Funds for the 2011 Woodland Trout Fund

Here is a letter from Troutmeister and WCA member Mike O'Neil regarding this year's fund. Read on:

WOODLAND TROUT 2011
A welcome voice from the past

Once again I take the figurative O’Neil pen in hand and write in hopes of getting a few dollars (or more if you like), to help us stock trout in the Fly Fishing section of Woodland Brook this spring and summer. My father did the selfsame thing for many years, and I felt it would be entertaining to share the letter that he penned to the faithful 24 years ago, begging alms. You will note that the theme is a familiar one. To wit:

LET US BEGIN by agreeing that Woodland Brook will never inspire lines like:
“To the West! To the West!
To the land of the free!
Where the mighty Missouri
Rolls down to the sea.”
It would be ridiculous in fact—not unlike comparing a leaky faucet to the falls of Niagara—to equate our piddling little trickle with dozens of such watercourses: with the Congo as well as the Missouri; with the Amazon, the Nile, the Yukon or even (author blushes) the Gowanus Canal. Few of which lack their own sort of piscine life.

Catfish are present along a thousand miles of the Big Muddy. Tench up to eight pounds are available in the upper Thames. Big tarpon await the angler in Florida and huge pirarucu abound in the Madiera, the Xingue and the Tapajos as well as the Amazon. Still, bigger may not necessarily be better—at least to a fly fisherman.
The channel cat is not a particularly enticing object. The tench is mostly notable for its ability to go on flopping after its head has been bashed by a tire iron, and tarpon waters many contain alligators. These big reptiles seldom attack humans, it is true, and then only in rather clumsy fashion; they clamp their jaws on a leg and roll until the limb is twisted off. Crocodiles are a different matter, however—the stomach of one opened in 1926 contained fourteen arm and leg bones and three human spinal columns. Not that the pirarucu fisherman is in much danger of being eaten of a croc. Piranhas—which swim in schools of hundreds and can dismantle a cow in ten minutes—would almost certainly reach him first.

Are these analogies too outlandish? Let us then consider the dozens of big clear streams which tumble into the Pacific from the western American coastal range. They are without soluble minerals and, thus, virtually without aquatic insect life. Their sea run fish do not rise. One can only hook their steelhead by “mining” the bottom with flies made of fluorescent yarn or devices called cherry bobbers. One can find both big trout and big hatches in Dollar Watch Creek to the east of the Washington mountains. The fisherman is advised, however, to encase his legs in three foot sections of stovepipe to ward off rattlesnakes. No such peril attends visitors to England’s chalk streams. But these waters are so placid and streamside cover is so sparse, that the angler in instructed to approach a rising trout as he would his God—on his knees. And one who wades the Esopus must deal, as we all know, with flotillas of louts on inner tubes.
Makes our own darlin’ little brook seem pretty attractive…hmmmmm? Attractiveness, of course, is a relative term. Don’t we all agree that its charm can be enhanced by buckets full of the Beaverkill Hatchery’s splendid brown trout? I sincerely hope so since all this colorful prose has been composed to extract payment for same.
Paul O’Neil-1987

A check, made out to THE WOODLAND TROUT FUND, sent to Mike O’Neil, 101 Rambling Road, Vernon, CT 06066 would be very much appreciated. To borrow a piece of stage business from George M. Cohan—My father thanks you, my mother thanks you, my sister thanks you; and I thank you—

Mike O’Neil—Troutmeister