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Fishing with George
George Carl has his hands full during a January outing on the Napa River. | Buy photos
For the Register's outdoorsman, it's just good to be out there
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CommentIt’s 90 minutes before dawn on a freezing January morning.
George Carl is out in front of his west Napa house, warming up the SUV with the 20-foot aluminum boat hitched to the back.
George Carl is out in front of his west Napa house, warming up the SUV with the 20-foot aluminum boat hitched to the back.
His wife, Andi, is out running through the neighborhood in the frigid air.
Nothing unusual here. Andi always runs early so she can hit the road by 7 for her job as a vice principal at a Fairfield elementary school. George has been getting up before light to fish pretty much all his life, and has kept doing so even in recent years — after the leukemia hit.
Nothing unusual here. Andi always runs early so she can hit the road by 7 for her job as a vice principal at a Fairfield elementary school. George has been getting up before light to fish pretty much all his life, and has kept doing so even in recent years — after the leukemia hit.
On this morning George is loading for a short trip. The ride to Moore’s Landing in Carneros takes about 15 minutes. George eases the SUV into an oversized parking spot designed for truck and hitch; the Napa River is 50 yards away. A few minutes pass before the headlights of a pick-up truck stir up the shadows and Ron Modrall pulls his truck alongside the boat.
It’s 5:37 a.m., and it is fishing time. Again.
George and Ron have been hunting and fishing together for 35 years. They have roamed far and wide in their adventures, but Napa County is home. They know the outdoors spots within a couple of hours of Napa as well as most of us know our backyards.
In recent years, their friendship has grown deeper with another common bond. They are both cancer survivors.
Ron’s bout with cancer began 25 years ago, and he has largely beaten it, but now has serious medical problems from a degenerative bone disease.
George, the Register’s outdoors columnist, was diagnosed with two forms of leukemia three years ago, and is enduring an up-and-down battle today.
The two men talk nearly every day. They like to talk about fish and deer and whether it’s possible that a fellow named Legend really landed a 44 lb. striper in the Napa River. But they also tell each other about their medical odysseys.
“We compare stories and emotions and dreams,” said Ron. “I am very willing to do that because it helps him, but it helps me, too. It gives me strength.”
Whether they are fishing, talking fishing or daydreaming about fishing, the hardship of the illnesses stays with them. “You’re never away from it: it’s always in your thoughts,” said Ron.
On the water
George backs his SUV down the ramp until the boat is in the river. Ron has loaded onto the boat already to ease the strain on his legs.
George settles in, I step aboard and the 90-horsepower engine churns upriver at an easy 5 mph. It’s still too dark to make out the contours of the banks.
But we can see the fish, or at least little fish shapes flashing on the screen of the fishfinder, a sort of sonar that measures water depth and signals when something sizable is swimming past. We’re in depths of 5 to 20 feet, and striper bass are stacked up underneath us.
George and Ron have a secret spot they like near the Southern Crossing. We putter into the area and cut the engine. The fishfinder indicates the boat is nearly being lifted out of the water by all the stripers below. George says he’s never seen so many.
He and Ron make their first casts. Ron notes the tide is coming in, but both men say they are not of a mind with the fishermen who swear by the tides around here. The magic is not in the tide, but in the time of day, they say. You have to be out when the fish are active and feeding, which mostly means close on either side to sunrise and sunset.
George has plenty of his own ideas about the great outdoors in these parts. His outdoors column has appeared in the Register for 18 years, and he also talked about the outdoors during the decades he worked at KVON.
Former KVON owner Tom Young said he hired George to do advertising work more than 30 years ago, but George’s passion for the outdoors gave Young an idea. “He had a hobby of hunting and fishing, and I thought it would be an idea to have some features in our radio station about hunting and fishing,” said Young. “It turned out to be quite popular.”
Over the years, George fished and hunted his way around Napa County and environs, going farther and farther afield for pleasure and for the benefit of readers and listeners.
