Fear And Loathing On The Water
WHEN THINGS GO BADLY, YOU’VE GOT TO STAY POSITIVE AND TURN YOUR TRIP AROUND.
The sky is clear. Mangrove leaves glow in early morning sun. Dirty brown water floods the mud flats of Delacroix, Louisiana. I take in the view from the poling platform while struggling to move the boat against a twenty MPH wind. The last few days have been challenging, to say the least. We’ve battled the thunderstorms and wind, poor light and water clarity, and today the water temperature has dropped ten degrees. We were chased out of Venice when the Mississippi rose nine feet and landed here, where at least we know a couple of spots. The whole trip has been a mess and I’ve spent most of it on the platform. On the morning of this, the third day, I have only landed one redfish and I’m looking to turn things around.
I pole the boat into a sweet looking spot where the lee of a small island meets the mouth of a creek. It looks too good to not hold fish. My buddies Scott and Daren have given up on their fly rods and gone over to the dark side, throwing spoons and jigs on gear rods. Daren fires a cast into the creek and Scott casts to the island. Both lines come tight and we have a legitimate double in the first thirty minutes of fishing. My shoulders relax and I think that today things just might turn around. I spin the push pole in my hands and sink the point into the soft bottom to hold the boat while my friends land their fish. That’s when I hear a loud snap and the pole is suddenly free in my hand.
There’s no managing a flats boat in strong wind with a broken push pole. We spend most of day three riding back to the dock, driving a half hour to the nearest hardware store and fixing the pole. By afternoon, when we return to the flats, things have changed and there isn’t a redfish to be found. I blind cast wildly to fishy looking water while a pounding rises in my ears. My frustration becomes palpable and my casting sloppy. We call the day around 3:30 when the boats wiring starts acting up. I ride back to the dock in a state of self loathing. Voices of negativity singing choruses in my head. Feeling sorry for myself like a little bitch.
Just a week earlier I was swinging flies for steelhead on the Deschutes river in Oregon. Conditions were tough there too. I’d taken my friend Andy Bowen for his first west coast steelhead trip, to learn how to cast a two hander and swing flies from Jeff Hickman, who taught me. Andy was on the board early with two nice fish. His first, a wild buck, handed him his ass early in the fight, almost spooling him. The look on Andy’s face was priceless. He kept his cool and, with constant coaching from Jeff, landed the fish.
It was a perfect first steelhead experience. I always choose my words carefully when
Read More »DIY Bonefishing – It’s All About The Short Game
By Rod Hamilton
“I HAVE SEEN MORE THAN ONE FFF CERTIFIED CASTING INSTRUCTOR BROUGHT TO TEARS AFTER HIS TENTH BLOWN SHOT AT UNDER FORTY FEET”
Whether you are wading in eighteen inches of water, weaving through the mangroves or doing the Flamingo Slide over a mucky flat, there is no such thing as a seventy-foot cast. For DIY fisherman, it’s all about the Short Game.
Leave your driver, fairway woods and long irons in the bag. DIY success is about accuracy with your wedges and putter. It calls for short precise shots, minimal false casting and one chance to make a pinpoint presentation. There are no Gimmies at thirty feet.
I have had the good fortune to fish with some great anglers and casters this year. I’m still awestruck by the elegance of them laying out an eighty-foot line. But I’ve come to realize that the skills required to be successful from the front of a skiff don’t necessarily translate to being successful in the “hand to hand” combat experienced by the DIY guy.
I’m talking about soft presentations at 20 – 40 feet in 25 m.p.h. winds with one false cast. Then dropping the fly not in a Hula Hoop, but on a Frisbee.
Let me tell you I have seen more than one FFF Certified Casting Instructor brought to tears after his tenth blown shot at under forty feet. It’s the difference between being a great driver of a golf ball and a great putter, both are wonderful skills to posses, but different.
Setting the stage for a DIY day; you just got out of your car or off your bicycle. The fish you will be encountering have seen a “Charlie” before; in fact they probably bolted from one yesterday. And the direction you walk has more to do with “where can I go” then the sun, wind and tide.
And, 90% of your casts will be forty feet or less.
SKILLS REQUIRED FOR THE SHORT GAME:
Read More »Keeping The Energy In Your Fly Cast: 2 Common Mistakes
By Louis Cahill
An energized fly line is crucial for a good cast and a good presentation.
The act of casting a fly line is really just a matter of transferring energy. We often use the word throw, as in, “Throwing big streamers,” but that isn’t an accurate description of what we’re doing. Hopefully not anyway. Fly lines don’t careen through the air like a golfball. They unroll in tight graceful loops. Right?
