You’d figure a fellow nice enough to bring a bottle would get treated better, but not knowing I was getting paid for the excursion – I just took him to the semi-crappy spots. If I’d known there would be beef jerky, cigars, and real coffee – I’d have carried him through the discarded Pampers and [...]

Scientists must be humorless SOB’s to subject shrimp to a backpack and treadmill. What’s surprising is the shrimp has the ability to run this sprint for hours, making me rethink any retrieve I might use while fishing a shrimp imitation. Have we been misled by their aquarium behavior, or are we just complacent because they rarely sprint from the barbeque?

There’s football on the “Telly” – Ma’s in a panic in the kitchen, and your only responsibilities are to lounge around and overeat to the point of complete folly..   Here’s hoping everyone made it to your table safely, and there’s enough couch space to accommodate the Thanksgiving Food Induced Coma that follows…   We [...]

The lads at DryFly Media sent me a DVD entitled: “Rivers in Motion: The Yellowstone” – it’s a novel idea akin to “visual white noise” – the sights and sounds of the best stretches of your favorite river to put you at peace with the world… Knowing that Singlebarbed wouldn’t be at peace if the Holy Ghost [...]

I hadn’t ever considered the high risk nature of the hobby, but after reading the recital of ills, they missed tromping on medical waste while wading, but that’s a recent hazard – known only to us locals. There’s a lot we take for granted, mostly because it’s home turf and we’ve seen most of the [...]

Snowbound and at wit’s end, Roughfisher grits his teeth and accompanies his bride shopping. At his darkest hour and with purse in hand he stumbles into the millinery aisle – to find the lost graveyard of Antron yarn. All us brownline types are cost conscious – sided by strong women who don’t complain when a [...]

Too many parallels between dentistry and fly fishing for me to feel entirely comfortable in the chair. I might get my big mitts in a fish’s gob and snap a photo or two – but I don’t insist on irradiating my prey or opt for the full panorama shot. Makes me wonder whether they sulk on the bottom trying to get rid of the taste of my thumb.

The Xuron vise is being made again, it’s the “general practitioner” of fly tying tools with a hundred years of history and a simple design that defies refinement. It’s also one of the cheapest tools on the market and can accomodate all the oddball styles like Waddington shanks and tube flies. I run a quarter million flies through it in the last couple of decades – with no visible wear. Perhaps Eric Leiser and the Catskill crowd were onto something.

Tinkering around with tadpoles seems appropriate as there’s so many underfoot. I liken it to ATV chum – as everytime a fleet of riders cross the river a couple million squashed tadpoles tumble downstream.

Doctors and dentists have great boondoggles – fly in trips to Canada so they can dap a fly under the auspices of continuing education. All we get is a lecture on how we screw up – and a plate of stale cookies next to a tureen of watery coffee. Mom and Dad were right, we should’ve stayed in school and applied ourselves.