Author Archives: KBarton10

Despite the cost of hackle, dry fly purism might be on the rise

You want light or lead meat? Illinois is about to follow Wisconsin in adoption of the Lead Sinker Act (SB1269). Having seen little mention of the proceedings in angling print, I’m wondering whether folks have read the detail.

Ingestion of lead pellets from hunting first surfaced the issue many years ago, most states have some form of restriction on their use around wetlands.

The Lead Sinker Act bans the use of lead sinkers and lead head jigs in all freshwater impoundments. It’s the definition of “jig” and “sinker” that neatly covers flies as well:

“Lead jig” means any lead weighted fishing hook that
measures less than 1.5 inches along its longest axis and that
contains one ounce of lead or less.

“Lead sinker” means any device that is designed to be
attached to fishing line for the purpose of sinking the line,
and that contains one ounce of lead or less.

Nymphs weighted with lead wire fall into both categories. Despite that giant black stonefly being greater than 1.5″ it’s still attached for the purpose of sinking your line.

Or is it?

A sinking line is attached to your reel for the purpose of sinking anything attached. If the fly’s weighted too – is this a “Chicken and Egg” issue?

Unfortunately the legal profession is not to be trusted as they’ve bigger fish to fry, evidenced by the discussion on the copyright infringement suit of the lighted fishing rod. The vendor sued another manufacturer who dared illuminate the tip of his rod, and while all the lawyers had to weigh in on the real meaning, it’s obvious few, if any, were fishermen.

The “pole” blatantly includes anything that could be called a “pole” and is certainly different from the “rod”. Just like you saying the pole includes the reel shows off the fact that the pole includes the ENTIRE fishing pole, including reel, and handle, and any other little attachments (see light bulb).

I’m glad we got that straight, because based on the patent attorney’s claim above, fly poles are different than fly rods, and that fly must be an addition to the pole, therefore it’s purpose is to sink the rod, not the line, so they’re legal?

They might convince me to sign up for the inevitable class action suit, but I won’t be initiating it.

Now that we’re all horribly confused, it’s time to stock up on tungsten beads and solder. “Lead free” solder retails around $50 per pound, and  is available in comparable sizes; 0.015″ (around 1 AMP), 0.020″ (2 AMP) and larger.

Just a sign of the times, you can bet similar legislation is enroute to your state soon. While angling vendors have replaced split shot with tin and other compounds, both proportions and structural integrity of flies will be resistant to materials that are sized differently, not to mention the poor fly vendors that’ll have to market the antimony variant to the states with special regulations.

If you’re ordering your flies online, caveat emptor – the penalty is up to six months license suspension, and $1000 per day fine.

… and don’t get too attached to tungsten. We’ve a similar issue with ingested Tungsten, although most of the studies to date were delivered intravenously. Heavy metal is just that, they’re all bad.

Acute tungsten intoxication results in death from respiratory paralysis , preceded by nervous prostration , diarrhea, and coma. The most frequently observed sign of chronic intoxication is poor growth …

The fish get smaller, then they die. Just what we’re looking for …

Fair and Unbalanced, the ascendancy of Brownline Journalism

Most Grammatical Mistakes in a Single Sentence 40 Rivers to Freedom just announced the winners of his prestigious 2009 Fly Fishing Blog Awards – normally a source of great angst and suffering among us callow journalism types.

We were stunned to find the Trout Underground Writer’s Network took home three “Floggers.”

Trout Underground, the 800 pound gorilla of temperance and snark took a rare second fiddle to us boorish Brownliners – who took home the “There’s no real Journalism Allowed on Fly Fishing Blogs” and the Best Blog of 2009 awards.

(Tom, it takes more than a case of Scotch and the promise of Moonpies to take the overall title, the field is now crowded with talented blog authors. Think Jungle Cock, small denominations from non consecutive birds..)

I showed for the ceremony in a stunning strapless, V-cut Simm’s shorty, but Alex and the staff at Hatches Magazine suggested that formal attire wasn’t consistent with family programming.

