Monthly Archives: December 2008

Could Abel reels be a victim of Bernie Madoff

wallstreet The Drake has uncovered a link between one of the Madoff sons and the investment group that recently purchased Abel reels.

If the “Madoff” name is familiar it’s due to Bernie Madoff slurping 50 Billion dollars in what’s considered to be the largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered.

Most of the details of the Madoff scam have yet to be unearthed, but some accounts have the Madoff sons as being swindled along with the rest of the crowd. Investigators are tight lipped – and the fear is Poppa Madoff had to have accomplices to pull the wool over so many for so long.

In either case, if you’re a big fan of Abel – you may want to keep a close eye on developments, as they might vanish overnight. You may want to get a couple spools beforehand.

Ten fingers on the fender

busted Now that the screaming has died down, Mom’s in the bedroom sobbing and the “little criminal” has been banished to his room for life, you still have to dispose of the half ounce of dope Ma found in his underwear drawer.

One option is to flush it quickly, but the other is to toss it in your tackle box…

Proof that fishing bait can be genuinely addictive! Hemp seed is one of the most effective and well-known fishing baits; so find out why this is and how to exploit this drug-containing bait for the best big fish catches!

I’m not so sure that on a slow day you won’t be tempted to eat the stuff yourself – which may be the real root of it’s popularity among anglers. Boilie baits are a dough-based bait extremely popular for coarse fish in Europe. The recipes are as archaic and secretive as any other construct in fishing – closely guarded, and passed down from father to son.

A great method commonly used in the past in the UK was to super-glue seeds onto individual hairs on the hook and this was very effective … If you really want to exploit hemp you can produce an homemade boilie made primarily from crushed and shelled seeds and hemp protein powder, (plus a binder,) and also readymade base mixes are available from bait companies (with varying nutritional effects.)

Assuming it works, do you let the kid out so he can score you a dime bag, you’re going to run out at some point, no?

…And remember that water is lost by evaporation not just absorption, so do avoid burning your hemp and the bottom of your pan by keeping an eye on water levels and stirring helps prevent this.

Yes, careful not to burn the hemp, that would be counterproductive.

Seems like an awful lot of work and I bet them Carp would eat a brownie as quickly as a boilie – stick with the tried and true…

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A taste of the future pristine, so’s you can wax sentimental over its present

salmon_lifecycle It’s just another Brownliner saga where fellows turn up their nose and giggle about who’s got what on their waders – and how they wouldn’t be caught dead in the company of me or Roughfisher …

We get you don’t want us dating your sister, and are resigned to our fate, we were  just attempting to get you to peer over the rim of your latte’ and consider waters other than pristine.

We knew the lines would blur eventually.

… and did they ever – blurred with a vengeance. Now we’re able to enjoy the efforts of hundreds of noble salmon, while cloaked in water where we feel at home, the local sewage plant.

You can scoff at us from the safety of the guardrail – but the satisfying thump of large fish in an orgy of feeding, will be known only to the odiferous few.

The journey from Lake Michigan would have meant swimming through a shipping channel that bisects the ArcelorMittal steel mill and the BP oil refinery, then heading up the Grand Calumet River, through a shallow 700-foot stream that starts at the outflow pipe, then shooting 200 feet up a drain pipe that churns out more than 15 million gallons of water a day.

Once inside the plant, they laid eggs, which hatched into fingerlings that feed on microscopic daphnia — another creature known for dying off quickly when exposed to toxics common to wastewater — then grow and swim back out into the lake. Years later, mature fish return to the spot where they were laid to spawn again.

Baranyai, who started out shoveling sludge as a laborer more than 30 years ago, said watching the annual circle of life unfold in the unlikely environment has made him into a naturalist.

“At first, no one believed us,” said Baranyai, who sought experts to identify the species. “They said they must be carp, then they saw the pictures. Then they said we had salmon, but there was no way they were spawning here, but we had genetic testing that showed they were from the same breeding stock.

I’ll leave it to the magazines to butcher the flies we’re using, I’d be flirting with the boundaries of taste and risking my hard fought PG rating – but there’s tons of white marabou involved…

I’d think they could get some good answers studying the folks living under high voltage transmission lines

Magnets are a growth industry I’m a firm believer in science, I’m also firm in my belief that Walmart will own the technology before the first salmon return successfully…

Scientists are attempting to hack the magnetic signature in Salmon that cause them to return to their birth stream, hoping they can redirect fish to different streams and increase their rate of survival.

“We would set up a large magnetic-coil system that lets us dial in the precise magnetic field that we want,” he said. “Then we could take fish from a location where they still survive, raise them in the magnetic field of the tanks, and see if they go to the new river.”

