March 03, 2010
Why We Miss
Ducks Unlimited Magazine
March/April 2010
In 1969, the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published the five stages of grief, a process that people go through when faced with a terminal illness. Since then, the model is now applied to all of life's troubles and trials. If these five stages were applied to a waterfowler experiencing a season of miserable shooting, the process might evolve as follows:
1. Denial: "My shooting is a little off today, but did you see how fast that duck was moving?"
2. Anger and Blame: "Aargh! Why am I missing? I can't believe I bought this piece-of-junk shotgun."
3. Bargaining "Just let me hit a duck, any duck, please ... just one duck. Is that a coot over there?"
4. Depression: "I'm such a loser. I'm never going to hit anything. My shooting is so poor a mallard drake threw his loose change into my duck blind."
5. Acceptance: "I've got to get some help. Practice more. Deal with my shooting so I can get back in the game."
Chances are most waterfowlers have been through this process at some point in their hunting career and can easily fall back into denial, blame games, and the rankled dejection from missing familiar shots. If missing is like a chronic disease, then it's prudent to practice some preventive medicine and see if you have any of the following symptoms that might be bringing your shooting down ... and not the ducks.
Read the rest at Ducks Unlimited Magazine.
Posted by jcard at 06:20 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2009
The President, the Professor, and the Wide Receiver
Foreign Policy
November 17, 2009
This week, U.S. President Barack Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, is making his landmark visit to Asia, including a Wednesday stop in Seoul, where South Korea is in the midst of a racial reckoning. His visit could have positive repercussions for years to come. Race is a thorny issue in the country, and biracial persons especially so. Both North and South Koreans embrace pure bloodlines, untainted by non-Korean DNA. Biracial children are broadly considered unadoptable, and children and adults of mixed race endure ostracism and bullying. But in the past few years, a number of events and people have made South Koreans reconsider racism and persons of mixed race.
Read the rest at Foreign Policy.
Posted by jcard at 02:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2009
Korea’s Four Rivers Project: Economic Boost or Boondoggle?
Yale Environment 360
September 21, 2009
The natural landscape of South Korea has been largely re-engineered, with nearly every river damned or forced into concrete channels. Now the government is reviving plans for a mammoth water project that would dredge and develop hundreds more miles of waterways and put added stress on the country's remaining wildlife.
The Korean peninsula was once called geum-su-gang-san, “a land of embroidered rivers and mountains.” Before South Korea industrialized in the postwar years, the rivers were wild-running freestone streams barreling down the mountains and turning into sandy shallow rivers edged by wetlands as they reached the sea. In her 1898 book Korea and Her Neighbors, 19th-century travel writer Isabella Bird described the upper Namhan River as “where pure emerald water laps gently upon crags festooned with roses and honeysuckle, or in fairy bays on pebbly beaches and white sand.”
That world is long gone now, as the Namhan and nearly every other South Korean river has been dammed, forced into concrete channels, or otherwise re-engineered by successive governments that have funneled billions of dollars to the powerful construction industry to fund countless public works projects designed to tame the country’s rivers. Today, besides a handful of creeks deep in the mountains or protected in national parks, only one major river, the Dong, exists in a natural meandering and un-dammed state.
Read the rest at Yale Environment 360.
Posted by jcard at 05:41 AM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2009
Book Review: Brother One Cell--An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons
InTheFray Magazine
February 3, 2009
Every expatriate in Asia has known this guy. He is the one that cultivates a patch of marijuana in the hills near Lake Biwa. He smuggles condom-wrapped ecstasy tablets up his ass from Ko Samui. He buys magic mushrooms in a Cambodian bar for resale in Singapore, or horse-trades cheap methamphetamine in a Seoul nightclub. And now and then you hear of these guys getting busted, and later you wonder what ever happened to them.
While teaching English in Seoul in 1994, Cullen Thomas made a plan to visit a remote mountain village in Luzon, buy bricks of hash on the cheap, mail them to himself in Seoul, and to sell them to the expat crowd. The first brick arrived safely, and he was a 23-year-old cosmopolitan outlaw: “Like many of the other foreigners, I fooled myself into thinking that I could operate alongside Korean society and yet not have to answer to it.” He signed for the second brick poste restante, and was quickly surrounded by drug agents.
Read the rest at InTheFray Magazine.
Posted by jcard at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2009
Big Trouble for Bigeyes: Will the Pacific tuna follow the buffalo into extinction?
Asia Sentinel
January 19, 2009
Although the world’s largest tuna stocks are in growing danger of collapse, the countries battling over how to divvy up the diminishing bigeye and yellowfin tuna in the Pacific Ocean are giving no ground. They met recently in Busan, Korea to argue over the fate of the Pacific’s stocks, which account for 55 percent of the tuna eaten worldwide, but refused the advice of their own scientific committee to make drastic cuts in the amount of tuna taken, settling for a far smaller cut in the catch and probably guaranteeing a thinning fishery.
