Don’t Throw The Hail Mary
FISH, FISH EVERYWHERE AND NOT A FISH TO CATCH.
I was trout fishing with a friend in North Carolina the other day. We were fortunate to find a nice piece of water which held a good size pod of fish. Maybe a dozen total spread across the tail out. A couple of them were really nice fish. I called my buddy over and pointed them out to him, insisting he take a shot at them.
He’s fairly new to fly fishing and was a little intimidated by the sight of all those fish. He didn’t know exactly how to approach the situation. Option paralysis took over and he made a choice that I suspect a lot of anglers make in that situation. He dropped his fly upstream of the pod and hoped for the best.
Casting to the geometric center of a pod of fish is sometimes successful but never optimal. Often you spook the whole pod and walk away empty-handed. If you catch a fish it will likely be the small enthusiastic fellow darting around taking what he can get. The big guy is not going to move to your fly. He’s going to play it cool.
Any bird hunter will tell you, when you flush a covey of birds, you don’t fire into the group. You will only end up shooting
Read More »7 Reasons I use the Double Figure 8 Loop Knot In Freshwater And Salt
By Louis Cahill
This easy fishing knot will help you catch more fish.
I learned the Double Figure 8 Loop Knot when I started getting serious about tarpon fishing. It quickly became the go-to knot for all of my saltwater and streamer fishing. I even use it to attach nymphs from time to time. It has become indispensable to me and I am absolutely sure that I catch more fish by using it. No matter what species you target, the Double Figure 8 will help you fish better.
HERE ARE 7 REASONS I USE THE DOUBLE FIGURE 8 LOOP KNOT.
Better Action
The key to enticing fish to eat a fly is lifelike action. Since a loop knot doesn’t lock the tippet down against the eye of the hook, your fly is free to move at any angle in the water. Any fly attached with a loop knot will move in a more lifelike manner and is more likely to be eaten.
Flies sink faster
With a traditional fishing knot, like a clinch knot where the tippet is locked to the eye of the hook, a weighted fly has to pull the tippet down across its width. This causes resistance. Think of it as putting your rod tip in the water and moving it quickly sideways. Can you feel the resistance? With a loop knot, the fly can pivot in the loop and dive, drawing the tippet down along its length. Think of that as plunging your rod tip into the water tip first. Much less resistance, right? That’s why loop knots are the standard for saltwater fly fishing.
Small profile
The Double Figure 8 does not rely on multiple wraps of line for its holding power. The simplicity of the jam knot creates a strong knot that’s much smaller than other fishing knots. A smaller knot is less visible to the fish. This is huge when using heavy bite guards for species like tarpon or musky. This does, however, lead to the one exception in my use of this knot. I do not use it to attach the hook when fishing tube flies. Because I rely on the larger knot to stop the tube, I use a surgeon’s loop.
100% line strength
The Double Figure 8 is a jam knot. That means it’s two simple knots which slide together and lock into place. There are no weak points in the knot. No places where tippet can cut itself and tags don’t pull through when the tippet stretches. Your knot strength is the full tippet strength.
Low friction tightening
The strength of you knots is only as good as
Choosing Carp Flies: What Are They Eating?
by Dan Frasier
“IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHERE TO START WITHOUT INTIMATELY KNOWING THE WATER AND FISH YOU ARE ABOUT TO CHASE, CARP WILL WHIP YOUR ASS.”
John Gierach, in his book Death, Taxes and Leaky Waders, writes about expertizing. That is, acting the part of an expert. He explains, “Our answers are laced with complicated qualifications. They ramble, they’re never simple. Often they’re so obscure they end up being meaningless. But then, if you have to ask the question in the first place you probably won’t understand the answer, right?”
This, I must admit, is not a phenomenon to which I’m immune. It’s not that I hope to make anyone feel ignorant or inadequate, nor is it to make myself look like I know more than anyone else. It’s a product of how the information came to me. I didn’t learn how to catch carp by being presented a tidy thesis from which to work. I picked up information in bits and pieces over the years and apparently that is how my brain stored it.