It’s all hypothetical still, but if the Exxon Valdez smashed into an Alaskan peninsula soiling a couple dozen watersheds in the process, fry could be gathered as they migrate downstream and be “magneto-zapped” to return to the Klamath River in California, until them precious Alaskan rivers are restored to full health.

… of course the Klamath locals will enjoy fishing unlike anything ever seen before, and will protest their fry being “brain zapped” to return to  Alaska, but the theory is kinda sound, maybe …

Assuming all this works, someone in a white lab coat would zap a hatchery tank full of alevins to return to undammed, pristine waters enjoying the highest chance of survival. That person would then sell the information to us (if they were smart) as they can tell us which river and what year to be lieing in wait.

By then Walmart will have installed the gizmo in their parking lot to irradiate us continuously, sending us to whichever store has the most  unsold inventory, or we’re wandering around aimlessly wondering why we want a Tofu-Watermelon milk shake in Modesto, when we live 300 miles away.

Ready for the resurgence of Donny Beaver? Even the Brownliner’s won’t be safe as big city swells lease-option the toxic brown water so’s they can program monstrous salmon runs to the delight of their paying membership. Buying massive amounts of fry pre-programmed to return to a questionable waterway will be a simple “pay for play” transaction, accompanied by two or three years of fresh “No Trespassing” signs, resentment, and litigation.

“Home” is imprinted on all of us, and I’d guess Mother Nature uses a similar mechanism for all species – so it’s only a matter of time before some creep magnetizes the girl’s gym.

War on Six Dollar Items – Head Cement

Lacquer and thinner There’s thousands of glues, lacquers, shellacs, and cements, but no such thing as “head cement,”  that’s a term we invented to describe grabbing a gallon jug of something used in the woodworking industry, decanting into a tiny little jar and selling it for 97 times what the jug costs.

Fly tying cements are one of two types; the vinyl cement family, and the lacquer-shellac family. A good rule of thumb is high gloss = lacquer, and dull = vinyl cement.

Vinyl cement is available in many viscosities – and most of those sold in fly shops are thinned to a water consistency for maximum penetration. Lacquer is usually thicker and is almost always sold with thinner, allowing you to customize the mix to your liking.

Lacquer gets thicker as it gets older and is subjected to oxygen, vinyl cement mostly evaporates with exposure to air – without changing viscosity. Most tiers have both in their desk; vinyl cement is flexible and works well with feathers, lacquer dries shinier, harder and is brittle.

Both have great qualities, reinforcing a feather to make a wingcase would be vinyl cement; it doesn’t add shine, is more flexible than lacquer, and the first couple of fish won’t destroy feathers as it retains some of the original flex despite the coating. Exposed thread would be best served with lacquer as it dries harder and often the shine is desirable, like the larger exposed heads of steelhead or salmon flies.

Last year I wrote where to find cheap vinyl cement but I never touched on the glossy lacquers and what to look for…

I prefer the nitrocellulose lacquers once used in the automobile industry (which has since shifted to water based lacquer). These are the thin lacquers used with spray guns and are now used for finishing musical instruments.

Violins and guitars derive much of their sound from the resonance of the body, and a hard glossy lacquer is preferred to enhance its musical qualities (I assume a flexible sealer would dampen sound).

I buy the Lawrence-McFadden lacquers by the quart ($18.00), along with a quart of thinner ($10.65) and either use it as a 50/50 mixture for general fly tying – occasionally using it un-thinned for the “large head” flies, where gloss is part of the overall presentation.

Nitrocellulose lacquers produce a very hard yet flexible, durable finish that can be polished to a high sheen. Drawbacks of these lacquers include the hazardous nature of the solvent, which is flammable, volatile and toxic.

Decanting and resealing the larger containers has always led to quarts of wasted wood finishing products lining your garage, and how each time you’d opened one it had turned into a dried hardened mass.

Instead of pouring into a smaller container, save a couple of straws from your favorite fast food vendor – those big round ones that induce an aneurism because the milk-shake-substance hasn’t thawed yet.

Cut one of those about two inches above the height of your quart jug. When you need to refill your bench bottle – just press it down into the lacquer and when it hits bottom put your finger over the end. Hold your small bottle over the lacquer jug and transfer the straw – about three trips with the straw and you’ve filled a head cement bottle half way, repeat with the thinner, and stir. Toss the straw when you’re done.

No mess, no drips, and the large cans reseal tightly so you get to use all the goody.

I’m not sure how many years two quarts of head cement represents – but to a casual tyer it’s measured in decades. Store-bought head cement is at least $5 per bottle – double that if you buy thinner, so it’s a considerable savings over their product – whose bottles often leak or evaporates the product anyhow.

