Then it comes, the classic statement with which she closes every one of these early morning exchanges- "Don't do anything stupid."

"Aw come on honey; I told the exotic dancers we'd have margaritas and karaoke on the canoe today!" Then she throws a pillow at me, I tell her I love her, and I'm off.

Lately, the destination has been Stampede Reservoir. Every year I try to learn a new fishery in my area, and this fall I had decided to make Stampede my pet project. With over 3,000 surface acres when full, numerous coves, points and arms, and good populations of trout, salmon and even smallmouth bass, it's certainly worth exploring; my curiosity was piqued though, by a recent conversation I had with Victor Babbitt, owner of Tahoe Fly Fishing Outfitters.

Victor told me he likes to fish the upper end of the reservoir in fall, and that on a trip the previous week he caught numerous small rainbow and brown trout while fly fishing from his Outcast inflatable drift boat, and also witnessed another angler bringing in an eight-pound brown, caught on a Kastmaster spoon tossed from shore. After hearing this report, I quickly hatched a plan, and enlisting my friend Ward Nimmo to accompany me, I followed Victor's directions the very next day to the area he described.

Despite the current low water level at Stampede the boat ramp is still open and large boats with powerful motors can put in and easily zip to any point on the lake, but with my canoe and electric trolling motor it's a long trip from the ramp to the far reaches of the creek arms, so I was glad to have instructions as to how to access the shore in this area via dirt logging roads. These roads are not well marked, not shown in their entirety on any map I've found, and many are not suited to passenger vehicles. A few years ago, I spent most of a day and a tank of gas with my old Toyota wagon trying to get to Stampede this way, using a Forest Service map, a compass, and dead reckoning. I never did find the lake, and I dented my oil pan before giving up and fishing the Truckee River instead.

I'm now driving an Isuzu Rodeo with considerably more ground clearance, though, and the directions I was given sounded pretty easy to follow, so Ward and I made a scouting trip on the morning of September 18. The access was just as Victor had described, and we enjoyed a full day of canoe trolling on the reservoir's Sagehen Creek arm. Within the first half-hour of fishing, we discovered what would be our productive pattern for the day; trolling small, jointed plugs along the shoreline in less than 10 feet of water. Almost immediately after letting his rainbow trout pattern Rebel out on a fifty-yard tether, Ward caught a nice two-pound brown. We rounded a point twenty minutes later and as I hooked then brought in a small rainbow, he reeled in as well to check his minnow plug for weeds, and we both saw a five-pound brown follow the lure right to the canoe, roll on it without connecting, then slowly sink back into the green depths. "Whoah!"

After that, two hours passed without a fish, so we tried some slow-troll attractor blade techniques in deeper water, but had no takers. Following a lunch break on shore, we returned to our shallow-running lures and found the rainbow trout on an afternoon bite, with over a dozen from 12 to 18 inches coming in on a variety of floating plugs, including a brown trout pattern Rebel Minnow, a # 7 gold Rapala Jointed, and a Luhr Jensen Klawdad. Winds were light, the weather sunny and mild, and toward evening we were treated to a spectacular wildlife show. A small group of mule deer stepped down from the wooded hills to browse along the shoreline, followed at a distance by a cinnamon-colored black bear, mimicking their every move. When the deer took ten steps, the bear would take ten steps, and when they turned to look at him, he'd turn and look over his shoulder too, trying to appear nonchalant.

We fished right until sunset, draining two deep-cycle trolling batteries, then packed up just as full dark came on. The isolation of our location, on national forest land with no lakeside houses or docks, became apparent as we lingered for a moment and noticed there was absolutely no sound coming from the woods around us. No cars, no people, and strangely enough, not even one insect, bird or coyote. In an envelope of silence, we drank in the rare peace of the moment, and our attention was then drawn upward, to a brilliantly sparkling sky. At over a mile above sea-level, far from any urban light pollution, we could see so many stars that they formed cloudlike clusters in some areas, while the sparser zones were punctuated with frequent streaks from meteors, burning up as they fell from space into the atmosphere. Most were just distant white lines, quickly dissipating, but we were startled by one closer 'falling star' that roared overhead with a flaming, sparking orange tail, like a Roman candle. I kid you not, we actually heard a meteor.

The memories of my outdoor adventure and the big brown trout Ward missed played in my mind all week, forcing me to set out for Stampede again, against my wife's will, on September 25. This time I was alone, arriving before first light to enjoy a bit of stargazing, and of course to be in position by sunrise for my first trolling pass off the point where I hoped to once again encounter Mister Brown.

