Apparently, Ron Dykes isn’t interested in The Fish Hack becoming his new best friend and sharing with me the best of the Rogue River’s booty — a fresh March spring chinook salmon fillet.

Dykes is the man who caught the first verified Rogue River spring chinook of the season Saturday at the old mill site 4 miles east of Gold Beach.
And he’s ben gnawing on its 20-pound carcass ever since.

“It’s a pretty nice, fat one,” says Dykes, 44 and a Gold Beach lifer. “I’ve eaten on it until I was blue in the face.”

And that has your’s truly seeing red.

I’ve been begging for a chunk of that chinook. And despite more than a little love thrown his way in The Fish Wrap blog posting Tuesday, Ron won’t share the carcass with The Fish Hack. Not even a belly-strap.

The only thing he’ll share with The Fish Wrap is his story.

Dykes loaded up his 1984 Challenger and headed to the mill site early Saturday, the first day he tried for an early springer.

Dude knows the river and its salmon. There’s always a slug of early chinook moving into the Rogue in early March…when the conditions are right. That means flows of 10,000-15,000 cubic feet per second of water 47-48 degrees, with a good green color to it.

“Those are the conditions when the water’s just right, and that’s what it is right now,” he says.

Straight-up at 9 a.m., the springer grabs his anchovies with a spinner. Yada yada yada, he gets it in the boat. A hen.

“I was caught off-guard,” he says.

That’s because it was deja-vu, all over again.

Turns out that he caught the first verified springer last year. Same spot, same way. Almost the same day, too.

“Unbelievable,” he says.

The Fish Hack has another word for it: Selfish.

How else do you describe getting the best dish two year’s running and hording them both?

For Dykes, it’s not Ginger OR Marianne. He’s got Ginger AND Marianne. No culls there, for sure.

Strike “selfish.” Insert “envy.”

Dude would be crazy to share.

“They’ll be another one here pretty soon,” he says.

To: Ron Dykes,
Gold Beach, OR.

Dear Ron:

This is a letter of introduction I’m faxing to you from me, The Fish Hack at The Fish Wrap, your new best friend.

The boys down at The Rogue Outdoor Store in Gold Beach told me you caught the first Rogue River springer of the season Saturday at the old mill site 4 miles upstream of the mouth. A 20-pounder, they say. Brought it into the store for verification. A true chromer, they say.

Well, Ron, I am of the opinion that the first and freshest Rogue springers are the best-eating fish Oregon has to offer, the best of the outdoor booty afforded people like you, Ron. And me.

You always should share your best booty with your best friends, Ron. And I’m right there to accept a slab of that first springer. I’m here for you, man. I’m here to share.

If only you’d take my calls.

There are others out there who would pretend to be your new best friend, just because you caught that fish. Like Bill Monroe, the Fish Hack at The Oregonian. But don’t believe him.

Last year, Monroe went so far as to claim that Rogue springers are SECOND ONLY to Columbia springers in edibility. Yeah, smoked maybe.

Rogue springer or Columbia springer? That’s not asking Ginger or Marianne. That’s like, Marianne or Mrs. Howell? Not enough beer in this town for me to…

The point is, do you see what friends do for each other, Ron? I’m sticking up for you. Sticking up for your fish.

So, a couple salmon steaks are cool. A fillet even better. I’ll even come get them. Tell you what: I’ll expense it, then split the mileage re-imbursement from The Fish Wrap with you when the check comes in.

All you need to do is take one of my calls, Ron. Ron? You there?I see your home phone still buzzes straight to the fax machine every time I call.

So, here’s my fax. You got my number. You got my e-mail. Send along a picture of your — ummm, ‘our’ — first springer of the year. I’ll post it on line and even stick it in The Fish Wrap.

That’s what buddies do for each other. Right?

Your new best friend,
The Fish Hack

You won’t find many musings about the ongoing Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in The Fish Wrap these days. But that was quite the opposite 17 years ago when a local musher’s trek through Alaska created a running serial that kept Fish Wrap readers glued to daily stories of his perils and progress.

And in doing so, musher Terry Hinesly took part in one of the most astonishing story-behind-the-story events in the career of yours truly, The Fish Hack.

Hinesly alone is quite the story. A Hodgkin’s disease survivor, the then-Eagle Point man is a dog nut who tried but failed to finish the grueling Iditarod in 1985. He tried again in 1990, and the community adopted this determined survivor as the Rogue Valley personified. Our own Jack London.

