5 Tips for Beating Out the Winter Cold on the Water
I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m past the days of heading out into Arctic conditions to fly fish unless I’m outfitted properly. Call me a wuss or nancy, that’s fine with me, I don’t care how big the fish are, you can catch them. I’ve been miserable too many times over the years and I refuse to put myself in that position anymore. If I’m unable to enjoy myself wetting a line, there’s absolutely no reason for me to be out there. Furthermore I’ve had some really close calls with frostbite in the past, and frostbite is scary stuff folks.
Read More »Prolong the Life of Your Leaders with Tippet Rings
Leaders have got quite expensive over the past couple decades.
Recently, I saw a pack of two fluorocarbon leaders retail for $20.00 in a fly shop. That’s a pretty good hit to the wallet if you get out on the water to fly fish regularly. One way you can prolong the life of your leaders is to use tippet rings. The tippet ring takes the leader out of the equation by providing the angler a reusable anchor point to tie on tippet and attach flies. Climax manufactures and sells tippet rings and although I don’t like using them for my dry fly fishing because they can create micro-drag, they work very well for nymph fishing.
Tippet Ring Rigging Instructions
What I like to do is take a 7 1/2′ tapered 2X or 3X leader and tie the end directly to the loop ring. I then tie 24-30″ of 4X-6x tippet to the other side of the loop rig and tie on my tandem nymph rig. This keeps me from having to cut into my leader when I’m changing out flies or if I break off on a snag fishing. The tippet rings are also very nice for anglers that struggle with their eye sight up close, and makes it very easy
Tandem Tactics for Trout. Part One: Touching The Surface
FOR A WHOLE LOT OF REASONS, TWO FLIES ARE BETTER THAN ONE.
There’s nothing new about fishing teams of flies. European fly anglers have fished elaborate multi-fly systems, called casts, for generations. Most serious trout anglers here in the US regularly fish two or three flies, where regulations allow. Still, there are many anglers who resist this technique. These anglers are often intimidated by casting a team of flies and, perhaps more often, just not sure what to tie on.
Nymph rigs, with split shot and indicators, are a challenge to cast but the second fly is really not the problem. When the setup tangles, the split shot is generally the culprit. If you are comfortable casting split shot, you will likely not have trouble with the extra fly but if you are still concerned, consider replacing that split shot with a weighted nymph. A tungsten bead or some lead on the hook shank can sink your setup as effectively as shot and may catch a fish.
My nymph rigs almost always include two or three nymphs and at least one split shot. Yes, like everyone else who owns a fly rod, I occasionally get a tangle. I’m pretty good at getting them out and adhere strictly to the two minute rule. If it’s going to take more than two minutes to untangle, I cut my flies off and re-tie.
There are a couple of things you can do to reduce tangling with weighted set ups. Tangles usually result from slack in the system. Slow your cast down and focus on making nice clean loops. The smooth application of power and abrupt stop are never more important. In truth, most tangles do not form in the cast itself but are due to a failure to control your line while not casting. Fish often help with this. Missing a fish on a small trout stream often ends in tree climbing. Be conscious of you rig as you move from spot to spot and set up to cast. This will cut out a lot of the birds nests.
Dry Dropper rigs
The most commonly used team of flies is the dry dropper. There are two common strategic ways of looking at this technique. The first is
Consumer Surplus and Fly-Fishing
By Louis Cahill
What would I have to pay you to give up fly-fishing?
If you are not familiar with the term consumer surplus, don’t feel bad. It is, to my mind anyway, a pretty esoteric concept, but one which economists hold a lot of stock in. It’s a way of measuring the parts of our economy that can’t be measured. It’s the value of what you don’t pay for.
On one level it makes a lot of sense. An area that economists spend a lot of time evaluating is the digital economy. For example, a study was done to evaluate the consumer surplus of Facebook. If it could be determined what people would pay for Facebook, that figure would be the consumer surplus. That’s a hard value to asses, so they did the next best thing. They figured out what it would cost to get people not to use Facebook. They actually paid people to give it up for a month. The average cost of getting someone off of Facebook was $48 per month.