“What I started doing this years ago with my son (Guy Carl, the oldest of George’s four children), we’d started doing everything we could in a day,” said George. “First it was one or two hours from Napa, then four hours from Napa. Then a day and a half from Napa.”
George came to the right place to write an outdoors column. He says Napa County has the third-highest percentage of licensed fishermen and hunters among its residents of all the counties in the nation. The county has two chapters of Ducks Unlimited and members of several other hunting and fishing groups. He proudly notes that Napa hunters and fishermen kick up more than $100,000 a year to preserve wildlife habitat.
“We are preserving where other people are losing,” he said.
He also notes that Napa County is one of the most biologically diverse places in the country, with vast marshlands in the south serving as a home to countless shorebirds, while the rugged mountains to the north support deer and wild turkey as well as mountain lions and, in his estimation, 40 to 50 black bear.
Radio days
Ron was raised in the San Francisco Bay delta, hunting and fishing in wide open spaces that now house marinas, private fishing clubs and new homes. He moved to Napa when he was young and has lived here ever since, except for his service in Vietnam and a few years in Montana. Ron and his wife, Susan, live in Coombsville. Three years ago, Ron sold the Foster’s Freeze franchise on Imola Avenue after running it for decades.
George’s route to Napa was more circuitous. George, 66, was born and raised in Chicago. His radio career started when he was in the Army, working in the public information office at Fort Polk, La. He left the Army and returned to Chicago with an offer to be a deejay at a folk music station.
In 1964, George said, “the station changed and we were the first rock and roll FM station in Chicago. ... They didn’t have rock and roll on FM then. It was a place for elevator music.”
He promoted shows for the Turtles, the Beach Boys, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs and others before moving to a station in Kalamazoo. Offered another job in Michigan, he looked around for a bigger change and landed an offer from Napa’s KVON. He stayed for decades, shifting into semi-retirement 10 years ago, when Young sold the station.
The leukemia diagnosis surfaced in 2004. George explored the options, and in 2006 decided to get a bone marrow transplant at Stanford Hospital. It took several weeks to find a donor match, then last spring he and Andi moved to Mountain View for three-months of intensive, expensive treatment.
The experience was exhausting, as Andi and George recounted in a series of articles for the Register. Just as bad from George’s perspective is that it put a serious crimp in his outdoors schedule. George was relieved to come home, and has had good days and bad since. In recent weeks, he had a second transplant, this time while he stayed at home. The leukemia, however, has proved persistent.
Fish ain’t biting
At the fishing spot, we can hear bridge traffic in the distance and geese honking on their way past. Sometimes the only sound is the zip of the fishing lines as we cast into the water, and the soft whirr of the lines as we spool them back in.
After about 10 minutes with no action, George says, “Ron, you can start catching fish anytime. Don’t wait on me.”
Ron’s amenable, but the fish aren’t. Twenty minutes pass before the tip of George’s pole bends sharply down toward the water under the pull of a bite.
George works the fish, reeling him in, then pulling the pole straight up to bring the fish in closer. The fight doesn’t last long before Ron grabs the net, George brings the fish to the surface and Ron hauls him in.
A striper, about 22 inches, well above the 18-inch limit for a keeper, but well below the size of the beast supposedly caught by the Legend.
Light is appearing in the eastern sky, above Skyline Park. Songbirds make a huge ruckus along the shoreline. Ducks glide in the shallows and step along the muck in search of breakfast. George’s cell phone rings, and he digs it out of his pocket.
Andi’s driving to work, and at this moment is in transit only a couple of hundred yards away. George assures her he’s feeling good and is right where he wants to be.
George steps on a small foot pump attached to a propeller. Without using the engine, the boat circles into and out of the shallows, turning in slow arcs. Sometimes I look up to see the sunlight striking high on Mount Veeder. Other times, I’m staring at the softer curves of Mount George.
After a while, we troll down river. I manage to hook the bill of Ron’s baseball cap as I swing the fishing rod from one side of the boat to the other. I was that close to taking his eye out, but he doesn’t seem upset. I have a feeling I’ll be a fish tale as soon as I’m out of earshot.