The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which governs the annual catch, met as environmentalist activists circled them with a plan, for instance, to publicize the inaction by stuffing a large fake bigeye tuna into a coffin and marching it around outside the posh Lotte Hotel in downtown Busan where the commission was holding its annual conference behind closed doors and away from the prying eyes of the press and the environmentalists.
The environmental activists – Greenpeace members from across the world and the Korea Federation for Environmental movement, the country’s largest environmental group, intended to dress in traditional Korean hemp funeral garb in a publicity stunt designed to bring attention to scientific evidence that the Pacific stocks are in deadly decline.
The Busan police had different thoughts on the idea.
Read the rest at Asia Sentinel.
Posted by jcard at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2008
Life As Korea's Only Fly Fishing Guide
Field and Stream
December 2008
Few anglers think of Asia as a fly-fishing destination, but in 2004, James Card quit his teaching job in South Korea and became the only fly-fishing guide in the country. His slideshow describes what it's like to be a responsible for putting clients on fish in a foreign land and chronicles the far-flung species tucked away in a mountain range that runs the length of the Korean peninsula.
View the online slideshow and read the story at Field and Stream.
Posted by jcard at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2008
The World’s Top 10 Aerial Tours
Travel + Leisure
December 2008
Whether you’re ballooning over the Himalayas or hovering above feeding whales, some sights are best experienced from on high.
The hum of the single-engine Cessna fills your ears as you ascend above the Peruvian high desert. Below you, flat expanses of dry, brown earth extend in every direction, punctuated only by twisting dry riverbeds…a lifeless landscape. Then the plane banks, and over the intercom the pilot directs you to look at what appear to be just another set of curving, squiggly lines. But then, as you watch, the lines start to come to life, to form a definitive shape…with a spread-finned tail at one end, a gaping mouth at the other, and an eye in the middle, staring up at you: it’s a giant line drawing of a whale, carved right into the landscape.
Read the rest at Travel + Leisure
Posted by jcard at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2008
Go> Layover: Seoul
Outside's Go
August/September 2008
Often bypassed en route to higher-profile Asia, Seoul is a city of surprises. Where else is there a popular yacht club but no ocean?
This travel story can be read in full in the August/September 2008 issue of Outside's Go.
Posted by jcard at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2008
Paradise in No Man's Land: The Korean DMZ Is One of the Most Heavily Fortified Borders in the World-- And a Sanctuary for the Peninsula's Flora and Fauna
Earth Island Journal
Spring 2008
The dragon does not usually receive visitors in winter, but we went anyway. We left the jeep parked at an empty guard post on a dirt road edged with barbed wire. Landmine warning signs hung on the fence. The five of us hiked downward in knee-deep snow into the bowl-shaped valley, then passed through a thicket of royal azalea and Mongolia oak heavy laden with hoarfrost and last night’s snowfall. We emerged to behold the Dragon Moors. The entire scene was frozen over — the flowers, the herbs, and the mythical dragon that was thought to rest in the dark swamp water. In the distance we could see the snow covered mountains of North Korea.
As the first American journalist to come to the Dragon Moors, I was asked why I wanted to visit this particular region of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). In the entire length of the 154-mile long DMZ, the Dragon Moors is perhaps the most ecologically pure area. It is the only alpine wetland in Korea, and has been designated a “wetland of international importance.” Located 3,900 feet above the sea level on Daeam Mountain, it is composed of two peat bogs that have formed over the last 5,000 years. The wetland holds botanical specimens that cannot be seen anywhere else in Korea: prairie sphagnum, meadowsweet, Siberian geraniums, pitcher plants, sundew, buckbean, rushes, two-flower violet, Arctic starflower, catchfly and Hanabusaya asiatica , an endangered perennial herb.
The story can be read in full in the Spring 2008 issue of the Earth Island Journal.
Posted by jcard at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2008
Re-enter the Dragon--Seoul
Monocle
April 2008
Imagine if New York's Central Park had been occupied by a foreign army for the past century.
Posted by jcard at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
January 07, 2008
Korea's Cyber Vigilantes
Foreign Policy
January-February 2008
Webmasters, beware. If you have a map of Northeast Asia on your site and the body of water located between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is labeled “Sea of Japan,” you may soon find your email inbox full of messages seeking to “correct” your geography.
Groups of loosely organized South Korean netizens regularly fire off thousands of emails in an effort to promote their country’s national image and rectify what they consider to be grave mistakes about Korean history, geography, and culture. Depending upon how you view them, these folks are either selfstyled “cyber factcheckers” or hypernationalistic spammers. One such group is the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (VANK). Originally founded as an international pen pal organization, VANK’s mission no longer involves friendly exchange. Instead, its members scour Web sites for “errors” about Korea, then barrage violators with protest emails. For instance, VANK wages a continual campaign to change the name of the Sea of Japan to the East Sea. “We are aware that some people criticize us as nothing but nationalists who give onesided facts to foreigners. But it is a misconception,” says Park GiTae, VANK’s founder and director.