Personally, I have a lot of feelings about that. I quit Facebook about a year and a half ago. The account is still there and Justin Pickett posts on it for me but it’s been a year and a half since I looked at it. I would pay well over $48 per month to not see Facebook and I might be willing to pay others not to use it. If you are a Facebook user, I recommend giving it up. You’ll be happier, I promise. Ok, enough rant.
This got me thinking about the consumer surplus in fly fishing. What is the value of the things that we don’t pay for? Let’s start with Gink and Gasoline. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start charging you, but you’d be shocked how many times that idea has been pushed on me. You might be surprised to hear that I have turned down three offers to sell G&G, so I have some idea of what that figure might be, but what is it worth to you, the reader?
It’s worth a great deal to me. Not in dollars, but in my heart. That part of me is a little put off by some economist’s assertion that the digital efforts of my labor are simply part of some math equation bent on figuring my worth to the machine. Still, there is a dollar and cents value to what’s going on here and it isn’t cheap to run anymore. I’d like to point out that the bill is currently being paid by the awesome folks whose ads you see on the site. Also the folks who come on the hosted trips and the straight up heroes who contribute the content. That’s worth thinking about next time you hit the comment section.
So if we can put a value on the five minutes you waste every day, at work I assume, reading G&G, what about the time you actually spend fishing? Let’s use the same math as the Facebook study.
What would I have to pay you to give up fly-fishing?
Read More »Fight the urge….
By Jesse Lowry
I grew up with a bait caster in my hand, fishing for bass with my dad since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.
Even after I started fly fishing for trout in my teens, I never really crossed bass fishing with fly fishing, save for practicing my casting with a 5 weight and little poppers; which can be a ton of fun catching smallies and blue gill.
But when it came to largemouth bass fishing, me and dad were always out “hog hunting”. Two feet of water, tight to the shoreline, downed trees, logs, weed beds, heavy structure. We were after 6-8 pound fish (hogs by Canadian Standards), using 30-pound braid, stiff-as-a-board rods, and a reel that may as well have been made by Warn Winches. It was tournament style fishing and in my mind it was definitely not the place for a flimsy fly rod.
Then fly fishing found the internet and its endless streaming of everything. I realized there were fly rods bigger than my “heavy duty” 6 weight (we didn’t exactly have a local fly shop back then, other than some smaller local shops near the few trout streams in southern Ontario 5 hours away). For the first time, I saw someone fly fishing for peacock bass in the same type of structure we targeted bass with our traditional gear. After that I thought to myself, man… I could do that here no problem. Unfortunately I was in my mid 20s, about the time that life started to get in the way of fishing. My fishing time was precious, I wanted to catch, not fish. After about an hour with a fly rod and no “real luck” (anything over 2 pounds) I would get frustrated and pick up my trusty bait caster with a Yamasenko and typically boat a few “hogs” within the next hour.
(Authors note: Yamasenko’s are trophy largemouth crack in up here in Ontario, they can’t resist them. )
This year life has changed a bit, but by no means do I have more free time to fish. I just had my first child, a little girl named River, I’m still working 50 hours a week at a desk in Toronto, and have started building a home/fishing lodge in BC. However, I decided this year to make a conscious effort not to pick up a bait caster when I’m on the bass boat. Not because a fly rod is a more effective way to catch bass. In my opinion it’s not, and no matter how good I get on the fly, for me it never will be (not with that kind of attitude, you’re probably thinking). But fly fishing for bass sure is a hell of a lot more fun! When you hook into a good fish on a fly rod it’s far more rewarding than the 20 second fight on heavy traditional gear.
A few weekends ago was a real test.
Read More »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 »Garner’s White Trash Bass Fly
WANT TO CATCH BIG BASS?
How about really big bass? Striper fishing rivers in the south during the summer can be off the hook but it can also be challenging. Those big bruisers can get pretty damned selective and you a pattern that will get them moving.
Nobody knows this game better than Garner Reed. Today Garner is going to share a pattern he developed for catching big striped bass and spotted bass on the Etowah River. He calls it Garners White Trash and it gets the job done.
Watch the video and learn to tie this great bass fly.
