heads. LeAnn and her fish-chowing bear won top prize — a set of used Post-It notes off The Fish Hack’s desk.
This week, we ought to see some Easter fishing themes.

An Easter steelhead
And Fish Hack’s intelligence —
Not bright, but OK.

You remember Haikus. Three stanzas. Five syllables, then seven syllables and finally five syllables. All one theme, no rhyming required.

Here’s a blog-ender in deference to e-mails I see but never open…
Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam:
Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam
Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam.

We might not have libraries here anymore, but you Salmon Trolls are prepped for one storied salmon-fishing season in the oceans off the Southern Oregon and northern California coasts.

Federal Fish Heads at the Pacific Fishery Management Council today adopted the most liberal season possible for recreational chinook and coho fishing in the ocean here this year.

So liberal, in fact, that you can plan a trolling trip out of Brookings to fish for chinook on Mother’s Day.

Now, what better way to say, “I Love You, Mom” than getting your former Host Organism into a couple bright ‘nooks before she launches that morning’s Continental Breakfast over the charterboat’s transom.

The season breakdown is in The Fish Wrap on Sunday, then regurgitated in the Spring Fishing Guide that stinks up the regular rag on April 14.

But you web-heads get the skinny here first on the season in the Klamath Management Zone, which runs from Port Orford south into California’s Horse Mountain. A.K.A.: our main ports.

The chinook season begins May 5 and runs through Sept. 4, with a daily limit of up to two chinook 24 inches or longer.

Southern Oregon’s recreational coho fishing is lumped in with the Oregon coastal coho season. That opens June 23 and runs until Sept. 4 in the Oregon part of the Klamath Management Zone. However, coho fishing will close earlier if Oregon anglers catch the entire 50,000-coho quota before that date.

NoCal can be called NoCoho. Again, they have no fin-clipped coho season.

Trolling in mid-summer out of Brookings is the best way to add fresh ocean salmon to your Bio-Mass Footprint — That’s the amount of critters you kill and eat in your outdoor lifetime.

That’s true. Go look it up at the library.

Oh, never mind.

Just save a filet for The Fish Hack.

The Fish Hack is always looking to add a little class to The Fish Wrap, and often the best way to do that is to stay away.

But not today. The Hack is really feeling it. Still alive with Ohio State in the NCAA gamble-fest, looking to add a couple Benjamins to the wallet. So there’s no Monday Moanin’ here.

In fact, the Hack is so pumped about Monday that I’m feeling down-right poetic.

What a great time to start Haiku Monday.

That’s right. Three-line poems popular in Japan and just obscure enough here to keep The Hack’s interest. Five syllables, then seven syllables followed by five syllables. All one theme. Just like this:

The first line is five
And the next takes seven beats.
It’s your first haiku.

No heavy lifting required. Hell, not even rhyming is required.

Ain’t Rocket Science;
Not even brain surgery:
It’s just a Haiku.

Mondays from now on will be all about Bustin’ Rhymes.

Monday hangover:
When your brain begs for mercy
Yet gets no reprieve.

I’ll pop off a few, and you Fish Hack wannabes can weigh in with your own. Best reader Haiku of the week wins some sort of office supply from The Fish Hack’s desk.

He stares at the screen
Hoping words fly onto it:
How Hack writes haikus.

The Fish Hack is back at The Fish Wrap, where life is good but it would be “very, very, very, very good” if this here rag paid by the word instead of by the hour.

Had my fill of Californication last week, particularly when a side trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium revealed that fish and advice are alike in one way: When they’re bad, they’re awful.

Nothing wrong with the aquarium. The Fish Hack has one major shark-jones, and their tanks are loaded with my fellow predators. But the aquarium’s pubbin’ of its “Seafood Watch — West Coast Seafood Guide 2007” made me gag.

The aquarium is telling people to ask questions about the seafood they eat, and make choices based on where the fish is from and how it is caught.
That’s all good. Except, their recommendations violate The Fish Hack’s credo of “Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Farmed Fish.”

Their list of best seafood choices include farmed abalone, U.S.-farmed catfish, farmed sturgeon and farmed trout. Lingcod and Oregon salmon rank only as “Good Alternatives,” the same as dogfish and squid.

Dogfish? Farmed catfish? Farmed ANYTHING better than lingcod or Oregon troll-caught salmon?

Come on. Oregon troll-caught salmon are as good a resource as you’ll eat. Also, lingcod officially are a rebuilt marine stock, a real success story. Bagging on lingcod is soooo 2003.