The Fish Wrap was an afternoon delight back then. So The Fish Hack would come in each morning, telephone Iditarod officials and find out where Hinesly was in the race. His lead dog, Indy, was a fan favorite. School kids monitored his progress on the 1,158-mile course on maps. Wild stuff.

He had some problems, almost falling out of the race. But Hinesly stayed in there, right near the back, stalled by storms and short on healthy dogs. Daily drama.

Into his third week on the trail, the winning mushers and national media were long gone, and Iditarod officials all but pulled up stakes. Checkpoint info and regular staff were gone. The updates were impossible, though he was in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness.

Where was Hinesly?

I look at the map, count a few checkpoints and guess that maybe Hinesly has passed a little pin-prick on the trail called Elim, 123 miles from the finish line.

I call the operator in Alaska, ask for any phone numbers in Elim. She says there are, like, 10 phones in Elim. A bar, a house, a doctor’s office…

Gimme the doc’s number, I say. I dial. It rings 10, 15 times. Then some guy answers.

“I’m a newspaper reporter in Oregon trying to find a musher named Terry Hinesly,” I say.

“Well…this is Terry.”

The Fish Hack is speechless, but only briefly. Long distance bills are a bitch.

I tell Terry about the lack of race info, the operator, the doc’s office. Of all the phones in all the doctor’s offices in all of Alaska…

“That’s weird,” he says. “I’m just at this guy’s house and the phone keeps ringing and ringing, so I answered.”

With that, he said he made it through the Alaskan wilderness and should be in Nome the next day. Indy’s suffering from heat exhaustion, but he’s gonna make it and lead the team over the finish line.
“If I have to carry him in the sled basket, I will,” Hinesly says.

That March 21, 1990 interview and story remains one of my more surreal moments at The Fish Wrap and is a constant reminder that, in this biz, you just don’t give up looking for someone. Even one Eagle Pointer in all of Alaska.

Hinesly’s retired now. Hung up dog mushing and is living in Prospect. Don’t see him much these days.

But, we’ll always have Elim.

I bound into Room 29 at Jackson School with “Green Eggs and Ham” in hand today, ready to share Dr. Seuss’s birthday with a bunch of little kids who like learning by reading little stories.

It turns out I’m right, but for the wrong reason.

I thought I signed up to give some literacy props to Medford first-graders. But these guys are fifth-graders. Not necessarily the good Doc’s target audience.

This will be tough.

Their teacher, Sarah Major, recognizes me from the Fish Wrap. Using my regular name, she tells the kids I’m The Fish Hack, and I’m glad I’m accompanied with a plate of cookies to keep these mongrels at bay while I get the hell out of here.

Fifth-graders don’t like random adults, especially random adults with baby books. I know. I was a fifth-grader once, almost twice. Ate visiting chumps like it was hot-lunch day.

Then Major tells them a little about what The Fish Hack does at The Fish Wrap. Fishing stories, stories about bears, salmon. And I’m waiting for these little pessimists to pepper me with insults and disdain normally reserved for those who actually know me.

They erupt, all right.

They start telling me what they’ve learned this year about salmon, how they watched them spawn in the Rogue River and grow at the hatchery. They know about migration, what they eat in the ocean to make their meat pink. They even knew salmon actually grow skinny and longer as they head from the estuary to the sea.

“Smolting? You guys know about smolting?”

They ask questions about black bears, cougars, foxes, more black bears and then some more. I can see my answers going in one ear, but not coming out the other.

“You see out that window and it might not look this way,” I say, “but you live in some of the best wild salmon and bear habitat in the United States.”

They look happy, proud, informed.

These guys get it.

We whip through “Green Eggs and Ham,” and I realize we’re all reciting the final “Sam-I-Am” lines in unison. No one’s even thinking cookies.

I ask them what this story’s really about.

“Don’t think something’s bad without trying it first,” smiles a front-row girl. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Hmm.

Missing from the recent Jackson County Sportsmen’s and Outdoor Recreation Show was perhaps its most-watched, and most appreciated, presenter.

Stan Fagerstrom, the 83-year-old trick-caster, was not there. And for good reason.

The Bass Fishing Hall of Fame came calling for the former Florence bass fanatic. Fagerstrom was enshrined in the hall Saturday in Alabama during the Bassmaster Classic.