Read the rest at Foreign Policy.
Posted by jcard at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2007
PyeongChang: Melted Dreams
Asia Times
July 10, 2007
PYEONGCHANG - I've been visiting PyeongChang county in south central Gangwon province for the past eight years. I sometimes go in the winter but not for the skiing. I quit skiing in South Korea a year ago, frustrated with the mediocre slopes and poor quality snow. I come to the region for a few trout streams that tend to fish well during the dry, semi-snowless winter months.
Yes, semi-snowless could be an adjective to describe the countryside of PyeongChang county. Most sorely lacking is snow, and snow is needed to make a mountain town that people want to visit. South Korean winters are dry and precipitation is scarce. Snow comes in spurts and there are a few good dumpings a year and then the white stuff quickly melts off.
I was fly-fishing a stream in the PyeongChang region this winter. I wore a light shirt in the afternoon and mayflies hatched from the water. The ground was barren, brown and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspection team was arriving the upcoming weekend. The only snow to be seen held tight on the upper reaches of north-facing mountain peaks. It was one of the warmest winters on record.
There are some regional snow festivals in Korea (in Taebaaek and Naejangsan) and because of the lack of regular snowfall, festival activities often risk being canceled. There is one account of organizers resorting to rituals offering cow heads as a sacrifice for snow from the sky. Now and then there is a heavy snowfall, which usually put roadways into total chaos, and just before the IOC team arrived in PyeongChang last February, they luckily got the snow they prayed for. If the IOC team had arrived a week earlier, they would have laughed and returned to the plane.
Read the rest at Asia Times
Posted by jcard at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2007
Killer Machines
Foreign Policy
May/June 2007
South Korea’s leaders, it seems, love to think big. Most South Koreans, for instance, live in cramped apartments without basic appliances such as dishwashers or garbage disposals. Yet, their government said last year that it intends to have a robot in every home by 2020, part of a plan to become one of the world’s top robotics manufacturing hubs.
The latest frontier in the country’s quest for robotic supremacy? Its border with Kim Jong Il’s Hermit Kingdom. The state-run Agency for Defense Development is spending $35 million to develop three types of robots—one each for mine detection and removal, surveillance, and combat—which it hopes to begin deploying to the 155-mile-long demilitarized zone later this year.
Read the rest at Foreign Policy.
Posted by jcard at 03:09 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2007
Wind Market Status: South Korea
Windpower Monthly
March 2007
South Korea spies opportunities: Established industry spots a growing need
The 2007 market status report of the South Korean wind power industry can be read in full at Windpower Monthly.
Posted by jcard at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2006
Escape from Pyongyang
Foreign Policy
November/December 2006
(One of the three issues submitted that won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence).
Gobaek (To Tell the Truth)
By Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick
281 pages, Seoul: Mulpure Publishing, 2005 (in Korean)
In January 1965, few people were paying attention to the shadow war being waged on the Korean Peninsula. As the U.S. military campaign in Vietnam heated up, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung was attempting to reunify the two Koreas using unconventional warfare. His goal was to launch surprise attacks on U.S. and South Korean patrols and erode the boundaries of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), while sending agents across its porous defense lines to subvert the citizenry of the south. The Americans called it a “lowintensity conflict.” But American and South Korean soldiers were fighting and dying in counterinsurgency and antiinfiltration missions along the DMZ. The shadow war was just beginning.
For U.S. Army Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins, a 24yearold North Carolina native stationed at one of the many small outposts on the edge of the DMZ, the choice was stark: Risk death in a counterinsurgency operation in East Asia, or risk death in the jungles of Vietnam, where he feared being sent after Korea. Cowardice crept in. The young squad leader felt less and less competent to lead his 8th Cavalry men on recon patrols. Jenkins wanted out. Having heard the story of an army deserter who had defected to East Germany, moved on to the Soviet Union, and was then repatriated back to the United States, Jenkins naively figured that he could model his desertion in the same way. He would simply walk to North Korea, which was then allied with the Soviets, and they would deport him home.
In the cold darkness on the night of Jan. 4, 1965, Jenkins chugged 10 cans of beer and led three other soldiers on his last patrol near Panmunjom.
Read the rest at Foreign Policy
Posted by jcard at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2006
Potential Grows and Grows: New industry report in media spotlight
Windpower Monthly
October 2006
* Cowritten with Gail Rajgor, Windpower Monthly News Editor
Wind power recieved a welcome dose of positive press and media attention last month following the release of a new report by the Glocal Wind Energy Council (GWEC) and Greenpeace outlining how wind power could meet 34% of world electricity demand by 2050 and 16.5% by 2020.
The rest of the article can be read at Windpower Monthly.