I did have the chance to chat with the Judges, a rare opportunity to inquire of their scoring methodology. Naturally, I assumed real investigative journalism coupled with outstanding content had carried the day …

Naw, your posts aren’t funny, but the misspellings and bad punctuation are a hoot! In fact, the local English professor is writing a treatise on your apostrophe use, it’s fresh, complex, and usually wrong …

W’ell take it.

I’d like to thank Mom and Dad, and Timmy – the guy that I cut English class with in High School ..

Tore it from his daughter’s fingers no less

Reading between the lines suggested somebody was still paying for the crime. Singlebarbed reader RDT sent me a traditional gauntlet, a double-dawg-dare-you note describing his wrenching the yarn from an unsuspecting innocent..

I was finishing up the Golden Mutt post while staring at it and scratching my head. It’s a ribbon yarn in “clownshoe” colors, sturdy and about 1/2″ wide.

Six or seven things leapt to mind, but I had the stonefly materials at hand and whomped together something…

I'd call it a Scarab from the Mummy's Tomb

It’s one continuous strip of ribbon laid over the back and folded three times to make the wingcases – Lord knows it’s a garish looking scarab  monster, just ugly enough for a steelhead to take exception to its presence.

I’ll give it more thought, I just wanted RDT to know he was going to have to dig deeper to get me to blanch.

After 20 years of enforced servitude tying little drab things by the gross for fly shops, this is dessert. It’s in my fly box for the next outing, once the rain lets up we’ll see what carnage ensues.

The yarn is called “Incredible” from Lion Yarn Co., and both the “Autumn Leaves” and “Copper Penny” colors look enticing. Thanks much, RDT – we’ll fiddle with it and see what else we can make.

Adding cream and sugar likely defeats the purpose

The Secret to Beautiful Skin! It was an obscene ritual we practiced while taking turns screening each other from the road. Fall River in August has a pretty decent evening grab – but to get to it you’d donate a quart of blood and scratch for days.

Gary Warren and I would take turns dropping trousers while frantically smearing our entire body with 100% DEET, then we’d spray each other with the aerosol version and make a dash through the grass for the river.

Generously slathered DEET fixed us and the mosquito problem, ensuring neither of us would reproduce – and leading to its removal from store shelves.

Heat and harsh sunlight was the other issue for us guides – me being the junior ensured I’d get a respite every three or four days, but the primary and secondary guides often endured two and three week stints of 100 degree weather and 14 hour days.

They always wore long sleeve shirts and broad brim hats – which despite the heat burden would assist in keeping the sun off tender flesh -avoiding burns and potential for skin cancer.

Most fabrics offer little protection from the sun and wearing both shirt and tee shirt is not much better.

Researchers are linking coffee (caffeine) with skin protection and have discovered how caffeine blocks mutant cells from becoming cancerous.

“But, Nghiem added, people shouldn’t increase the amount of coffee or tea they drink to prevent skin cancer. “You are talking a lot of cups for a lot of years for a relatively small effect,” he said. “But if you like it, it’s another reason to drink it.”

If the human trials prove convincing, we can all stop apologizing for slopping coffee down our shirt fronts – it’ll be essential gear akin to fly floatant on your dry fly.

It’s mostly “teeth floatant” at the moment, but while you’re running for the underbrush wishing you had zipper-front waders, cursing both bacon and eggs – you can be confident your skin looks radiant.

When reality is stranger than fiction

Fortified with Mayfly guts Can my sense of humor be masking a sixth sense? I conjure something out of the blue attempting to get a giggle, and the following week I find it on sale at the grocery store?

Spooky.

Many years ago fly fishing was turned on its ear when Jim Teeny patented his Teeny Nymph. This was pre-Internet so the steam and venom was limited to snail mail.

I can’t wait to see your reaction to the big ® blazed on the side of your next salmon, and while it’ll be easier than eyeballing whether a fin has been clipped, the bigger question is do you have to give it back?

… not release it, return the corpse to its rightful owner.

The tale starts with a genetically engineered hybrid of the Atlantic salmon paired with a Pacific Chinook salmon, gaining weight twice as fast as either species – yet doesn’t get any bigger.