Fagerstrom has been preaching the bass-fishing mantra in the Northwest for 60 years, and he’s gotten his message into the noggin’s of more than a few of us in Salmon Nation.

Stan’s casting is just as legendary. With spinning or bait-casting rods, he chan chuck a hook-less plug into your pocket at 40 yards.

He even made a spectacle of your’s truly — the Fish Hack at the Fish Wrap — a few years ago, hitting my outstretched index finger while my little tax deductions watched and laughed in amazement.

After millions of casts and surgery on his right wrist, Fagerstrom can still fling it.

“I can still hit my targets as good as ever,” he told me. “And I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can. The last thing I want to do is nothing.”

A full feature on Fagerstrom appears in the March 1 Mail Tribune. Check it out.

Who would have thought that a single, solitary rodent in New York City would cause such a stir.

But that’s what happened last week, with the discovery of the Big Apple’s first beaver in almost two centuries.

When wildlife biologists videotaped a beaver Wednesday swimming in the Bronx River, it was the first confirmed beaver there since they were eradicated in the eary 1800s, the Associated Press reported.

To date, the only beaver associated with NYC is the beaver on the city seal. That was before this 3-year-old male paddled around all the mob-tossed carcasses swimming with the fishes in one of the nation’s most polluted streams.

Other than the fact that 44 million NYC rats are jealous of the fame afforded their buck-toothed cousin, this story merits some dissection for other several reasons:

1. It’s weird.

2. Atlantic City casinos have already set the over-under betting line at 2 1/2 … for the number of eyes its offspring will have.

3. It’s proof-positive that people who live in America’s wildest concrete jungle have a difficult time grasping what we take for granted here in wildlife-rich Southern Oregon.

4. It’s really freakin’ weird.

5. Hopefully, NYC won’t look to the City of Medford for tips on dealing with their city beaver.

Remember Medford’s Beaver?

In early 2002, a beaver moved into Bear Creek in downtown Medford, and summarily started munching through $4,000 worth of non-native aspen freshly planted by the Medford Urban Renewal Agency near the old Jackson Street Dam site.

MURA’s Director at the time called the beaver “a vandal” and suggested that it use drowned shopping carts, not expensive trees, to build its dam.

City parks workers got the beaver trapped and released near Lost Creek Lake.

Our beaver, evicted for being, well, a beaver.

So, New Yorkers, learn from our city’s missteps and revel in your rodent. Give him some love on Letterman. Maybe throw a Bronx Beaver Day Festival on the Waterfront, with the top raffle prize a pair of cement galoshes.

Just don’t take Medford’s lead and turn the Welcome Wagon into a Paddy Wagon.

Anyone with grade-school aged kids here knows that they must share some sort of genetic mutation which allows them to sense when a night’s surprise dose of snow will result in school closures.

At 5:30 a.m., my son Ben sticks his nose in my sleeping grill and bellows, “YOU SHOULD SEE ALL THE SNOW OUTSIDE!”

This is the same kid who has to have his covers stolen at 7:20 a.m. to get him out of bed on a school day. But if there’s snow, BAM, he senses the accumulation and is up and ready to partake.

At 5:45, he woke his sister, Maggie, almost 7 years old. Now it’s not even light out and I had two rabid snow chihuahuas to deal with.

At 6:15, they thought it was an injustice that he couldn’t go outside and play, and I’m a bad dad for it.

Then, at 7:40 a.m., Medford finally killed the school day. It would take a Taser to keep these kids inside and I didn’t have bail money, so I relented.

Snowball fights, angels, a snowman that looked a little like Alfred Hitchcock quickly ensued. And that was just me.

They did much of the same, too. Even took batting practice on iceballs that shattered at the crack of aluminum.

When all were good and soaked we changed clothes, put the rig in 4 wheel drive and buzzed around east Medford, purposefully speeding through slush piles to see how far the muck can shoot.

Yeah, that was us. Whaddya expect when you mix 3 inches of snow with two kids and a slightly immature Fish Hack.

Winter’s not always just about winter steelhead. Besides, when the Rogue is running chocolate and the little tax deductions are getting rowdy, a morning in the snow sure can take the edge off a day at the Fish Wrap.

Though my old I-can-sense-there’s-snow-outside gene has gone recessive in middle age, I’m glad my two little mutants were there to take care of me.

Two Oregon teens found out this week that they’re still fighting the Civil War in the South. Instead of muskets and cannons, it’s with fishing rods and bass boats.

