Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

I have been spending some parts of some of my weekends trying to catch a Steelhead at Meldrum Bar in Gladstone, Oregon. I’ve been using a technique called “Plunking”. The name sounds derogatory, and I believe it is intended to be. Plunking is generally looked down on by “real fishermen” whoever they are. I’ve been using it as a means to get some “me time” without a lot of driving, as well as an opportunity to see a different segment of society that I don’t normally.

Typically, the weather is terrible. It is usually cold, and rainy. I’ve been going some various weekend days since the middle of December. Occasionally it is a nice day on the bar. This photo is an example.

Plunking, involves hammering a pole holder in the ground, setting up a heavy weight rod with heavy weight line, and using a spin-n-glo, or something similar anchored by a heavy weight above the lure. This is cast into the river. The spin-n-glo floats a bit on its own, and the current makes it spin in place. Some place bells on their poles so they know when a fish decides to commit suicide on the gear. On a good day, I’ve seen five fish landed in a ten hour period. A typical day only one or two fish are landed.

The people that regularly commit time to this odd form of fishing are odd themselves. Many of them are retirees, that appreciate the proximity to their homes, as well as the ability to go crawl into their vehicles when the weather turns bad. Did I mention that you can just about drive up to the water?

Most of the people there drive American vehicles and use the “F” word as an “every-other-word” concept in English language construction, both of which I choose not to adopt. Aside from a bit of brusque language, the people are generally friendly. This is a positive, because as I mentioned before, when the weather is nice, it gets very crowded. I’ve seen over 40 poles in the water, with about 6 feet of ground between them. This situation leads to regular tangles, and few fish caught. Fortunately the tempers seem to stay in check. The Gladstone sheriffs make regular drives through the area just to make sure.

The only fighting I’ve seen is from the local fowl population. There are a good collection of geese, and ducks that seem to hang around all the time. They get regular feedings from the kids that show up, which must encourage the birds to remain. Occasionally one of the birds does something antisocial to one of the other birds. This leads to a large amount of carrying on and occasionally some feathers flying. I’m glad this, and the occasional fish death on the bar, is the limit of the violence there.

We recently went on a trip to Diamond Lake to get in some fishing prior to the treatment of the lake. The hope was that fishing would be good since the lake had been drained down to 80% of normal. It wasn’t good at all. Dan was the only one that caught trout. He caught a nice 17″ fish and a couple of smaller ones.

Morgan had a good time catching chub. He didn’t care about trout, to him, catching anything was fun. He caught 26 of them in about an hour.

It sounds like the lake will be better off in about three or four years.

They are building a new dock, and hopefully they will do some work on the cabins. The screen doors wouldn’t stay closed, and considering the number of mosquitos there, it was a real problem. The bathrooms were ok, but the caulking around the shower was just disgusting. There was a black mold or mildew growing underneath it. Ewww.

In any regard, we had a good time. It was nice to get out of town and not think about work for a few days, even if the fishing was terrible.

I sent the following email to Portland Police Chief Sizer with no response at all.

Hello Chief Sizer,

I’m concerned with the Portland Police’s policies toward illegal fireworks, as well as the lack of desire for officers to cite “small offenses”. I live on the corner of 44th and Clay in Southeast Portland, a block off of the busy Hawthorne avenue. We have been battling problems with drug dealers, stolen cars, abandonded cars, and loitering homeless. All of these problems have been getting better over time. There is another issue that comes about each year. It seems every year around the 4th of July and New Year’s Eve, the instances of illegal fireworks in Portland appears in our neighborhood.

From my personal perspective it is getting worse. There are more instances of firecrackers, shells, and other air based displays. I believe that the Portland Police don’t really care about the use of illegal fireworks.

