21 May 06

Good Morrrrrrrning Baaa-Hag-Daaaaad!!! (In my best Robin Williams voice)
“It’s hot!...jungle hot!”

Yep, it’s pretty darn toasty. May 15th, official temp: 114 …ouch! The fishing is good but the support from home is better. Special thanks in this note to Bill Ogg for the cleaning kits and Robert Hays for the great magazines and stuff from his church. It is great to have this connection to home and the sport of fly fishing. I’ll try to do a better job of posting updates.
The fishing is still good. The heat has really sparked the weed growth. That is bringing the smaller fish up to nibble at the edges. When I say “smaller” it is all relative. I’m talking about 2-3 pound fish. If they were trout I’d be giddy. 2-3 pounds is small for fish here. OH!...before I forget, I want to tell you about “Moby”. Moby is a mangar and lives in the lake adjacent to the main palace. Other people have told me about spotting him, but last week was my first confirmed sighting. There I was… (all good stories start out that way J)…overlooking a corner of the lake. I was with another guy and we were watching steelhead size shabut (kind of a torpedo-shaped carp) chasing dragonflies (I’ll tell you about the dragonflies in another note). These fish were all in the 10-15 pound class by the looks of them. I was looking at a particularly big one when I started to see a yellow/green tint to the water below him. The “tint” started to take shape and form. I’ve caught mangar before in Tikrit so I knew what I was about to see. But, I had no idea how big this thing was going to be! In just a few seconds one of the biggest fish I have ever seen came up from the bottom…floated there for a good bit and then just drifted slowly back down. Let me put this into perspective: I just mentioned the “steelhead-size” fish we were watching?...we could have used them for bait. This was easily a 40+ pound fish. The words I said in exclamation would have got my mouth washed out with soap (sorry, Mom). This was a !@#$% big fish – hence the new name, Moby. I’m going to close this and go out and try to catch him! How come my 8-wt. looks so small?
//Bill