“If a year-old unmodified salmon weighs 70 or 100 grams (1/4 pound), then a year-old (modified) salmon would weigh a kilogram (2.2 pounds) or slightly over,” he said, adding that the fully grown genetically modified fish doesn’t end up larger than the natural fish.”

They call it the AquaAdvantage® Advanced Hybrid, we’ll call it the “Double Chin.”

AquAdvantage Growth Chart

Figure you’re the same height in High School as today, any difference in weight suggests your “breadth” has increased. I’d say it’s the dawn of a new era in salmon fishing and flies.

Gone are the rare tropical plumage and feathers from endangered species, replaced with synthetics we’ll dip in Tempura batter.

We won’t have to worry about escapees – males never ask directions, they’ll simply mill endlessly at the mouth of the Panama Canal, while the females try to leap the lock gates.

The down side is they won’t expire like Pacific salmon, so this’ll be a yearly tourist spectacle complete with vendors selling bread slices for your kids to throw.

No wait, there’s more!

Trout are next.

Despite having to retrofit all the trucks with larger nozzles it’ll be every hatchery manager’s dream, docile 10″ fish that weigh 2 lbs. With that much bulk it won’t be able to swim upstream, it’ll drift with the current waiting for the Cheetos emergence.

It’s an elegant solution, plant them in the upper river and when they hit the brackish delta they’ll expire en masse, and if any make it to the pumps they can scent the lawns in the south end of the state.

Food and fertilizer in one flabby silver parcel.

Government intervention is fashionable, but rarely effective

Chinook in flight Government intervention is a popular topic in all circles of late, especially finance. Most have lost faith that governments are capable of managing anything unless some foreign army is landing on a nearby beach, and then we cheer loudly as the feds show in force.

British Columbia is responding to the threat to salmon stocks in a manner that bears close examination, as it may be one of the few examples I’ve seen of forward thinking…

BC has the double issue of a large and entrenched salmon farming industry, which has had a rocky relationship with locals for all the obvious reasons, but it also has some of the few remaining pristine stocks of wild fish, not yet mown under by development and pollution.

To balance the needs of both, the suggestion is the creation of a salmon agency with jurisdiction over all the causal agents that threaten salmon – from logging and global warming, to hatcheries and farmed fish.

The forum recommended B.C. create a water and land agency by 2012 to oversee the cumulative impact on salmon habitat of all resource activities, from traditional sectors such as logging and mining to modern threats such as run-of-the-river hydro projects. Government progress would be subject to independent, open audits.

It’s a “cradle to grave” approach that sounds like a sensible and thoughtful plan – given that threats to wild fish are many and varied. What teeth they’ll have to enforce will determine success, but it’s certainly a holistic approach that could prove better than crapping millions of fry in a dead river and calling it reborn.

Multiple jurisdictions from traditional agencies guarantee painfully slow progress on any issue, often measured in years or decades. I’d think having all of that under an umbrella agency would allow them to respond quickly to issues at a minimum.

With the miserable environmental record of my state as backdrop, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that while Arnold won’t be back, his replacement might have a model to jumpstart our failed salmon management efforts.

Mutt Stonefly detail – no need to fear a little color

Per the request to see a close up of these colorful oddities, I’ve included the top and bottom view.

The bottom shows the color gradient the yarn induces, and the top view shows the different colors of Bernat Boa wingcases added. Most used Brown, Black, or Olive – but I used golden brown on the Golden Mutt.

 The top of the Mutt's

Both Bernat Boa and Moonlight Mohair change colors every couple of inches – which is the entire point to using them. Naturals have a multitude of colors or striations, only not as radical as what the yarn does.

The underbelly, showing the yarn color gradient 

None of this matters, add the six or seven shades darker the fly will be when wet, and how water depth filters color – in shallow water red is still red, but below 8 feet, red is no longer red. The fly will appear different than seen in normal light – that’s for certain.

The resolution of the above does not show the sparkle dubbing component I blended for each fly and used under the wingcases.

Some set fashion, some follow, others would be wise to wait

This weekend featured continuous sustained downpour that blew the Little Stinking into the Great Muddy – one 24 hour monsoon turned a sleepy fetid little brook into a chocolate gravel throwing monster – increasing its size tenfold.

