New Awesomeness has Arrived

The Waterswatters are pleased to announce we've teamed up with Ass Hooked Whitey, Fly Times, Voluntary Beatdown and a few other folks to bring you the best in fly fishing typing. Imagine the combined power of the Pac Nor'west, the South, the Nor'East, country and western, honky and tonk, spey and singlehand, smartass and serious and you get

Buster Wants to Fish

HUZZAH! HUZZAH!

We recieved our orders at dawn, gathered our possibles, struck the canvas, checked our charges, and are on the march. The pipes and drums are playing Garry Owen, although I couldn't find that on Youtube, so here's some drunk Cav soldiers in Korea rocking out to Garry Owen, the 7th. First. Out Front. 'Cause soon you will be treated to a whole new level of awesomeness.

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Disco Midge

It could be a bead head....

Hallelujah

Went fishing up on the [So Redacted you couldn't get the location out by waterboarding] and lucked into a few of these guys . Fished a borrowed boo stick (sweet) and dries. In celebration of this I leave you with Van the Man

Lucero

Yep. Git it on.

Latest Triploid Hits the Newstands

Ego Deflation Monthly, click for full sized laughs

Yessir!

Red Gold by Feltsoul Media

Cause some places are too good for us to fuck up


Learn More Here and Here SON!

Downhill

Fishing [name redacted] Creek is a lot of fun. Good chance for a slam, zero to small crowds, and a beatiful place to camp and fish. Another cool thing is you hike up going in and down going out. The way it should be.

There, There

Hi Sweet Things

I know your kinda pissed at me for packing you up and moving you out here to the Sonoran desert. I know you miss your old haunts in Florida, chasing bluegill and bass, reds and snook. I see those looks you give me now, knowing I haven't gotten you wet in months. That thing with the hiking boots every weekend, naw babies, I'm doin that for us. You see, I'm out looking for water; I know you think you're being neglected for the hiking gear, but really I'm doin that for you. You'll see, someday soon I'll pick you up in my hands, fit you together all tight and straight like and you'll see. You'll see, cause when I said that I love you, I meant that I loved you forever and I'm goin keep on lovin you

Old arse smooth

We like to slow roll it.

Workhorse

This is Big Cat's blue-collar-style drifter. We like. Check out the "Snap On" seat. Yarp!

Blue Mountain - Bloody 98 @ Proud Larry's

Yessir.

30"

That's what I'm guessing this bruiser would tape at. I watched him for about twenty minutes.

Mooching trout part deux

More footage with a shot of me wading boots.

Symbiotic Trout?

Fished in Tennessee all last week. Had a blast. This was taken by a Pentax Optio on [name redacted] River. The trout were feeding on all sorts of goodness I was kicking up. First there was one, then two, then thirty....pretty cool schiatt.

Driving Blood Meridian, Part 2

Crossing the high mesas in the days to follow they began to come upon burned-out pits in the ground where the Indians had cooked mescal and they rode through strange forests of maguey- the aloe or century plant- with immense flowering stalks that rose forty feet into the desert air.

(Aloes, French Joe Canyon, Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

Glanton would not turn back. His calculations concerning the enemy included every duplicity. He spoke of ambushes. Even he in all his pride could not have believed that a company of nineteen men had evacuated an area of ten thousand square miles of every living human.

(Transmountain Expressway, looking down into Texas, Mexico and New Mexico, El Paso, Texas)

Two days later when the scouts returned in the afternoon and reported finding the Apache villages abandoned…They dismounted and moved among the shelters…the hovel doors were waist high and faced the east and few of the shelters were tall enough to be stood in.

(Apache wicciup, Apache Pass, Arizona)

Two mornings later the Delawares returned from their dawn reconnaissance and reported the Gilenos camped along the shore of a shallow lake…They saw to their arms, drawing charges from their pieces and reloading them…The party was crouched in a stand of willow half a mile from the fires of the enemy…Glanton addressed them. We got an hour, maybe more. When we ride in it’s every man to his own. Don’t leave a dog alive if you can help it…Don’t waste powder and ball on anything that cant shoot back…the riders put rowels to their mounts and lined out for the camp behind the dogs with their clubs whirling and the dogs howling in a tableau of some hellish hunt, the partisans nineteen in number bearing down upon the encampment where there lay sleeping upward of a thousand souls…Within that first minute the slaughter had become general. Women were screaming and naked children and one old man tottered forth waving a pair of white pantaloons. The horsemen moved among them and slew them with clubs or knives…The dead lay awash in the shallows of the lake…They moved among the dead harvesting the long black locks with their knives and leaving their victims rawskulled and strange in their bloody cauls.

