It’s not exactly a diamond necklace or a week in Jamaica, but a feisty brown trout at the end of a 3-weight rod put some energy in Mary’s 50th birthday weekend.

By Kevin Woster

It’s always dangerous, buying your wife a birthday gift that you might end up borrowing.

But Mary loved the 3-weight Scott rod with a matching Ross reel. And she loved it most when it danced with the electric weight of a brown trout.

 That happened eight or 10 times for Mary Friday on Whitewood Creek, where the browns were positively infatuated with her Size 18 parachute Adams.

She landed and released six or seven of those fish, including a couple of acrobatic 11-inchers that looked and - she said - felt much bigger on the light tackle. (Later, fishing a pond up near Hanna Creek, she also took a 12-inch brown on a nymph, which was also a delight.)

“Now I see what you love about this,” she said between hoots and hollers about three fish into the afternoon. “I understand what you’re always saying about feeling that wild energy of the fish. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever felt.”

Oh, and she added this: “I love my birthday present.”

I loved picking it out, too, pestering Hans and the guys at Dakota Angler & Outfitter for, oh, about three months trying to find the right outfit, based on what Mary liked and didn’t like about my gear.

There was a particular sense of urgency about all this since I had, uh, well, hmmm, shall we say broken Mary’s first flyrod - a respectable old Fenwick given by the inestimable Caster Don Polovich when Mary finished Jim Phoenix’s flyfishing classes at the YMCA last spring.

I’ll spare you the details of the Fenwick’s demise. I just wanted to take it for a run down to Rapid Creek late one afternoon, got hung up scrambling through a creek-side thicket and, well, the rest is family history unlikely to be forgotten.

But it was forgotten for a few hours Friday, as husband and wife shared a gorgeous autumn day on a babbling brook dimpled by rising trout.

I’m sure it gets better than that. But maybe not here on earth.

With golds and greens all around, this stretch of Whitewood Creek was birthday party central.

Mary and her “guide” were delighted by her first-ever wild brown trout on a fly - a 7-incher that danced on the water like juiced-up dragonfly.

During an Izaak Walton-like afternoon, Mary takes a break to put thing into perspective with “The Rule of St. Benedict.”

Lunch and time in the sun at Hanna Campground made a great ending to a near-perfect day.

Hey fellas, ever seen one of these before?

By KW

I missed the First Annual Take It Outside Autumn Angling Classic.

Wait, it’s my classic. How could I miss it?

Long story. And not very interesting. Suffice it to say that on Wednesday Keith Wintersteen, Caster Don Polovich and Patrick Nero carried on without me - rods in hands and flies on the water.

Somewhere in the southern hills they began what we hope will be an annual fall tradition. (And one that I hope to actually attend next year…)

They had a great time, too. Hauling in the fish and, in Caster Don’s case, recording it with his trusty trigger finger.

Just one question from the event organizer: What the heck are those fish anyway?

Patrick Nero (sorry, Patrick, hard of hearing….) shows off a braggin’-sized something during the TIO Fall Angling Classic.

Can you say PACU! Actually, it’s not a pacu. It’s a Wintersteen. But what’s that he’s holding?

Wintersteen never looked so good with a paddle in his hands. In an exquisitely composed scenic, Caster Don shows his enduring shutterbug skills, including straight-as-a string horizons. (How the heck you do that, CD?)

 

Deadwood Police Department officer Kip Mau leads a pack of 4th graders from Deadwood Elementary on the Mickelson Trail Tuesday. It’s a physical education class, gone mobile, thanks to PE teacher Jim Phillips.

By KW

Take It Outside? Jim Phillips has been doing that for years with his elementary school physical education classes in Deadwood.

Back in the 1970s, Phillips noticed fewer and fewer kids playing outdoors.

“It seemed like the playgrounds were empty,” Phillips said Tuesday, during a break from his teaching duties on the Mickelson Trail. “And I thought, ‘Where are all the kids?’”

