Author Archives: KBarton10

He was thinking it was Christmas until the other Crawdad bit back

I’m sure that fish was thinking, “Sweet, there’s two of them.”  – at least he was thinking that right up until I wadded the hook point through his gob..

I’m afraid he’s going to hold it against me, as he “arpy-chucked” half the meal when I grabbed him. On the one hand I could take this as the ultimate confirmation of “matching the hatch” – but it could just be a random happenstance.

Older Brother with a typical smallmouth Igneous Rock showed on the doorstep yesterday, ignoring the wind and blowing topsoil, insisting we stomp creekbed. I’d just finished another batch of LSO’s (Little Stinking Olives) and some other mid-sized nymphs and instead of all those empty compartments staring back at me, I had something visible in the flybox.

With wind-induced right angles, I would’ve been pleased with a tailing loop, it was classic “chuck and duck” weather, where the fly has about a fifty percent chance of hooking you as hitting the water.

We hiked down river to the stretch we’d sampled last week, a long slow bend that had carved the far bank, leaving an overhanging bank with enough height to break the wind slightly, although it was still difficult casting.

Hearing the crack of fly impacting fishing vest, I glanced at older brother’s hydration pack expecting to see a leak; it’s another layer of armor between sharp hook and tender flesh, a feature I hadn’t anticipated – but there’s some comfort in knowing you’ve got extra layers of protection.

A well munched crayfish, barfed up by a greedy smallmouth We started hitting Bass almost immediately, both of us are flinging LSO’s hoping we’re not the next victim, there’s a nice boil where my fly landed and I’ve got a smallmouth on – an 11″ fish that wished he was somewhere’s else.

I get him up close and reach down and he “yaks” a big reddish object out of his gob. I pull my crayfish out of his jaw and release the fish, lean down to inspect what he barfed up, and it’s what’s left of a real crayfish.

I’d love to think I’d “Cloned the Crawdad” – but it could be just an aggressive, greedy, fish with eyes as big as his stomach..

Matte finish faceted beads, so you can torment all your pals when they produce the store-bought flavor

I keep a small supply of the taper-drilled beads on hand for special circumstances, but the metal beads I use on flies are all from bead stores.

At $2.75 per 25, all I’m doing is adding another dime to a tree limb, and being a cheap SOB, that goes against the grain.

There are positives and negatives with the “bead store” product; they’re available in a bewildering assortment of shapes, colors, and metals, and they’re about 1/5 the price of your local fly shop. The downside is the holes are small, and for certain shapes of hook bend, just can’t slide over the sharp turns.

Model perfect bends are the exception, but Sproat and Limerick are chancy at best.

I just got an order of specialty beads from Beadaholique.com, with a matte finish that includes a faceted sparkle. It reduces the shine of the traditional beads and adds a sparkle that looks especially good.

I’ve often heard complaints from anglers who under bright conditions thought traditional bead head flies “too shiny” – and if you’re one of those fellows, you may want to eyeball the “matte” flavor.

 

Indoor Indirect Light

The facets give off a sparkle very much like seal fur in dubbing – a whitish wink of light that really looks attractive next to the dull matte finish. They’re available only in Gunmetal and Copper colors, 4mm size. The interior hole is 2mm, which is the minimum size you want to order (smaller holes can only fit 16-20 hooks.)

Next to the faceted beads are traditional 5mm copper beads from the same source – the holes on the 5mm look to be about 2.5-3mm, suitable for larger flies like stonefly nymphs, streamers, and the like.

For jewelry beads these are on the expensive side; the faceted bead is $3.99 per 144 beads, and the plain copper 5mm is $3.33 per 144, I’m assuming it’s the price of copper that makes these a dab more expensive than normal – usually I pay about $11.00 – $14.00 per thousand beads.

 

Outdoor Direct Light 

From the above outdoor photo you can see the additional glare off the traditional smooth bead, and how the matte finish is absent that extra gleam.

I can’t wait to give these a try – as I find myself using beaded flies much more often than I used to – it’s often the easiest way to weight them and you don’t need seventeen split shot to get them to hug the bottom in fast water.

Be cautious on your first order, you may be using a hook style that prevents their use. I use mostly Togen hooks that are unforged – that allows me to grab the point area with a pair of pliers and move it the 5-6 degrees necessary for the bead to pass the sproat “kink” portion. I would not try this on traditional forged hooks (those whose wire is flattened on the hook bend) – only round wire hooks can be deformed and returned to their original shape without inducing too much weakness.

Elastomeric sounds horribly sexy, but it’s still a rubber cap

I figured he was needling me because of my boundless generosity and acute business acumen. It’s a “no brainer” really, what with the decline in the stock market and all of us looking for that second job to make ends meet, I figured to leverage our fishing expertise into big coin…

“Caribou Barbie’s” husband leveraged his into a shot at Mr. Vice President, and his fishing could be from Marine-1 from now on, why should we aspire to less?

All I had in mind was utilizing them precious dirt water skills to go into the scrap metal salvage business – and with Daytripper, the Roughfisher, and myself – that’s three states, and in the current economic climate that’s a multinational conglomerate.

I’ve got more rusting metal in my watershed than the Coral Sea, and at current prices all it takes is a little elbow grease, a couple of conservation organizations to lure into our enterprise, and we can sit back and make like Sanford and Son’s.

Instead, Daytripper sends me a napkin when I need a crane … Microtrash? The smallest refuse in my creek … is me …

How many rusting Audi's will fit in one of these

Saving the environment from the perils of a six inch length of monofilament is a worthy gesture, but in a brownline fishery it’s the scale that’s all wrong.

I need something like Noah’s Ark where I can add rusting debris in pairs; first the Audi’s, then lawnmowers, water heaters, washing machines, tractors, bridge girders, and the small stuff like Volkswagens and Subaru Foresters…

That's a nine foot rod for comparison Think bigger guys, note the small sample to assist you in scoping the effort…

It’s not collecting aluminum beer cans to assist the school band in scoring uniforms, it’s heavy industry and enough income to score us each a couple of burritos.

Remember, after the first couple of million all our sins are forgiven, we’re the lions of the new-New Deal, and the cover of Time and the stony faces of a Senate sub-committee are only a heartbeat away.

Even the Holy Water is suffering mightily

I was considering a pilgrimage to California’s Carp Mecca when my brother gleefully informed me that Clear Lake is suffering from some unknown malady and carp are dying by the bushel.

Great.

I was hoping it was some hunger strike wherein I could render assistance with Darth Clam or some such gaudy worm-based substance, wind up with blisters on my “palming” hand, and rescue the environment in the same breath.

Apparently it’s plant decomposition robbing the water of oxygen, an as yet unidentified virus, or pesticides – and Lake County is digging trenches for disposal of numerous carcasses, hoping to minimize the bouquet. It’s enough to make a brownliner cry – first the local fish serve up a extra helping of extended digit, followed by mass depopulation of the Holy Water…

This year’s Clear Lake Bow Fishing Tournament killed 5 tons of Carp (10,104 pounds), and all I was looking for was a couple confirmed nibbles, it don’t seem hardly fair.

I suppose I could fish for trout, but there’s not enough frustration involved…

Live Bacon excretions prove fatal to Mayflies

The nymphal form of Bacon Based on my own experiences I’ve often wondered how long it’d be until somebody sued someone over farm effluent.

Considering that potable water supplies are a finite resource coveted by land developers and big cities alike, “that little brown creek” will be worth something to someone soon. Environmentalists and fishermen don’t count – they’re the fringe electorate whose predictable foaming of the mouth can be dismissed out of hand…

A PIG farm which polluted a stream with waste so badly that nothing could live in the water other than fungus and worms has been ordered to pay out almost £7,000 by a Suffolk court.

I found myself asking whether I was fungus or the worm ..

With the well documented illnesses spread by farm produce, and unfiltered pumping for irrigation, it also wouldn’t surprise me that some of these outbreaks weren’t caused by surface water – crapped in by all manner of agriculture, warmed to a lethal temperature, and then sprinkled into your evening meal as spinach, tomatoes, or bell peppers.