(Seasonal Lake, near Wilcox, Arizona)

One evening almost within sight of the town of El Paso they looked off toward the north…They camped that night at the Hueco Tanks…Two nights later bivouacked in a pass in the mountains they could see the distant lights of the city below them. (Looking down on El Paso from the Transmountain Expressway, the only pass through the Franklin Mountains)

They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers…Within a week of quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.

(Sunset, Deming, New Mexico)

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fire blacked palo verde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung grey and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests…Among their barbarous hosts they had met with neither favor nor discrimination but had suffered and died impartially.

(Palo Verde Tree, AZ90, Arizona)

They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier Del Bac, the church solemn and stark in the starlight.

(San Xavier del Bac Mission, Tucson, Arizona)

He set the horse’s face north toward the stone mountains running thinly under the edge of the sky and he rode the stars down and the sun up. It was no country he had ever seen and there was no track to follow into those mountains and there was no track out. Yet in the deepest fastness of those rocks he met with men who seemed unable to abide the silence of the world.

(Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

He first saw them laboring over the plain in the dusk among flowering ocotillo…They were led by a pitero piping a reed and then n procession a clanging of tambourines and matracas and men naked to the waist in black capes and hoods who flailed themselves with whips of braided yucca and men who bore on their naked backs great loads of cholla…and a hooded man in a white robe who bore a heavy wooden cross on his shoulders…This troubled sect traversed slowly the ground under the bluff where the watcher stood

(Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

Then he saw the pilgrims. They were scattered about below him in a stone coulee dead in their blood. He took down his rifle and squatted and listened…The company of penitents lay hacked and butchered among the tones in every attitude. Many lay about the fallen cross and some were mutilated and some were without heads. Perhaps they’d gathered under the cross for shelter but the hole into which it had been set and the cairn of rocks about its base showed how it had been pushed over and how the hooded alter-christ had been cut down and disemboweled who now lay with the scraps of rope by which he had been bound still tied about his wrists and ankles

(Looking down at the bottom of French Joe Canyon, Arizona)

Driving Blood Meridian, Part 1

We're fans of Cormac McCarthy 'round here, no suprise as he is a Southern Gent (raised in Knoxville) and now resident of the Southwest and as I was consulting the road map for my move from Florida to Arizona, I realized I would be cutting across some serious McCarthy territory, so I started taking photos along the way that seemed straight out of Blood Meridian, and a few places that I knew the Glanton Gang had moved through and some other places that just seemed to fit.

At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spider like among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun’s declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward night.

(Farm fields, West Florida, HWY 301)

He works in a sawmill, he works in a diphtheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and forty nine he rides up through the latter day republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches.

(Off I10, West of San Antonio, Texas)

They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of sand and scrub…By late afternoon riders were visible to the bare eye…What do you make of that, Captain? I make it a pack of heathen stock thieves is what I make it…They don’t seemed concerned do they…We may see a little sport here before the day is out…Already you could see through the dust on the ponies’ hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers…A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeon tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish Conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground…and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

(South Texas Desert, near Van Horn, Texas)

They rode through marl and terracotta and rifts of copper shale and they rode through a wooden swag and out upon a promontory overlooking a bleak and barren caldera where lay the abandoned ruins of Santa Rita del Cobre.

(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)

Glanton pounded on the door with his rawhide covered club like a traveler at an inn…The echo of his knocking clapped about the stark and riven walls of rock and returned. The men sat their horses. Glanton gave the door a kick. Come out if you’re white, he called.

(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)

Glanton and the Judge looked at the squatters and the squatters looked at the floor. Some of the roof beams were half down into the room and the floor was filled with mud and rubble. Into these ruinous works the morning sun now slanted and Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or half breed boy maybe twelve years old… Who’s this child? said the Judge. They shrugged and looked away. Glanton spat and shook his head.

(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)

It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain…The men on watch entered the room and stood steaming before the fire…Someone had reported the Judge naked atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode…In the meantime someone had found the boy. He was laying facedown naked in one of the cubicles. Scattered about on the clay were great numbers of old bones. As if he like others before him had stumbled upon a place where something inimical lived.

(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)

The Judge, said Tobin…I seen him before, said the Kid. In Nacogdoches. Tobin smiled. Every man in the company claims to have encountered that sooty souled rascal in some other place. We come down off the Little Colorado we didn’t have a pound of powder in the company. Pound. We’d not a dram hardly. There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. We were thirty eight men when we left Chihuahua City and we were fourteen when the Judge found us…Glanton just studied him…They’ve a secret commerce. Some terrible covenant…but if being naked of arms in that wilderness and half of all Apacheria in pursuit worried him at all he kept it to himself entire…The Judge had been up all night…Watchin the bats…Two men deserted in the night and that made us down to twelve and the Judge thirteen. I gave him my best study, the Judge…He appeared to be a lunatic and then not. Glanton I always knew was mad…We led the horses in the dark…When we reached the cave some of the men thought that he meant for us to hide there…But it was the nitre…We filled our wallets and panniers and our mochilas with the cave dirt.