Now we’re in full daylight and it’s a feast for the eyes: The brownish hues where the water meets the reeds, the egrets hunkered near a tree fallen in the shallows, a plastic chair high up on the bank near the Napa Pipe site — some fisherman’s lunchtime hideaway.
The fishfinder is still showing lots of action, but nothing’s biting.
Ron’s got a theory. Weeks of freezing cold have caused a slowdown. The fish are around, but they are deep in the water and not moving much.
George says how he wishes they found more fish to impress me, and repeats how happy he is just to be out here.
‘Trophy of our lives’
They both tell parts of a story that I think is more than just a story. In 2006, they went deer hunting together. They were doing that decades ago, long before the drug regimens and doctor visits and big words that describe tiny, microscopic things in your blood and bones.
On this trip they bagged a deer, and then the hard work started. By Ron’s estimate, it took them “six times as long as it should have” to bring the beast down to the road. When it came time to skin the animal, they had to take turns sitting in a chair, resting and holding the deer while the other did the dirty work.
At first it struck me as a sad story — two old guys who can barely do what they love.
Then it struck me as a happy story — anybody lucky enough to hunt with his best buddy decade after decade, has lived a good life, the life he wanted to live.
Later, Ron recounts the scene. “George had just come out of chemo. I had just come out of surgery. Two guys gimping along,” he said.
The deer wasn’t the biggest they’ve brought down, nor were the conditions the most difficult.
“But,” said Ron, “this deer was probably the best trophy of our lives.”
Back at Moore’s Landing, George’s SUV pulls the boat back to dry land. Ron asks whether we better not go to Emmylou’s for breakfast. George smiles. Says it’s up to me. After all, I have to get to work, right?
Well, yeah. But I don’t have to get to work until we’re done fishing — and we’re not done fishing until we’ve had breakfast at Emmylou’s.
Emmylou’s does a good business at breakfast. Lots of construction crews loading up on coffee, biscuits, sausage, eggs and more coffee. Lots of older guys. Half of them know George and Ron and stop by to talk. The conversation is a blend of famous Napa names — Bacigalupi, Peatman, Ghisletta — and talk about deer tags, Gray Lodge Wilderness Area in the Central Valley and wildlife management.
There’s a short scuffle for the bill and then its back out to the parking lot.
A couple of hours later, I’m staring at my computer at the Register office when George looms into view with a plastic bag. Today’s catch is filleted and waiting to go home with me.
Just one fish. But it sure felt good just to be out there.
In recent years, their friendship has grown deeper with another common bond. They are both cancer survivors.
Ron’s bout with cancer began 25 years ago, and he has largely beaten it, but now has serious medical problems from a degenerative bone disease.
George, the Register’s outdoors columnist, was diagnosed with two forms of leukemia three years ago, and is enduring an up-and-down battle today.
The two men talk nearly every day. They like to talk about fish and deer and whether it’s possible that a fellow named Legend really landed a 44 lb. striper in the Napa River. But they also tell each other about their medical odysseys.
“We compare stories and emotions and dreams,” said Ron. “I am very willing to do that because it helps him, but it helps me, too. It gives me strength.”
Whether they are fishing, talking fishing or daydreaming about fishing, the hardship of the illnesses stays with them. “You’re never away from it: it’s always in your thoughts,” said Ron.
On the water
George backs his SUV down the ramp until the boat is in the river. Ron has loaded onto the boat already to ease the strain on his legs.
George settles in, I step aboard and the 90-horsepower engine churns upriver at an easy 5 mph. It’s still too dark to make out the contours of the banks.
But we can see the fish, or at least little fish shapes flashing on the screen of the fishfinder, a sort of sonar that measures water depth and signals when something sizable is swimming past. We’re in depths of 5 to 20 feet, and striper bass are stacked up underneath us.