When I later attempt to access that information in order to answer questions for other people, it tends to come out jumbled, full of caveats and obscure to the point of being useless. It’s frustrating to myself and to the person who just wanted to catch a damn carp or two.
Many extremely good carp anglers have written and presented eloquently on how to catch these fish. Often, top 10 lists of must-do’s are used. Sometimes, detailed descriptions of how to address particular situations are discussed. Oftentimes the expert is reduced to simply giving some generic thoughts and suggesting some experimentation. The problem is, I know too many guys are way too good at catching these fish.
That’s a problem because one expert is often saying things that are diametrically opposed to another. Two flyfishers, equally adept at catching carp on the fly, and two totally different set of rules. It has to be extremely confusing to the beginner.
The effect of all of this conflicting advice is that we have made carp out to be a practically uncatchable species, which feeds in a way so unique that you apparently have to be born an expert to even expect to hook up. There are so many rules, and points and counterpoints that the fish seem impossibly complicated. Of course, that’s crap.
The real problem is that each expert is an expert on their fish. I hear advice and descriptions that I know would fail miserably elsewhere. I’ve SEEN it fail miserably elsewhere. Hell, I’ve been the failer!
I’m nothing if not stubborn, and so, despite it’s difficulty, I will be doing a series of posts aimed at helping the carp novice enjoy success earlier and more often than I did. I’ll be discussing generalities that will apply on any water you fish. There won’t be specific advice, or fly suggestions. That’s a fool’s errand. The fact is, if you think you know where to start without intimately knowing the water and fish you are about to chase, carp will whip your ass. So lets discuss the questions that only you can answer that will produce a successful carp outing.
WHAT ARE THEY EATING?
Read More »Small Stream, Big Reward
By Jason Tucker
Spring has sprung, and if you listen closely you can hear the rumble of fly anglers prepping their gear for trout fishing.
Trout seasons will be opening very soon if not already. We’re all looking forward to warmer temps, fly hatches, and trout looking up. While a lot of anglers will be hitting the main streams, I personally can’t wait to do some small-stream fishing. You should do some too.
There’s a lot of good reasons to skip the mainstream and fish the headwaters or tributaries. For instance, Michigan has somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 miles of trout stream depending on what day of the week it is. While there are certainly several hundred miles of mainstream, the vast majority of trout holding water is typically in the headwaters and tributary streams. This translates to several advantages for you the angler.
Elbow Room. I’m quite fond of fishing Michigan’s Au Sable River. It’s one of the finest trout streams in the world. But never have I fished that river without seeing at least one other party, and if the hatches are on you’re probably fishing within sight of other anglers. It is a great river, with copious fly hatches and large numbers of trout that can support the pressure. But constantly bumping into others and being bumped into gets tiresome. If you simply go fish one of its many tributaries you can eliminate this problem entirely. As a matter of fact, I can say that most of the days I’ve spent on Michigan’s small streams, I’ve never seen another person.
An even greater surprise was when I moved to Georgia. I figured being this close to major population centers it would be even harder to find empty water. Nope. There’s some streams that receive a lot of pressure, but head up almost any ravine with a stream in it and you will have it to yourself, and quite frequently the fishing will be spectacular.
Wild Fish. While many a mainstem gets stocked on a regular basis, quite frequently the headwaters and tributaries are not stocked at all, either due to a lack of angler effort or lack of access for stocking trucks. This translates into
Read More »Poonfroggin
It’s already plenty warm by 6:00 AM.
The hot pink band hugging the horizon and lighting up the water foreshadows the brain-baking heat that will be here any minute. It’s going to be another brutally calm day in the Florida Keys. We’re poling quietly down the flat, the little Dolphin skiff slicing the mirror as we go.
My buddy Scott is on the bow while I apply thick white sun screen like cake frosting. My good friend Joel Dickey is on the platform and he seems a little fidgety. We found fish here the previous morning within just a few minutes, but it’s pretty quiet here now. Joel keeps looking over his left shoulder, like he’s being followed. After several glances he stops, fixed on the horizon.
“Naw, that’s…there’s somethin’ goin’ on over there,” he mutters. “Reel up Scott, we’re going over there.”
My eyes aren’t what they used to be. We’re halfway there before I see the birds. They’re working hard on the back side of a little bay. I can just make out the edge of a huge raft of floating weed. The little bay is choked with it. We come off plane, well away from the raft. Joel mounts the platform and takes up in quiet.
“You here that?” Joel asks. I don’t of course because I’m deaf as a post but Scott hears it and you can tell he’s excited about it, whatever it is.
“They’re crushing back there.”
The raft is about the size of a football field. I guess, I never played football. I played soccer and it’s about the same thing. Every so often the grass is interrupted by hot tub sized patches of open water. And in every one of those hot tubs there’s a tarpon working. Rolling and crushing shrimp.
Once in a while you’ll see this happen, when the weather is hot and still. It’s hard to believe that the ocean can run out of oxygen, but it does. In spots any way, when the conditions are just right. The warm water holds less oxygen than cooler water. When it’s calm at night and the turtle grass isn’t producing oxygen and there’s no wind to stir the surface, the shrimp start to suffocate. They come to the surface to find air and they seek the cover of the grass. Too bad for them that the tarpon know all about it.
These fish are little guys. Ten to thirty pounds but they are tarpon to the bone. So here’s the challenge. To make a pin-point cast, of sixty to seventy-five feet, into the far side of one of those openings, where you can get a couple of strips off before your fly is in the grass. Time the cast so the fish rolling in the open water is on his way back up to the surface and seal the deal ASAP.
Feeding them will be the easy part. Once you stick them they go ballistic. They jump and run and jump and run, sewing all of that grass together with your fly line. It’s just like fishing frogs for bass, except that’s a twenty pound tarpon you’re horsing out of the grass, not a three pound bass.
The casting, it turns out
Read More »Dealing With Stuck Ferrules, the Smart Way
Years of fishing bamboo rods taught me one thing for sure. Stuck ferrules are as unavoidable as the occasional skunk and that holds true for graphite. Sometimes it’s avoidable but often it’s not. What is totally avoidable is damaging your rod in the process of unseating them.
Often it’s as simple as getting a good grip on the rod. When a rod is wet it’s easy for your hands to slip and strip off or bend snake guides as they go. When you get a good grip on the rod you find the ferrules were not as tight as you thought. I carry a pair of latex gloves in my pack for that purpose. The latex gets good traction even when the rod is wet, making unseating the ferrules much easier.
When ferrules are stuck and more force is needed there are a couple of options. Most folks know the trick of holding your hands high and pulling them down behind your head. This lets gravity and the natural rotation of your shoulders work together to pull the ferrules. You can also put the rod behind your knees and push out on your forearms with your legs. Both of these methods work, sometimes.
When ferrules are really tight
Read More »The Beginner’s Advice on Casting for Bonefish
John Byron, The Bonefish Beginner
Just finished three week in the Bahamas chasing big bonefish with Louis Cahill, proprietor of this blog.
Great trip, hampered only by my inability to cast well to good shots. I got slightly better, learned a few things, but frustrated myself far too often to enjoy the shots I missed. I also paid close attention to my boat mates, most of them also beginners or at least casual bonefishers.
The problem we all seemed to share? Buck fever. Stage fright. Cranial-anal inversion on the bow of the flats boat. We knew what to do. We steadfastly refused do it.
I’ve no cure. But there’s an approach that helps me and so I pass it along to anyone else who’s blown a close shot downwind at a tailing bonefish waving a sign that says ‘feed me’ and you can’t get the fly into the same zip code.
