Month: May 2016

The day after the crushing loss at STSNBN I had to head back to town for an evening commitment, but I checked in at our home water on the way.  It had been stocked for the first time this year since we were last there, so I was hoping for some easy stocker rainbows to salve the wound.  I sort of got it.  The water level was really low and the banks were trampled.  The main stocking pools were as low as I’d ever seen them.  Still, the first downstream pool yielded five rainbow, the most ever, and I thought maybe it was going to be a pretty good half a day.

I used a tandem Frenchie and Hare and Copper, and also a sparkle bugger.  Three came on the nymphs and two on the bugger.

I moved downstream, but the little cliff pool and the pool where James caught his first trout were low and trampled and bleak looking.  I caught a brookie from the latter.

Then I reached a deep pool just beneath that, behind a large rock.  I messed around with several rainbows at depth, hooked one and lost it at the net, then caught a final fish on the nymph rig.

And that was that.  It started out well, but all of the other pools were low and empty.  I covered most of the regular stocking water but didn’t see another trout.

The next trip was a solo outing to STSNBN en route to the cabin for a night.  Conditions were just about perfect.  The chub were just coming off their spawning colours, with some of the males’ tubercles starting to fall off.  They weren’t as swarming and voracious as they get later, but I steadily caught chub and some shiner.  I saw the odd trout, including a small one in the starting pool, but generally was striking out.

When I got into the trouty lower stretch it became a bit of a spooking excursion.  I saw a couple of larger fish, but didn’t threaten to catch anything.  The most interesting thing was in slow pool, where I caught four small smallmouths.  I’d only ever caught a single smallmouth before (from the same pool) at STSNBN, and these were there first centrarchids of 2016.

I got down to “trout pool” and slapped in my sparkle bugger.  A largish brown chased it, and behind it came thundering a massive brown.  The strike missed and they both disappeared.  Frustration was starting to build, now.  The bottom pool yielded nothing but chub, but I tried to just savour the late evening and I spent a good while there.  I started back as dusk was coming on.  Which experience has shown is by far the best time for the browns.

I got back to trout pool.  For whatever reason I switched to an egg pattern with a pigsticker hung off it.  I tossed the pigsticker into the likely water (a deep run, complicated this year by a drowned log and branches) and the largish brown hit it.  Behind it, again, came the massive brown, racing again to try to steal the prize.  There was a vigorous fight, but I got the largish one in and netted.  I measured it at a shade over 13″.

So.  That should have taken a pleasant day and made it a pretty damned good day.  But there was this business of the massive one, which dwarfed the largish one.  I figured all the commotion, and me having to come down the bank and into the water to net the largish one, should have ended matters.  But I went back up the bank and got settled.  In went the pigsticker to exactly the same place.

And the massive one rose like a submarine and hit it.

I’ve played what happened next over and over in my head for the past weeks.  It still stings about as much as it did live.  The thing was solidly hooked.  The largest trout I’ve ever had on a line, including some pretty big ones from my early 20s in the Canadian wilds.  It ran all over the place.  I was using the GM Suikei 39 and it was doing its job.  But.  But but but.  I had gravitated toward 6X fluorocarbon tippet.  And that’s what I had on.  I didn’t expect a potentially 20 inch brown.  Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.  Yet the GM 39 protected it.  The thing lumbered around, and when it didn’t feel like moving, I couldn’t move it.  It breached and came down on its side like a cow tipping over into the pool.  All sorts of thoughts about landing it went through my head, always followed by panicked reality checks that the damn thing wasn’t landed yet and it wasn’t real obvious how it was going to get landed.  In retrospect, I know what my only chance would have been.  I had the GM 39 in the shortest position, at 330.  If I’d opened it up to 390, I’d have had the distance to bring the fish to my (short handled) folding net.  That’s the only way I could have gotten it.  Had there been a second person who could have netted it, the fish was caught.  It was firmly hooked, and stayed on the line for several minutes.

As it was, I tried to handline it.  I got the line in my hands.  The fish thrashed in the shallows across the front of me.  I got another couple of feet pulled in and another hand on the line.  The fish got turned directly away from me, gave a huge thrust, and the 6X fluoro tippet, held in my hand with no give, snapped.

I sat there for like five minutes.  It was a fish that dwarfed a 13″ brown.  It could have been over 20 inches.  So I just sat there looking at the pool.  Maybe not the fish of a lifetime.  But probably one of them.

So oh well.  Eventually I collapsed the rod, picked myself up, and walked back to the Jeep in the dark.

Still not over it.

So for Mother’s Day weekend James’s mother, James, and I headed to Marquette, on the Mississippi, across from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights and tried to act like tourists.  We walked around trails and scenic overlooks at Pike’s Peak State Park, strolled what passes for a quaint touristy downtown in McGregor (nice from a distance, variable up close, probably in better form during main season), hiked at Effigy Mounds National Monument, and had dinner at a Wisconsin supper club.  There had been some rumblings that someone might like to dip a toe into this fishing stuff, so I told her to buy a license and trout stamp, and was somewhat surprised to find she did.  So on Mother’s Day we headed out into uncharted waters.  First we went to an Allamakee County stream I’d fished before, notable for having all three trout species, but not all that easy.  We rigged up, and as we were walking down to the water a young couple with spin rods arrived.  They immediately hurried past us and started fishing the first main pool downstream of us.  ‘Kay, whatevs, whatevs.