Finer than human hair, shiny as baby seal, and colors like the peacock

Mother Nature just doesn’t color critters that way. Natural feathers and fibers might have a range of three or four shades from tip to arse, some strident color down the center as in furnace or badger, but the complete color wheel within a six inch length – is an exclusive property of synthetics.

As in the past, I lock into new materials like a pit bull on a postman’s leg, boring you fellows to tears mostly…

 Baby Sunfish

I figure sculptors have the same vision, something in that block of marble says, “Whack away until everyone else sees it.”

This weekend was mostly rain and for unknown reasons maturity got a foothold and I stayed indoors to shake a persistent cough. With nothing better to do I fiddled with the “Fishing Jones” yarn until I had a fast method of removing the center stitched area.

A combination of trimming with scissors and flame to cauterize the edges, makes for fast conversion of the thick band of yarn into two identically colored hackles.

Given the Baby Sunfish above, I think it was worth it.

I’m thinking Steelhead and Shad flies when I see this yarn, Matuka streamers are just a side benefit. All the wild and vibrant hackle colors in an indestructible nylon versus weak chicken feathers is too good to be true.

In direct contrast to the Boa yarn – the center stem of this material is about the same size as a chicken saddle stem, allowing you to pile on the turns of hackle (and colors) with as much gusto as your imagination permits.

The above fly was modeled after the Sunfish I’ve got in the Little Stinking – bright little aggressive SOB’s – with me assuming their eagerness to eat means they’re prey as well as predator.

I’m hoping for a break in the weather Sunday, I just might get to fling this in anger.

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Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime

Join Now for the best seats While doling out all that cash to banks and insurance companies the Bush administration managed to find the remaining 70 million owed to the West Coast salmon fishery.

Maybe it’s my fondness for the Brotherhood, but of all the folks receiving federal aid, these lads need it least.

Fishermen have always been a proud and capable crowd, and rather than enforced idleness, what would serve the commercial fishing industry best is some of that leftover Iraqi ordinance – not money.

They’ve got the boats already, why not offload the unnecessary nets and winches – add a couple extra crews from neighboring trawlers, and go hijack some merchant shipping?

Everyone loves pirates, so why not cash in on the tanker hatch?

Middle America could enjoy a resurgent auto industry after a half dozen Nissan or Toyota container ships are met by the “Salmolian” navy and held for ransom.

We’ve got ample natural preserves off the coast to host the next “Tortuga” – throw a couple casinos on some sandy beach, add some colorful personalities wearing eye-patches and gold teeth, and it’s a poster child for self sufficiency.

Loosely allied with our government and not subject to the niceties of the Geneva convention – we could export all them hedge fund managers that were expecting to fold laundry at Club Fed, and feed them to sharks instead.

I smell a cash cow, especially with the Pay Per View royalties…

It’s the invention destined to make Catch and Release agreeable to the most hardened killer

Take a proud and noble prey and reduce it to a “turd” of shapeless fish flesh? The Wunder Boner is the greatest argument for catch and release ever devised…

Not even McDonalds has the nerve to display how a Fillet of Fish sandwich is made – with good reason, it’s liable to be as photogenic and noisy as pressure extruding a carp through a garden hose.

Freshly imbued with your day-long coaching of Wood’s Lore and sportsmanship – your proud child offers Mom the stringer, only to see them mashed into the cutting board as a sodden lump of flesh?

Why not just step on them first … and tell me you gutted the thing, or is that Sushi roll already stuffed?

Perhaps the most important addition to your fly fishing arsenal

OptiFade was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made, and the discovery that dipping the gear in the Little Stinking’s effluent adds a watery sheen – has made it an integral part of my fly fishing arsenal.

OptiFade - the Deer's Eye View

OptiFade is a new optical pattern camouflage developed by the Gore-Tex folks, the picture at left shows what deer see.

I was able to borrow a prototype to attempt some carp sneakage, slipped in the creek and got the entire ensemble wet…

Apparently the unique combination of industrial effluents contained in the Little Stinking enhanced the land-based camo with a watery sheen, making me nearly invisible to the human eye.

Want Proof?

Me and Pal Tom, after the tour How about me standing next to Tom Chandler, after he’s revealed all his Upper Sacramento Secret Spots unknowingly…

It sure was cold that day, and I’m still feeling guilty Wally the Wonderdog got blamed for clipping Tom’s fine sandwich – but I was starving…

It appears that Gore-Tex is going to cut me in for a piece of the pie. Up till now I’ve held out the “mysterious formula” that makes the water-camo, faithful Singlebarbed readers will get a discount – but I want a piece of whatever you shoplift.

