New Patagonia fly fishing catalog 2011.

Patagonia have made a new 2011 fly fishing catalog - and it's great, as usually - check it out HERE

Paul Greenbergs article about the Gulf Oysters after the BP oil spill.

Paul Greenberg's article  from The Times of London

April 14 2011 12:01AM

First wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, then ruined

during BP’s disastrous oil spill, the Gulf oyster beds

are in jeopardy

Just off the coast of Empire, Louisiana, about 40 miles north of

where BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig sank into the sea a year ago,

Captain Eric Buras steers an open-decked barge in a tight circle.

His two crew members, Raymond Sylve and his son Emmett,

stand at a cleaning table, hammer- headed hatchets at the ready.

After five circles, Buras throws a lever and the boat’s dredge

emerges from the deep and comes up over the

railing. Shrakkkkhroars the chain link holding bag and around

50 wild Louisiana oysters, each as big as a man’s clenched fist,

spill out on to the table.

As the Sylves work at the clumps with their hatchets, breaking

them down into individual animals, Buras grabs one, wedges a

knife into its hinge, prises it open and severs the meat’s

ligaments with a sweep of the knife. The liquor and the waters of

the Gulf mix in the shell. “You wanna eat one?” he asks.

I think seriously for moment about last year’s spill and the

suffering the Louisiana fishing community has endured. The

stories of fishermen who had lost their boats and their oyster

beds in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, who were on the verge of

gaining some of it back with an anticipated bumper crop in 2010

— only to lose as much as 80 per cent of their oysters in the spill.

I think about the reams of government data saying the seafood is

safe, the counter-narratives from a few in the bayous that say it is

not, and the rumours whispered in oyster country that the

dispersant Corexit is still being sprayed in nighttime sorties

whenever a random slick bubbles up from the mud. Then in the

way one addresses a muddy-shelled Louisiana oyster fresh from

the muck, I press my lips to the very center of the meat and

inhale the whole briny mass. Not a whiff of taint. It is delicious, if

a bit warm.

William Thackeray wrote that eating an American oyster was

“like eating a baby”. Presumably the author was referring to the

tremendous size of the Crassostrea virginica he encountered

when Stateside, a totally different genus from Ostrea edulis, the

smaller European oyster eaten from Colchester to Belon. But

Thackeray might also have had his gag reflex triggered by the

sheer abundance of American oysters that once paved the nearshore

waters not only of Louisiana, but most of the American

coast.

Back then, as Mark Kurlansky tells in his book The Big Oyster,

New Yorkers consumed on average 600-700 locally caught

oysters per year. Billions inhabited New York harbour.

Today they are gone, the beds of the famed Chesapeake are in

trouble and many lesser grounds are fading fast. In a

phenomenon the National Academy of Sciences has described as

“a moving wave of exploitation”, oyster collapse has moved down

the American coasts with ever more distant estuaries providing

the “seed” oysters to keep collapsing fisheries further north in

business. Pollution accelerates the process. This trend is not

exclusive to the United States. A 2011 paper by the Nature

Conservancy reported an 85 per cent reduction in oyster reefs

worldwide. The mouth of the Thames has suffered as much

oyster loss as the mouth of the Hudson.

The last great Northern Hemisphere stronghold of the wild

oyster is their most southerly redoubt, the Gulf of Mexico. It’s

one of the only places left in the world where most people can

afford to sit down at a bar, order and consume a dozen oysters

and then feel financially capable of saying “you bet” when the

waiter comes by and asks, “How about another dozen?”

Drive down a Louisiana thoroughfare heading into the town of

Golden Meadow, a sign catches my attention. “Collins Oyster Co”

it reads, “Out of Business After 90 Yrs. Thanks to BP’s Oil and

Governor Jindal’s Freshwater.” Inside, I meet Wilbert Collins

and his son Nick, lifelong watermen born of watermen who

explain with the charmingly elongated vowels of Cajuns speaking

English, what had prompted their lawn sign. “On TV they always

showed those birds full of oil. They make a big issue with it,”

Wilbert Collins tells me, “But they killed millions and millions

and millions of oysters and nobody said nothing.”

What killed the oysters was not crude oil but freshwater. As oil

rushed toward the coast last spring the Governor’s coastal coordinator

made the call to throw open the Mississippi River’s

freshwater diversion devices that had been installed, ironically to

help improve the water quality of the Delta. The emergency

measure was taken in the hope that a counter-surge of river

water would drive oil offshore.

While it’s hard to judge the efficacy of this move, what it did do

was drive millions of gallons of freshwater over the oyster beds.