Read More »Carp Are Not Bonefish
By Dan Frasier
Hardcore carp nuts are hard people to like.
We’re argumentative, sensitive about our fish, and contentious. We’ll assume you’re insulting the fish we love so much; taking offense to the most innocuous statements and won’t hesitate to demean whatever quarry you choose to pursue. I was once heard saying, “Trout are the pretentious man’s bluegill.” Things like that. For the record, I later apologized because I love trout and the dude I was yelling at didn’t deserve it either way. But this defensive nature begs the question, “How the hell did we get like this?”
The answer is pretty simple. We spent years fishing in the shadows. Lying about what we were chasing or being derided for chasing them. To this day, I catch shit nearly every time someone asks me what I’m fishing for. When we finally decided to come out of the closet, it was mostly to derision and smirks. We caught fish, posted pictures and spent a fair amount of time fighting off the hate that comes with fishing for something that people have been misinformed into believing destroys the water quality and reduces the populations of real fish. It was a rough time to be a carper.
About 10 years ago a man by the name of David McCool, in Traverse City Michigan, coined the term “Golden Bonefish”.
David was a marketer by trade and guide in his free time and he wanted to “rebrand” the carp. He decided the first order of business was associating carp flyfishing with something more palatable to, what can be, a snooty and exclusive audience. Don’t believe me? Tell a flyfishermen you put a worm on your hook and cast it with a flyrod and see how exclusive we can be. Anyway, David got some notoriety and the association with Bonefish stuck. In a lot of ways, it was the crack in the flyfishing world’s defenses that we needed to come barging in. And it worked.
David fished the crystal clear sand flats of Lake Michigan near Traverse City on Traverse Bay. Hell, he probably still fishes there. I’ve lost track of him. The point is, his fishing was wading knee deep flats over sand in bathtub clear water while looking for shoals of fish cruising and tailing on small baitfish. He was bonefishing… for carp. It just made sense. And you can still bonefish for carp. I’ve done it. You have to get a boarding pass to a select number of destinations at the right time of year to do it. But it’s available. So David wasn’t wrong. He simply didn’t understand the diversity of conditions under which we would eventually find ourselves flyfishing for carp.
To this day, the association with bonefishing persists. People discuss using carp as training for bonefish trips, or inevitably try to sell flyfishing for carp as bonefishing in freshwater. It’s such a flawed notion it doesn’t make all that much sense.
Flyfishing for carp is so ridiculously
Read More »3 Tips For Better Bonefishing
CHANGE THE RETRIEVE BEFORE THE FLY
If the bonefish are following your fly but not eating it, the fly may not be the problem. As fly fishermen, we always want to blame our fly. I think this comes from trout fishing and the idea of matching the hatch but often, whether fishing in fresh water or salt, the problem is the presentation and not the fly.
When you cast your fly to a bonefish and he keys on it and follows the fly for a good ways, then turns off, generally it’s the retrieve he doesn’t like. Often changing it up will solicit the bite. If you’re stripping slow, speed up. If you’re stripping long, go short. Most often I find that a series of short fast strips followed by a pause does the trick. The beauty is that you can make this change immediately and catch the fish at hand.
Read More »12 Tips for Taking Awesome Fishing Photos
WANT TO TAKE BETTER FLY FISHING PHOTOS?
Just the other day one our Facebook followers asked if I would post some tips for taking better fishing photos. I’ve written a good bit on the subject, but the articles are scattered across the site. I thought this would be a great opportunity to put together one source for some of my best photography tips and tricks.
So here it is, 12 tips that will make your fishing photos rock!
Holding Fish For Photos
The first step in getting a great shot of a fish is knowing how to hold it properly. I am constantly amazed how many anglers don’t know how to hold a fish for a photo, but to be fair, Kent and I have had a lot of practice and we have it down to a science. Here’s an article from each of us on the subject.
Hold That Fish
4 Tips For Getting A Better Picture Of Your Trophy
What if you’re fishing alone when you catch the fish of a lifetime?
No problem. Here’s an article that will give you plenty of options for getting a great shot.
Getting The Hero Shot When You’re Fishing Solo
Great photos start the basics.
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