I don’t care if it’s in a pen sunk off Argentina or some dirty pond in Billy Bob’s backyard. Farmed fish aren’t real fish. They don’t get fat on shrimp or bugs. They’re fed ground-up fish carcasses and drugs to make their flesh appear edible.

Remember the movie, “Soylent Green?” Charlton Heston was fed ground-up people cut into bite-sized squares. Is that healthy?

Aquariums shouldn’t be lending cred to farmed anything. What’s next? Sam Elliott on television saying, “Tofu. It’s What’s Fer Dinner.”

If you aquarium people want me to roll into a restaurant asking for farmed catfish, then you need to hit KFC and demand a bucket of factory-raised chicken whose feet never touched the ground.

That’s just bad form. And even though The Fish Hack isn’t paid by the word, I’ll give you 17 extra “reallys” to string in front of that “bad.” No charge.

The Fish Hack won’t be adding his regular stain to The Fish Wrap for awhile, but that doesn’t mean you Blog Brothas and Mothas get a break from your daily cuppa Hack.

I’m in San Jose with ducats to the NCAA West Regional Finals. The Fish Hack’s parents, aka Sperm Donor and Host Organism, scored seats through a legit connection. Promised one to me if I didn’t sit with them or ever use their names online. In other words, obey the restraining order and I get seats for three games.

Today opens with the Kansas Jayhawks versus the Southern Illinois Salukis. Game 2 is Pitt Panthers versus UCLA Bruins. Let the other Hacks break down the match-ups hoops-wise. We’ll do it by the critters that represent their institutions.

JAYHAWKS v. SALUKIS

Hoopsters say it’s the Jayhawks in a laugher. Fish Hack says get real.
Hard to like the Jayhawks here because THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A JAYHAWK. It’s a term used in Kansas territorial days for everyone from drunken raiders to abolitionists to drunken abolitionists.

A Saluki is a Persian hound that hunts by sight, not scent. That makes it hard here.
How can a Saluki sight-hunt a myth?

The only way to solve this is Fake Species v. Real Species. Fake species are unprotected under Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife rules. So take the Saluki’s, which already beat Bigfoot and Unicorns to get to the Sweet 16.

PANTHERS v. BRUINS

Another tough one because both species come in under gooey pseudonyms. “Panthers” brings back memories of the late 1990s when an ODFW spin-doctor actually tried to get The Fish Hack axed for making fun in The Fish Wrap of her insistence of changing “cougars” to “mountain lions” in official ODFW publications. Last heard, The Spin Doctor was peddling organic dog biscuits. Pretty obvious who won that one.

“Bruins” rhymes with “ruins,” which is what UCLA does to my bracket if they blow this one.
So, it’s bracket-munching Bear versus Cougar’s out-of-state cousin. Omnivore versus carnivore.

Take the Omnivore, by a nose.

What are these people doing?

This is the new glass-bottom Skywalk unveiled today at the Grand Canyon, where you can now get a birds-eye view of the bottom of the canyon by actually peeking between your boots.

That’s right. This $30 million bridge extends over the canyon’s rim, and the glass floor allows visitors to look straight-down 4,000 feet into the depths below.

Now, The Fish Hack is no Mensa. Proves that with every new post here and with most Thursdays in The Fish Wrap. But I do know a thing or two about Darwin. And I think he’d consider glass-bottom sky bridges a hell of a recruiting tool. Like screen doors fitted onto submarines, or Siegfreid and Roy.

This over-accessorizing of the natural world is something that The Fish Hack can’t endorse. You shouldn’t use fake accents to the real thing. But if you do, the last product to incorporate into the natural world, short of DDT, is glass. Remember the Bottle Bill? Hello?

What’s next? A glass-bottom driftboat, so you can see the rock that sinks you? Glass-bottomed four-wheelers so Sand People can see the dunes they cross? Shouldn’t part of experiencing the ruggeds of nature include doing something natural, or maybe even a little rugged?

Fish Bowls might be a good after-market add-on for the Pope Mobile, or for Bubble Boys looking for more permanent digs. Hell, glass slippers provide a sanitary option for guys with foot fetishes. But stapling some glass bridge to the side of one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World is just wrong.

You shouldn’t have glass IN the Grand Canyon, so you shouldn’t have glass OVER the Grand Canyon.

And they better not keep the glass too clean and transparent. Some condor might fly into it, and there’s no squee-gee big enough to clean that mess.

All right, Fishheads. It’s the piscatorial cunnundrom of the week, and we’re going to solve this Big Fish Madness thread now so The Fish Hack isn’t accused of miking this motha well past its pull date.

