Speed Clinch

This one's for my fellow fly fishers.

The clinch knot isn't the strongest out there for tying your tippet to your fly (my default these days for most flies is actually the Orvis knot), but I have to confess that I use the unimproved clinch occasionally out of sheer laziness. (Sometimes I have cause to regret this decision later when a fish breaks off the fly.) But most of the time it suffices. I think my continued use of the clinch is also a result of having seen this video showing a super fast way to tie the knot. Caveat pescator!

Maine Guide Tip

Every week, I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

Using a Watch As a Compass

In extremis an analog watch can double as a rude compass. Point the hour hand at the sun. Halfway between twelve o'clock and the hour hand will be south, so 180 degrees in the opposite direction is north. Try it with an actual compass (before you're lost). It really does work.

Lost on a Maine Mountain

Speaking of classics, I don't know a little boy who doesn't thrill to the tale of Donn Fendler, who spent nine days lost in the North Woods and somehow survived. Seventy years ago this week, the twelve-year old Boy Scout from Rye, New York was climbing Mount Katahdin (Maine's tallest peak) when he got separated from his party in a thick blanket of fog. He ended up wandering, lost and alone, while 350 searchers combed the area for what many presumed would be his dead body. But despite an early series of rash decisions, his Boy Scout skills — and a whole lot of luck — kept him alive. On July 26, 1939 Donn Fendler emerged from the forest; exhausted, emaciated, and dressed only in his underwear, he came upon a remote hunting camp where he was finally rescued. In the days that followed, he became a national hero and even received a medal from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Seventy years later, Maine's original "lost boy" still gives talks to school kids on the importance of being prepared before one enters the woods.

Long Live Dersu!

Dersu the Trapper: A True Account by V.K. Arseniev is one of my favorite books, and I owe my discovery of it to my friend Bill Roorbach, who once showed up at a cocktail party with a dog-eared copy and just would not shut up about how wonderful it was. He insisted upon reading aloud the scene where Arseniev and Dersu, caught alone in a frozen swamp, must hurriedly weave together a shelter of rushes as a Siberian blizzard descends upon them. That chapter got me hooked. Jaimy Gordon, who wrote the preface to the McPherson & Company edition, describes the book this way: "A Russian classic little known in the west, Dersu the Trapper is at once a geographer's memoir of his expeditions in the Siberian Far East, and a tale of adventure on the wild frontier in the same family with the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fennimore Cooper and the Western novels of Irish-born adventure writer Mayne Reid, both of which certainly influenced it." I'm not sure what I could add to further describe this weird and wonderful tale except to say that the woods-wise Dersu (my understanding is that he was a fictional composite of several of Arseniev's guides) remains one of my favorite characters in literature.

The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa made a film version titled Dersu Uzala which, for some reason, I've never got around to renting, although I'm a big Kurosawa fan. It's almost worth restarting my NetFlix subscription.

Maine Guide Tip

Every week, I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

The Little Orange Book

For more than thirty years, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has been passing out a little orange book titled You Alone in the Maine Woods that's chock-full of quirky illustrations, tips, and humor to help you save yourself if you ever get lost in the Maine woods. The booklet, described in depth in the November 2007 issue of Down East, teaches you how to make a compass out of a wristwatch, ways to start a fire in the rain, and how to build a basic shelter, among other things. For your own personal copy, click here and download a PDF version.

(c) 2007 Down East. Used here by permission.