As an example, on Saturday night (July 8th) at 11pm, someone in the neighborhood was setting off skyrockets (much louder than standard bottle rockets) every once in a while. My wife and I went to bed. At 2am, the explosions were a lot louder and more frequent. I looked out the window to see showers of sparks resulting from the skyrockets exploding above our house. I changed my clothes to go out and find the people responsible. By the time I got outside (not two minutes later), I saw that there were lights from a patrol car flashing on Hawthorne. I saw two individuals sitting on the corner. I walked up to the intersection and watched the proceedings. The officer gave one individual his license back, and the individuals walked away. It was pretty clear that these were the guys responsible for the fireworks. I approached the officer, and he didn’t seem to care about the problem we had been experiencing. He told me he was “cutting them loose”, and wouldn’t say anything beyond that. I would assume he would at least cite them for the fireworks. While I appreciate the officer’s presence, I certainly didn’t appreciate his lack of action, nor his lack of sympathy for my frustration.

We live in the city. As a result, we have some expectation that people are going to be unpleasant from time to time. Living in the city, though, we also have the expectation that Portland City Police officers are going to make an effort to enforce the laws, not just the ones that are convenient.

As an example, in the past, I have caught homeless people in my yard urinating on the property. The Police were called (via the non-emergency number), and the Police response was to ask them to leave. I made it plain to the operator, and the officer on site what I had witnessed. I’m pretty sure that urination in public is an offense that warrants a citation. While I think it is likely that a homeless person will fail to pay for a citation, or fail to appear in court, failure to cite them also leaves their record clean. In my mind this just compounds the problem. If they had been cited, and failed to appear, the offense would appear the next time the Police checked their identification.

Thanks for your time.

It seems the weather men are at it again. The threat of “snow” is in the air. There is a small chance that it might actually be below freezing somewhere near the ground in the next 24 hours. I’m certain “Stormwatch 2005″ will be in full swing on the evening news, although I never watch it.

I remember the last “big” storm we encountered, the newscasters were reporting that there was snow falling in Salem. That made the news. Almost as exciting as this entry.

Next week is a big one for our household. Lisa and I are going in for the next ultrasound, and we should find out the gender of the baby! Once we know the gender, name selection should be a little bit easier. It will at least cut down on the potential search parameters.

Work has been time consuming, and we had a slight reprieve with the Thanskgiving break. It would have been nice to have a few more days off before the chaos of the end of year holidays begin, but such is life.

Our television stopped working a few weeks ago, and we have been forced to use Lisa’s 13″ television. The color reproduction on her 13″ is a lot better than the 27″ we had before. I’d like to replace the 13″ with a 32″ LCD HD television, but I have run into complications. First is the expense. I can’t justify spending that much money for a new TV right now. The second is the cabinet. The TV must be 32″ wide to fit into the cabinet that Lisa bought a while back. The interior of the cabinet is actually 38″, but the doors on the cabinet push in when they are open, to be out of the way. Unfortunately this leaves us with 32″ of space. It has been a bit difficult to find a 32″ LCD that doesn’t have speakers on the side.

On that note, shopping for a TV is at best frustrating. I’ve read reviews online. I’ve been to Best Buy, and Costco to compare. The problem with Best Buy is that they don’t seem to care what the TVs look like. Half of them are out of adjustment, one of them even had the cables swapped, so all the colors were inverted. Its nearly impossible to make a sane decision about what is good and bad in those environments. The sales people could seem to care less.

I’ll just keep saving my pennies, and perhaps someday soon I can replace the 13″ with something more, well, visible.

We went to Florence this last weekend. I don’t like posting about our trips before we leave… too much information on a public forum. We went to do some fishing for Chinook, and spend some time decompressing. We did a bit of both. Lisa’s father and I went salmon fishing on the Siuslaw river on Thursday and Friday afternoon. It is a tidal river (at least in the sections we were fishing). Here is a picture I took from the boat before the battery on the camera went dead:

We were fishing with sand shrimp and salmon roe on a bobber, with weights below. The river was full of fish, and plenty of them were eating the bait. Unfortunately those that we landed were not quite the size we expected:

The whole group of us also went crabbing off of a dock, and brought in a couple of nice crab for dinner. Chicken seemed to be the preferred bait. The local sea lion population left it alone.

A guy salmon fishing off the dock also had the misfortune of hooking a seagull while casting his bait out. The seagull took a dive for it, and hooked itself in the mouth. It took two guys and a pair of pliers to free it.

It finally started raining on Saturday while we were on the dock, which made it an opportune time to leave the dock.

All in all, it was a nice to get away from town for a few days.