Nice trout or what? Definitely not what. Rapid City flymaster Hans Stephenson shows off a Black Hills beauty. But you’ll have to wait for a while to get the details.

By Kevin Woster

 This might be one of those cases.

Hans Stephenson is a talented young flyfisher who understands that there’s much more to the sport than landing a big one.

But he also knows that, sometimes, the big one makes the trip.

Take that 22-inch rainbow, as Hans did recently in a Black Hills stream.

Nice fish, with a nice story to match.

But I can’t tell it to you here, just yet. I wouldn’t want to scoop Hans. He’ll have a column about catching the fish in the Journal’s outoor-recreation section this coming Saturday.

I will tell you this, that rainbow isn’t one of those well-fed hogs that hangs near homes along Rapid Creek, waiting for the next shower of fish pellets. (Although I wouldn’t mind tying into one of those…)

Hans says this one’s a wild rainbow, in every sense. He also says that, uh, well….I guess we should wait for his column.

By Kevin Woster

I gotta tell ya, I’ve got a serious hankerin’ to shoot a duck today.

I won’t, because I’ll be up in Deadwood at the South Dakota Festival of Books. It’s a great event, with some excellent writers and packs of old friends.

Still, with the duck season opening today in most of the state, I have to think a bit about those misty Deuel County sloughs of my college days, the cattail-and-willow chutes by the old flowing well at Red Lake during my teenage years and even the occasional greenhead flushing from small West River rivers and streams more recently.

Maybe it’s the chilly nights that put the itch in a guy’s trigger finger. Or maybe it’s the thought of crock-pot mallard or wood duck on the grill.

But it’s definitely time to get my waders wet for something other than flyfishing.

And that means cracking another box of steel shot. Which reminds me of how little controversy we have anymore about the switch from lead shot to steel that GF&P began 27 years ago. Those were some wars comparable to the open-fields disputes of today, except they involved a greater cross-section of the public.

Now non-toxic shot is required for all waterfowl hunting as well as small-game hunting on most public lands. It has been so for some time.

That switch always made sense to me. It still does.

Most of the hunting public seems to agree.

By Kevin Woster

A misstatement in the new state hunting handbook required a correction by GF&P, and probably deserves attention here in the wetlands of Take It Outside.

Coated lead shot is still lead shot, from a legal standpoint.

So disregard the sentence on Page 22 of the handbook that reads: “Coated lead shot does NOT qualify as lead shot.”

Actually, it does. That means you can’t use coated lead shot for waterfowl hunting, or for hunting small game on most public lands. Birds eat spent lead pellets as grit and can suffer lead poisoning.

Approved non-toxic shot types are steel, bismuth-tin, tungsten-polymer, tungsten-matrix and any combination of tungsten-iron-nickel-tin-copper-bismuth.

Not coated lead.

I repeat, not coated lead.

It’s still considered toxic shot.

If Martha Stewart were a hunter, she might say it’s a bad thing - for hungry birds.

By Kevin Woster

We got good news and bad news this week from the effort to preserve the endangered pallid sturgeons on the Missouri River.

It was a good year for producing baby sturgeon at federal hatcheries. But fears of a disease outbreak mean the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery near Yankton, an important facility in the pallid-sturgeon propagation effort, the fish folks will have to kill 5,200 baby pallids.

During a routine health inspection of the fish, biologists detected some cell abnormalities and decided to euthanize the fish rather than release them into the wild.

“We erred on the conservative side,”  Rob Klumb, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fisheries biologist in

Those goals are crucial to the federal and state effort to preserve the pallid, a wonderful river fish that suffered dramatic population declines because of the

Former Journal photographer and wandering fly angler Don Polovich shows off his giant stone fly tattoo at a recent Black Hills Flyfishers meeting.

By Kevin Woster

According to Polovich, his creation might not be finished.

He might add a brown trout.

To his leg.

He already has a tattoo below the knee of the nymph stage of a “salmon fly,” a giant stone fly found in the mountainous streams of Wyoming and Montana.

“Now I’m thinking maybe I need a giant brown trout coming down to eat it,” Don said.

I think he was kidding. But maybe not. He’s pretty serious about his flies, and his trout.

And his tattoos, too.

 

 Tiny fish like this mini-rock bass, caught on a jig in a sluggish section of Rapid Creek near the fairgrounds, provide entertainment beyond their size.

By Kevin Woster

 By now, you probably know that I love little fish.

Big fish are great. Given a choice, I’d rather catch a 5-pound largemouth than a 1-ounce rock bass.

But I still love the 1-ounce rock bass. Or the tiny bluegill. Or the itsy-bitsy crappie.