Posted by jcard at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
GWEC Report: In the Mood for Doing Business
Windpower Monthly
October 2006
* Cowritten with Katherine Ross, Australian correspondent for Windpower Monthly
Spirits were high at Global Windpower 2006 last month, a marked change for a renewables event in Australia where the mood at this time last year was anything but cheerful. New market opportunities, both at home and abroad, lie behind the renewed sense of optimism.
The rest of the article can be read at Windpower Monthly.
Posted by jcard at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2006
Will South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" Crumble in North Korea's Atomic Twilight?
World Politcs Review
October 11, 2006
BUSAN, South Korea -- The Korea Earthquake Research Center recorded a tremor in North Korea at 10:36 a.m. on Monday. It measured 3.6 on the Richter scale and was not a natural event. Shortly after the seismic activity, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) announced they had successfully completed a nuclear test, calling it a "historic event," and a "great leap forward." North Korea became the ninth member of the elite club of nations that possess the nuclear bomb.
The test was conducted in a tunnel dug into a small mountainside near the village of Hwadae on the northeastern coast in the province of North Hamgyeong. Initial estimates of the explosion's size found it to be the equivalent to 550 tons of TNT, which is considered small by atomic bomb standards.
Reaction was quick. The test garnered condemnation from the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia, China, Indonesia, Australia, India, the European Union, the Philippines and the U.N. Security Council. However, the common reaction of the United States and South Korea deserves special attention. After several years of increasing divergence in their relationship, the incident may help the two countries rebuild a unified front in their policy toward North Korea.
When he was elected in 1998, Kim Dae-jung founded the Sunshine Policy, a strategy to appease North Korea at all costs in the name of encouraging future unification. The policy can be likened to lending money and aid to a destitute brother who engages in criminal activity while leaving his abused family to go hungry. The point of the Sunshine Policy is to keep the delinquent brother out of the house so he does not interfere with the parvenu prosperity of South Korea. The last scenario South Korea wants is a meltdown in the north, the burden of 23 million refugees and responsibility for the reconstruction of a divided nation.
Read the rest at World Politics Review
Posted by jcard at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)
August 31, 2006
Destination: North and South Korea
Salon.com
August 31, 2006
The "black hole" of Asia and its estranged brother to the south are revealed in books from a political refugee, an American mountain man and a war veteran.
The DMZ runs across the Korean peninsula like a barbed wire belt, hiding an estimated 3 million land mines. Loosely formed during the waning days of the Korean War, the dividing line was made official during the 1953 armistice. The wire sprung up like kudzu vines and rifles haven't been put down since. Over time, the democratic capitalistic South has prospered, while the North limps along as a pariah nation led by a dictator's son who runs his fiefdom like an open-air prison.
North Korea is called the black hole of Asia. So little is known about the country that the intelligence community relies on satellite imagery and defector debriefings to create a picture of what is happening there, the world's most reclusive and repressed police state. One cannot expect much fine literature to squeak out of its closed borders, especially when famines waste the population every few years.
Read the rest at Salon.com.
Posted by jcard at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2006
The Geography of the Korean Psyche
Asia Times
June 6, 2006
SEOUL - The road that leads to the Dragon Moors, an alpine wetland, is a rutted two-track lane that goes past a rainbow-trout farm fed by a rushing cold-water creek. The dirt road winds its way up the forested valley and, judging from a tour map provided by Inje county and a store-bought driving atlas, it is accessible to the general public.
The road gets narrower and is lined with brush. A rock bashes the undercarriage of the car and the driver curses viciously in both English and Korean, and then a weathered sign appears. "No entrance," it reads, and states that if one wants to visit the area, one must receive official permission.
Entering without permission could lead to a 200,000 won (US$212) fine. You wouldn't know it from the maps, but the Dragon Moor is within the Mintongseon, or the Civilian Control Zone of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.
The DMZ is the world's most heavily fortified border, with 1.2 million land mines on the South Korean side and thousands of soldiers facing each other across mountain valleys. The DMZ is composed of multiple parallel lines; some are invisible, and others are chain-link fences crowned with concertina wire. The boundaries are real, but they are left unmarked on maps produced in South Korea.
Read the rest at Asia Times
Posted by jcard at 07:33 AM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2006
David Spanbauer, Wisconsin serial killer
Crime Library
May 8, 2006
At age 19, this Wisconsin psychopath broke into a home, tied a young baby sitter to a bed and raped her at knife point. He then shot the homeowner in the face. Sentenced to 70 years, he only served a few years. He then raped another teenager and was sentenced to only 12 years, but was again released to hone his skill as a serial killer.
Excerpts:
"Chief Deputy Larry Shadick of the Langlade County Sheriff Department likened it to hunting. He said of the killer, "He just was hunting. Like when you go hunting, he found himself a victim.""
* * *
"Spanbauer worked the parks and the city beaches in the hot summer sun of 1972. He eyeballed the bikini-clad women lying in the sun. He just spent 13 years in prison. The half-naked women at the beach drove him mad with sexual urges. Later he told psychiatrists he did what he did out of sexual frustration, and he simply couldn't wait any longer."