Too much freshwater blows out an oyster’s pump as it tries

desperately to maintain a salinity balance. Two months of open

diversions on an overfull river proved too much.

“Them things pushed a lot freshwater,” Wilbert’s son, Nick, tells

me. “A ridiculous amount. And it didn’t move the oil at all.”

Representatives from the State of Louisiana see their action as a

very difficult but necessary choice between short-term injury and

chronic damage. But the Collinses and the State agree on one

point: that BP should have done more to fix the problems it

caused. “BP is now refusing to provide emergency funding to

help mitigate these ongoing impacts to our oyster community,”

Olivia Watkins, from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and

Fisheries, says. “BP had actually committed to that funding late

last year. However, they have since changed their mind and

retracted that commitment.”

As proof of the oyster apocalypse, Nick Collins takes me out on

his boat and surveys his beds. As in my earlier trip, the dredge

dragged along the bottom came up full and then spilled its

contents on to the cleaning table. Every single oyster was a dead

empty shell.

This is particularly painful after Hurricane Katrina. Katrina

destroyed a lot of oysters, but hurricanes also spread larvae, or

“spat”, far and wide. It can take years for oyster numbers to

rebuild after a hurricane but when they finally do the results can

be spectacular. A plethora of post-Katrina oysters should have

been coming to market right when the BP well blew.

But even if Nick Collins were pulling up bushels of oysters full

with the plump meat of yesteryear, he might not be able to sell

them at a decent price today. Typically, food scares are irrational:

the recent dumping of radioactive water into the seas of Japan

has cast a pall over the consumption of all sushi, Japanese or not.

And perhaps food-cautious emotions are hitting hardest after the

spill in the places that sell the most oysters — Louisiana

restaurants.

Tommy Cvitanovich is the owner of a popular pair of restaurants

in greater New Orleans called Drago’s. After telling his chef to

fire up a dozen of his famous (and delicious) charbroiled oysters

for me, he tries to set me straight on what he feels is the public’s

glaring misconception of Louisiana seafood post-spill.

“The perception of our oysters not being safe is ludicrous,”

Cvitanovich says. “Right now, our seafood is the most tested food

product in the United States. You’ve got Wildlife and Fisheries,

the State Board of Health, the State Department of

Environmental Quality all testing the waters. And that’s just at a

state level. On a national level you have NOAA, FDA, and the

EPA and no one is coming up with positive tests.”

In spite of all of these tests, a poll of national restaurants that

was commissioned by Greater New Orleans Inc found that only

19 per cent of those restaurants’ clients held a favourable view of

Gulf seafood in 2010, compared with 75 per cent before the spill.

A lot of this is plain irrational fear from people outside the region

who are not aware of the intensity of effort being directed at

verifying seafood. But some of it stems from the sheer quantity of

seafood Gulf residents eat. In the brackish sluiceways and milktea

bayous of the rural part of the state the standard unit of

measurement for local seafood is the sack. A sack is a burlap bag

that can hold roughly 18 dozen oysters, 37 dozen crayfish, or 50

dozen bigano snails. Any of these creatures might end up in a

sack at any given month of the fishing season, and it is not

unheard-of for a family in the bayous to go through a sack in a

single day several times a week.

This has prompted some, such as Wilma Subra, a Louisiana

chemist who provides technical assistance to the Louisiana

Environmental Action Network, to cast doubt on the way the

safety of Louisiana seafood is being framed. “When the

government established levels of concern for polycyclic aromatic

hydrocarbon (PAHs), they used consumption rates that are not

appropriate for the Gulf,” Subra tells me.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries asserts that

this is not the case. One of its recent press releases states that the

average consumer could eat 1,575 jumbo shrimp, 130 oysters or

9lb of Louisiana fish every day for up to five years “without

exceeding the health risks for contamination”.

I can personally attest to the overwhelming quantity of local

seafood in the Gulf diet. By simply eating what is available in

roadside shacks, people’s homes and restaurants my final tally

for the week is 97 oysters, 36 shrimp, 26 crawdads and a half

pound each of flounder, catfish and amberjack. Most of it was

fried. All of it was delicious. To date, I am asymptomatic for PAH

poisoning, though my doctor does mention something about

elevated cholesterol. . .

Towards the end of my time in Louisiana I find myself thinking

not only about Gulf seafood’s impact on my body, but also my

body’s impact upon Gulf seafood. And so just before heading

back to New York I decide to do a little penance, driving East

along Highway 10, a road literally made out of oysters that were

dragged from the bay and crushed up into roadbed.

My destination is a site just outside Mobile, Alabama, a place

where the non-governmental organisation The Nature

Conservancy is trying to rebuild what had once been a billionstrong

oyster colony.

