Build Your Own Fly Rod: DIY Video 3
Things are heating up in our DIY fly rod build.
Matt Draft is back for the third video in our seven part series on building your own fly rod. In this video you’ll learn about tip tops, how to spline a rod blank, wrap your guides and get everything aligned. Our rod is starting to look like something by the end of this video!
Check out Matt’s site, Proof Fly Fishing. As a special thank you to G&G readers, Matt will be offering free shipping on all of his kits for the next seven weeks. Just use the code G&Gfreeship on his web site.
BUILD YOUR OWN FLY ROD: DIY VIDEO 3 TIP TOPS, ALIGNMENT AND WRAPPING GUIDES.
Read More »GAS
By John Byron
It’s a thing. Gear Acquisition Syndrome. GAS.
The most you can use at any one time is one. One guitar. One fountain pen. One fly rod. But how many you have is N, where N is a much bigger number than one.
That’s GAS.
The concept and phrasing, GAS, came from the world of music. Yes, how many guitars, pickups, mikes, etc. does a person need? And from photography, cameras, lenses, etc.
But perhaps the largest cluster of GAS-plagued souls is in fly fishing: rods, reels, lines, boots, buffs, hoodies, packs and the list is endless.
Does the rumor of a new line of fly rods from Scott or Loomis or Sage make your heart flutter? Has Amazon told you that you can’t return any more purchases for refund? Have you convinced your significant other that only a certain line on a certain reel will actually catch bonefish and you don’t have either but found a sale price online and your next trip will fail if you don’t buy them?
These are signs of GAS. But the surefire way to know if you’ve got it is to look in your garage or down in your basement:
Are your fly rods a small, neat collection of well-purposed tools? Or an inventory challenge?
Did you recently look in a drawer, find a reel, and say ‘Gee, I forgot I had that’?
Do you have to move a lot of fishing tackle aside to find fishing tackle?
Do you have more than twenty
Cut A Dovetail Every Day
Woodworking has taught me a few things about fly fishing.
Before Gink and Gasoline I was, for a time, very involved in the world of woodworking. I was fortunate to photograph and spend time working with some of the most talented folks in the field, many of them are still great friends. I still build my own furniture, in fact I just finished making a new set of cabinets for my kitchen, but it’s a hobby, not a job.
It was the early 2000s when I met Frank Klausz, a Hungarian-born furniture maker working in New Jersey. Frank specialized in high-end custom furnishings and reproductions and wrote books and magazine articles as well as instructional DVDs. An old world craftsman with a sterling work ethic and a great sense of humor, his name will be familiar to anyone who has studied the craft.
Frank is specifically known for his hand cut dovetail joinery. For many, hand cutting dovetail joints is the skill which separates the hobbyist from the artist. It is the kind of skill that’s bedeviling to master, while the master makes it look almost automatic. I had hand cut a few projects before I met Frank, but he was the one who really turned the lights on for me.
Cutting a perfect joint is really a matter of hand skill and muscle memory, much like fly fishing. There is some theory you need to understand but when it comes down to it, your hands must function independently from your head. The only way to achieve that is by repetition.
“I couldn’t really cut dovetails until I cut three-hundred for one project,” Frank told me.
“Cut a dovetail every day for a year and you’ll never have to think about it again.”
That advice ended up being a life lesson. I didn’t make it a whole year, but I cut
Read More »A Tight Line Presentation is Key in Saltwater Fly Fishing
SLACK IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.
When fly fishing in saltwater, keeping the slack out of the system is job one. Slack can cause missed fish, long distance release and even refusals. A tight line is key at every stage of the process, but many anglers overlook the initial presentation.
Triggering a fish’s instinct to strike relies on the fly having a lifelike action when the fish first catches sight of it. That means that the fly should move in the manner of the prey it represents from the instant it hits the water. In most cases that cannot be accomplished with slack in the system. Even, or maybe especially, when fishing crab patterns where the natural action is the fall to the bottom, slack kills. These flies are often eaten as soon as they hit the water and if the line has slack, you will never know it.
There is nothing more important to success in saltwater fly fishing than a tight line presentation, but it’s not an easy thing to pull off. Here are some tips and a video to help you get the slack out.
Read More »Buying US-Made Fly fishing Gear Helps US Fisheries
DID YOU KNOW THAT 10% OF THAT NEW FLY REEL GOES TO SUPPORT FISHERIES?
It’s true. Thanks to the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 and the Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950, a 10% excise tax on all hunting and fishing equipment goes into a trust fund to support fish and wildlife management.
The US public lands and the opportunities they offer to hunters and anglers are unmatched in most countries. If you are an American angler, a short conversation with European anglers will leave you thanking you lucky stars you were born in the US of A. Our public lands and National Parks are the finest anywhere but we too often take them for granted.
The hidden engine behind our fish and wildlife management is this 10% tax. It has brought species like white tail deer and turkey back from the brink and puts fish on your fly regularly. I know taxes are a hot button subject and I’m not looking to start a political debate so let me be clear. No one wants this tax to go away. It has been a boon, not only for the sporting public but for sporting manufacturers as well.
The idea is that by creating a quality hunting and fishing experience, more people will hunt and fish and they will spend more money doing it. It’s worked very well. The numbers are better documented for hunting than fishing. Hunters spend between five and ten billion dollars a year, generating as much as $324,000,000 in management funding. Firearm manufacturers see a return on their tax investment of around 1000%! You can read more about this (HERE) (HERE) & (HERE)
It’s pretty clear that Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson have been good to both the economy and the ecology, but there is one place where they come up short. The tax is figured on
Read More »Does Casting Technique Matter For Small Stream Trout Fishing?
