Laegreid Outdoors

One of my more successful casts. The day before Christmas, Christmas Eve-Eve, if you will, my father and I decided to chase after the wily Steelhead trout. Armed with my 13' fly rod and a burning need to try it out, we ventured forth under gray skies. After getting our eat on at the Mountain View Diner in Gold Bar, we started to drive, trying to find a place to fish. Unfortunately, the river was high, fast and muddy, and while we were driving, the weather set in. Now, when you go fishing in the winter in Washington, you expect to get rained on, so when it started to rain a little we weren't too concerned. We became worried when the rain got heavy, and then downright concerned when the hail and lightning started. The one bit of luck we had then was that we hadn't gotten out of the car yet since we hadn't found castable water. So we drove around a bit more, marveling at the hail and high water. This is a chart depicting river flows. We fished the day highlighte...

Wishing you and yours the best. Have a very Merry Christmas !

It's happened. I've lived and fished in the Northwest long enough and have heard enough testimonials to have finally entered another part of the fly-fishing world: that of the two-handed fly rod. For those of you who aren't aware, most fly-fishing is done with a single handed rod, using some variation of the standard cast. The rods are anywhere from six to ten feet, and are, obviously, held with one hand. This is what I assume a majority of people think of when they hear fly-fishing or casting: Two handed fly rods are a whole different ballgame. Ranging from eleven feet to fifteen on average, these rods are big. There are rods that are even longer (twenty feet!) but we won't go into those today. The two-handed rods originated on the river Spey in Scotland, and the technique of casting them is called Spey Casting.  Spey casting doesn't require as much space behind the caster as regular, single-handed casting does, so in places like Washington, where there is...

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and it is well past time that this blog got an update. My girlfriend and I took our vacation in Wyoming with my family, which afforded me an opportunity to pursue the wily North American elk. It is a tale best told with pictures, so here ya go: The night before the hunt was gin clear: The morning started off bright and brisk, and the scenery was absolutely fantastic. We stopped and glassed every once in a while: We mostly saw rocks, but what rocks they were! Elk had been there: And a bobcat: Wyoming has a tough climate that makes for some gnarly trees: Men and guns needed a rest: What everyone who doesn't know Wyoming thinks Wyoming looks like: Tiny plants peeking out from the snow: The hard work of a beaver: Ready for Sports Afield: My dad in the center, being watched by some mule deer on the hill to the left: An old, old can: At the end of th...

Laegreid Outdoors has covered squid jigging, and we've covered fly tying, so I figured, what the heck, let's mash 'em both t ogether. This was the result: Do squid like fuzzy things? This one looks highly effective. Now I don't know about the semantics, so I'm not sure if we can call these squid flies until they've been fished off of a fly line; for now they are squid jigs. Someday (when I acquire a boat) they will be fished off a 5-weight and a sink-tip, for now they'll be riding fluorocarbon into the Salish Sea.   There are a few reasons I tied these: I've had most of my squid-success on small jigs; these are smaller than my small jigs. We shall see if that makes a difference. There are some instances where fish will hold on to a lure longer if it feels more natural. Since my squid jigs were all hard plastic, these will let me find out if that holds true for squid as well. I like making weird things. So these little guys are...

I am one of those people who doodles. Doodling is like art, but quick and dirty and usually not shared.  It's a good way to pass the time in hours-long meetings or while on a flight with crummy movie choices. After not fishing for a while, doodling can be a quick outlet for fishing-frustration when you can't get home to fiddle with your gear. Meetings can be productive I do also create some art, which is slower and fancier and often shared, but obviously doodling happens more often. So Since I'm a blogger now I guess, you can look forward to more of my outdoorsy-type doodles and arts. Heck, I might even post some photographs every once in a while! For now, have fun with these few images, these introductions to my doodly, arty brain; hopefully they'll help you through a meeting or long day away from the water like they have for me. Steelhead! Squid! Brook Trout! Since you made it this far down the post, I hope you like what you've seen....

