Here’s someone who takes sleeping with the fishes a bit too literally this Valentine’s Day.

The Associated Press provides this shot of Darren Horness of Wisconsin who played cupid on the ice of Lake Winnebago by spearing this 72-inch sturgeon.

Now, what better way to spend America’s most pseudo of holidays than donning snowmobile pants and getting horizontal in the snow with 6-foot, scum-sucking bottomdweller.

I get a lot of e-mail, but this one jumped out at me today because of the name in the sender’s slot.

Guinnane.

That name should be familiar to readers of my Feb. 8 outdoor column about the Feb. 1 boat capsizing off Sporthaven Beach near Brookings. Billy Guinnane, 57, died after a sneaker wave caused by a new underwater shoal swamped the small aluminum boat. Brian Wilby, Guinnane’s 70-year-old friend and longtime fishing partner, survived.

While other readers wanted to talk more about their experiences with sneaker waves or other issues, Layne Guinnane’s e-mail was one I had to read first.

She said the piece was “touching, but it was more about the survivor than the victim.”

Layne was right. It was more about the survivor than her husband, and I’ll do something about that right now.

The Yellow Pages says Billy Guinnane was a real estate agent in Redding, Calif., but that says very little about this man.

He was a saltwater boy, through and through. His dad was a ship captain, who dragged Billy from the San Francisco area to Guam as a child. He was raised fishing on the sea and had deep resect for it, Layne says.

Layne, incidentally, grew up in Shady Cove and Eagle Point, and still has family here. So does Wilby.

That fateful fishing trip actually was more about fixing a broken water pipe than lingcod and Dungeness crab. Layne says Billy was at her parents’ house in Brookings to fix a pipe and sneak in some fishing with Wilby when the work was done.

Billy loved fishing and diving, Layne says of her husband of 23 years. They had no children.

Layne is convinced, as is Wilby, that Billy would have survived and helped tell the story of the sneaker wave had the boat not struck him in the head during their nearly 15-minute ordeal in the water.

“It was a tragic accident,” Layne writes in her e-mail. “Brian was not at fault. Anyone who knows that area knows they were in close enough to the beach to a point where I have seen children playing. I could go on and on about what a fun and wonderful man he was but that only counts to people who knew him.”

Well, we all know a little more about him now. Certainly well enough for Billy Guinnane to remain in our memories the next time any of us motor over the Chetco River bar for a little lingcod and Dungeness.

All right, you Fisheads. The Fish Hack at the Fish Wrap says it’s time today to lay the foundation for your Monday call-in fishing, er, call-in sick.

Rain’s on the way and the Rogue River is set to peak and then start dropping Monday. That means Monday should sport the best conditions for winter steelhead fishing on the Rogue since December.

The change in water levels won’t be great, but it will trigger some serious steelhead migration into the Rogue Valley from the Lower Rogue Canyon and below. Coastal guys have been hammering steelhead down there on roe for weeks; now, us inlanders will get our chance.

And you know I’m serious because The Fish Hack doesn’t throw a semi-colon at you Fishheads in some run-of-the-mill steelhead report.

Problem is, fishing will be best in the Merlin and Galice areas. Those are full-day driftboat trips for Medford-ites, not some morning jaunt to TouVelle before clocking in.

So, you gotta get the whole day off.

But it’s too early in the year to use vacation days. That’s more for trips planned well in advance.
No, Dr. Fish Wrap’s advice here is log one of those sick days for yourself, instead of banking them for taking care of sniveling kids like you always do.

But you do need to make Monday’s sick call at least appear legit, even if you dial from the Hog Creek boat ramp. And the best way to do that is start the fake illness now.

So, I hope you feel that tickle in your throat, right? Tell a coworker you think you have a fever or a upset stomach. My favorite? Say you suspect have some low-level infectious disease you found on Wikepedia and that you’re headed in for a test Monday.

The steelhead gods forgive such minor transgressions.

Besides, jobs are for people who don’t fish.

Sometimes journalism can look awfully predatory to the general public, occasionally even from the inside as well. When tragedy befalls someone, we seem to swoop toward the vctims like vultures, often racing to be the other media scavengers. As one of those scavengers, I can tell you it’s rarely really like that. In fact, it’s often the opposite.

And my upcoming Thursday outdoor column on the Mail Tribune’s sports page is a great example of how the subjects of bad fortune in a column or news story often don’t end up feeling victimized at all.

