Got an hour to kill? Enjoy this film shared by Joe Tomelleri of the native trout of Mexico. A description of the video reads “Truchas Mexicanas is a bi-national group that has been studying the trout of Mexico since 1997. As many as 12 species of native trout inhabit Mexico’s rugged and forbidding Sierra Madre. This is the saga of her trout, her native people and the struggle to save a dwindling resource.”
You may notice a few different things on the site and with Mountains to Marsh overall.
Ads are gone for now.
I had to upgrade hosting plans with WordPress in order to host additional images and with that upgrade came an ad-free site, which is great for you the reader, but a bummer for me the blogger as it comes out of my pocket.
In the past I’ve used Photobucket to host pictures on this site and others. That came to an end once they decided to switch from being a free hosting service to one that requires a subscription over a certain storage amount. I had three separate accounts full of pictures on Photobucket that I was mostly able to recover and I’ve since gone through the arduous process of uploading them here and fixing the broken links from every post from 2011-2018.
I’m already at 75% of my new WordPress storage quota and I likely will not upgrade again because of the cost. With that being said, there will likely continue to be long lulls between posts.
This site has always been operated as a way for me to document the fishing(or outdoor) trips I go on. It provides a great resource to me to be able to have all of those trip reports stored in one place and seemed like a more stable alternative to writing all of them on a forum, where a forum could shut down at any moment (I’ve seen it happen).
I’ve always published the reports and pictures to the public with the hopes that they would inspire and maybe provide some knowledge to those interested in the same sorts of things I’m interested in. The content has always been provided by myself (anything related to fly tying was always provided by Blake) and is created when I have time and motivation to put it together. That time and motivation has waned over the last few years as my family has grown.
As you may have noticed I’ve reached a point in my life where fishing trips don’t happen with regularity any more. This is not something that bothers me as I really enjoy spending time with my family on the weekends rather than going fishing, but because of this, and with the arrival of another child any day now, I have resigned from the Jackson Kayak fishing team this year. I’ll still be fishing out of their boats, in fact I just took shipment of a new Bite, but I really couldn’t justify occupying a spot on the team with how little I kayak fish these days.
That’s it for now, if you’d like to continue to see what I’ve been up to be sure to follow on Instagram @mountainstomarsh.
Last weekend I wanted to get Marin out of the house so I asked her if she wanted to go see what fish lived in the “creek” at the nearby park. That wasn’t reason enough for her to commit to going, but then I sweetened the pot and told her that we could play on the playground after we fished which got her to immediately put her shoes on and head toward the door.
The “creek” is a drainage ditch that runs through the park near our house. It’s not very long, I’m not even sure it has a name. You can jump across it and not get wet in some places, at bends it slows down and deepens enough to make a pool. Those pools will hold fish. On a hot, cloudy February day those fish were hungry. We caught several species of small sunfish, some on tiny nymphs, but more on dry flies. I brought a 1wt and had fun making bow and arrow casts to the pools and watching fish explode on the surface shortly after the fly landed. Marin had a blast holding the fish and releasing them back into the water.
Dollar sunfish (Lepomis marginatus)
Redspotted sunfish (Lepomis miniatus)
Green sunfish (Lepomis cyanellus)
Longear sunfish (Lepomis megalotis)
Bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus)
I was surprised at the diversity within this tiny trickle of a ditch, but really it shouldn’t come as a surprise as Louisiana is truly a melting pot for Lepomis species. This was borderline microfishing but it was actually pretty entertaining, especially with ultralight fly tackle. Marin loved it too, which is really all that matters.
Mountains to Marsh 