George and Ron have a secret spot they like near the Southern Crossing. We putter into the area and cut the engine. The fishfinder indicates the boat is nearly being lifted out of the water by all the stripers below. George says he’s never seen so many.
He and Ron make their first casts. Ron notes the tide is coming in, but both men say they are not of a mind with the fishermen who swear by the tides around here. The magic is not in the tide, but in the time of day, they say. You have to be out when the fish are active and feeding, which mostly means close on either side to sunrise and sunset.
George has plenty of his own ideas about the great outdoors in these parts. His outdoors column has appeared in the Register for 18 years, and he also talked about the outdoors during the decades he worked at KVON.
Former KVON owner Tom Young said he hired George to do advertising work more than 30 years ago, but George’s passion for the outdoors gave Young an idea. “He had a hobby of hunting and fishing, and I thought it would be an idea to have some features in our radio station about hunting and fishing,” said Young. “It turned out to be quite popular.”
Over the years, George fished and hunted his way around Napa County and environs, going farther and farther afield for pleasure and for the benefit of readers and listeners.
“What I started doing this years ago with my son (Guy Carl, the oldest of George’s four children), we’d started doing everything we could in a day,” said George. “First it was one or two hours from Napa, then four hours from Napa. Then a day and a half from Napa.”
George came to the right place to write an outdoors column. He says Napa County has the third-highest percentage of licensed fishermen and hunters among its residents of all the counties in the nation. The county has two chapters of Ducks Unlimited and members of several other hunting and fishing groups. He proudly notes that Napa hunters and fishermen kick up more than $100,000 a year to preserve wildlife habitat.
“We are preserving where other people are losing,” he said.
He also notes that Napa County is one of the most biologically diverse places in the country, with vast marshlands in the south serving as a home to countless shorebirds, while the rugged mountains to the north support deer and wild turkey as well as mountain lions and, in his estimation, 40 to 50 black bear.
Radio days
Ron was raised in the San Francisco Bay delta, hunting and fishing in wide open spaces that now house marinas, private fishing clubs and new homes. He moved to Napa when he was young and has lived here ever since, except for his service in Vietnam and a few years in Montana. Ron and his wife, Susan, live in Coombsville. Three years ago, Ron sold the Foster’s Freeze franchise on Imola Avenue after running it for decades.
George’s route to Napa was more circuitous. George, 66, was born and raised in Chicago. His radio career started when he was in the Army, working in the public information office at Fort Polk, La. He left the Army and returned to Chicago with an offer to be a deejay at a folk music station.
In 1964, George said, “the station changed and we were the first rock and roll FM station in Chicago. ... They didn’t have rock and roll on FM then. It was a place for elevator music.”
He promoted shows for the Turtles, the Beach Boys, Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs and others before moving to a station in Kalamazoo. Offered another job in Michigan, he looked around for a bigger change and landed an offer from Napa’s KVON. He stayed for decades, shifting into semi-retirement 10 years ago, when Young sold the station.
The leukemia diagnosis surfaced in 2004. George explored the options, and in 2006 decided to get a bone marrow transplant at Stanford Hospital. It took several weeks to find a donor match, then last spring he and Andi moved to Mountain View for three-months of intensive, expensive treatment.
The experience was exhausting, as Andi and George recounted in a series of articles for the Register. Just as bad from George’s perspective is that it put a serious crimp in his outdoors schedule. George was relieved to come home, and has had good days and bad since. In recent weeks, he had a second transplant, this time while he stayed at home. The leukemia, however, has proved persistent.
Fish ain’t biting
At the fishing spot, we can hear bridge traffic in the distance and geese honking on their way past. Sometimes the only sound is the zip of the fishing lines as we cast into the water, and the soft whirr of the lines as we spool them back in.
After about 10 minutes with no action, George says, “Ron, you can start catching fish anytime. Don’t wait on me.”
Ron’s amenable, but the fish aren’t. Twenty minutes pass before the tip of George’s pole bends sharply down toward the water under the pull of a bite.