I set James’s mother up with the Tenkara Times Watershed 330 and a black sparkle bugger.  At the first half-decent holding water, I thought lightning was going to strike as a mid-sized rainbow started hitting her fly.  It tried to strike at least twice, but it was her first time fishing in her life, so figuring out what to do didn’t happen instantly.  The fish flirted a bit longer then lay low.  After a while the dude with the spinning gear came back up and told me his bail had broke.  So they left.  We continued downstream through the nice series of pools in open farmland and stopped at the first pool in the woods, after which the going gets a lot more difficult.  James and his mother got some flashes.  I had a brown almost to the net and lost it, but nobody caught anything.  We headed to Elkader where I’d planned lunch on a patio overlooking the Turkey River at an Algerian restaurant.  But we were too late for lunch and the restaurant was closed.  We caught the tail end of a Mother’s Day buffet at the only other restaurant I knew of in town, then I decided what the heck, let’s go to Richmond Springs.

It was as you’d expect on a sunny Mother’s Day Sunday, swarming but generally good natured.  There wasn’t anyone at the first couple of beauty pools up near the springs, so I parked at the shelter.  We weren’t really serious – I just took the Watershed rod and my vest.

Well. So. James’s mother started casting and armed with 500% more experience than first thing that morning, starting looking like she’d done it before.  She got proficient at tossing the bugger.  More than that, she settled in obsessively.  This happened once before in our lives, when it turned out 20-odd years ago that she had a more obsessive video gaming streak than I did, albeit directed at arcade-style games (an old Apple Mac game called Apeiron, I think, was the revelation).  James and I kind of looked at each other.  She started getting follows and flashes. I was yapping advice and as often happens a fish struck in mid-yapping, obviating the advice.  It started thrashing around, hooked, and I waddled out and handlined it in.

So she caught a brook trout.  This was a bit strange.  When James and I started last year, the first Iowa trout I caught was a brook trout, one pool down in the same stream.

No other fish cooperated, but it was an impressive showing, and she had to be more or less hauled off the stream.  I got a turn with the rod late on and caught a small rainbow.

Who knew?

Today is the last day of elementary school.  I’m picking up James and heading out for two nights in the cabin, and the last Iowa fishing possibly for a good while.  We’re not quitting fishing.  Rather, we’re heading out west for good portions of the summer.  First, we leave next Friday for a three week trip to Utah (fossil collecting for my work), Nevada (fishing a trout stream in the basin and ranges), Wyoming, and Colorado (one ultralight hiking/fishing trip each on different parts of the Encampment River).  James is then off to Europe with his mother for three weeks and I plan to go hardcore high altitude alpine lake fishing in Colorado.  Then when he returns in July the plan is to be off for several weeks fishing in the Wind River Range in Wyoming.  But for now, I have several recent trip reports to catch up on, and we’re going to savour a last couple of days of familiar streams.

My go-to rig has become tandem nymphs, with a size 14 Frenchie and a size 14 bead-head hotspot killer bug hung off the bend.  It’s just lethal.  T’he above are pretty crude because my tying is at best a work in progress (but they catch fish like crazy, so…) but the sand and fluorescent orange ones in the top row are just slam-dunk killers.  They get attention from trout in all likely holding water, period.  The bottom row are experiments I’m going to chuck in on this trip.  Three oyster and fluorescent pink (with huge 210 denier Danville thread, the only hot pink I have), black and purple (Pearsall’s silk; I wanted to make some “black and blue” but I don’t have any blue thread), black and red (70 denier Ultra thread), olive and chartreuse (3/0 UNI thread, the only chartreuse I have).

 

I’ve spent more money than I care to tote up on fly tying equipment and materials since I restarted fly fishing last year.  I now tie all of my own flies.  There are still a handful of residual commercially bought flies in my boxes, but they are rarely (/never) used patterns.  Pretty much everything James and I use to catch fish these days, I tie myself.  I haven’t dealt with a huge number of products and retailers, but my experiences have mostly been extremely positive.  J. Stockard is where I buy most of my materials.  My only minor complaint is that while they offer free shipping on orders over $100, it’s glacially slow.  Like, wait 10 days slow.  To get basic UPS ground you have to pay a flat rate of $10, which is more than most outlets charge for small packages with little weight.  But I can live with it.  They’ve only messed up one order, when they left out a spool of UTC Ultra wire from a large order.  They were immediately responsive, but when the spool arrived three days later, it was the wrong sized wire.  Again they apologized, explained they’d checked and the wrong size had been put in the bin, and then in another three days the correct spool arrived.  Stuff happens, they were nice about it and friendly and responsive.  I continue to send most of my materials business their way.