“Secrets of the Upper Sacramento” (as writ by hisself) available from Amazon.com – just in time for Christmas.

Unpopular at the Pier, No Bailout for old rod companies

Tom Chandler published a short piece on the struggles of some of our older, venerable rod companies, how the downturn in the economy was forcing layoffs and depressing sales.

Tom asked for comments.

 

Dear Rod Company Executive,

Recently I’ve learned of the downturn in the economy and the Hard Times that will surely follow. It’s my understanding that as part of the Darwinian process – where the strong companies responsive to their customers have a small chance at survival, and those that didn’t have none …. many of you won’t be around much longer.

That’s Good.

As the sole author of a pissant little angling blog, my readers have been subjected to much spit and vitriol on this sacred subject; the state of the fly rod industry, and its absurd pricing.

It’s my steadfast belief that a fly rod made of paper-backed silica or carbon scrim, containing 12 rings of Portuguese cork, 8 stainless or chromed guides, a lathe-turned aluminum reel seat, and 50 yards of nylon thread has no business approaching $1000 dollars in price.

… this from your industries’ Dream Customer, the guy that owns more rods than fingers, loves new technology, and is itching for an excuse to own more.

Sorry, I’m not interested in your tackle. Your canny Madison Avenue marketing geniuses mistook the Wall Street banking crowd as your constituency, and you’ve been making rods for them – not us fishermen.

You’ve set your cap on an unsustainable economic model, and assumed this tiny niche could endure any form of price indignity. We’d swallow “NiTQ” as something really rare – rather than a silica garage floor coating, we’d perceive a lighter rod as worth an additional $250, insist that a carbon reel seat was sex compared to rare wood – it’s lighter and cheaper for you to make, certainly – sex it’s not.

Real fishermen know sex, we know it’s sweaty, wet, dirty, and some fellow on the far bank is yelling “Woo Hoo, Yeaah!.” We’re not the effete little poseurs you bet your entire company on.

 

Those guys – the back-biting little pricks shown in recent advertisements, aren’t answering your phone call, they’re on the street wondering whether Obama means jail time – or whether they can sell their New York condo before they’re foreclosed on …

Good Goddamn riddance – to them and you.

It’s the perfect storm, Mr Rod Company Executive; a severe recession looming, financial markets in disarray, and none of those institutions are going to loan you a dime. You make luxury items, really expensive luxury items, and with a decade of belt tightening looming – that Chinese blank is looking mighty sweet to me and my pocketbook.

You’ve had your heyday, relying on “buy American” to lure us back from what we could afford – to the outlandish priced crap you’ve insisted are pre-requisites of excellence and keeps the “club” exclusive. Most of us are still making payments on that rod courtesy of extended credit and misguided loyalty.

You blew the excess inventory out in warehouse sales, which hit eBay only days after you did so, and now we’re left wondering why that sonofabitch local vendor sold us a rod for $800 that can be bought on eBay for half that. Your current models should’ve been shredded – or donated to clubs for charity fundraiser’s – instead I can get a new Helios for less than $400, which really confuses me – as we’ve been so loyal to you.

… and the whole fly fishing thing is evaporating in front of us; angling on the decline, quality water in freefall, the government either outmanned, outgunned, or wants to mine what pristine watersheds are left, we’re besieged on every front with invasive species, water rights, water diversion, power generation, stream access, and global warming, and I’ve got to ask – where are you?

Shouldn’t some of you have been pounding fist at a congressional hearing on one or more of these pervasive issues? Now that everyone is taking a turn at the Public Trough – suddenly you want to be “hat in hand” in front of a congressional panel with your fleece outers and tweed uppers?

Them senators – ill-informed and misguided though they may be – are hoping they can keep bread on someone’s table, preserving industries and jobs for folks that can’t afford your tackle already.

Cars are a luxury too … but they’re not the “obscene” kind of luxury befitting a thousand dollar item used only 9 times per year.

No sir, you haven’t paid much attention to us. We recognize that most of you aren’t fishermen – having freely imported plenty of Wharton’s finest – and losing your soul in the process.

Great rod companies, with great product and enough cash on hand to withstand a 50% drop in sales for the next decade – will survive. But I’m not going to help you, not one bit.

I’m legally bound not to reveal my “media” discount, but it confirms what I’ve written about your tackle – your base costs are unchanged, and less than one hundred dollars per rod. Each small iteration in “rod tech” is trumpeted by your colorful advertisements and cocksure staff, obsolescing what I’ve bought with a robust price increase – and little else.

We’ve always loved your product, but we love our kids and homes more.

I’ll buy your rods later from the receiver – after they’ve shuttered your doors and you’re left in the parking lot with a cardboard box and your precious red stapler.