* * *
"Winneconne is a small town of the Fox valley region, not far from Spanbauer's known circle of roaming around. In the early 1990's, a band of drunken redneck teenagers called the "Winneconne Possum Kickers," prowled back roads and shined opossums with flashlights. Once the opossum froze up, they kicked the animal to death with steel-toe work boots. That was evening entertainment for the local juvenile delinquents of the area in a time when women and girls started disappearing."
Read the rest at Crime Library
Posted by jcard at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2006
Wind Market Status: South Korea
Windpower Monthly
March 2006
South Korea gets serious about wind: First major projects herald birth of market.
The 2006 Wind market status report of the South Korean windpower industry can be read in full at at Windpower Monthly.
Posted by jcard at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2006
February Wind Wire
Windpower Monthly
February 2006
Two Projects
Suzlon supplies turbines for first phase of a wind park. Acciona Energia buys a major stake in a wind park north of Busan.
News about the windpower market in South Korea and the rest of the world can be read at Windpower Monthly.
Posted by jcard at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
Bucks of the Badger: Bowhunting Wisconsin whitetails in post-war ghost town
ESPN Outdoors
January 19, 2006
BARABOO, Wis. — The Badger Army Ammunition Plant has long been a legendary place for bowhunters in the know.
Imagine a small, American suburb that has a few whitetail deer sneaking through the backyards; it's a common scene throughout the United States.
Now imagine if the same suburb were abandoned — a ghost town, if you will — for a few decades. Weeds, prairie grasses, brush, thickets and saplings grow thick from neglect and deer would wander the overgrown streets of cracked concrete.
The deer slip in and out of shabby buildings with broken windows and others bed down on sun-warmed cement patios of dilapidated houses.
That accurately describes Badger Army Ammunition Plant in Baraboo, Wis.
"We used to do drives, and it was nothing to kick up 75 to 100 deer," said Sherman Raschein, who has bowhunted the local Sauk-Baraboo area since he was a boy. He grew up 5 miles away from Badger Army Ammunition Plant and hunted there in the early 1990s when he was a university student.
"When you went in there you had to make sure you had plenty of arrows, because you had a lot of shots but almost all of them were at running deer."
"The Badger," as dubbed by locals, is between the nearby Wisconsin River and the Baraboo Range in a region composed of ancient quartzite outcroppings that speckle the southern upland forest.
Badger Army Ammunition Plant hunting
Hunters have called the experience of tracking deer at Wisconsin's Badger Army Ammunition Plant surreal, for they can hide behind buildings and atop ammunition bunkers.
The boundary abuts Devils Lake State Park. It is the same kind of country described by Aldo Leopold in his classic conservation book "Sand County Almanac." In fact, Leopold spent his weekends a few miles away at his cabin retreat.
Read the rest at ESPN Outdoors
Posted by jcard at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2005
Book Review: Literary Crimes of the Daewoo Chief
Asia Times
August 12, 2005
Every Street Is Paved with Gold: The Real Road to Success by Kim Woo-choong
After five years and eight months in exile as a laxly pursued fugitive, Kim Woo-choong returned to the motherland in June to face charges of political payoffs, illegal loans and accounting fraud. There is one charge that is missing from the list, and that is being a literary fraud.
In 1989, Kim penned a book in Korean called The World Is Big and There's Lots to Do. It was required reading for all employees of the Daewoo empire. It was the company Koran, the chaebol bible, and in 1992 it was translated into English and published as, Every Street is Paved with Gold: The Real Road to Success.
It's one of the books that never should have been written and should be tossed on a shelf with such titles as On Humanity and Human Rights by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Corporate Transparency Ethics by former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay and The Guide to Marital Fidelity by former US president Bill Clinton.
On July 1, South Korean prosecutors indicted Kim for accounting fraud, obtaining illegal bank loans and laundering $25 billion through a secret British front corporation. Early in his book, Kim writes, "Business is more than making money; losing less money is sometimes important, too." He also wrote, "In business, you can't just add one and one and get two. You have to see one turning into 10, and 10 turning into 50. That's the way to count in business." He is believed to be responsible for the largest accounting fraud in history, bigger than Enron and WorldCom. When Daewoo tanked with $80 billion in debt, Kim fled the country.
Read the rest at Asia Times
Posted by jcard at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
Angling Abroad: Highway 61 Visited: Brown Trout Down Under
ESPN Outdoors
April 22, 2005
This New Zealand road in the Motueka Valley is the gateway to an endless flyangling paradise … if you can crack the sightfishing code
MOTUEKA, New Zealand — I pulled off Highway 61 and set up my tent before the impending storm clouds.
Minutes later, I was standing hip deep in the Motueka River waving a graphite rod in the air and flirting with electrocution. Lightning cracked the sky apart and thunder banged off the mountains.