It’s the difference in particle motion and wave motion. We can hit a golfball pretty accurately but once that ball leaves the club we are out of the equation. We no longer influence it’s travel to the target. That’s more like casting a spinning rod. A fly cast is more like a jump rope. The rope continues its orbit as long are we hold tight and put energy into it. If we let go of the rope, it falls to the ground.
We talk about slack in fly casting a good bit. When we introduce slack into the line during the cast, it behaves much like that jump rope. There are several bad habits many fly casters share, which create slack and drain the energy from their casts but in this article I’m going to focus on two which are very common and devastating to a good cast.
Before I get into specifics I will give you this tip. As you cast, you should feel a steady tension on the line with your line hand. Hold the line between your thumb and forefinger and make some false casts. The line should stay straight and taut between your line hand and the stripper guide and the pressure should be pretty constant. This is true whether or not you use a double haul. If your line is slapping around and jerking at your line hand, you need to work on your timing.
The two parts of the cast I want to talk about are the ever-important stops in both your forward and back cast. Whether casting forward or back, the stop is what creates the loop. The thing many anglers don’t realize is
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 »Pack The Heat So You Can Pack it Out
NO TREES HERE TO CLIMB AND I CAN BARELY SEE THE TRUCK WITH MY NAKED EYES FAR OFF IN THE DISTANCE.
The recent run-in with the local WYDNR officer, who just gave me the run down about heavy bear activity in the area, has got me the heebie-jeebies. I’m trying to let loose and be one with the rod, but I can’t stop from thinking I’m smelling wet dog in the air, and I’m terrified of what could be lurking behind the thick moose brush out of sight. If you’re in the process of planning a trip into the deep wilderness where bear, moose, and other dangerous predators thrive, you just might consider purchasing a canister of pepper spray, and keep it holstered on your side. Hell it could save your life.
Two years ago, I stumbled right on top of a Boon & Crockett moose bedded down during a short hike-in to a secluded stretch of the Snake River. Luckily, we both decided to flight in opposite directions, and I only had to change my britches before wetting a line. Guiding in Alaska one season, I somehow managed to stay under the radar, as two giant brown bears went toe to toe battling over a spawning bed within inches of my outpost tent. And I’ll never forget the feeling of total panic, when I walked up on a fresh bloody mule deer kill on the Upper Hoback River this past July. With my heart pounding out my chest, and the realization of no one knowing my whereabouts, I quickly said the hell with fishing, and high-tailed it back to the truck before I became desert.
We often drop a thousand dollars or more for our out of town fly fishing trips without giving it a second thought. That’s why I find it ironic, that when we get there, we gawk at the $50 price tag of a can of pepper spray. I’m not sure if it’s my life experiences that’s making me wiser, or if I’m just getting softer in my old age, but I’m damn sure of one thing. I’ve already used up all my get out of jail free-cards with
Read More »3 Counterintuitive things tenkara has shown me
By Daniel Galhardo
Tenkara has taught and old dog some new tricks.
Since I started learning tenkara, it’s become obvious to me, that regardless of how intuitive the method is to the novice fly angler, some parts of tenkara are likely counterintuitive to the experienced fly angler.
HERE ARE A FEW THINGS ABOUT THAT ARE LIKELY COUNTERINTUITIVE ABOUT TENKARA TO THE EXPERIENCED FLY ANGLER:
A long rod is an asset in small streams
Small streams call for short rods. It makes sense right? Small mountain streams have always been my preferred playgrounds. Prior to my discovery of tenkara, my favorite rod was a soft action 7 ½ ft rod. It cast beautifully, I felt the force of the line loading it, and I felt I could maneuver it anywhere I wanted. But, that short rod probably contributed to my falling in love with tenkara. In streams we have this thing called drag. When line lays on the water, currents pick it up and drags the line downstream faster than the fly. Then, you have to mend. And, with that beautiful 7 ½ ft rod I had to mend…a lot. It was hard to achieve a good drift when fishing moving water. Like anyone else, I was absolutely intimidated by the idea of using a 12ft rod in those waters. That’s almost 5ft longer! That’s my whole wife’s worth of extra length. But, guess what, it worked. On my very first cast it was obvious that the dynamics caused by this new trigonometry had changed. I could fish pools on the other side of streams I liked without any mending. I certainly did not expect that. Nowadays you’ll find me using a 14ft 7inch long rod on my local Boulder Creek, a mountain stream that is about 25ft wide in most sections and a good amount of evergreens on its shores.
Let the rod bend!
It’s common knowledge: your fly rod is only designed to arc so much before it breaks, and to prevent breakages you should not have the rod pointed up with a deep bend on it. One is usually taught to keep a relatively low angle between the rod and the fish, lest it break. Yet, with tenkara there is no reel to allow a fish to take line. If your rod is at a low angle
Read More »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 »My Favorite Strike Indicator: Video
I don’t always fish an indicator, but when I do…
It’s the New Zealand Strike indicator. I love these little wool indicators. They are the best I’ve ever used. They’re super sensitive, easy to use and they don’t kink up your leader. The thing I love the most about them is they give you a more natural drift than a bobber. You can even let them sink in deep runs and still see the strike. Sinking your indicator gives you the most natural drift you can get with an indicator.