First, they’re really cool looking. And cute, in much the same way a puppy is cuter than a full-grown dog.

Second, they’re cooperative. Little fish hit with reckless abandon. That’s part of the reason so few live to be big fish.

Third, they can live in small water. Surprisingly small water, in odd little stretches of creek and easily accessible pools, sometimes only a few inches deep.

Little jigs. Little flies. Little hooks. Little fish.

If Martha Stewart were an angler, she might say it’s a good thing.

By Kevin Woster

After a couple of visits to Rapid Creek up in the Rochford area, I’m left with this nagging question: Should it be catch and release?

Or should at least some stretches be catch and release?

And should there be more stretches of creek in the Black Hills over all that are catch and reelase?

I started thinking about that on the Rochford stretch because of the limited number of 10-plus-inch trout I caught, and saw.

Are there more big fish there, and I just didn’t see them? Or are a lot of the bigger browns getting caught and cooked? Or does that little creek just not produce many big trout?

Downstream from Pactola, there’s a popular 2-mile stretch of the creek that’s catch and release. There’s ealso a short stretch of catch-and-release stream in Rapid City, through the golf course. Should there be more, given the fact that brown trout numbers are so low? Or should it be catch-and-release for browns and regular regs for rainbows?

How about Spearfish Creek? Should there be catch-and-release stretches for browns, like there is for a 1-mile stretch of self-sustaining rainbows?

Is the wild brown trout population in the hills in general in need of more protection?

I wonder.

By Kevin Woster

Some people struggle in retirement to stay busy.

Don Polovich can’t quite figure that out.

With a flyrod in one hand and a camera in the other, and some of the world’s most beautiful fishing water at his feet, Don is making retirement an artful enterprise.

And he’s doing more than catching fish. He’s capturing images as well. Here are three of his more recent beauties,  taken in the Bighorns of northern Wyoming along the North Fork of the Tongue River west of Burgess Junction. Described by Don himself:

On Friday, Sept. 7, the temperature reached the mid-70s under bright sunshine. Saturday was overcast, foggy, misty, with temps in the 50′S.  Sunday morning I woke up to about an inch of snow.  I took a drive and came across the two bulls in a snow-covered meadow.

The bull moose had been watching me for several minutes, about the same length of time I watched him.   At the right time I took this photo, from about 40 feet.  Then I got the heck out of there.

The smaller bull at left had been nudging the larger bull for several minutes. When the big boy had enough, it simply squared off head to head and gave a push. The smaller bull backed off and went back to feeding.

And one piece of streamside advice: There is more to fly fishing than catching great, healthy fish. Casters should stop, sit down on a bank and take a break once in a while. There are all kinds of things watching you. 

(Amen, Don, amen…K.W.)
 

Paul Stabile’s creation - the KWRAR described below - as photographed by the Journal’s Seth McConnell, and soon to be fished by that old surface swatter hisself, KW.

By Kevin Woster

Now that’s a fly: the KWRAR, up close and personal.

We give you this macro look, in case you want to duplicate it for use in your own stream or pool.

It’s untested and unproven, but certainly well intended. (Right, Stabile?) If I were a trout, I couldn’t resist. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.

Fresh off the tying vice at Dakota Angler, the KWRAR is now ready for action. If only its owner - and namesake - can manage to fling it somewhere close to an obliging trout.

We’ll see.

Sheree VandeGarde of Denver flashes the grin of a finisher Sunday after concluding her 10th of 10 Mickelson trail treks.

By Kevin Woster

OK, so the woman from Denver won.

By about 26 miles.

But she had an advantage. The Mickelson Bike Trek was a three-day event. I only rode for two.

Sunday, I quit and went fishing. That meant the Denver woman - whom I barely edged for next-to-last place on Saturday’s leg of the trek - got me after all. (That Denver woman, by the way, is not to be confused with Sheree Vandegarde, pictured above, who finished much higher…)

There’s something to be said for finishing.

But there’s something to be said for fishing, too. I chose the latter Sunday, in large part because I was, uh, saddle sore from riding longer and harder than I ever had before, with a pair of bermudas instead of an appropriately padded pair of biker’s shorts. So I skipped the final day of the trek in favor of brown-trout fishing.

The story of my particularly pained body part, which I described in some detail in my newspaper column today, also inspired the creation of a new trout fly at Dakota Angler & Outfitter just down the street from the Journal.

It’s called the Kevin Woster Red A.. er, uh, let’s just say “bottomed” … Renegade. That’s KWRAR.

Dakota Angler regular Paul Stabile came up with the fly. It’s a pretty much regular renegade fly pattern, with some red thread thrown in, appropriately, at the end.

KWRAR. It’s great to be famous.

Now we’ll see if it catches fish.