I went out and admired the snarling beast, watching Audi’s and Toyota’s tumble past intermingled with goat guts and lawnmowers.

There will be new holding water aplenty – and while the bridge reverberated from log strikes and abandoned farm equipment – I couldn’t resist a couple of fist pumps, all we need is three or four more storms of the same quality, and us Californian’s can start to breath easy.

Enforced idleness allowed me to finish the Purple, Olive, Gold, Rainbow, and Red stonefly nymphs that SMJ and I’ll be testing come April. I’ll only share the magnetic versions, but he should fall for it repeatedly and often. I still have four dozen rubberleg versions to finish this weekend and I’ll have an even 10 dozen stoneflies – enough to get into all manner of trouble.

… after that we start working the mid sized caddis.

I’ve located a current source of the Polyamide double eyelash yarn I’ve been using on the streamers, figured to pass it along if anyone’s interested.

Plymouth Parrot Polyamide double eyelash

The Plymouth Yarn Company makes “Parrot” – a full sized double eyelash identical to the Gedifra Costa Rica that I’ve been using (and no longer made).  Crystal Palace Yarns makes “Rave” a half size double eyelash that is no more than an inch wide – yielding a polyamide “hackle” about a size #16 (once trimmed from the yarn and prepped).

Crystal Palace Rave

Both are posing next to my collection of bead equipped, full shank leaded, color-imbued, stonefly nymphs. I’ll mention the “Rave” hackled damselflies in the top left corner of the fly box once I’ve stuck something other than my finger..

Statistically Sage is a wart on the Shakespeare derriere

Despite the colorful nom de plume here’s what you look like; you own a Sage fly rod, you fish a Scientific Angler fly line, and you buy all your flies from Orvis.

Unfortunately for the $1000 rod crowd, the Shakespeare Ugly Stick retains the title of most purchased rod in the continental US, and is also the rod most purchased with a bundled outfit.

Southwick Associates the statistical think tank for angling and hunting released figures for last year’s responses from their AnglerSurvey.com site. Southwick is a marketing and statistical “for profit” organization that compiles market information for both hunting and fishing manufacturers – and occasionally releases free reports for our consumption.

Sage commands a tenth of the fly rod market, Scientific Anglers has nearly 25% of fly line sales, and Orvis is responsible for 10% of fly sales.

Individual reports are available for specific states, and the message is mixed – but trending downward, as are the nationwide statistics compiled by Fish and Game.

The greatest growth in licenses appears to be rural areas, with the urbane city types falling by the wayside.

For the Moldy Chum – Trout Underground Bikini War:

Your obsession with bikini based angling fantasy holds water, to wit:

Just shove them aside and claim your prize Statistics for California are unavailable, but Florida is a sunny state and a close approximation. There are 1,200,000 women in Florida between the ages of 18 and 29. Roughly 13% of the population bought licenses, of which the greatest single demographic (9%) was male retiree.

Figure 110,000 women in the proper age group are available to drape themselves in a bikini on a rock. You’ve repeatedly insisted that the “supermodel” variant is desirable; taut, lithesome, and abundant in all the appropriate areas. Assuming “Supermodel” is 10% of the available age group, there are 11000 women available to fulfill your angling fantasy.

There are 8000 lakes (greater than 10 acres) and 2300 miles of shoreline, and models have the opportunity to engage a bikini 2 out of 7 days, therefore, there’s 3143 supermodels available to lounge on rocks on a given weekend. This implies there’s a bikini clad lounging supermodel for roughly each three miles of shoreline.

Unfortunately, there’s five steroid fueled weightlifter boyfriends per mile – and those that aren’t dating senior retiree’s, will be mopping your face on granite should you unsheath your camera.

I couldn’t find statistics for lounging bikini clad supermodels that long to be courted by a sweaty fishermen old enough to be their dad, with a wet dog that insists on sitting in the front seat, whose idea of the perfect date included a chili dog with sweetened cabbage.

Any of you fellows want to put a number on that?