Back in the rental car to wait out the storm, I studied road maps and hummed Bob Dylan's song, "Highway 61."
It's named after the legendary road that follows the Mississippi River down to the Gulf of Mexico. It's a highway I know well, and it's a pathway to countless side roads for angling adventures, whether it's southern Wisconsin spring creek trout or monstrous Louisiana catfish.
In New Zealand, however, State Highway 61 on the South Island follows the Motueka River Valley, one of the nation's most productive brown-trout fisheries. Its numerous tributaries also are well regarded and thousands of hours could be spent fishing them.
The brown trout of the Motueka are part of a radio-tracking study carried out by the New Zealand Fish and Game Department in order to determine their migration patterns. Hooking a brown with transmitter antennae is a possibility.
Normally, the Motueka and its tributaries allow for sightfishing, but the almost daily rainfall made this impossible. With some luck, determination and my ever-present rain jacket, I caught some agreeable browns in the murky water in rivers throughout the Nelson-Marlborough region.
However, I was fishing "blind," as they call it here, and it left me craving to stalk trout in the famous, ultra-clear waters for which New Zealand is so well-known. But the rain kept coming and the water kept rising.
During a lull in the downpour I walked back to the river and found another angler casting into the darkened river. His name was Simon Blackburn, and he wouldn't be taken for a tweed-and-necktie flyfisherman.
Blonde dreadlocks fell down to his shoulders and polarized sunglasses wrapped around his face. We both stared out at the river swollen with rainwater and I tried to figure the situation out.
"So let me get this straight; you can usually see the trout in this river?" I asked Blackburn.
"Yeah," he answered.
"And you can just point them out and cast to them?"
"Yeah."
"And that's normally how you do it?"
"Yeah. It's crazy, eh! But when the river's like this most guys reach for a spinning rod; the water's just too high. And this part of the river probably gets caned pretty hard by the locals. It's too accessible."
Blackburn turned out to be an intense trout-fishing addict and back at his camper truck we exchanged stories and I immediately took a liking to him. He was another guy with one eye on the open road and another on the nearby trout waters.
He lent me a copy of Troutfisher magazine to read and it was good he did, for that evening I was trapped in my tent for an all-night thunderstorm.
A couple of days later while exploring the Motueka, I noticed a sign for River Island Lodge, a place I recalled from past research. I pulled in to inquire about fishing and possible accommodations.
I was greeted by the owner, Alistair Webber. I soon realized he was the same Webber mentioned in the Motueka chapter of "Catch that Trout! Fishing the South Island of New Zealand," a flyfishing guidebook by Rob Giles. I felt blessed to meet a local expert and I listened to his every word.
He suggested I visit Kahurangi National Park — the wilderness holy land of brown-trout rivers. Running through that expanse of backcountry are the fabled Karamea River, as well as the Beautiful, Ugly, Roaring Lion, Leslie and Crow rivers.
When Webber fished alone, he explained, he often fished blind using strike indicators and nymphs. But he also had high acclaim for sightfishing.
"With two anglers working together, one casting, one spotting, there's nothing like it," he said. And he passed along the name of a local guide, Steve Perry, recommending I experience this method of fishing in tandem.
The Kiwi summer brightened up as I drove to the upper reaches of the Wangapeka River that enters the wilderness area of Kahurangi National Park. If I were to trek toward the fabled Karamea River, this would be my starting point. My plan was to get a feel for the area and also to exercise self-control.
I decided I would not cast until I spotted a fish.
After two hours of wading and hiking, I approached a pool holding three brown trout — big, medium, small. The small one would make any angler very pleased. The medium one would make your day. The big one was stunning.
I walked back to the woods, sat down on a rock and watched the fish through my binoculars for 20 minutes. Finally, so this is it, I thought, this is what sightfishing is all about.
I crawled over the rocks and slid into the water's edge, keeping a low, stealthy profile. From the rear position, I couldn't see the fish. I cast toward the memorized spot and nothing approached the drifting Adams and hare's-ear rig. I cast two more times and nothing. I wondered if I spooked them.
I scrambled back over the rocks and spied the pool. They were still there but in different positions. Again I crawled and waded into the river. I cast again and nothing.
For the next hour a pattern emerged: Make ten casts; wonder if the trout are still in the same spot; wade and crawl back to shore; observe that the trout are still there but have moved slightly; crawl and wade back into casting position; cast again.
I kept this up until the trout decided they had enough of the chaos and found some security in the deep, dark waters of the opposite shoreline.
Hiking back to the car before dark, I mulled over what Webber recommend about fishing in tandem with another angler, one casting, one spotting. In this kind of environment, such teamwork was the obvious way to go.
The next morning I found myself on the Baton River, a tributary of the Motueka, with Steve Perry of Riverside Angling Adventures. A local of the Nelson area, he has been a tramping and kayaking guide in the past, but his specialty is flyfishing for the local browns.