This story certainly is about tragedy: Two longtime friends and fishing partners get hit with a sneaker wave near the Chetco River bar, capsizing their 15-foot alumimum boat. They are tossed into the sea, without life jackets. Eventually, both are pulled from the surf by passersby on the beach, but only the boat operator survives.

Some readers might think, how could you possibly interview the survivor for a story? My experience says, how can you not?

I tracked the survivor down, called and left him a message. He returned my call two hours later. I found him gracious and grateful that I made the effort to find him. He was more than willing to answer any and every question about what happened, what he was thinking, what he was feeling.

And, as with every similar victim I have interviewed in 20 years of covering Southern Oregon, he thanked me when we were done.

My job isn’t to decide for this man whether he should share his ordeal. My job is to give him that choice.It’s his tragedy, after all. He deserves a chance to have a say in what the world knows about it.

His story is compelling and sad. But it’s his to share. He wants you to read it so, perhaps, you don’t end up repeating his experience.

Stay tuned.

I drove up to the DEQ vehicle check-station today like a guy taking his best old bird dog to the vet knowing the news won’t be good. My rig just turned 16 years old and sports enough general ailments that passing the smog test to get two more years worth of road time seemed as likely as Jessica Simpson calling me because she likes my column mugshot.

The rig — known by the DMV as a 1991 Toyota 4Runner — stalled four times in line. I didn’t even bother bringing a checkbook because there’s no way this old heffer was going to pass. Just tell me how bad it is, and I’ll see if a mechanic buddy can resurrect it just enough again to fake it through I/M.

The attendant asked for the mileage. 189,000 and change, much of it on backroads, beaches, snow and mud. Towing miles and boat ramps and even driving off the cliff at Cape Blanco State Park for most of the past 15 years to fish chinook at the Elk River mouth.

He then looked for illegal immigrants clinging to the undercarraige, then stuffed a pipe up the tailgate. No revving the engine, nothing. A few seconds later, he pulled the pipe out.

Man, I thought. Flunked before it even started.

“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I was a moron, then asked how I intended to pay.

“You mean, it passed?” I asked.

This old rig with the absessed engine and serious transmission issues? Passed?

This beater with the porous muffler, rag-tag catalytic converter and a power steering system with a quart-a-week habit? Passed?

Now I know how jailhouse brides feel on parole day.

I’ve got at least two more years on the prowl, legally, with the best rig I’ve ever had. Sure, it’s got its problems and gets washed every presidential year, whether it needs it or not.

But it’s my rig, and I’m proud to be its driver. We’ve done a lot of killing and hauling fish together. And now the DEQ says we can start adding to our biomass footprint again this weekend during the first winter steelhead trip with the blue “09″ tag on the plates.

“You know,” I told the attendant while handing him a debit card, “keeping a man and his rig together is a beautiful thing.”

We hustled back to the office, me and my rig. Jessica Simpson should be calling any minute.

It used to be that Super Bowl Sunday was one of the best days to fish for winter steelhead on the South Fork of the Coquille. But two things ruined that.

1. VCRs. The game used to be in the early afternoon, so most guys would be off the water by 11 a.m. That left most of the river open. But guys started taping the games and staying on the water longer. Technology stinks.

2. Late Stat. Now the freakin’ game starts at 3:30 p.m., enough time to fish all day and dry out your waders before kick-off.

My best Super Bowl steelhead story is a South Fork one, too.

My buddy, John Griffith, hooks this pig on bait. The fish jumps straight out of the water and lands in a tree. It flopped around, tangling enough leader in the branches that the fish was stuck.

Cursing, Griffith wades up to his nips and starts breaking branches until the steelhead finally flops into the water. Once the branches floated freely, Griffith reels in this 15 pound hen like you would a smolt. The thing was stuck in the tree so long it was completely gassed by the time it hit the water.

Kind of like Rex Grossman will in Miami.

Check this out: I just got a message from a woman who read my piece on Medford boat-builder Willie Illingworth, who is battling cancer, and she’s gotta talk with him. Normally, I don’t play match-maker, but then I hear her name: Esther the Molester.

Now, anyone who knows Willie knows he’d want to talk with someone with that name, regardless. I checked with Willie’s peeps and they agreed, so I passed on his number.

Eighteen years as the Fish Hack at the Fish Wrap have proven to me that Mail Tribune outdoors readers are the most interesting and eclectic people around. Not everyone’s story hits the Outdoors Page, so here’s a place for everyone to log in and pop off about anything outdoors — woods, waters, whatever.

So start poppin’.