George works the fish, reeling him in, then pulling the pole straight up to bring the fish in closer. The fight doesn’t last long before Ron grabs the net, George brings the fish to the surface and Ron hauls him in.
A striper, about 22 inches, well above the 18-inch limit for a keeper, but well below the size of the beast supposedly caught by the Legend.
Light is appearing in the eastern sky, above Skyline Park. Songbirds make a huge ruckus along the shoreline. Ducks glide in the shallows and step along the muck in search of breakfast. George’s cell phone rings, and he digs it out of his pocket.
Andi’s driving to work, and at this moment is in transit only a couple of hundred yards away. George assures her he’s feeling good and is right where he wants to be.
George steps on a small foot pump attached to a propeller. Without using the engine, the boat circles into and out of the shallows, turning in slow arcs. Sometimes I look up to see the sunlight striking high on Mount Veeder. Other times, I’m staring at the softer curves of Mount George.
After a while, we troll down river. I manage to hook the bill of Ron’s baseball cap as I swing the fishing rod from one side of the boat to the other. I was that close to taking his eye out, but he doesn’t seem upset. I have a feeling I’ll be a fish tale as soon as I’m out of earshot.
Now we’re in full daylight and it’s a feast for the eyes: The brownish hues where the water meets the reeds, the egrets hunkered near a tree fallen in the shallows, a plastic chair high up on the bank near the Napa Pipe site — some fisherman’s lunchtime hideaway.
The fishfinder is still showing lots of action, but nothing’s biting.
Ron’s got a theory. Weeks of freezing cold have caused a slowdown. The fish are around, but they are deep in the water and not moving much.
George says how he wishes they found more fish to impress me, and repeats how happy he is just to be out here.
‘Trophy of our lives’
They both tell parts of a story that I think is more than just a story. In 2006, they went deer hunting together. They were doing that decades ago, long before the drug regimens and doctor visits and big words that describe tiny, microscopic things in your blood and bones.
On this trip they bagged a deer, and then the hard work started. By Ron’s estimate, it took them “six times as long as it should have” to bring the beast down to the road. When it came time to skin the animal, they had to take turns sitting in a chair, resting and holding the deer while the other did the dirty work.
At first it struck me as a sad story — two old guys who can barely do what they love.
Then it struck me as a happy story — anybody lucky enough to hunt with his best buddy decade after decade, has lived a good life, the life he wanted to live.
Later, Ron recounts the scene. “George had just come out of chemo. I had just come out of surgery. Two guys gimping along,” he said.
The deer wasn’t the biggest they’ve brought down, nor were the conditions the most difficult.
“But,” said Ron, “this deer was probably the best trophy of our lives.”
Back at Moore’s Landing, George’s SUV pulls the boat back to dry land. Ron asks whether we better not go to Emmylou’s for breakfast. George smiles. Says it’s up to me. After all, I have to get to work, right?
Well, yeah. But I don’t have to get to work until we’re done fishing — and we’re not done fishing until we’ve had breakfast at Emmylou’s.
Emmylou’s does a good business at breakfast. Lots of construction crews loading up on coffee, biscuits, sausage, eggs and more coffee. Lots of older guys. Half of them know George and Ron and stop by to talk. The conversation is a blend of famous Napa names — Bacigalupi, Peatman, Ghisletta — and talk about deer tags, Gray Lodge Wilderness Area in the Central Valley and wildlife management.
There’s a short scuffle for the bill and then its back out to the parking lot.
A couple of hours later, I’m staring at my computer at the Register office when George looms into view with a plastic bag. Today’s catch is filleted and waiting to go home with me.
Just one fish. But it sure felt good just to be out there.
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Lynn wrote on Feb 27, 2007 1:40 PM:
Matthew wrote on Feb 27, 2007 2:14 PM:
Ron wrote on Feb 27, 2007 3:03 PM:
Bryan Poli wrote on Feb 27, 2007 4:10 PM:
vince wrote on Feb 28, 2007 8:54 PM: