Sunday Classic / The Original Eyewear For The Flats
Bonefish are just cool. They never cease to amaze me. Like all fish, they are perfectly adapted to their environment and in their environment you need a competitive edge. Right in the middle of the food chain, the bonefish has to get in, get fed, and get out in a hurry, before he becomes somebody else’s lunch. To do that, he needs keen eyesight, a hard nose, a turbo charged tail stroke and some high-tech eye wear. I handled hundreds of bones before I ever noticed the eye glass, and a few more before I captured a good photo of it. It’s so clear and flawless that the light and the angle you look at the fish need to be just right to see it. It is a slick outer lens that covers a good portion of the bonefishes face and encapsulates it’s eye. If you study it’s profile you will see that it turns the bonefish’s already sleek profile into a perfectly hydrodynamic projectile. The equivalent of cycle racers shaving their legs.
No doubt, this aids in the bone’s remarkable speed, but that’s just part of the story. The eyeglass serves a much larger purpose. The bonefish has
Read More »Saturday Shoutout / The Films of Camp 4
On our recent adventure for BF Goodrich’s Playground Earth we had the good fortune to work with the incredibly talented folks from Camp 4 Collective, a group of athlete/cinematographers based in Salt Lake City UT. I know from the emails and comments that we have received that many of you are as eager to see the footage as we are. Well, almost as eager.
While we all wait for the editing to be done, I thought I’d share some of Camp 4’s amazing work. While none of it is fly fishing, you can’t help but be moved by the beauty an drama of these incredible films. I can’t wait to see what they have done with our, considerably more humble, adventure.
Read More »Fly Patterns 2013 – G&G Top Picks
I told everyone a while back that I would be writing a post showcasing Gink & Gasoline’s top fly pattern picks for 2013. The flies below caught our eyes and we wanted to share them with the community. We hope everyone finds this post helpful and gets excited about adding some of these great patterns to your fly boxes for the 2013 fly fishing season. Match the number by each fly in the header photo with the quick links below for more information about the fly patterns, creators and fly manufacturers.
Read More »Redington SubZero Waders Review
I’m really excited to talk with everyone about the new Redington SubZero Waders that I had the opportunity to field test a great deal this winter. The name “SubZero” pretty much says it all. These hybrid technology waders, are the first of their kind that I know of, constructed from both breathable nylon and neoprene. The waders are designed for one thing, to provide anglers extra protection in key areas to ward off cold weather and increase fly fishing longevity on the water. I can tell everyone, with 100% certainty, that the waders proved worthy of their name. I noticed a significant warmth advantage when I tested them side by side with other nylon and gore-tex breathable waders on the market. If you’re looking for a pair of waders that will make your winter fishing more pleasurable, look no further.
Read More »Sunday’s Classic / Two Reasons for Greasing Your Leader
Many anglers out there shy away from fishing tiny dry flies because they find it difficult to see them and keep them floating during their drifts. Greasing the length of your leader with fly floatant can help your tiny dries float longer and make them easier to see on the water. A good scenario for this would be if you’re fishing a CDC pattern where you don’t apply floatant directly to the fly pattern. By greasing your leader you’ll increase the floatation of your pattern and it will stay afloat longer in more turbulent water. If you find the standard dry fly dropper rig is failing to get the attention of feeding fish during a hatch, try instead tying on a single emerger or nymph….
Read More »Saturday Shoutout / Deeter on the Sport of FlyFishing, CO Snowpack, Moncada Tying Videos
This week’s Saturday Shoutout we bring you three quick fly fishing related links. The first is from Kirk Deeter at Fly Talk about how a Father and son fly fishing relationship has changed his past view that fly fishing isn’t a sport. The second is a quick report on snowpack levels for the South Platte range in CO and how unexpected lat April snowfall has the upcoming fly fishing season looking bright. The third is a link to Erik Moncada’s youtube channel, that show cases several great fly tying videos.
Read More »Adventures on Playground Earth
Kent and I are back from our BF Goodrich, Playground Earth / Owyhee River adventure. After spending the weekend in a coma, more or less, I’m rubbing the sleep from my eyes and trying to make sense of the surreal events of the last two weeks.
It seems like a year ago, we were power sliding the Ford Raptor around hairpin turns at sixty-five mph and feeling a little awkward when the director referred to us as athletes. Looking around at the room full of world class competitors and then at our beer guts, we didn’t feel like athletes but everyone (cast and crew alike) treated us with such respect and warmth that we felt like we belonged.
We made new friends, learned new skills and I got to experience the awkward feeling of being in front of the camera rather than tucked safely behind it. Our week at Miller Motor Sports was a learning experience all around but it didn’t prepare us for what was ahead.
Kent and I are used to rolling up on a river we’ve never seen and figuring out the local fish. That is, after all, what we do and over the years we’ve gotten fairly good at it but it became clear early on that this trip was going to be different. We were
Read More »April Photo Caption Contest Winner
Big thank you to everyone who participated in the April photo caption contest gear giveaway last week. Great job on giving me crap about fly fishing in my boxers. Lord knows, I deserved it, but despite me looking like a total lunatic, it was a good way to deter other anglers from fishing our water. Many of you are probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. I was trying to untangle fly line in the prop during a massive cluster truck on the river when I got pulled off a boulder I was standing on as I tried to keep the boat from drifting downstream of me. I learned that a back up gear box is worthless if you leave it in the truck at the boat ramp.
Read More »Sunday Classic / High Point
Tim looks like he has swallowed his tongue. He’s pale, eyes dilated, the corners of his mouth twitching. He’s soaked in sea water, eyes burning and red. His fingers digging into his seat bottom, he squints and stiffens like a corpse preparing for the next wave which drops the little skiff hard. It sounds like a car crash and sends another five gallons of water into our faces. Nothing, it appears will stop the next navy blue, six foot wave from hurdling over the bow. It’s a fraction of an inch from doing just that when the bow lifts. The wave seems to ride the bow up, hovering literally an eight of an inch from crashing over into the cockpit for a few seconds. And then the whole thing starts again. Norman Rolle, our guide stands stoic in the back of the boat, a buff bearing the Rio logo pulled up over his face all the way to his Smith wraparound sunglasses. His right hand is on the back of Tim’s seat, his left gently twisting the throttle of the outboard, accelerating up the waves then coasting down, steering us carefully through the cross currents and surf crashing into, and back from the wall of jagged rock that the Bahamians call High Point. High Point is one of the most inhospitable places I’ve ever seen. It juts into the Atlantic like a knife blade for a quarter mile, huge rough hewn boulders guarding it’s coast. It separates the inhabited northeast coast of South Andros Island from the wild and isolated south. It can only be passed on a fairly calm day, and today is not so calm.
Tim leans over to me and says nervously, “Jesus, this is bad”. I’m suddenly aware that I’m grinning and quite possibly looking a bit out of my mind.
Read More »Saturday Shoutout / Tim Romano’s Argentina Cast and Blast
Tim Romano is back from a cast and blast trip to Argentina and he’s showing off the photos over at Fly Talk. Tim is one of the best photographers working in fly fishing and there are some amazing images in this slide show. Sit back, relax and enjoy!
Argentina Cast and Blast