I’m still in a state of enforced idleness, waiting for water levels to resume some semblance of clarity. I keep checking hoping the stream flow meter has malfunctioned, but it keeps telling me to stay home.

…so I ignore it, and wander out for some visual confirmation.

The good news is there are two separate colors instead of a single cocoa latte murk, I assume one is water color, the other is raw selenium. 300 cubic feet per second and it won’t be recognizable until it’s half that.

Instead of anything really productive, I’ve been fiddling with Spey flies and Angelina fiber. I thought that I would hit the American for some steelhead, but got scared off initially by the proposed closure. The Fish and Game Commission decided not to close it, largely because the season was nearly over.

Spey flies have their roots in Scotland, used on the river Spey for Atlantic Salmon. I have always admired their minnow-like silhouette and figured with a little modification they would make nice bass flies.

Hair or fiber can become hackle simply by spinning them in a dubbing loop and palmering the result up the hook shank. Angelina fibers already scream “eat me” and they’re agile enough to dance like crazy underwater. I spun them into hackle using 34 gauge copper wire instead of thread, this’ll make them bulletproof against fish teeth.

We’ll see if “Old Nondescript” can’t see his way to skipping the mayfly nymphs for a small bass-burger; that’s opal Angelina palmered up the shank, with a couple turns of Citronella, topped with some Marcasite. It should be a fair imitation of a little bass, Pikeminnow, or a bluegill.

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