It’s Day 77 of the Underground’s Home Hostage Crisis, and no, it hasn’t escaped the Underground’s notice that if he can hit a tiny, fast-moving clay disk with a shotgun, a fleeing contractor wouldn’t offer much challenge.

Just saying is all.

Fortunately, the L&T and I managed to liberate small parts of our home from the grasp of the slow-moving insurgents, and the end may yet be in sight, though with even the absolutely, positively, drop-dead deadlines slipping away, it doesn’t always feel like it.

Of course, this blog isn’t about home-based acts of remodeling terrorism.

It’s about fly fishing, and with California’s general trout season closing soon, I’m abandoning my newly expanded (and largely sleep-deprived) family for a few hours in favor of a trout stream.

Where Do You Go When You Can Only Go One Place?

As closing day looms, fly fishermen tend to panic, though with many of California’s rivers now open to C&R fly fishing year-round, closing season no longer means putting people like Wayne Eng on suicide watch.

Before Chris Raine almost single-handedly got the Upper Sac’s season extended, you could actually watch Wayne grow more disconsolate as the closer neared.

One year I even brought a battery powered fishing game to Wayne & Myrna’s end-of-the-season party – a desperate attempt to stem the black tide that engulfed Wayne after the close, where he could only look at the river running by his front door.

It was useless of course – like handing a pack of cigarettes to a heroin addict – but it was either that or encourage Wayne to engage in highly illegal acts of fly fishing.

Fortunately, local fly fishing life has improved the last five years, though realizing that most the other local rivers (and all the small streams) are closing soon is still a bit of a rabbit punch to the groin.

It’s as if fly fishermen are faced with their own version of that old question: “If your home was on fire, which thing would you save first?”

Only for us, it’s “If the season’s closing soon, which body of water do you fish last?”

For me – and for reasons I can’t even begin to explain – it’s going to be a small stream.

Stream Y, in fact.

The Forecast: Trout, Followed by Rain

The weather forecast allows as to how I’ll probably see a little rain, and given the altitude and proximity to the mountain, it’s likely temperatures won’t even reach the 40-degree mark.

That, Undergrounders, sounds like perfect soft shell weather, and after this trip, I may be forced to write an addendum to my previous soft shell equipment reviews, where I largely gushed about this embraced-by-mountaineers-and-outdoor-geeks technology.

Since I published that review, I’ve tested the Patagonia “Insulator” soft shell in a steady (and very cold) rain, and discovered it’s not waterproof – but it is waterproof enough to hold up for three hours or so before I noticed any dampness.

And yes, even when it got damp, it stayed fairly warm.

Would I wear it all day in a driving rainstorm? Not on a cold day, I wouldn’t.

But more after the trip, which because it’s a special occasion, will probably see me wielding a bamboo fly rod.