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
How To Get High Line Speed
Casting in the salt is demanding at times, to say the least.
To help fight those strong winds that affect your distance and accuracy you have to add as much controlled power as you can to the cast. This is absolutely crucial.
Having high line speed helps you to stabilize the line in the air during casting. This helps in your accuracy, distance and gets the fly to the fish quicker. Increasing your sense of urgency and your intensity will help up your line speed big time. Many times in the salt you are battling time as well as wind. You have a limited amount of time before the fish spooks or moves out of casting range.
Your strength is an important factor in high line speed as well. The stronger you are, the more power you can apply to your cast. You will get out of the cast what you put into it. If you push the gas pedal down a little you go 30mph. If you push the gas pedal down a lot you go 90mph.
When the wind is blowing 20 knots or harder you have to push the pedal down hard! Get that fly line moving fast and casting in those tough salt water winds will be much easier. But remember we are talking about controlled power and the only way to apply control and power is to practice. Just like the cast, you get out what you put in.
Let’s cover some other tips that will help increase line speed.
BEND YOUR KNEES & SPREAD YOUR STANCE
Bending your knees and lowering your center of gravity helps in a couple of ways. It gives you balance on the boat and allows you to apply power from your legs into your core. The power from your core will then be transferred into the cast.
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Read More »10 Tips For Targeting Rising Trout With Terrestrials
One of my favorite times of the year to fly fish for trout is when I’m able to target rising fish with terrestrials.
It’s always a breath of fresh air when I’m able to leave the nymph box at the truck in exchange for my terrestrial box, that’s overflowing with stacked foam and rubber legged imitations. I love nothing more than seeing trout come up and devour these patterns on the surface. Terrestrial fishing can be some of the easiest trout fishing of the year, but occasionally it can get technical, especially late season, when the fish have grown accustom to spotting out our terrestrial imitations.
Below are ten tips that should help you bring more fish to the net when targeting rising trout with terrestrials.
Tip 1: Get on the water early. Beetle Patterns work really well at first light, when hoppers can still be inactive, and the low light will help you stay concealed.
Tip 2: Don’t immediately cast to a trout you just saw rise. Waiting 10-15 seconds before presenting your fly will allow the feeding fish to get back into its feeding station, and begin looking for its next meal.
Tip 3: Make sure you present your fly far enough upstream of a rising fish. Trout often drift back with the current to take food on the surface.
Tip 4: Take your time, waiting 45 seconds or longer in-between presentations to a rising fish. Don’t continuously cast over and over to a rising fish. This will often spook or put the fish down.
Tip 5: Don’t stick with the same pattern if you’re getting refusals or the fish are ignoring your fly. Change out the size or type of your terrestrial pattern.
Tip 6: For Flat slow moving water, o
Read More »The Thrill that Comes From the Unknown
If you ask me, I think the surprise factor in fly fishing is underrated. Most of us choose to spend our time preparing and planning out every single detail of our fly fishing trips, so we can eliminate it. We spend hours tying recommended flies, we go threw our gear with a fine tooth comb checking for imperfections, and we research everything we can about the water and species we’ll be tackling. We do this because we want to feel in control. Furthermore, we do it because we want to catch fish. Problem is, fly fishing isn’t all about trying to squeeze out every bit of success we can muster out of a day on the water. A big part of fly fishing for me is letting go and
Read More »Choosing a Fly Rod is Like Choosing a Guitar
“WHO ARE THOSE $850 FLY RODS FOR? IF THE EXPERTS DON’T NEED THEM AND THE BEGINNERS CAN’T APPRECIATE THEM, WHO NEEDS THEM?”
If you follow G&G on Facebook then you probably know about my love of old school blues. If you don’t follow us on Facebook, you should, you’re missing half the fun.
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I went out the other night to see my friend Gabriel Szucs, AKA “Little G Weevil,” play some blues at a local bar. G is a singularity. Hungarian born, he moved to the states, to the south specifically, to immerse himself in the roots of the blues. After years on Beale St. in Memphis, he fell in love and married a gal from Atlanta and moved there for her. That’s the only way we would ever have a local blues player of his talent.
I discovered G in a hole in the wall BBQ joint called Hottie Hawgs. It’s a dive but there was briefly an awesome music scene there. Trust me when I tell you that this guy is a world class talent. Unfortunately, no one has told the Hungarians that Americans haven’t given a shit about the blues for forty years so you’ve likely never heard of him.
Honestly, you haven’t heard G until you’ve heard him live. It’s his jaw dropping improvisation and the way he responds to the crowd that blows you away. OK, I’m getting to the fishing. I expected to see G playing his flame top Fibenare or maybe his 1940 Kay, both remarkable guitars, but instead, there he sat with a cheap Epiphone acoustic that he payed $150 for in a Mississippi pawn shop.
He slapped a vintage pickup on it and off he went. It sounded amazing! I could not believe he was playing those licks on an acoustic. Epiphones, Gibson’s budget priced imports, are OK guitars but most good players couldn’t play like that on a Taylor or Martin.
“Yeah, it’s hard to play but I don’t care,” G told me. “I like the way it sounds, it’s different.”
You sure couldn’t tell that it was hard to play and that got me thinking about fly rods. You can spend anywhere from $200 to $5000 on a fly rod. You can pay more if you want a really special collectors item but what do you need?
It’s a complicated question. I have some inexpensive rods that I love. I have some really expensive ones I love too. What’s the difference? Other than
Read More »DIY Magnetic Fly Box
Make a fly box and win a Gink and Gasoline sticker!
THERE IS ONE THING THAT ALL FLY FISHERMEN HAVE IN COMMON. WHETHER WE CHASE TROUT OR TARPON, MUSKY OR BASS WE ALL CARRY TOO MANY FLIES.
For any given day on the water I select fly boxes from a stack in my office and cram as many of them as humanly possible into my pack. Not only do all of these fly boxes take up space, they eat into the budget too. This little DIY box helps with both. It’s cheap and tiny.
I love magnet boxes, especially for small flies. Getting a number 24 midge into and out of foam is almost impossible and dumping them lose into a bin is a disaster. The magnet box holds these tiny flies nice and tight and keeps them from tangling up in a ball. It’s easy to find the fly you’re looking for and retrieve it. The foam strips in the lid are great for dries and a few larger patterns.
To make this box I start with an Altoids box. This is basically free because I’m buying the mints anyway. I used a Yellowstone souvenir box for this one. The next step is to apply the magnetic sheet. This is cheap and easy too. These magnets are
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