I was given a Temple Fork Outfitters Tenkara rod (the 10’6″ Soft Hackle model) for my birthday, and it remained in the wrapper until the giver was around to show me what to do.

I have since deployed the thing with great success on the Housatonic River, mostly for smallmouth bass.

I also bought a smaller one for use in small trout streams.

It’s a fixed-line rod, no reel, and it telescopes out. When in the closed position it’s easily stuck in a day pack.

Backpacking anglers love them. So do more sedentary types.

Meanwhile giant snakes are everywhere, especially on the Housatonic. It’s so warm and dry that even the snakes need to cool off.

So fishing upstream of the Amesville Bridge, on heightened snake alert, I beheld an enormous serpent.

It rose up out of the river, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

Well…that’s a little exaggerated.

But it was still a big snake, just hanging around waiting for some oaf like yours truly to come blundering by.

Also upstream of the bridge, a comprehensive effort by those mysterious Rockpile People.

I see this everywhere I fish — rocks arranged in piles, for an unknown purpose.

These intrepid Rockpilers braved the evil serpents and put up a whole mess of them.

And finally, first trip on the Lower Lake on Mt. Riga with the pontoon boat. The TFO rod landed my first big largemouth of the year, as well as a fairly hefty crappie.

I frequently have Snake Alerts when fishing, and it is always something I have spotted in my peripheral vision — a root, or old piece of hose.

I leap in the air, my pulse gets going, and that’s that.

But the other day on the Blackberry River, I looked down and beheld — A SNAKE!

An honest-to-God coiled-up underwater-type snake.

Which insisted on following me around. I gave it the slip. It hung around, looking for me.

Because it is an evil serpent that wants to bite me. Never mind it’s about three feet long tops, and about the diameter of my thumb. It is an manifestation of Satan and I don’t want it messing with my trout fishing.

The Hendrickson hatch has begun in Northwest Connecticut, and the other night I was fishing single dry flies and catching mostly stockers on the Blackberry River in East Canaan.

I also made the acquaintance of a truly large rainbow trout, which I have named Mongo. (I name all large fish Mongo. It’s simpler than thinking up new names — Hercules, Samson, Ralph — and trying to remember them. Plus I am almost 100 percent certain the fish doesn’t care what I call him.)

The pool in question is right above a breached dam, and a favorite spot for bait and spin fishermen. I usually skip it, but as I walked by I noticed the large number of trout holding and the presence of Mongo, who left my bank as I strolled by and swam lazily into a different lie.

So I went out in the pool, expecting every fish to scatter. They did, but came back quickly enough.

Except Mongo, who settled in about ten feet away from me and yawned at my offerings.

I bumped the damn fish in the face with a nymph and he shrugged it off.

I photographed him, sort of, with the point and shoot through my sunglasses. Not ideal, so I have added a helpful red oval around Mongo.

He’s a big one. I have since witnessed two slingers hook Mongo and fail to land him. The second time it was a pair of guys who failed, largely because they wouldn’t get in the water. For the price of wet feet, they could have had a trophy trout.

But Mongo is still with us, and thank goodness for that.

Notes: The Blackberry is heavily stocked and heavily fished. The stocked brook trout responded particularly well to my “Meat Lovers” trio of sucker spawn, San Juan worm and crayfish. As the season progresses, most of the stocked trout will be hauled out and the net will show stream-bred and/or holdover rainbows and browns. These fish will be in the less accessible stretches of the river, which are a pain to get to and not that easy to fish, with a substantial canopy and extra-slippery rocks that make wading difficult.

I knew that someone had remade “I Spit On Your Grave,” the immortal rape ‘n’ revenge exploitation flick made in the late 1970s in Kent, Conn.

I did not realize that the remake had spawned two sequels.

So I didn’t know what to expect when I popped “I Spit On Your Grave 3: Vengeance in Mine” into the DVD player.

One thing about the original — it had a budget of about $12 ($43.64 today).

Spit 3 has pretty good production values. So when Angela (Sarah Butler) indulges in some creative plumbing with the personal rear end of a child molester, it is very realistic.

There’s some plot that detracts from the story, and a really crummy cop, but mostly it’s angst and revenge.

So if that’s your thing, see this flick. If not, you haven’t missed anything.

Two coils, for overall grossness.

March 31 — Another secret stream, secretish, anyway. The last time I named it I got a lot of squawking from self-righteous nimrods who should know better.

Well, bite me, self-righteous nimrods. (Which would be a good name for a rock band, incidentally.) It’s Sages Ravine, truly in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut, and accessible only via a half-hour hike from the top or from an unmarked pulloff on a state road below, with room for two cars if they are small.