As we sorted the gear, Perry recommended using strike indicators. I showed him a gigantic fluff-ball indicator I used for fishing under frothy roller dams back home.
He raised an eyebrow. "I want to get a picture of that," he said. He then produced a cream-colored speck of lamb's wool. Dabbed with floatant, it is Mother Nature's best strike indicator material. It's found on barbed wire and thorns where the ubiquitous sheep pass by, which in New Zealand is almost everywhere.
His inside knowledge of the river was quickly evident. After a short walk through the pasture, we emerged from the wood's edge to see a deep pool of surfacing browns. It was the kind of sight that turns normal conversation into whispers.
There was one behemoth brown in the pool and after a few casts he was hooked. The line slashed through the pool and I tried to keep my head together.
After minutes of fighting the fish, the line stayed taunt and unmoving. Perry speculated the enormous trout went under a ledge at the head of the pool. We pondered the no-win situation and, with a shrug, the line was broken off. Unbroken was the adrenaline surging through my blood and the day just started.
We continued upstream, wading across as the river meandered. Perry stepped up on a rock like a footstool to get a better view on the riffled run ahead.
"Right here, James," he said.
"It looks like a rock," I responded.
It felt like I was with my father during my first deer-hunting season and could not see the obvious outline of a whitetail on a hillside.
"Let's change glasses," I suggested. There was no magical difference in lens quality, only color. His polarized grey lenses were like looking through a smoky diamond, while my amber lenses made the world look like the dawn of a nuclear winter.
"It still looks like a rock," I said.
Then the rock shifted upstream and shifted back. I gasped with enlightenment. I wondered how many fish I passed by in the previous days.
Positioned 30 feet behind the trout, I cast ahead of it and listened to Perry's remarks: "A bit higher, James. Looks like he's … still there … just below the white rock."
Another cast and I watched the strike indicator disappear in seconds. The 5-pound fish fought well and, after admiring the colors, I released him back into the Baton.
We moved upriver and I asked Perry a question that had been bothering me for the previous two weeks: "So since this sightfishing requires such clear water, what do you do when it rains a lot, like this past month."
He told me the typical strategies: wait until the river clears, go deep with nymphs and hit the obvious cover.
Perry then recounted one experience on a rain-swollen river:
"I just walked along the shoreline and there they were — all stacked up, out of the main current. Some of them had their dorsal fins sticking out of the water, and I just took them one by one."
By the end of the day, we developed an easy rapport, told stories and traded opinions, and Perry taught me some techniques of New Zealand flyangling arcana necessary to land the trout that fin free in this wonderful land Down Under.
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Hunting the Snakehead: Angling Tactics from Asia
Outdoor Library
June 10, 2005
Most American anglers are familiar with the snakehead story. These non-native fish have permeated throughout the waterways of multiple states and the Fish and Wildlife Service marked the snakehead as an "injurious species" making it illegal to import and transport the fish across state lines. Bass Pros Shops even put a bounty on the fish by offering a gift certificate reward for snakeheads captured and turned in to conservation authorities. It is an alpha predator of the freshwater ecosystem and if it becomes further dispersed, it could be impossible to eradicate.
Call it the globalization of angling, but chances are the Chinese angler casting for snakeheads in a swampy canal outside of Beijing is using similar equipment and tackle as an American angler fishing for largemouth bass on a Mississippi slough. And like the bass fanatics, the snakehead in Asia has its following of hardcore anglers that pursue this fish with a methodical passion. Strangely enough, snakehead fishing and bass fishing are extremely similar.
Read the rest at Outdoor Library
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Angling Abroad: Mandarins in the morning
ESPN Outdoors
August 30, 2004
Tackling mandarin fish, brook perch in South Korea's freestone rivers.
HADONG, South Korea — My angling apprenticeship for mandarin fish was with Mr. Na, a man obsessed with the pursuit of this unique fish.
He was a mid-level salaryman at a shipyard and his wife was an airline attendant. She wasn't around much and I think he preferred it that way.
Mr. Na finished from work, drove an hour to his favorite river, fished hard and intense throughout the night, slept for a bit in his truck, and returned to work in the morning. That was his life.
"We use lead jigs," he said and handed me a fistful of unpainted jigheads and another fistful of soft plastic curly-tail grubs. Quite generous of him, I thought. It was 4 in the morning on the Gyeong Ho River. By noon all of the jigs he gave me were gone.
If the North American muskellunge is known as the fish of 10,000 casts, then the mandarin fish of the Far East is the fish of 10,001 casts. Although it isn't a fish that is easily spooked, it is more of a matter of covering an underwater area that holds an inconceivable amount of rock structure.
Known in the Korean language as "sogari," Siniperca scherzeri is distributed throughout Manchurian China, the Russian Far East and the Korean peninsula.
The mandarin fish makes its home in fast-flowing freestone rivers, hiding under and around rocks to ambush their prey.
It has the walleye preference for cold deep water with a gravel bottom. It has the ambush instinct of a smallmouth bass. And it lives in a river ecosystem that a brown trout would find comfortable.
"You must be more sensitive," said Mr. Na, gesturing slowly with his rod.
"Sensitive," he said again, and he suddenly set the hook with a wrist snap. He was snagged.
English was his second language and he was commenting on my retrieve and not my personality. The presentation must flutter past the nooks and overhang ledges where the sogari lurks.
Casting out the jig and slowly retrieving it gently over the rocky bottom produced many inevitable snags and I was steadily working my way through my stash of jigs.
As the sun was rising, Mr. Na hooked a mandarin that was fighting hard and trying to dive deep. I scrambled over the boulders as he brought it close. Its body was a golden brown dappling of mottled spots and leopardlike rosette patterns. It was a 19-inch mandarin. We admired it and he returned it to the water.
Leviathans among mandarin fish are considered to be those in the 25-inch range. However, since conservation of fish isn't a priority in this part of the world, not a whole lot is known about the mandarin in South Korea. There are no game wardens because there are no laws pertaining to angling. Consequently, there are no fishing licenses, no bag limits, no size limits and no restrictions. The health of the mandarin fishery could be great, or it could be poor. There's really no telling.
What is certain is popularity of the game fish. There are Korean angling clubs that specialize in mandarin fish. And among national Korean fishing magazines, articles on mandarins typically are included in each issue — usually accompanied by photos of sogari on stringers. This all leads me to believe that the sogari is being overharvested.
The good news, however, is there appears to be a new breed of Korean fishermen, like Mr. Na, who practice catch and release. I believe they are South Korea's best hope to help its poor freshwater conservation standards.
Later in the morning, he handed me a small, generic inline spinner. "What's this for?" I asked. He laughed, "It is a 'keokji' killer!"
I quickly learned what a keokji was after a couple casts in some shallow rapids. It was the exploding dark shadow that burst from the rocky bottom and smashed my spinner. It was the mandarin fish's smaller, more aggressive stepbrother.
The Korean brook perch — Coreoperca herzi, aka aucha perch — has nearly identical habitat characteristics of the mandarin fish, but tends to hunt in the shallow stretches of river. They grow no more than 12 inches long but are a compact, muscular fish that are a pleasure to play on ultra-light tackle.
I haven't seen Mr. Na in quite awhile. I moved to another province and we fell out of touch. That was fine by me. I was starting to despise fishing with leadhead jigs that got snagged every other cast.
According to articles in local fishing magazines, however, this was the best way to fish for the sogari, along with spoons and suspended minnow crankbaits. But there are other ways.
Many of the sogari rivers are in fly-rod country; having gravel bars that allow for long back casts in every direction.
A new province meant new rivers to explore and, armed with what I learned, I studied the Seom Jin River near my home. It runs along the western border of the Jiri Mountains and is one of Korea's premier mandarin rivers.
Since neither fish have the predilection for surface feeding, I loaded my reel spool with sinking line and my fly box with streamers, nymphs and strike indicators. Simple stiff leaders were constructed to throw out medium-size flies with larger tippets to match the fly and to help fend off abrasions and snags.
With a wide variety of streamers, I found that the jerk-strip retrieve method to be the most successful and intense for catching the brook perch.
The imitation of an escaping wounded baitfish is irresistible for the opportunistic hunter. This method is fast moving in both cast-retrieve actions and for covering long stretches of shallow rapids. It's an aggressive style of casting for an aggressive fish.
Figuring out how to catch rapacious brook perch on the fly was not so difficult. The mandarin fish was a different matter. It's not aggressive as the brook perch and would need a perfect drift through the deep holes with a tantalizing fly coaxing it to strike.
Getting the heavy line with open loops out to the target area required some wet wading and scrambling up to the many boulders that characterize these kinds of rivers. By elevating yourself on the boulders, you give yourself more room to cast and you get a better view to determine water depth. With the mandarin down deep, spooking the fish is negligible.
One of the difficulties with the fast current was to get the fly deep to the low-lying mandarin before the drag set in. A strike indicator is essential in the rapid current and it is difficult to tell if the nymph is hitting a rock or in the mouth of a finicky mandarin.
Split-shot and size No. 8 beadhead nymphs combined with the sinking line was enough to get it down.
And getting it down is the trick. It produced a strike from a nice-size mandarin, and more strikes after that. Strikes don't come as often as the brook perch, but a mandarin of more than 20 inches heading downstream and deep will make your drag whiz.
For an American angler, bringing a mandarin to net will be a most exotic
sporting species to add to your wish list.
Like nearly all game fish, the best times for angling both of these fish is as dawn and dusk.
Korea is nicknamed the "Land of the Morning Calm," and there is no better place to be than on one of the country's freestone rivers, casting your fly in the morning calm under misty mountains and into free-flowing rivers.
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