In case you’re wondering, I don’t get any kind of sponsorship from the company. This sounds like a plug, even to me, but this is just a tool I love and I think you’ll love it too.
WATCH THIS VIDEO AND LEARN HOW TO USE THE NEW ZEALAND INDICATOR.
Read More »Dean River Chinook
By Jeff Hickman
IT’S TIME FOR THE BIG BOYS.
With the rapidly increasing popularity of Spey fishing, targeting Chinook salmon has also recently become hot. These large powerful anadromous fish have always been attractive to fly fishers in areas with strong populations. But with modern spey rods and Skagit heads they have become much more accessible to fly anglers. The old myth that they don’t eat flies is far from the truth! These Kings of the river are as good as freshwater gamefish fish get. When they are fresh-from-the-salt and in the mood, they will attack flies every bit as aggressively as steelhead do!
I had heard the old timers’ stories of the good ol’ days when the Chinook were thick in west coast rivers and fly anglers could catch as many as they wanted. While at times we do still have some good Chinook fishing in Oregon, I wanted a full immersion to experience them. So years ago I got a job guiding fly fishing on the Kanektok River for Alaska West and I headed north to cut my teeth on Chinook fishing. I had heard in western Alaska, Chinook were plentiful and they were like Winter steelhead on steroids. It was true and it was there that I fell in love with these leviathans. I spent nine seasons on the Kanektok guiding and swinging flies for Chinook and I learned a lot about them in the process.
The recent scuttlebutt among Chinook anglers is over the emergency Chinook fishing closures in the last two years in Western Alaska. In western Alaska, King salmon stocks are experiencing a period of low productivity. Run forecasts have been too low for ADF&G to allow any commercial or sport Chinook fisheries in the entire Kuskokwim River drainage including all Kuskokwim Bay tributaries. Among the closures again this year are the Kanektok and Goodnews Rivers. Both are legendary rivers for having robust healthy runs of these amazing fish. This is very tough news for everybody that has a connection to this area and these fish. I hope that these robust runs are able to recover quickly to the sustainable fishable levels of the past.
But Alaska isn’t the only destination to catch Chinook on the fly consistently. I now spend the early part of my Summers chasing Chinook in British Columbia. When the two words
Read More »Seeing the Fish: Tips on how to focus and see more fish
By Owen Plair
Sight fishing is by far the most exciting and exhilarating way to target fish with a fly.
Whether you’re combing the flats looking for cruising bonefish or walking a river looking for that big Brown sipping on the surface, sight fishing brings out that true primal instinct in both fresh, and saltwater anglers. The feeling of watching a fish feed in its natural environment, presenting a fly in that environment and watching the fish make that gorgeous mistake of eating it, is simply amazing. Fly fishing is fly fishing no matter how you catch a fish but when sight fishing, there are a lot of things that have to come together just right. Seeing the fish is the very first piece of the puzzle and the most important.
As a saltwater guide, the most important part of my job is finding the fish and then being able to get my angler to see them. Looking for fish is fun and one of my favorite things about guiding, but it’s not always easy. There are so many variables. Obviously the most aggravating and unpredictable variable is mother nature. Sometimes I wish I could take mother nature out to dinner a few times a week just so she would always be nice. The other main problem is the angler not being able to see the fish. If you don’t see the fish, then the difficulty of catching that fish is raised 10 times. This article is a brief summary of how to open your eyes to your surrounding, not just using sight but all of your natural instincts to find that fish and present a fly.
When I go on a trip to a new fishery, I always ask my guide or friend, “What are we looking for?” Two sets of eyes on the boat are always better than one, even the guy sitting on the cooler drinking a beer should ask what to look for. I find that one of my favorite feelings is when I step on the bow, strip out my line, and start studying the water. It allows you to be ready and most of all aware what’s around you. Even certain sounds like a tarpon rolling or a fish busting bait can tell you what direction to look.
We have all had moments when we don’t see a fish and all hell breaks loose trying to find what the guide is looking at. The bow clock was created for sight fishing and is one of the most important tools for understanding where to look. Talk with your guide or friend and point your rod from 9 o’clock to 3 o’clock so that you both are on the same time zone. The bow is 12 o’clock and always 12 o’clock, no matter what direction I’m spinning the boat. Always look directly at the nose of the boat to find 12 and adjust from there.
Getting an idea of distance is very important. Knowing when to look 40 feet at 11 o’clock or 80 feet at 11 o’clock can be crucial. Most fly lines now have
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