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Gearing up: It's tiny, light and casts well; whether it catches fish is up to you
At first blush, the Compact Pen-Sized Collapsible Fishing Rod and Reel from gofastandlight.com looks like something Ron Popeil would hawk on an infomercial. Though it costs about the same as the Pocket Fisherman (Pocket Fisherman is $20; Pen-Sized Collapsible is $19, including a choice of reels: spin, fly or casting), this tiny gizmo might really have some backpacking applications. We took it along on a six-mile hike into the Echo Lake chain and cast it a few times. It fits quite nicely into a pack, and the rod expands to 36 inches. It weighs only 2 ounces (about the same as nine quarters, according to a news release). Granted, this isn't something you're going to use at a Bassmaster's fishing derby, but its compact size and light weight underscore the company name: Go Fast and Light. Did we catch anything with it yet? Well, uh, no.
Killing Fish to Make Room for Others
(KCPW News) Apparently Utah's state fish doesn't do well with competition. State wildlife officials have wiped out the existing population of Brown Trout and Mottle Sculpin in a portion of the Diamond Fork River to make room for 10,000 Bonneville Cutthroat Trout. DWR Conservation Manager Scott Root says the state used a naturally occurring toxin to kill the fish. "We used backpack sprayers to apply the rotenone and we had 20 different trip stations with the chemical. As far as we can tell it was a complete success." Root says the poisoned fish will decompose and fortify the food base for the new Bonneville Cutthroat in the river. The toxin has not been shown to hurt other organisms in the river system. Wildlife officials installed a barrier to keep Brown Trout from moving back upstream into the portion reserved for Bonneville Cutthroat.
Injured vets strong-arm the river
Bond - The trout rose and sipped a mayfly off the surface of the Colorado River. Joshua Williams caught the small disturbance on the water from the corner of his eye. Standing in a drift boat, he raised his fly rod and the trout rose again and gulped in the artificial fly on the end of the line. And suddenly, Williams was in trouble. He'd done this a hundred times before on the rivers and creeks around his home in Virginia, passionately throwing a fly at rising trout, holding the long rod in his right hand and gently stripping in the slack line with his left, a delicate two-handed operation. But on Friday, the baby-faced 22-year-old Army staff sergeant who spent a hellish year engaged in street combat in Iraq had a problem. He didn't have a right hand. The trout surged into the current.
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