In the Notes app on my iPhone I have a list of do-this-dummy guidelines I read every morning before I go out. And then try to remember and use on the water. As follows…
“Fish coming, twelve o’clock, sixty feet going left”
Take your time
Don’t rush it
Curb your enthusiasm
Relax a bit and take charge of the situation
Control the cast
Slow! Smooth! Deliberate!
Let the fish get closer before you cast
Load the rod
Snap your wrist
Use the wind
Double haul
Line speed Line speed Line speed
One less false cast
Important! Keep your rhythm — do not over-drive the final cast to the fish
Control the fly
Rod tip in the water pointing down the line
No slack! No slack in the line!
Fly-Fishing: The Stop
By Louis Cahill
There is nothing more important about a fly cast than how it ends.
There are a lot of moving parts in a fly cast. Plenty of things have to be done right for everything to go perfectly. That being said, you can get away with a lot if you have a good stop.
If your cast feels anemic, your leader doesn’t turn over fully, your loops are big and sloppy, your line lands on the water before our fly, or you’re not getting the distance you want, I’ll bet you five dollars to a doughnut the problem is with your stop. You’re likely doing one, or all, of three things wrong. Use the following as a checklist to see if your stop is all it should be.
Three rules for a good stop.
The stop must be positive.
This is often called a hard stop and I like that term because it captures the feel of a good stop. The casting stroke should accelerate from a soft start to a hard stop at its fastest point. It should not slow to a stop and once it stops it should not falter. It should feel as if your hand
Read More »Fishing New Water
By Jason Tucker The time has come in my life where I want to expand my horizons. I want to light out, free myself from the confines of my routine, my local area, my set habits. It’s true that there are still many rivers, runs, hatches and fisheries I have yet to explore in my native Michigan, but the world is a big place. There’s a lot of water out there. While there are worse things in life than exploring Michigan’s water, it would be a shame to go through life without experiencing other places. My interests and aspirations are as varied as classic Western fishing in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, or remote brook trout in Labrador and Ontario, to bonefish on the flats of the Bahamas and Oahu. Somewhere in the back of my fantasies lurks one fish, the permit. That may be a bit down the pike, but someday. I hope. I recently had the opportunity to get out of Northern Michigan for a few weeks and head south, get out of the cold for a while. This winter isn’t as bad as the last, but it’s still pretty bad. I got the invitation to go spend the winter in Georgia with friends, and so I took them up on it. The problem is that they are not fly fishing friends, a character flaw that I had to overlook. A big draw for me was the idea of being able to explore new water that is fly-fishable year round. I’ve never caught a trout on a dry fly in January and the thought appealed to me. For me Georgia is a blank slate. I know they have trout streams and even some native brook trout in the northern mountains, but I personally associate the south with catfish, bream … Continue reading
Read More »A Powerful Fly Cast Is All In The Thumb
PICTURE YOURSELF GRASPING A BROOMSTICK AND DRIVING IN A TACK WITH YOUR THUMB.
I get the opportunity to work with a lot of anglers who are making the transition from freshwater fly fishing to saltwater. Not surprisingly, most of them struggle with generating the casting power needed to deliver a good presentation in the kind of wind often experienced in flats fishing. Almost everyone has the same pesky problem. They try to generate a more powerful cast and everything breaks down. The problem is not in their arm or elbow or wrist, but in their head.
It’s a problem of understanding the mechanics of the cast. It seems logical to think that more power in means more power out and I guess that’s true but there is a common misconception about where that power is coming from. Most anglers, when trying to add power to a cast, focus on the fly or the line. They visualize throwing that line to the target. The result is a casting stroke that resembles a pitcher throwing a baseball. Including the wind up in the worst cases.
This imagined model of throwing a static object puts all the wrong physics in play for a good fly cast. The resulting casting stroke relies too heavily on the arm and takes the rod out of play. Our instinct tells us to throw harder but the arm is a poor tool for throwing a fly line and our cast fails. The answer to a powerful fly cast is timing and technique, not power.
I’m going to give you a simple tool to help generate a powerful cast but first let’s look at the mechanics.
The fly cast is all about the transfer of energy