What a thrill to receive the “Best Outdoor Magazine Column” award from the Outdoor Writers Association of California (OWAC). Presented at the OWAC Spring Conference, the award was for one of my regular “On Patrol” columns, “A Whale of a Tale,” featured in MyOutdoorBuddy.com.
Yelloweye rockfish (Sebastes ruberrimus). Photo by Retired Fish and Game Warden Larry Bruckenstein.
Imagine you’re fishing somewhere off the California coast and you hook into a big one. You finally hoist the monster to the deck and discover it’s nearly three feet long, brilliant red-orange in color, with bright yellow eyes the size of fifty cent pieces. Hard to imagine this fish could have been swimming around in the ocean when Roosevelt was president−not Franklin (1933-1945), but Teddy (1901-1909)! Yelloweye rockfish (Sebastes ruberrimus) are known to live up to 118 years. Very slow growing, they don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re between ten and twenty years old.
Saving California’s remaining abalone fishery from money-hungry poachers is a daunting task. By telling the stories of dedicated wildlife officers in my upcoming sequel to “Badges, Bears, and Eagles,” I hope to educate the public and, in some way, help conserve this precious resource for law-abiding sportsmen and future generations.
I’m honored that my book, “Badges, Bears, and Eagles,” has been selected as a finalist for the 2013 Book of the Year award from ForeWord Reviews magazine. Here’s the press release put out by my publisher, Coffeetown Press.
The other day I came across a thirty-year-old photograph I had taken of my younger brother Matt. Matt was diving into Rock Creek, a tributary to the north fork of the Feather River, located about an hour southeast of Chico. Kathy and I had picked Matt up for a day of hiking in Northern California’s Feather River Canyon.
I’m currently writing a sequel to my first book, “Badges, Bears, and Eagles.” One of the chapters in my next book is entitled “The Headhunter.” It’s about a beautiful Rocky Mountain mule deer buck that was poached back in December of 1992. What made this wildlife crime so heinous wasn’t so much that the deer was killed during closed season. It wasn’t even that it was taken inside Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge. What bothered me most was what the no-good scoundrel (for lack of a better word) did after he killed the deer.
Out of Ventura Harbor we sailed this past November, in pursuit of a long-held dream. My wife Kathy and I had been waiting for years to visit Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California’s Channel Islands and part of the five-island Channel Islands National Park. We spent the day hiking the island and learning about the indigenous plants and animals that inhabit this fascinating archipelago, just twenty miles from the mainland. Being scuba divers, we were especially impressed by the crystal clear waters that surrounded the island, beckoning us to return someday with our scuba gear and underwater camera.