Teens from Bend and Salem found themselves swamped by Southerners in something called the Junior Bassmaster World Championships Sunday on Alabama’s Logan Martin Lake.

That’s right. The competitiveness of bass fishing, so big in the South, has splashed into the junior ranks as well. And the carpet-bagging Norttherners got whupped by the Confederates.

The two age-group winners are from the South. One hails from Kentucky and the other from South Africa, of all places. One of the Oregonians caught one fish that weighed less than 2 pounds; the other Beaver State entrant caught nothing.

No surprise that Oregonians who go from salmon territory to the Land of the Largemouth got whacked in the classic. After all, they live in a cold-water place where fishing is an activity, a hobby. There if it’s not sport, it’s a religion.

In 20 years of outdoor writing, I’ve covered one major pro bass tournament when two Rogue Valley anglers competed in a 1993 national tournament in Nashville, Kentucky.

There, I spent more time hanging around with the good ol’ boys than the tournament fishers, and the result was a unique understanding of how manliness in the South is measured by the length of your bass.

Check it out here.

The Louisiana trip I wrote about in my last blog — the trip that produced 270 pounds of fillets, including the mackerel mugging for the camera — includes one ordeal on that fishing trip that never made it to the newspaper.

We three Oregon outdoor hacks were joined on that June fishing boat by a guy from Indiana who had never been on the ocean.

Turns out, he never will again.

The guy, who primarily writes about hunting, gets on the boat with us at sunrise wearing a shirt with his Web site and logo all over it and Dramamine patches on his neck. The 24-foot boat only has seats for the captain — a 21-year-old Cajun crack-up who called us “Aheegun Outdore Rahtaz” and later took us to his favorite haunts — and the bait boy. So us four anglers have to stand in the back as we motor 32 miles into the Gulf in 3- to 4-foot seas.

That’s rockaby swells for Oregonians. But that’s considered rough seas for Gulf fishermen. Apparently, it’s also a perfect storm for Hoosiers.

Not 10 minutes into a two-hour run, this poor guy is ready to let loose yesterday’s lunch. He’s doing the groan thing and we’re trying to convince him to smell the outboard exhaust and get it over with, but he doesn’t.

Nothing worse than a groaner on board. They can be like dogs. Once one dog howls, the whole neighborhood chimes in.

We finally get to the base of an oil derrick and start fishing, and we expect the Hoosier to start feeling better. But it turns out that actually motoring is easier than jigging in the swells for this poor guy.
We’re hooking red snappers, cobias and mackerel every 15 seconds our sardines are in the water, and the Hoosier is squatting against the transom, pure green. We’re telling him to let it fly, you’ll feel better, just don’t groan. But he doesn’t trust us.

After a few hours of agony and not a minute of fishing, the Hoosier actually asks the captain if he can be dropped at an oil-rig piling while we fish. Apparently, it’s better to bear-hug a metal piling alone and in the middle of the Gulf for hours than to fish with us.

Through 10 hours of personal agony, the Hoosier never does barf. But more impressive is that he doesn’t scuttle the entire trip by asking to go back to port.

Too bad he never can stand long enough to fish.

We’re impressed with his fortitude. We even vote to split our fish with him, but he refuses.

“I want absolutely no memory of this trip,” he says. “Not one fillet. Not one anything.”

You can’t will yourself sea legs. But, as the Hoosier shows, you can always be a good sport.

As we ramp into Mardi Gras, I can’t help but harken back to my last visit to Cajun-ville, which turned into one of the most memorable fishing trips I’ve ever had.

Headed to Lake Charles, La., for an Outdoor Writers Association of America conference, my friend Pat Wray of Corvallis organized a pre-conference fishing trip out of Houma, La. We flew into Houston and drove seven hours literally to the end of the road in the Bayou … a marina, a few motel rooms and a bar.

We boarded a 24-foot boat the next morning and hauled 32 miles into the Gulf. Fishing around oil derricks, we hammered five species of fish … real red snapper (not the stuff people pretend are red snappers off Oregon) mackerel, barracuda, amberjack and tasty cobia (like a warm-water lingcod).

We caught hundreds of fish. Constant action, eventually killing 270 pounds of fish we shipped home. The last package of red snapper will be dinner on Fat Tuesday.

Check out this mackerel. Not very tasty, but it fought like a 30-pound steelhead on crack. How about those teeth.

Oh, I’m the one on the right.