Three Proven Options For Deep, Deep Nymphing
By Louis Cahill
IT’S TIME TO MAKE LIKE CAPTAIN NEMO AND GO 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.
Sometimes the only trick to catching fish is getting the fly down to their level. When you’re nymphing and you’re not catching fish it’s always a good idea to add weight before changing flies. Often one split shot is the difference between fishing and casting.
I have fished with friends who were shocked at how much weight I use on my nymph rigs. They always end up following my lead and catching more fish. Especially in the heat of summer or cold of winter, weight is usually the answer. But just because you’re fishing heavy doesn’t mean you can’t fish smart.
Here are three rigging options that will help you make the most of the weight you use.
THE STRING OF PEARLS
The struggle in fishing deep is not sinking your flies. They are usually weighted and sink pretty quickly. It’s your leader that needs the weight. You can pile up a couple of #7 shot or a half dozen size BBs just above your tippet and it will drag that leader down but there’s a smarter way to use the weight.
I use hand-tied leaders and
Read More »Spey Casting Diagnostics Checklist
By Jeff Hickman
SPEY CASTING IS A PROCESS REQUIRING SEVERAL STEPS TO BE FULLY COMPLETED IN A SEQUENCE.
To effectively and consistently make good spey casts you need to focus on these steps, especially when learning. But even veteran and advanced two-handed casters also need to focus on the important steps. Everyone who has Spey fished has had a meltdown at some point where their cast completely falls apart. In my experience these meltdowns are triggered by one small element changing. That one element starts a chain reaction that wrecks the entire cast. The cause could be external such as a change in the wind direction or wading depth or the change could be internal — you got lazy on your anchor placement or started dipping your rod behind you.
Recently while presenting at the annual Sandy River Spey Clave in Oregon, I jokingly made a reference to a fictional Spey Casting Diagnostics Checklist that I printed on waterproof paper and kept in my wader pocket. I was simply trying to make people laugh as Spey casting presentations can be a bit on the dry side. After the presentation many people came up to me and asked if I could give them one of my checklists. Since I did not actually have one, I told them I could email a checklist over. But it occurred to me that this is something that people want, so here is my short checklist that you can print and bring with you to the river next time:
Read More »The CDC Blood Midge
MIDGE PATTERNS CAN BE REMARKABLY EFFECTIVE FOR TROUT.
Depending on how you count them there could be over a thousand species of midge. That’s a lot of choices for the discerning trout. There are almost as many choices for the angler and a midge obsession can easily get out of hand.
I find that more times than not a Blood Midge will do the trick. I spent a morning on the Colorado River one April and caught twenty-four brown trout on a blood midge without moving my feet. Trout are naturally attracted to these red patterns even when they are not an exact match for the naturals. I’ve tied many different Blood Midge patterns but my current favorite is the CDC Blood Midge. The power of CDC can not be overestimated. This is a great pattern and very easy to tie.
Watch the video and learn hoe to tie The CDC Blood Midge.
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 »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 »Fly Fishing with Stealth – 8 Common Mistakes
How often to you think anglers miss opportunities catching trout because of the lack of stealth? The more educated trout populations are in a stream, river or lake you’re fly fishing, the more important it is for fly anglers to mimic the way a hunter stalks game in the field. I estimate that I give away upwards of 50% of my trout catching opportunities due to my lack of stealth. Below are 8 common mistakes fly anglers make on the water that blow their cover and success.
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
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