There is something good about creating a physical thing. As a marketer I get to make things like mailers and posters and the like; feeling the actual object is the best part of it.  I know I've done something, it looks good, and it's in my hands. While that is a nice feeling in the workplace, it is blown out of the water by the feeling of completing a really nice fly. I've tied flies since the age of ten or eleven; my father was kind enough to show me how, and he started me off with a woolly bugger . That first night I tied some respectable flies under his guidance, and since then I've been addicted to it. Woolly Bugger The first years were good fun.  While the flies I tied with my dad were nice, the ones i tied on my own were little monstrosities.  There was no pattern, just my wee brain looking at bugs and crabs and minnows and trying to make imitations out of a box of hat-feathers and some materials filched from my dad's tying desk. They were all unique, th...

Since moving out to Washington from Nebraska, I have had many new fishing experiences, from steelheading in the S rivers to salmon fishing from Puget Sound beaches.  The most unique experience yet, however, is squidding. Squid fishing is far different from the bass fishing in Nebraska, which we did under the sun on warm mornings, stalking along the edges of sand-pits and casting plastic worms to fish we saw cruising along the bank. The season starts to heat up in October, as the first large schools of squid start to make their way south into Puget Sound. Those brave and/or stupid enough (i.e, me) to pursue the wee cephalopods in the cold and damp must wait until after the sun sets to head out.  The anglers go and stand on a dock or a pier that has lights; squid like to hang around the fringes of the light, darting in to grab shrimp and small fish feeding on the plankton drawn to the illuminated water.  The anglers use long, whippy rods to lob their multi-p...

So, rhinos are cool, and also pretty crazy endangered.  Poachers hunt them for their horn, which is sold on the black market for its medicinal and/or magical properties (Pro-tip: those 'properties'? You could get the same effect from chewing your fingernails; they're basically the same stuff).  So what does South Africa want to do to save the rhino? They want to legalize the rhino horn trade. If that doesn't raise some red flags, it should.  The focus should be on eliminating the demand base, thereby driving the price down to nothing and ending the poaching, not feeding the market.  It's not worth getting shot by anti-poaching rangers if you're only going to get five bucks for a rhino horn. I feel that an educational campaign might do more good than legalizing the trade of horn. If the consumers knew that they're paying top dollar for the same stuff that's in horse hooves, perhaps they might think twice.  Or the price of horse hoof would skyrocket. Who...

It's not often we get to hear of a massive societal change for the better, especially not when the environment or conservation is involved.   Occasionally, however, we get a win. The short version of the article is that demand for shark-fin soup in China is down due to a large public-awareness campaign (most didn't know what is in the soup and/or how it is harvested) and, more surprisingly, government action forbidding extravagant food, such as shark-fin soup, from being served at its banquets. Demand for the soup is down 50-70%. For those of you that don't know, the main ingredient in shark-fin soup is, you guessed it, shark fins.  The problem with that is, because only the fins of the sharks garner high prices from Asian markets, fishermen catch sharks, hack off their fins, and return the maimed, but still living, animals back to the sea. This is a wickedly cruel thing to do, not to mention a waste of perfectly good shark meat. The steps taken by shark supporters to...

Life is full of firsts.  Some are important; first car, first house, first steelhead, first fish on a fly, first day of hunting season, and so on.  This is the first post of the Laegreid Outdoors blog, which is a big first for me. I am Peter Laegreid, an avid angler and semi-competent artist; I pose as a marketer during the work week. That last name, by the way, is Norwegian in origin, and I pronounce it lay-Grade. Others pronounce it la-Greed, lag-reed, I've even heard it pronounced LaGreen. You can call me Peter. Now that we're on a first-name basis, I should probably tell you that this blog is going to be just chock-full of outdoorsy stuff. I'm based in the Greater Seattle area, so if you don't like hearing about anadromous fish, you may want to check out some other blog.  If you are looking for a place to hear about salmon and trout and steelhead fishing, weird bottom-fish I accidentally hook, squidding, hiking, environmental issues, and maybe even some hunti...