john gross. kahki hat, stash, shades.
As Jim Anchower would say, hola amigos, I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya. I haven’t had much to report of late. I suppose I could have written about how much it’s been raining here in Redding, or about the time my rig broke down and I had to take the Greyhound home (a scruffily dressed young man got on at a stop in the town of Weed, California smelling heavily of weed, the drug – he appeared unaware of the irony), or about our sweet new refrigerator (it has an ice maker.) Apart from that awesome stuff, nothing much has happened…except for getting lucky with the video camera this fall/winter. Something should come of that in the next wee while.
Anyway, now this is happening: Ken Maimone called up The Fly Shop the other day with some questions about sea trout fishing on the Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego. As it happened, a friend of mine was fishing there on that very day and I’d just got his report from the lodge that he’d had an 18 fish day. I related this to Ken, and, in the great tradition of fish story conversations between new aquintences, topics started bouncing from river to river and around the world.
Then it all settled down firmly on British Columbia’s Dean, a river I’ve never fished, and am not sure I ever will. Ken and his friends used to make annual pilgramages there between 1984 and 1994. As he spoke his voice was full of deep emotion, pregnant pauses and a certain dreaminess, as if he were telling the stories not to me, but to himself in an effort to re-live them. He’d been there, in the prime years of fish abundance on probably the greatest steelhead flyfishing river on the planet. I hung on every word. At the end of the conversation he said he’d send me some photographs, and he did. I think they’re amazing. We spoke again and I took a few simple notes as we talked about the photos. Both are included below.
Even if I never get to cast into the Dean or hold a steelhead from it, I’ll be happy to have visited it here in Ken’s photos, where it feels perfect.
Gary Maimone
1987 - commercial fishing strike. no nets. 76 steelhead for ken in the week. 15 fish three days in a row. Smoked two bogdan reels.
Thomas Mallory
dave franklin - elmer fudd hat. big fish.
Hugo Maimone. first dean steelhead.
Victoria Pool, sunrise, 300 yards long
double hookup on stump hole. dave franklin, van van arsdale. guy in forground has no big deal look. every day each guy waded in at same time, made cast at same time, hooked up on first cast at same time.
canyon shot overhung, from bella coola waiting rock (below photo.)
bella coolas would sit and wait for salmon to come in. petroglyphs on rocks. outlined in chalk by modern day river people.
van vanarsdale - white beard.
ken with black shirt on. chased three quarters of mile
“I’m sure you have your favorite spots. This was mine. The day I left, I started counting the days until I came back.
It was the greatest place in the world.
That place owned me.”
-Ken Maimone
the big pull 