The reservoir had been drawn down quite a bit since my previous visit, and driving close to the water I noticed in the high-beam glare that there was a rim of wet, muddy ground along the shoreline; ground that had recently been under water. I decided to stop where the dirt looked dry rather than risk bogging down in the mud, and as a precaution, I shifted into four-wheel-drive. TOO LATE! The dry land beneath me was only a crust, and my wheels began to spin as the truck broke through and sank in. Quickly hitting reverse, I turned the steering wheel hard one way then the other- the tachometer spiking to the red line as the engine howled in impotence and my tires slung mud. I stepped out to assess my predicament, and stumbled as my boots slipped ankle deep into the quagmire. Switching on my headlamp to look down at my wheels in the dark, I saw they were down to the rims in mud and the beefy off-road treads were filled, making my tires look bald, and act the same way when I tried one more time to power my way out.

I had only dug myself deeper, and things did not look any better in the light of day. As sunrise approached I heard and saw some huge splashes made by feeding trout in the lake, and those fish probably heard my high-volume cursing as well. On my hands and knees and getting muddier by the second, I peered beneath my truck. While not quite up to the axles, there were enough points where the undercarriage was resting on the mud that I could think of only one possible solution, to jack up each wheel and put rocks and gravel underneath, until the whole vehicle rested higher up, then to dig out the mud in a path behind both the front and back wheels, then fill that rut with more rocks, gravel, or sticks, so I'd have a hard surface on which to back out. Easy, right? I spent the next five hours at the target aerobic heartrate for a guy my age trying to accomplish this goal. First, I had not brought a shovel, so my plastic canoe paddle served as a poor substitute. I used it to dig holes in the mud, then I hiked the lake bed to find large flat rocks, carry them back to my truck, to lay in the holes, in order to have a stable surface to place the jack.

Then I pulled out my jack, or should I say JOKE that came with the truck.. It was like a tiny model of a real hydraulic jack, and consulting my owner's manual, I found that the frame contact points where the jack was to be placed were well underneath the vehicle, a little far for safe jacking even on dry pavement, and now impossible to reach through the mud. So I chose instead to put the little curved cup of the jack's top against a similarly shaped curve of the body, just forward of the rear wheel. Inch by inch I cranked it up, and just as the wheel lifted high enough for me to dig beneath it and lay in some gravel- BOOM! The truck came slamming back down. The jack had punched a hole right through the sheet metal of the truck body! it took me several minutes just to wrench the damn thing out of the opening it tore. I had thrown my old Toyota scissors jack in the truck as part of an emergency kit though, and found that this device worked just fine to safely raise the vehicle, but partway through the second wheel as I stopped to catch my breath, I somehow lost the jack-handle in one of the mud piles I'd created, and from then on had to use my needle-nose pliers to operate the jack. The resulting loss of leverage made the procedure twice as difficult. Without another option, I painstakingly raised each wheel, then used one of my deep-cycle battery boxes as a makeshift bucket to gather gravel from farther up the lake bed. Again and again I trudged uphill, using the lid to scoop small rocks into the box until it was full. Then I carried each load back to the truck, dumping the gravel beneath the wheel I had jacked up at the moment. After that I brought still more material including sticks and larger rocks to build a dry path behind the car, breaking one of my canoe paddles while shoveling out mud to make a trench in which to lay the stuff. Ten feet, maximum; that's all I needed to move before I hit dry ground. When I finished this monumental undertaking, the truck sat a good six inches higher, I had a raised line of dry rocks and sticks behind each wheel, and for good measure I used a screwdriver to painstakingly scrape all the mud out of my tire-treads. I climbed wearily into the driver's seat, turned the ignition key, shifted to reverse, and with a feather-light touch on the accelerator, proceeded in 3 seconds to spin out from under my tires the material that took me all morning to place beneath them. "AAAGGHH!"

I did have a tow rope, and was ready to offer cash to anyone who drove down to the lake and had a strong enough vehicle to pull me out, but had not seen another soul all day. I was done, physically and mentally, and was now faced with the prospect of walking out eight miles or so to the town of Truckee for help. Yes, I also brought the cellular phone, and no, it didn't work out here. That's why my wife talked me into getting one in the first place, so I could call for help if I was stuck in the backcountry on a fishing trip. Sprint PCS- Pretty Crappy Service. The thing basically only works when you walk in your door and could just pick up the regular phone.

As I sat on my tailgate and read 'looking for service' over and over, I noticed a boat motoring toward me at high speed from across the lake. It drew nearer and louder until I stood wearily then trudged to the water's edge, bare feet making farting noises in the slop. I had long before taken off my boots and put them on the truck's roof, so I could knock the thick coating of claylike mud off them when they dried in the sun.

The approaching vessel was emblazoned with the Placer County Sheriff's Department logo, and one of the three occupants waved to me as they drew near. I waded out up to my waist before realizing that it was a jetboat, which without a propeller could come in quite shallow. "How you doing?"

"Not so good!" I yelled back with my arm outstretched, palm down and tilting left to right in the universal symbol for 'not so good'.

"We were looking at you through binoculars from across the lake and it looked like you might be stuck."

