The Geezer Hatch
Ever heard the phrase, “the geezer hatch is on?”
I’ve used it myself. It’s a common way of saying there are a bunch of old dudes on the water. It’s pretty common to hear younger anglers and guides grousing or making jokes about old guys who can’t see their flies or wade like a mummy in a black and white horror film.
In the past decade, fly fishing has taken on the soundtrack of extreme sport and with it some of the attitude. Too many of us feel compelled to judge our fellow anglers and that comes down pretty hard on the over-seventy set.
Like any cross section of humanity, old guys run the gambit from pompous assholes to salt of the earth. On the whole, the younger guys I know treat them pretty well but once they are out of ear shot, there is often a comment made that reveals the judgment.
Maybe I notice it because I’m at the point in my life where it’s painfully clear that we’re all going down that road. It may also be that I habitually pull for the underdog and have a heightened intolerance to inequity. I’m not saying it’s a major problem, just an underlying prejudice that rubs me wrong sometimes.
This is where my friend Mike Ray comes into the picture. I’ve gotten to know Mike over the last year or so and had the pleasure of fishing with him both on the river and in the salt. Mike is a great angler. A solid caster, in spite of a badly scarred hand, and an all-around fishy guy who’s company I thoroughly enjoy. He’s about seventy, a retired lawyer who’s done well for himself.
If you didn’t know him, if you hadn’t fished with him, you might be tempted to throw him right into the geezer category. (Sorry Mike.) If you spend some time around the man, you see something completely different. That’s how prejudice works.
In fact, what you find is a guy with a youthful spirit, an open mind, and a hell of a nice cast. But there has always been something more to Mike that I just couldn’t put my finger on. There is an air about him when he put on his waders and climbs in the boat that is nothing short of a transformation.
There’s a calmness that comes over Mike when those waders go on. A comfort and a confidence that you don’t see in many anglers. His body language changes. The way he stands and holds his cigar, the way takes a knee on the bank, and I think even the way he sees the world become something completely different. Something old and familiar.
On a recent trip to Patagonia I found out what it is.
Read More »My Two Favorite Picky Trout Tailwater Nymphs
These two patterns never let me down on tough tailgaters.
Most of you are aware that Louis and I just got back from fly fishing and filming our segment for Playground Earth, sponsored by BFGoodrich Tires. We had the pleasure of fly fishing the Owyhee River, one of the finest trophy brown trout tailwaters I’ve ever had the opportunity to wet a line. The resident brown trout here proved to be quite picky, calling for not only accurate drag-free presentations from us, but our casts also had to be timed correctly to the feeding trout we had located. Out of the thousands of flies that we had on hand between us, two nymph patterns accounted for 80% of all trout landed. The splitcase bwo nymph and the splitcase pmd nymph were regular taken for naturals on the water througout our time on the Owyhee River. Never again will I only have a handful of these patterns on hand. I was down to my last splitcase nymph by the end of the trip.
Read More »Swinging Steelhead Flies for Trout
WANT TO GO STEELHEADING BUT THERE ARE NO STEELHEAD WHERE YOU LIVE?
Think about scaling down. The same flies and techniques that we use for steelhead will catch plenty of trout. And why not? Steelhead are just big sea-run trout and they have the same common instinct as their land-locked cousins.
I find myself fishing light switch rods for trout a lot these days. They are great versatile rods and I use them, not just because they’re effective, but because I enjoy it. One day, when I was swinging a small streamer with my 11′ 3″ three weight it struck me that was doing all the same things I did when steelheading. I went home and tied some of Hickman’s fish tacos in olive, size eight.
_DSC6030I caught a lot of fish on those flies but I thought I could take it further. I was tying flies for an upcoming trip to the Deschutes and I threw a couple of them in my trout box. My buddy Dan and I went fishing and devoted the whole afternoon to swinging steelhead flies. The results were awesome!
We caught a bunch of really nice fish but that’s not all.
Read More »Fly Fishing, Always Have a Plan B
Just about every fisherman out there is familiar with the saying, “never leave fish to find fish.”
I live religiously by this common sense fishing advice. It’s saved my butt many days on the water guiding, and keeps me from straying away from productive water when I find myself being drawn away to fish other spots upstream that look great. Always remember that fly fishing is full of hot periods and cold periods of catching. So when fishing it’s hot, you want to capitalize on it as much as you can before it goes cold. Sometimes it can be hot fishing for several hours, while other times you may only have one hour of hot fishing, such as when a hatch is in progress. Quite often anglers can have more success sticking around fishing one area throughly, when it’s producing, than fishing a bunch of spots partially. Every stream is different of course, but it’s generally safe to say that some sections of water always will be fishing better than others througout the course of a day. A fly fishers job is to determine where those hot sections of the water are and fish them.
