Fly Fishing in the L.A. River

Thanks to The Eastsider L.A. for flagging a wonderfully quirky site devoted to city fly-fishing. UrbanFlyVentures, the blog straightforwardly tells us, is "dedicated to urban fly fisherman." A recent post by Dan Zambrano says his Google aerial-map research on the Morris and Station wildfires inadvertently led to him to notice what promised to be good fishing spots in the L.A. River. He and his friend Sean then headed to a river bank near Los Feliz, parked their truck and hiked with their gear until they found a large pool in the riverbed.

"There was very little conversation," Zambrano reports, "no drama, no people and it just felt great being out on the water, casting with my favorite rod and enjoying the peace and quiet murmuring of the River. Anyone, I repeat, anyone who tells you that Carp are not worth the water they swim in has not fished for them in earnest."

That's right -- the two men were casting for carp and once, Zambrano says, he snagged one of the two-foot long specimens, only to have it escape in the rocks. After several hours, the pair relocated to under the Hyperion Avenue Bridge in Atwater. There, they discovered a fellow fisherman sitting in the middle of the river on a lawn chair. The stranger had been lucky, he told them, using tortilla bait.

Zambrano and Sean headed home empty-handed that day: "The ride home was a mixture of contentment over our new-found location and amazement that we had been out-fished by tortillas."