This is the last installment, the Finals, of the hypothetical battle among fish species to determine which fish, pound-for-pound, offers the best fight. It’s spawned by Versus.com’s similar use of March Madness bracketology to pour lighter fluid on the unsolvable debate on which fish brings the best A game when hooked on rod and reel.

Today, it’s Steelhead v. Shad.
Both anadromous. Both great biters and tough fighters. But some intrinsic differences loyal readers of The Fish Wrap could recite in their sleep.
Steelhead, obviously, are native. Shad were hauled by train from the East Coast and introduced to the Sacramento Delta in the 1880s.
Naturally, native gets precedence, but this is about pull, not pedigree.

And pull they do. Both need light leaders, thin rods and good drags for anglers to get the upper hand.

But for the money, one fish not only brings it on, it’s powers are so impressive that they are intimidating. Hook one and get ready to run downstream, reel screaming and hope you stay on top of him until you can turn him.

And the fight never ends with just one run. It’s two or three runs, easily.

You gotta give major props to Shad. Yet they’re no Steelhead, the pound-for-pound champ that The Fish Hack would lay a benji on in any contest.

All right, Fish Heads. It’s time for the two semi-finals of the Big Fish Madness tournament, in which our Final Four fish square off to see which pisces is, pound for pound, the toughest around.

It’s the NCAA-style bracketology used by Versus.com to promote fishing shows on the Versus cable channel and their website as profiled in Thursday’s Fish Wrap.

OK. Here, it’s Steelhead versus Bluegill and Fall Chinook versus Shad. Imagine them the same size. Which ones are tougher?

Chinook v. Shad is an intriguing match-up. One big-school darling of the Northwest; the other a Mutant Herring from Heck. The draft horse on crack against a skinny little slime-ball.

Gotta like ’em. Both are anadromous, bite well and pull like hell. One big difference, though, is how big a leader and how much drag can you use.
For chinook, you can get them to swallow some hardware lure and crank down the drag until you could slow down a Volkswagen and still not lose them. However, Shad’s mouths are so soft and their power so strong, they’ll actually pull so hard that they yank the hook right out of their own mouth.

The Fish Hack is impressed by intentional lip-piercing without anaesthesia. Shad in a squeaker.

Steelhead v. Bluegill is a blow-out. The fish from the Farmers’ Pond ain’t in the class of the cold-water god of the Northwest. That’s why there’s Steelhead beer and The Northwest Steelheaders Association. No Northwest Bluegillers Association meetings where dudes down Bluegill Ale and talk about the 8-ouncer that got away.

That gives us an all-anadromous Finals. Steelhead v. Shad in a weekend fin-off. Stay tuned.

Hanging at The Fish Wrap gets no better than during March Madness. Get paid to hang out and bet on sports. Awesome. Pete Rose really did have something there.

But The Fish Hack is backing away from the big screen just long enough to do a Final Four of fish in the Big Fish Madness tournament featured today in The Fish Wrap.

That’s the Versus.com promo that uses an NCAA-like bracket to set up hypothetical battles between different fish species to determine which fish is, pound for pound, the toughest around. To check it out, click here.

Versus started with 32 species. We’ll cut to the chase and do just the Final Four. But first, a disclaimer.

Fish Wraps are notoriously loaded with Homers, and when it comes to sport fish, this hack’s no different. For blogging’s sake, we’re only grading species The Fish Hack has caught. So there’s no tarpon, grouper, bluefish, bonefish, etc. Those are all the NIT — Not In Tournament.
That said, here’s my Top Four Prime Time Pisces:

STEELHEAD — Definitely a No. 1 seed on my bracket and easily in the Final Four. Nothing stronger and more admirable than a Rogue summer steelhead. The reason The Fish Hack underachieves at The Fish Wrap. Well, that and the fact that no one who knows me would hire me.

FALL CHINOOK SALMON — Elk River fall chinook pull like a draft horse on crack. But still a No. 2 seed that needed a little help to get this far.

SHAD — I once got spooled by a shad on the lower Umpqua. Burned into my backing and stole my fly line. So it gets the nod. That way, there’s no admission that perhaps it was a badly tied nail knot that was the culprit there.

BLUEGILL — Give Dickie-V his props. They’re like ants…small, but can carry, like, 65 times their own body weight. Still, a darkhorse.

Tomorrow, it’s Steelhead versus Bluegill and Fall Chinook verus Shad.

Go ahead and tell me you’re winners and any agruments for or against any of these fish. Or just wait for The Fish Hack to settle the score.