But it’s not always like that.  In his book “Simple Flies,” Morgan Lyle recommends Performance Flies.  They are a source for competition hooks and materials.  Their website looks great.  It seems to be updated regularly.  I placed an order on March 22 for a Coq de Leon cape listed as in stock.  I got an auto-response email acknowledging the order.  Then nothing happened.  I checked the order status online and it showed “Processing”.  Eventually I emailed, asking whassup?  Nobody replied.  I have since emailed multiple times, and been ignored.  Two months later the order shows the same on their page.  I got the cape from somewhere else, but their page says the order can’t be cancelled and they ignore my emails.  Conclusion: stay the heck away from Performance Flies. [Update 6/22/2016 – Kevin Compton of Performance Flies finally got back to me.  He said he hadn’t received my earlier emails, apologized profusely, and refunded my money. He said they’d just opened a retail store in Spruce Creek the week of my order and things were chaotic – they sold their only two of the tailing cape I ordered and hadn’t received another from Whiting.  Well, okay, apology accepted.  I will give them another try in future.  They certainly are a source of a ton of Euro goodness.]

And another gripe on equipment.  Mostly the standard stuff lives up to the billing.  Dr. Slick stuff is only eh-okay.  Their whip finishing tools are really flimsy (the bamboo handled one came completely apart when I dropped it on the floor; okay, I dropped it on the floor, but the thing just exploded and the cheap glue holding the bamboo bit on completely gave way).  I went through most of their scissors.  The cheaper ones aren’t really worth it, but their Razor Scissors live up to the billing.  But anyway, my complaint is about bobbins.  I got a couple of the regular Wasatch bobbins sold by TenkaraBum to start with.  They work great.  Then I got a Rite Bobbin (half-hitch) from somewhere.  I fell in love with it.  It’s a pain to switch thread, but (seemed like) a great bobbin to leave your go-to thread in with the tension precisely adjusted.  So I purchased three more from J. Stockard.  Well.  It became obvious one of them was a dud immediately.  It broke any thread you put in it within 10-20 seconds of wrapping.  I assume there’s some burr or rough metal edge just inside the tip of the bobbin, because that’s where it reliably breaks the thread.  I had it in mind to put it under a microscope and see if I could identify the problem and fix it.  But I haven’t gotten around to it.  A second one was a lot more insidious.  You could tie two or three flies with no problem.  But then, magically, the thread would break.  I assumed for a good while the issue was me, that I was catching the hook point or something.  Or maybe the 8/0 thread spool I was using.  It became clear there was a problem with the bobbin as I’ve started mass tying Frenchies and Beadhead Hotspot Killer Bugs.  It dawned on me as the thread would magically break, again right at the tip, when obviously clear of the hook tip and obviously not under undue tension.  It can happen twice tying a single fly.  It can happen once every three flies.  But it happens, again and again, and it’s the bobbin.  I switched to the Wasatch regular bobbin using exactly the same thread. A dozen flies later, the thread hasn’t broken a single time.

Well, the Rite Bobbin people seem like nice folks, but all I have are the data in front of me.  I bought four of their products, and two of them simply don’t work.  (I actually have barely used the third of the ones I bought as a group, and am now leery of it.)  Not going to be buying another.

Yowza.  I saw these on Anthony Naples’ site, and had to make some.  They just seem like such a natural combination, yet it had never occurred to me to put the elements together like this, and I’ve yet to see them elsewhere.  Maybe they’re well known, I don’t spend a lot of time in the online world.

Even before putting them in the water, the idea was just so perfect, they almost had to work.  And boy howdy, did they work.  On a just completed stay at the cabin (trip reports to come), the first day I fished these, they accounted for all but two of 14 rainbow and 3 wild browns, then the next day all but one of 20 wild browns.  They don’t just work, they kicked it on two very different streams, one a heavily fished stocker, the other a protected catch and release wild brown stream.  I mean they kicked it.  They took fish from pretty much every likely holding position on both streams.

And they’re killer bugs, so they’re extremely quick and simple to tie.  I did it like this: #14 Daiichi 1560, bend down barb, put 7/64″ gold tungsten bead on.  Mount in vise, add 10 wraps of 0.015 lead, push it forward to trap the bead.  Tie in 8/0 fluorescent orange UNI thread behind the lead, wrap a foundation back to the bend, come forward and make a dam to secure the lead, wrap over the lead, and generally make a nicely tapered thread base, ending with the thread behind the bead.  Tie in a five(ish) inch strand of sand killer bug yarn, wrap it back to the bend and forward again, controlling taper by twisting the yarn more or less, and tie it off behind the bead.  Form a hotspot band with the thread (the 8/0 UNI is what George Daniel uses for Frenchies on his YouTube demo, but it’s tightly corded – to cover the bulgy yarn a thread that you can flatten more, like a 70 denier Ultra, might work better, but the UNI works fine) and whip finish.  Colour the yarn with a sand felt marker, done.

It’s kind of like the front half of a Frenchie and the back half of a killer bug (minus the copper flash at the rear).  And while it’s only a two day sample size, it’s the most effective fly I’ve used since returning to fly fishing last year.