Here’s some more common sense fishing advice for you all. Don’t continue fishing water if all you’re doing is striking out. Learn to cut your losses and be quick to move on in search of more productive water. Let’s face it, time flys on the water, and if you’re not careful, you can blow threw an entire day before you know it. No place is this more true than
Read More »2 Alternatives for Attaching Your Split-Shot
YOU’VE BEEN FISHING HARD ALL DAY LONG SEARCHING FOR THAT PERFECT HONEY HOLE. YOU KNOW THE ONE I’M TALKING ABOUT, IT’S THE ONE THAT HOLDS THAT TROPHY TROUT THAT KEEPS HAUNTING YOU IN YOUR DREAMS.
It’s getting late, your tired, and you know you should be heading back, but there’s a bend just up ahead, and your curiosity keeps pushes you forward with those powerful words, “This could be it, just see what’s on the other side”. Sure enough, as you round the corner you lay your eyes on a picture perfect run, offering everything a trophy trout could desire. You get into position, make the cast, mend your line, and begin following your strike indicator with your rod tip, when out of now where, it shoots under the surface like it was just attached to a iron dumb bell. You set the hook and feel the heavy weight of the fish thrashing its big head, and you’re immediately on cloud 9. The adrenaline rush doesn’t last long though. It’s quickly replaced by painful heart ache when you feel your tippet snap, and watch your rod go straight. The excitement is all over…, you won’t land that trophy fish or even be graced with a quick glimpse of it for that matter. The only memory you’ll have to remember that trophy trout by is the few aggressive head shakes. You bring your fly-less rig to hand and find the tippet broke at the split-shot.
Has this ever happened to you before?
If you attach your split shot too tight on your tippet it can weaken its strength significantly. Most anglers try to avoid this by tying a triple surgeon’s or blood knot above their tandem nymph rig, and attach the split-shot above that. The knot keeps the split-shot from sliding down to the flies during fly casting, and it only has to be snugly secured, which limits the chances of it damaging the tippet. It’s not 100% full proof, but it’s the most popular method used by experienced nymph fisherman. To limit the break offs during fierce fights, anglers should get in the habit of regularly checking their nymph rig for
Don’t Be a Sleep at the Wheel When Fishing Egg Patterns
Egg patterns are a staple in my fly fishing and guiding.
Stocked trout are suckers for them, but even wild trout will gladly snack on them if you correctly put it in front of them most of the year. Several different egg imitations and sizes are available for fly anglers to fish with. Y2K’s, glow bugs, sucker spawn and nuke eggs are just a few of the variations out there. I’m all for using these effective egg patterns on the water, but there’s one very important thing fly fisherman need to understand about fishing egg patterns, and it needs to be respected. When trout eat egg patterns, they usually do so with total abandonment, and if you’re not quick to set the hook, you’ll find trout will end up getting hooked deep in their throat or gills a high percentage of the time.
I’ve noticed this a lot over the years with the clients I guide. They’ll be asleep at the wheel during their drift, and the strike indicator will bounce three or four times, and then take off before they finally get around to setting the hook. If you’re going to fish egg patterns, do the fish a favor and be ready to set the hook at the first sign of a bite, no matter how subtle it is. This will greatly cut down on your egg patterns being swallowed by the fish in the process, and you’ll be practicing respectful catch and release. If you aren’t willing to take this approach, keep your egg patterns stowed away in your fly box.
Some of you may be saying, “wait a minute Kent, it’s reasonable to think the same thing could happen with other fly patterns if you wait too long to set the hook, right?” Yes, but I’ve found the frequency of it happening is far less than when you’re fishing egg patterns. Just the other day on the water, I put this very argument to the test. My client had a banner day. We landed a great number of fish, of which, many came on our nuke egg dropper. My client was doing a brilliant job of making good presentations and fighting the fish, but he was regularly setting the hook too slow. The delayed hook sets contributed to multiple eggs being swallowed and/or hooked deep in the throat by the trout. I had no choice but to snip the flies off, or risk injuring the trout further trying to remove the fly. After a while, I decided to stop fishing the egg patterns all together, and informed my client it wasn’t anything personal, but the slow hook sets were causing us to harm the fish, and since we respected the trout so much, we needed to stow them away for the remainder of the day. My client agreed 100%. He had already landed plenty of fish, and he admitted it was a serious problem we needed to eliminate. So I took off the egg dropper, tied on a soft-hackle and we continued fishing. Bites came, slow hook sets remained, but every fish we landed in the net had the soft-hackle lodged directly in the corner of the trout’s mouth, not in the throat. If this isn’t strong
Read More »Let it ride
By Daniel Galhardo
DON’T RECAST YOUR FLY UNTIL IT’S HAD A CHANCE.
It takes some time to learn how to read water well. But, at least when it comes to fishing mountain streams, the concept is easy to grasp: fish are looking for food and shelter, and don’t want to spend a lot of energy looking for food. Currents bring them food, slow water and breaks in the current gives them shelter. With that in mind we quickly learn that seams where current meets calm water may be the best places to target with our flies.