"Yes, I'm an idiot."

"Oh, you're not the first. You need a tow truck?"

"Yeah, looks that way. I've been trying to get out by myself, but... did I mention I'm an idiot?"

So he radioed his dispatcher to call for a tow truck. After a few minutes the reply came that a truck was en-route, but the towing company had requested to meet me at the boat ramp, rather than have the driver try to find his way down the logging roads to my vehicle.

The man who had first hailed me immediately offered me a ride to the ramp, and all on board waited patiently while I put my scattered, spattered belongings in the truck and locked it. Wading back out to the jet-boat and putting my filthy feet on the nice, clean deck, I introduced myself and offered profuse thanks to my saviors, Deputies Nora Prince and Mike Fisher of the Placer County Sheriff's Department, and Game Warden Ron Perrault. I know their names because they gave me their business cards when I asked for information so I could thank them in print on this website.

They were out on a joint patrol, responding to a report of an injured deer on one of the reservoir's islands. They'd found the limping buck earlier that morning, and by walking slowly toward him had shooed him off the island, causing him to swim back to shore before some less kind soul harassed or poached him. When last seen, he was making haste for the safety of the treeline. The patrol boat then made a circuit around the lake and found even more sorry and desperate creature- me.

Nora, Mike and Ron, here's to you. People tend to think of law enforcement personnel as looking just to catch you doing something wrong, and it's not until you're in trouble and need help that you consider the other, equally important role they play. These people were consummate professionals with genuine concern for my welfare, and respectfully refrained from making me feel any more stupid than had already been rendered obvious by the situation at hand.

They let me off at the boat ramp and I walked up with Deputy Prince. She was retrieving the sheriff's department vehicle and trailer, as they had finished their patrol for the day. I waited for the tow truck and looked out over the lake, which was glassy calm and punctuated by fish-splashes. Now, I know it's considered poor taste to stereotype people, but are all tow truck drivers rude? I mean, they're already gouging you because you're stuck and at their mercy; couldn't they at least smile while they stick it to you?

"Get in! Don't touch anything! What? Huh? Grumble grumble." We left the parking lot, headed down the paved road, then just as the driver told me that the towing rate was 180 dollars per hour, starting and ending at the shop back in Truckee, he took a dirt turnoff down an unfamiliar trail. I was about to tell him to turn around before I single-handedly paid for the company's new truck, when I looked back and noticed DFG officer Perrault following us. My driver also took notice in his rearview mirror, then suddenly took a left fork in the rock-strewn trail, bringing us around a curve, over a rise, and down to the creek arm not far from my truck.

By the time he set up, attached my vehicle to the cable from his winch, pulled me ten lousy feet and estimated the time back to his shop, I was into him for 270 dollars. Warden Perrault had pulled up next to us, and the driver asked him to stick around while he called in my credit card number, as if to say "In case this guy's a dead-beat and tries to cheat me."

After he finished beating me to the punch and left, I chatted with the game warden. He told me he followed us in part to make sure the tow truck driver didn't take me on the scenic route like a taxi driver with an out-of-town tourist, just to rack up the bill. I was all the more impressed with his literally going the extra mile for me, and then as we talked he divulged that he reads the Fishsniffer website and enjoys my articles! Remember that, all you poachers that like to post and boast on the site's message boards. Big brother IS watching you. I thanked him again, bid him goodbye, then carried my canoe to the water and finally went fishing. Of course by this time the wind had come up; I managed two upwind runs and slow-troll drifts down the creek channel, catching one 14-inch rainbow trout on a Seps Sidekick dodger and nightcrawler before the waves grew to whitecaps. The drive home was long and grueling, due to my fatigue and also because at highway speeds my steering wheel and front end shimmied violently. I thought I would need an alignment, but fortunately found that hosing 40 pounds or so of dried mud out of my wheels alleviated the problem.

I walked into the house at sunset, forgetting my appearance until my wife exclaimed "Oh my God!" and pointed to a cloud of dust surrounding me, like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comic strip.

"Honey, you know how you're always saying 'Don't do anything stupid'? Well, today I decided to break out of that old rut." I went straight to the shower as ordered, then pan-fried the catch of the day for Martha as I told her the story of my misadventure.

"Mmm, delicious; the meat is all pink." she remarked as she squeezed lime and poured hot sauce onto the fish.

"Enjoy, baby; enjoy every damn bite. Better eat the head and bones while you're at it. That there is a three-hundred-dollar rainbow trout."

"I thought you said it was two-seventy." she said as she choked on a mouthful.

"Gas, ten bucks; nightcrawlers, a dollar-sixty-nine; Bondo repair kit for the hole in my truck, seventeen-fifty. Defeat, humiliation and a face full of mud? PRICELESS."

Until next time, remember, never stand in a canoe!
Mark Wiza
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