By Louis Cahill
You can sure catch a lot of trout with no more than ten feet of fly line, but does that mean that casting doesn’t matter?
I had this conversation recently. I was fishing a classic, pocket water stream with a friend and at some point he asked me point blank why I was catching fish and he wasn’t. He was shocked when I told him the problem was with his cast. Neither of us had more than ten feet of line out of the tip of our rod.
It’s a problem that plenty of beginning, and even intermediate anglers have. Even with a very short line, poor casts make for poor presentations. the problem is compounded in tight quarters where your first presentation really needs to be your best. Flailing about in close proximity to fish is generally not productive.
One of the most common casting mistakes I see anglers make, when casting a short line, is using too long a stroke. Often, anglers will do this because they are struggling to load the rod. With the head of the line still on the reel, it’s impossible to load the whole rod like you would in a longer cast. The problem very quickly becomes one of line management. The long, and usually circular, casting stroke dumps the fly line on the water, making it nearly impossible to get a good drift. Especially in the conflicting current of fast pocket water.
Fixing this problem is super simple, and comes down to
Read More »Unhook Thyself! Safe, Painless Hook Removal
IF YOU’VE BEEN THINKING, “I LOVE GINK AND GASOLINE BUT I WISH IT COULD BE MORE LIKE JACKASS”, THEN TODAY IS THE DAY YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!
There are two kinds of fishermen. The ones who have hooked themselves and the ones who are about to. It’s a bad feeling the first time you put a big streamer hook in yourself past the barb. You feel pretty helpless if you don’t know how to handle it. I’ve done it many times and I’m here to tell you that there is an easy, and even painless, way to get that hook out. As a veteran guide Kent has had to do it plenty and he’s a master. He’s taken hooks out of clients without them even knowing it was done.
We’ve been wanting to do this video for some time. We kept waiting for one of us to get hooked but it hasn’t happened so on a recent float on the South Holston with the guys from Southern Culture on the Fly and Bent Rod Media I decided to take things in hand and hook myself so we could show you how to deal with it. I have to say, it was harder to get that hook in past the barb than I thought. If you listen closely you can hear Dave Grossman of SCOF almost lose his lunch.
So watch and learn and please,
Read More »Weather Dictates When and How I Fish My Terrestrials
Every year, I’m asked by clients, when is the best time for them to come up and experience the terrestrial bite? For years, I kept a terrestrial fishing journal to help me better serve my clients. The journal documented the arrival times of specific terrestrials and when I first started catching fish on them. It seemed to help me for a couple seasons, but after that, I started to become too reliant on the data in the journal, and I lost sight of the most important variable of all in timing the terrestrial season–weather. Depending on what the weather is doing for the current year, it can speed up or postpone the arrival of the terrestrial season. Some years it will only sway the start of the terrestrial season a week in either direction, while other years, it can sway the arrival well over a month. Understanding the role weather plays in the lives of terrestrials can help anglers nail down more accurately when the terrestrial season will begin and peak in their area. If you can be one of the lucky few to time and start fishing terrestrials before everyone else does, you can be rewarded with some of the biggest fish of the year.
Read More »Chasin’ Sea Runners, NZ style
By Chris Dore
So we don’t have any Sea Trout here in New Zealand as many would know them, but we have some great sea run brown trout fishing.
Our ‘Sea Runners’ are just your standard, wild brown trout simply exercising their efficient feeding patterns: they follow the food into and out of the salt as availability determines. What this means, however, is that there are a whole lot of fat, strong, and very fit fish that don’t see a lot of angling pressure while in our estuaries… Best of all, the months our main rivers are closed are often the best times to target them in tidal areas open year round.
When whitebait run in the springtime, many upstream residents of our coastal rivers drop back to the tidal zones to take advantage of this protein bonanza. Often these fish, along with those already residing in the tidal estuaries will follow the food out of the river mouths with the tides, and patrol the adjacent beaches.
With this event currently happening here in NZ, here are a few tips to get you amongst these estuarine brawlers.
• Whitebait aren’t strong swimmers: they will swim with the current which means upstream with the incoming tide… Your flies should too.
• However a useful tactic at times is to “swim against the flow” if your flies aren’t getting noticed. With often hundreds of naturals swimming around in a uniform direction, stripping your imitation across the current will stand out and get noticed.
• Fish your flies in teams to maximize their appeal. As mentioned, there are often hundreds of naturals moving about: a solitary fly being twitched here and there will get lost amongst the masses. Instead, fish teams of two, or three flies. With every strip of line they will
Read More »Fly Fishing Alpine Lakes
Fly Fishing on alpine lakes for trout has become one of my favorite ways to spend a day on the water.
There’s something really special about making long accurate casts to rising trout on the move. It’s very much a team effort between the fly angler and the oarsman. Often you can’t just sit in one spot and expect to get shots at rising trout. More times than not the oarsman has to stealthily row along with the cruising fish, pacing himself with the trout and their heading, so the angler can make a pin point cast just ahead of the trout.
Cutthroat Trout Release on a Montana Alpine Lake
Timing the rhythm of the trout rising is a key success factor for the angler as well. Get on the water early for the best dry fly fishing. Once the sun gets up high in the horizon most of the trout will stop feeding on top and move to deeper water. They do this for two reasons.