The winning combo today was a bead head black Wooly Bugger, size 12, and a Deer Hair Sedge (light and dark, sizes 16 and 12) up top. I also used a brown Wooly #12, a Copper John #14, and sucker spawn #12 with success, but nothing was as consistent as the black Wooly and DHS.

The fish chewed all the hackle of the Wooly (see photo).

I saw a caddis — at least it looked and acted like a caddis — hit the water and start skittering around. A brookie of some heft shot up and gulped it.

So for the last half hour I imitated that behavior with the DHS, large and small.

I also offer my first 2016 entry in the exciting “Aaagh Snake!” series of photos, which features pictures of inanimate objects that look for a moment like a giant evil nasty snake. Previous entries have included lengths of garden hose, fan belts, and, like today, roots.

I am under strict orders not to publicize this brook trout stream. So I will only say that it is somewhere in New England, unless it’s in New York, or maybe Pennsylvania.

The hiking is arduous, with the very real possibility of being treacherous. If I turned an ankle or something it would be very difficult to get out.

I tried to capture the steepness of it in these pix.

There are some legitimate 8-10 inch brook trout in here.

I really like hitting the small streams this time of year — before the understory grows up and I find myself in the middle of a thicket of prickers.

Some photos from two recent expeditions on small streams in search of brook trout.

Wachocastinook (aka Riga) Brook, March 12:

Sages Ravine, March 17

In both cases the winning fly was a soft-hackle wet fly, size 14, yellow.

These guys are seeing things. You aren’t.

I recently re-read Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and, a couple years earlier, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Looking back at these books as a middle-aged man with over a decade of sobriety, I expected to have a different opinion or reaction than I did as a stoned teenager or drunken college student.

(Er, um, drunken graduate student also.)

One thing stood out to me — Neal Cassady was psychotic. Not a holy angel spouting beatitudes. A lunatic.

When  the “Electric Kool-Aid” subjects Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drove their school bus cross country in 1964, with Cassady at the wheel, they filmed everything. They recorded everything too.

Of course they didn’t synch the audio recordings with the film footage.

Which meant that at journey’s end, Kesey and Kompany had miles of footage and tape to edit together.

They tried, but it was a mess, and ultimately the project fizzled.

In 2011, Allison Ellwood and Alex Gibney’s “Magic Trip” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Sundance Film Festival audience routinely enjoys the most appalling crap. They liked “Magic Trip.”

The directors managed to put together a more or less coherent account of the fabled trip, and even synched up some of the sound with the pictures.

Which is why I say, without any doubt, that Cassady was a complete whack job.

Where Allen Ginsberg heard an angel speaking, I hear babble from the padded cell.

It may just be a difference in perception — but I don’t want this guy driving the goddamn bus. Especially not while wearing headphones and shaking his head and waving his hands around.

The wheel, Neal.

Or is it “The Wheel, Neal”?

Anyway, despite the best efforts of the filmmakers to restore the footage and add to the myth of the Pranksters, “Magic Trip” boils down to the longest home movie of all time.

Hint to future psychedelic warrior/filmmakers — people who haven’t taken LSD can’t see what you are seeing, so shooting a lot of footage of people standing around in bathing suits will not be very interesting.

It’s probably a good thing that the Pranksters didn’t have modern digital equipment. They would have wound up with 1000 hours of shaky camera footage of people in bathing suits staring at the sky or at a stream or at the mud — not a miserly 100 hours.

Eyes on the road, cowboy

“Invasion of the Girl Snatchers” was the title given to the mid-80s rerelease of the 1973 exploitation flick “The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow.”

That’s pronounced “Mawk bee ang jow.” Just like it’s written.

The story, near as I can figure, has to do with Aph, a hippie wizard, who is under the control of the evil alien Utaya, who is in the body of private detective Sam Trowel and thus forced to wear Trowel’s truly unfortunate double-breasted sport coat.

There are bad guys and less bad guys and big 1970s land barges and hicktastic songs and zombies and alien confusion about human anatomy.

And hippies. Lots of hippies.

Aph wears a robe, has one of those broccoli haircuts and says things like “Oh Queen Shiltipada, hear the words of Aph, son of Jehovah” at the drop of a hat.

At the drop of two hats, you get stuff like this: “Wait! I question the ability of his astral shell to pierce the vortex of Etheria and yield its harvest to the upper kingdom.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with that, although Dope Number One tries.

“Man, you are a sickie!” he hisses at Aph, right before Queen Shiltipada drinks all the nitroglycerin that’s cunningly stored in a Lancer’s bottle.

I don’t want to spoil the end for you, so I’ll just say it makes no more sense than the beginning.

This true Grade Z filmmaking — spastic cuts, horrendous lighting, and the same two breasts, off and on.

An all-time classic Four coils, and a nomination for the next Iron Coil award.

The Godz — Whiffenpoof Song