No fishing possible, due to both what is hopefully the final course preparation crunch time (being doing almost nothing else since last March) and uninviting snow-ice-sleet weather with continued high water levels. Two days of rain about to happen, combined with snow melt in daytime highs of 38-40F, aren’t likely to help much. So fishing is mostly playing with indoor toys at the moment. To that end: rod stand!
I knew I had to have one as soon as I saw them on DragonTail Tenkara, but they were out of stock for a while. Is it worth $75.99 plus $15.00 postage? Why, yes. Yes it is. Because you can stand in front of your rod objects and grin and kind of nod to yourself, all self-satisfied. And you can arrange them just so. Hours of wintertime non-fishing killed right there.
It comes disassembled with some awesome Chinglish instructions, but it’s not hard to put together. I always, no matter what I’m putting together, put something on backwards and don’t discover it until much later, and this was no exception. But you don’t even need any tools to put it together. I think it’s made for things like displaying your wares at trade shows, or possibly store displays.
I had all of my rods kind of tilted against the grill of an amplifier, then when I tidied up and sorted out the room they were stacked against the wall in a corner. This is better. I still have no idea what to do with all the rod socks and tubes I’ve accumulated. I don’t use them for anything. At the start, I carefully put each rod in a sock and a metal tube before I put them in the car. Coming home, they just stayed in their slot on the pack. Pretty soon I just put them in their pack slot as I left. Maybe one or both would be useful if traveling by air or on an extended motoring trip, but, really, at the moment I have zero use for them.
I also tried to get my rapidly expanding fishing library, stream stuff, and tying materials under some kind of control. I’ve bought a good portion of the beginner-level tying books, the small handful of driftless guidebooks available, and am edging into some of the standards on fly fishing. Though the books on flies are far more useful than the books on tactics. Western style tactics focus hard on casting. Sometimes I think there could hardly be a better advertisement for tenkara than reading a couple of the small stream chapters or books written from a western gear perspective. Like, you could do that. I guess. But why would you? Still, anything about fly fishing is worth reading.
My take, from my own experience, is that it’s pretty easy to learn to tie from books. Good ones, anyway. I went to YouTube a few times to see things in action (hair stacking is a good thing to actually see done), but the best books will give you all the background and starting advice you need. Knowing what I know now, if I had to choose just a few to start with, they’d be:
Fly Tying Made Clear and Simple by Skip Morris (the followup is good, too)
Charlie Craven’s Basic Fly Tying by Charlie Craven
The Benchside Introduction to Fly Tying by Ted Leeson and Jim Schollmeyer (takes a more encyclopaedic vs tutorial approach, with a great split-book, patterns at the top, techniques at the bottom structure, like two books bound in one)
They are all superb, with good step by step photographs. For extensive advice on beginning materials, I’d also recommend:
Essential Trout Flies by Dave Hughes
It’s kind of a distillation of his much larger tome, Trout Flies.
You probably wouldn’t want to start with it, as that’s not its intent (though I think you could), but if you fish tenkara then soon after getting a hold on the basics I would recommend devouring:
Simple Flies by Morgan Lyle
I only list it afterward because it doesn’t attempt to take a step by step beginner tutorial approach (though it has excellent step by step photographs for each pattern) and you’d probably want to start with a book written from a pure beginner perspective. I regard “Simple Flies” as the most important book in my fly pattern library, though.
I haven’t been tying, because for some reason tying is too concrete an activity to count as good procrastination. I can waste hours doing mindless stuff instead of making lectures. But when I start tying, a little voice says “For god’s sake. You should be making lectures.” And I instantly guilt myself out of it. Writing this post, on the other hand, is excellent procrastination.
At this point I’ve accumulated everything needed to tie all of the nymphs and streamers I use, plus most of the standard patterns they teach you in any book. I’m over the materials hump just about everywhere except for dries. And of course I pine to get over the hump there too, with a range of sweet rooster capes. Which is irrational. Because I’m not big on fishing dry flies at this stage (caught a grand total of two fish on them in 2015, within ten minutes of each other). Yet I still feel a deep down need to learn to tie them. And I want me some lovely $80 necks. There’s no explaining this sort of thing.
The vise is a PEAK rotary, mostly blinged out (exceptions are the brass knobs, which I’m not going to buy, and the travel bag, which I likely am). I’m completely happy with it and would recommend it. The only other one I seriously considered was a more expensive Dyna-King. I may yet get one down the road.