One of the only touching things about the otherwise faceless life

of an oyster is that what an oyster likes best is the nubby shell of

another oyster. In Louisiana, where BP payments are falling

short, oystermen are standing on the sidelines, lacking enough

money to put “cultch” (oyster shells), back on to the beds so that

if oysters spawn this spring and release larvae or “spat”, the

young will have somewhere to “set” and mature three years later

into an adult oyster.

With cultch either lacking or covered in slime from the

freshwater inundations, a terrible downward spiral could be at

hand. No cultch means nowhere for young oysters to set, which

in turn reduces the amount of mature oysters, which in turn

leads to dirtier water, which leads to even fewer oysters. And

pretty soon the water becomes brown and murky, fish are less

abundant and sediment chokes the bottom.

The only thing to be done is to put oyster shells back in the water

in hope that baby oysters will find them and make a home for

themselves.

Wading into Mobile Bay, water quickly washed over the top of

my boots but the enthusiasm of the several dozen volunteers was

warming. A few hundred metres out from the landing I join the

brigade, passing 5kg bags of oyster shells hand-to-hand.

Previous reefs built this way by the Nature Conservancy have

shown to attract thousands of oysters per square metre. By my

eye, the reef we are building is approaching 10 metres. In a

morning’s work, my personal contribution has possibly laid the

groundwork to put back into the world all that I have taken.

But the oyster has suffered a terrible blow. The Gulf has lost tens

of millions of them in a single year. The world has lost hundreds

of billions in the past century. If we are going to fix things, we’re

going to need a lot more oysters.

Paul Greenberg is the author of Four Fish: A Journey from the

Ocean to Your Plate

STOP Pebble mine - Help Robert Redford support this case.

Help Pool 32 spread the word, send this link to your friends, to you favorite forums. Or   support it directly yourself.

Visit the NRDC website and learn more about this very serious cause.

Let's do the right thing - for a change - STOP PEBBLE MINE NOW!!!!

Help wild salmon people to send a mail to Obama - please!!

Please help Wild salmon people by send a message to Obama.

Please use this link to Wild salmon people and get your name on the list - don't forget "Consumer power rules"!!

This has nothing to do with fly fishing!!!!

This has absolutely nothing to do with fly fishing

now you are warned!!!

But I laughed my bud of when I got this pic in my mailbox a few minutes ago - don't give up guy's, we have to stand together and find something to write about woman.

Maybe something like this : Woman are great because they never use any money on shoes, they are great because the really never control anything in our lives, they are also great because the never have headaches  - and they are absolutely really great when they bring you mother in law on your "romantic vacation" in Maui !!!!!! :O)

What is slow food???

What is slow food??

Slow food is an international non profit organisation, founded with one single goal - to counteract fast food and a fast and stressful life.

Fish: It’s a slippery issue. Hidden underwater, our marine resources are not easy to study or understand. What state are our seas in? What fish species are on the verge of extinction? Can we influence the market? Should we stop eating fish?

Just when we think land is in sight, we find ourselves out in the open sea again, unsure how to proceed, buffeted by contradictory advice, apocalyptic scenarios and a confusion of expert opinions, no longer sure what’s allowable or even safe to eat.

But if we stubbornly make the effort to investigate the subject, we can see strong currents of thought starting to form. Slow Food has been working in the field of sustainable fish for many years, raising awareness among seafood-lovers through the biennial Slow Fish fair in Genoa and developing projects to support responsible artisanal fishing communities. Our network’s members organize local initiatives all around the world.

This website reflects Slow Food’s journey and offers pathways through this complex topic for anyone who wants to learn how to use common sense, curiosity and appetite to make choices that are conscious, delicious and responsible. 

This website is full of very interesting information, check it out here, by clicking on the slow fish logo

 or use this direct link: http://www.slowfood.com/slowfish/

Don't mess with Mother Earth - it's bad karma.

This pic says it all - don't mess with the "Old Woman" take your trash with you home. Someone is watching over your bad behavior,

 and it will come back to you one day. 

:o)

New algae along the Danis coast line - so sad!!

This screen dump is from the Danish Metrological Institute, and it shows a new algae situation around Denmark 3 days ago. We have gotten a new algae type, which kill every fish, that get caught in this new kind of pollution we are seeing these days.

The problem with this one is that it is blooming while the water temperature is very low, which normally isn't the case. So how we have problems when the water is cold, but certainly also when it gets to warm - beside these problems, we are facing illegal netting , overfishing, other kinds of pollution, fish farming and deceases - sometimes i wonder why we are able to catch a single fish at all.