 They were watching TV, he decided, instead of riding bikes and sliding slides and playing pickup football or basketball or baseball, or just chasing around the hills and dales.

 As the years went by, the trend continued - and worsened with the advent of video games and home computers, which tie more kids to the chair, rather than the outdoors.

 Phillips, a long-time PE teacher and well-known sports referee, decided to do something about it. He took his elementary level PE classes outdoors - to run, bike, ski, snowshoe and swim.

Now Phillips teaches classes in the gym for only a few weeks each school year. The rest of the classes are outdoors, where kids test themselves physically and keep in touch with natural resources.

What’s better for a kid than that?

She tried to tell me her name in passing, but all I got was Holly. I did identify her positively, however, as a 4th-grader having fun in PE class.

Jim Phillips, right, needs volunteers to help with his outdoor PE classes. Tuesday they included Wilson the black Labrador and his boss, Frank Pavich.

Jerry Bolton of Black Hawk, a Rapid City Regional employee, works a promising pool in Rapid Creek upstream from Canyon Lake.

By KW

Indeed, it felt - as Keats so smoothly said in his “Ode to Autumn” - like warm days would never cease, as I spent an easy Monday afternoon drifting bulky grasshopper-pattern flies on Rapid Creek above Canyon Lake.

Rainbow!

And another!

And yet one more!

With three plump 17-inchers caught and released, I finally gave up the rod to wander and watch:

* A father and daughter who also gave up fishing to explore the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness” together.

* A Rapid City Regional Hospital employee offering pheasant-tail nymphs - with success - to the rainbows in the creek.

* The sun, with late-summer, early fall maturity that fills all fruit “with ripeness to the core.” It also blended brilliantly with the red cliffs above the creek, and further illuminated the already brilliant changing leaves.

How fine the season, with more warm days to come. Don’t let them pass without seeing and hearing what should be seen and heard. It isn’t spring, of course. It might be even better.

As Keats said: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, though hast thy music, too.”

Indeed.

The sweet songs of fall are here.

Red cliffs above Rapid Creek near the state fish hatchery are illuminated by the late-day sun.

The face of fall? Sure, for those with eyes and a little imagination, even leaves have life-like faces.

After fishing the creek, a father and daughter set aside their gear to stroll into the season.<>

 

 See the bird, catch the bird - even if it’s plastic.

By KW

 OK, I’m back (in town, if not officially at work) from our vacation on beautiful, rainy, relatively windy Lake Okoboji (where the weather allowed some hiking and bass fishing, including a 17-inch largemouth and a smallmouth of about the same size).

 I left in a rush last week, without time to give you the rest of the Wintersteen/Izzie story.

 The doves weren’t flying. So we weren’t shooting. But before we launched Wintersteen’s canoe for some serious pond fishing, he and the Wizard of Iz did a little water work off the dock.

I’m not quite sure who had the most fun.

The Wizard of Iz heads for the dock, plastic dove in mouth.

There’s something going on here between Izzie, the plastic dove and the hatchery biologist. But what could it be?

By KW

Call it a dove hunt gone south.

Or east, actually.

Southeast to be exact.

We were somewhere down in the Fairburn area Monday morning when Keith Wintersteen pulled his canoe-carrying van over to the side of the section line and pronounced: “This is it. It’s time to open the season.”

Or something like that. I can’t remember exactly, since I was staring at a mourning dove perched in a plum thicket 40 yards away.

My eyes squinted. My trigger finger twitched. And I was reaching for the door handlewhen my hunting compantion shouted: “Whoa, tiger. Hold your fire.”

Turns out, that was the best shot I had all hunt. I didn’t take it, of course, because I wasn’t even out of the car, I hadn’t even finished my bear claw and my trusty 20 gauge - trusted to fire, if not hit - was still slumbering in its case.

Oh, and also because it’s illegal to shoot doves on the sit. We didn’t shoot any on the sit or in the air. But we had a fine dove-season opener.

You can tell that by the picture above, can’t you?

What do you suppose those guys - the dog, the plastic dove and the hatchery biologist - were up to?