(Cave, French Joe Canyon, Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)

The Judge. We left him at a high pass, a little Clearwater creek. Him and one of the Delaware’s. He told us to circle the mountain and to return to that place in forty eight hours. We unloaded all the containers onto the ground.

(Freshwater Spring, Apache Pass, Arizona)

The next day on the far side of the mountain we encountered the two lads that had deserted us. Hanging upside down in a tree. They’d been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man’s appearance. But if the savages had not guessed it already, now they knew for sure. That we’d none of us any powder.

(Oak tree, Apache Pass, Arizona)

But in those two days the Judge leached out the guano with creekwater and woodash…He got up when he seen us and went to the willows and come back with a pair of wallets and in one was about eight pounds of pure crystal saltpeter and in the other about three pounds of fine alder charcoal…he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain…He was first to the rim of the cone…Then he set down and he begun to scale at the rock with his knife…It was brimstone…most pure flowers of sulphur…went to a cupped place in the rock and dumped out the charcoal and the nitre and stirred them about with his hand and poured the sulphur in…Captain Glanton, he says. Come charge that swivelbore of yours and let’s see what manner of things we have here…The foremost of the savages was not more than a furlong on the slope…then the Judge, he steps up to the rim and he had with him a good white linen shirt…and he waved it to the redskins and he called down to them in Spanish All dead save me he called. Have mercy on me. Todos muertos…God it set them yappin on the slope like dogs…Gentlemen. That was all he said. He had the pistols stuck in his belt at the back and he drew them one in each hand and he is as either handed as a spider…and he commenced to kill Indians. We needed no second invitation. God it was a butchery.

Western Commerical Zoning

Speaks for itself, mostly

Kitchen 8/11-8/12

Check out the granite countertops

Damn Beavers!

This is a pic from a relative's farm in South central Tennessee. It used to be deep, cold (almost cold enough for trout), and purty as hell. It's a shadow of it's former self.

[name redacted] Creek

Fished a spring fed creek with the Walker County Boys. It was good to get the boots wet, been awhile. It's really too hot to fish down here right now. It's best to be off the water by 10:00 in the AM (It was 84 degrees at 7:00AM this morning on my way to work). Heading to the Appalachians this weekend to fish and beat the heat. Can't wait.

Tight cast

Almost

Cazador almost got that beauty of a spotted bass to the boat. Almost. Would have easily been the fish of the day. Notice the pocket pulled out and reversed.....not for amateurs. He's not always unlucky, he did boat Mrs. Cazador. Also...I'm not a fan of the visor, but that Jameson Inn visor does bring it.

Editors note: You might need sunglasses to view this pic due to Cazador's Malibu-like tan

There's a bass in there

I think we're back

Dog Day Edition
Things are starting to settle down and looks like we may have time to resume internet fishing. Winter in the South is here.....it was 97 degrees (Fahrenheit to you non-USA'rs) with 97% humidity. Brew-tall. Throw in severe drought and it has sucked donkey balls, royally. Thee Dog Days are upon us.

To our three readers, thanks for sticking around.

Thanks for Leaving the Door Unlocked

Well, I am starting to settle into the new digs out in the Sonora. I left the Florida Sprawl behind for a town of 1,700 people 22 miles south of I-10 with just about nothing between the town and the highway, check it son. My dirt merchants, Moose and Fiona, have learned the subtle joys of chasing jackrabbits through the yard. Down AZ90 aways is the metropolis of Sierra Vista, around 17,000 people, with enough conveniences you don't go ape shit from just hanging out at the Circle K. Local fauna include the aforementioned jackrabbits, western diamond backs, black widows, javelina, bobcat, mule deer, whitetails, black bear and mountain lion. Accordingly, I am doing some "hardware" procurement for trips into the Huachuca's, Whetstone and Dragoon Mountains.

It's good to move now and then, it wakes you up from your nap and I'll have more later and should be occupying my usual spot at the fire once I get a dial up connection at the house.

Cheers
Ulysses

Things we like - Pt 6

drag the river, turned up very loud. Add Maker's Mark, sunset, and camp chair. Repeat often.

Roughian Country

Roughian [ruff-eee-an] adjective

1. Not played on "country" radio

2. Gritty, real, with pain

3. Usually involving booze and guns

4. See also Chris Knight and Drag the River

Been listening to Chris Knight's Trailer Tapes. Raw and beautiful. This is Knight at his best. Also picked up Drag the River's entire collection from Suburban Home Records. Been wearing 'em out. Just pure heart driven country with heavy doses of pedal steel. We highly recommend picking their stuff up. Especially now that they have disbanded.