Once we learn this basic piece of information, we all want our fly to land with 100% accuracy where we suppose fish will be. But, hey, sometimes it won’t!
In recent days I have been taking a lot of people fishing. Most were new to fly-fishing and to tenkara. After giving them some basic instructions on how to open the rod, how to tie the line to the rod tip and tippet to the tenkara line and then tie the fly onto it, I would teach them how to cast.
It’s been said that anyone can learn how to cast with tenkara in a matter of minutes. I have found that on average it takes 7 or 8 casts to learn how to cast with tenkara fairly well, and I’m not exaggerating. But, like anything, it takes time to get the tiny fly to land exactly where they want. If I had to guess, I’d say that in the beginning about 70% of their casts will land in the vicinity of where they wanted. Perhaps 25% will land just off the target zone. And, of course, about 5% will land on the trees in front or behind them, but that’s a different article for a different day.
The 25% slightly off-target casts is what I’m interested in making a point about. Actually, it doesn’t matter if it’s 25%, 50%, or even if you’re
Read More »The Myth of Manual
IT’S A COMMON MISCONCEPTION THAT “REAL PHOTOGRAPHERS” ONLY SHOOT IN MANUAL.
It’s not true. Certainly not for me. I grew up using manual cameras. Cameras that didn’t even have light meters. In fact I’ve spent as much time looking at the ground glass of a view camera as through the lens of a DSLR. I’m perfectly comfortable with it but I recognize that the automatic features of modern cameras offer benefits that can improve my work and I see nothing wrong with using them.
What “real photographers” do, is understand their exposure choices. How a photograph is exposed has an enormous impact on its emotional content as well as its clarity and color palette. The proper exposure for any given image is a highly subjective thing and possibly the most important choice the photographer has to make. Whether in manual or automatic mode, there are choices to be made and good choices are never made blindly. The key is in understanding what your camera sees and knowing how to control it.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR METER
The first issue is understanding how your light meter works. There are two components to this. First, how the light meter judges a scene and second, how that judgment is influenced by the meter mode selection. First we will look at what your meter sees.
No matter how advanced your light metering system, it is still a dumb machine. That holds true for use in manual mode as well as automatic. This is where novice photographers go wrong in switching to manual mode. The meter functions in exactly the same way and the user either understands that functionality, or they don’t.
To put it simply, the camera doesn’t know what it’s photographing. It is only able to judge tone. To some extent modern cameras know about highlight and shadow but what they really see is the middle of the tonal scale. A value that photographers call
Read More »Catch And Release Is It’s Own Reward
By Louis Cahill
I SPENT A WEEK LAST YEAR AT THE PENLAND SCHOOL FOR CRAFT, TEACHING A CLASS ON BAMBOO ROD MAKING.
I was having dinner in the dining hall one evening with ten or so folks I’d never met. Eating with new folks every night is a sort of tradition at Penland and it’s a lot of fun. Every one was curious about fly fishing so I was answering questions and generally being the ambassador for all things fish related. It came up that I practice pretty strict catch and release. A woman at the table stated, more than asked, “what is it with you fly fishermen? If I’m going to go to all the trouble to catch a fish, I’m gonna eat it! What’s wrong with you?”
I am often honest to a fault and with out thinking I answered, “fish are, I think, the most beautiful creatures that live. Every one is unique. I think that’s the real reason I fish. Just to hold them and look at them. If I didn’t fish I’d never get to do that. I like to eat fish but I guess I just don’t have it in me to kill something that beautiful. ” When I stopped talking the table was silent and everyone was looking at the woman. It was uncomfortable at best. “Oh fine”, she exclaimed, “I feel just great now” and left the table. I didn’t mean to come down hard on her. It was a sincere answer and she did ask. Frankly it kind of shocked me that everyone else didn’t see it the same way.
Last year I had the pleasure of teaching my oldest friend to fly fish. He was so excited when he caught his first fish, a beautiful little brook trout.
Read More »3 Tips For Targeting Fall Browns
AUTUMN IS A GREAT TIME TO TARGET BIG BROWN TROUT.
This time of year brown trout are in pre-spawn mode and are moving from their year-round holding water to the spawning grounds upstream. This offers anglers the chance to tie into a nice mature fish that might be too reclusive to be caught the rest of the year. I had the chance to do just that while showing a buddy from Wyoming some of my favorite water in North Carolina. Here are 3 tips that helped make it a successful day.
Target Resting Water
The fish you are looking for are on the move upstream. Fish prefer to do their traveling at night, in the safety of darkness. That means that they are resting during the day. You will frequently find them in runs below water falls or long stretches of fast water. They will rest there during the day and take on the challenging water when they are fresh. Focus your efforts on the resting water. It worked well for us.
Use Your Eyes
Fish in pre-spawn mode will often hold where you least expect them. While fishing with my buddy Jackson the other day I stopped to take a leak on the bank and