Watch this Danis video from the TV news showing the problems out there along the coasts, so sad, so very sad!!!

(PS. the red color shows the highest level of algae concentration.)

Risking it All!! - a true "must see" video

Will we ever learn, or are the humans just an ignorant stupid race who want to spoil everything around us??. Take a good look at the information on this website called  "Calling from the coast", and then start to think about what is really going one in our world. It's time to ask our selves if we are living in a cooperative world?? - don't forget "consumer power rules" - and then go see the new movie called " The Inside Job" it will for sure put things in a new perspective.

Here is an article from "Calling from the coast" which is a great source of information, use the link to learn much more, there is a lot of very interesting reading if you feel just the slightest curious  - which I do, I must admit.

The north and central coast of British Columbia is one of last great wilderness areas that still supports a vibrant & productive ecosystem.  Home to thousands of runs of salmon, steelhead, grizzlies, wolves, orca, rare white bears, dolphins, porpoises and hundreds of other species, the coast is a natural spring of wealth & wonder.  The plan to build the Enbridge pipeline, with ensuing tanker traffic, threatens all of this- the coastal ecosystem, the coastal economies and local food security.

The BC coast supports many economies through commercial fishing, sport fishing & tourism, as well as providing massive natural food sources that feed thousands of people- serving up salmon, crab, halibut, clams, cockles, oolichan, herring, sea cucumbers, urchins, rockfish, lingcod, geoduck, seaweed, etc. A natural resource that just keeps giving. Enbridge plans to risk all of this to transport the dirtiest oil in the world to market. It’s your coast, province, and country. This short video outlines the plans for the pipeline and tanker route, the company behind this proposal, and what it means for our beautiful coast. Oil on our Coast was produced with Hartley Bay & the Gitga’at Nation with the goal of inspiring & educating in order to help save what sustains us.

Sockeye inquiry reveals a potential virus.

Here is an interesting article from the "Farmed and dangerous" website - a website full of very interesting information, about the consequences from farmed salmon, which we all should be much more critical about as consumers. 

Don't forget "consumer power rules"!!!!

Sockeye inquiry reveals a potential virus that may be linked to mass in-river sockeye deaths and hears testimony that suggests salmon farms should be tested.

A large number of Fraser sockeye salmon are dying en-route to their spawning grounds, and stresses induced from warmer water temperatures are a factor. Salmon do well in temperatures around 16 degrees but over the past 20 years, the temperature of the Fraser River has increased by about 2 degrees resulting in warmer waters at migration time. However, another piece to this puzzle was revealed in the inquiry: a purported virus linked to the en-route deaths.

Salmon biology expert Dr. Scott Hinch, a professor at UBC, wrote a report on climate change effects on Fraser sockeye and presented his findings to the Commission of Inquiry earlier this month.

During his testimony Dr. Hinch was asked about the purported virus research he was involved in with Dr. Kristi Miller from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) that was published earlier this year. Dr. Hinch indicated this may be an important factor contributing to large mortalities of Fraser sockeye and he also suggested that testing salmon farms for this potential viral signature is important.

Subsequently the inquiry heard from Dr. Laura Richards, Director of Science for the Pacific Region of DFO, on the virus issue on March 17th. Various participants suggested that DFO management suppressed scientific information – it is clear the issue of this purported virus is turning red hot in the sockeye inquiry. All this evidence is raising some huge questions. If a virus is killing large numbers of salmon, did it come from salmon farms? Or is it being amplified by salmon farms? And why does it appear as though DFO has been suppressing information about this virus theory? Stay tuned to the sockeye inquiry and view the documents and transcripts as they appear here on the Cohen Commission website.

Use this direct link to the Farmed and dangerous website and learn so more about the consequences from this industry.

PS. Don't forget to check out the blue links
- if yo want some pretty exciting informations.

New edition of Flyfishers Inc. out now.

Flyfishers Inc. from New Zealand is out now with a new great issue

 - check it out by clicking directly on this front-page picture below

They call it the drop shot issue - absolutely great - they show some super shots of people loosing or dropping their catch.

Here is just a few of these great shots - enjoy !!! - I love it :O)
Keep up your great work guy's.

New really great edition of "This is Fly" out now.

There is a lot of fantastic e-mag's out there "floating in cyber space" - This one is yet an other example of how well it can be done - GREAT work, keep it up guy's :O)

Click on this pictue will take you directly to this e-mag.

New great edition of "Fly'mage" out now.

Check this great e-mag out from Fly'mage, they shot some amazing pic's of jumping fish, well done guy's :O)

Click direct on this picture of the front page, and yu will get right to this e-mag.

http://www.flymage.net/