The thought of my unsavory boots tromping through your side salad should send an average person screaming in terror – fortunately you’re made of sterner stuff, or only eat meat n’ taters..

It’s fast, durable, light sensitive, and fish love them

It’s more of a preoccupation with efficiency, cheap materials, fast tying, and desirable physics.

Fast sinking flies allow me to cast at the target, and with low water and the increase in algae – it usually means I’m dragging less debris when the fly enters the “eat” zone. “Keeling” the fly so the point rides upwards gives me a slim chance at avoiding the bottom – giving the fly the ability to make contact without being hung or gathering debris and increasing the size of the fly.

 

Me, I just like the color. It’s consistent with my preference for blended dubbing – with multiple component colors present to present fish whatever color he likes best. These are 10/0 Mauve beads with an oily iridescent sheen, presenting multiple colors to a hungry fish, and hopefully inducing him to grab.

I was using these much of yesterday – one of those flies you can tie two dozen an hour; perfect for gifting pals and aggressive casting, where adorning a tree branch means you’re dry eyed and vengeful.

 

I call them “Jelly Bellies” as they’ve got that squishy-translucent, worm look to them. It’s a nice searching pattern with plenty of color – and reacts differently to direct sunlight or indirect lighting. The photo at top is indirect indoor lights, and the above is direct sunlight, note the pronounced rose tint to the glass. The foreground three are tied with a few fibers of aurora blaze Angelina over the top, adding some flash akin to Gary Lafontaine’s Sparkle Pupa.

You could go the “green” route and claim they’re lead free, or please your PETA buddies because everything on the fly is synthetic, but the real value is banging out 3-4 dozen while watching listening to the pundits describe the earthbound spiral of your retirement fund.

I scored these at Joann’s Fabrics, about a buck for a lifetime supply, and trout love them.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

You can have one, but you must renounce your ancestral claim to lands and castle

There’s nothing like the plaintive howl of a youngest son to turn Ma into a baking dynamo, and likely she made older brother eat a bar of Ivory Snow for high-grading the baked goods.

It’s the same rush of adrenalin that allows Mom to lift a car off a child, trifling details like “he’s round as a butterball and could afford to lose 20 pounds,” is lost in the rattle of pans and flurry of baking powder.

The least I could do was take older bro fishing, now that I’d ratted him out, an opportunity to torment him further – dancing just out to fist range – chanting “Ma loves me more’n she loves you..”

Little brothers are pricks even in their dotage.

New water was in order as I was still smarting from Saturday’s outing. We moved upriver to a stretch neither of us had seen, sandwiched between two gravel quarries.

I don’t think the fish had seen a fly before and we had our hands full; smallmouth, largemouth, sunfish, hardhead, and pikeminnow assaulted us in large numbers, mostly smaller fish – and the action was brisk.

“Igneous Rock” was fishing a Manhattan Leech and I started off using a similar fly I call a Jelly Belly, it’s another glass beaded monstrosity using oily rose colored glass beads.

 

The above fish is a Sacramento Sucker in pretty stressed condition, note the copepods attached to the lower extremities. He’s wearing a Jelly Belly, making him a double sucker.

Almost identical to the Pikeminnow, Sacramento suckers are distinguished by a bit more yellow pigmentation, and the lateral line is straight; Pikeminnow have an upward slant to the lateral line at the rear of the gill plate.

 

This time of year water is both low, and extra warm – making fish vulnerable to parasites.

I swapped out the smaller fly for the Little Stinking Olive – I’d had time to produce some variants that had double the lead of the earlier flavor, and added 4 strands of soft crimp Aurora Blaze Angelina to the tail. It’s the dredging version, fast sinking and with a bit of flash to assist in deeper, darker water.

Everything ate it, including bluegill and sunfish.

Older Bro busted off his leech and I palmed a Little Stinking Olive, it was time for some horsetrading. “OK, I’ll give you one of these, but you must renounce all claim to my Lemon cake, there’ll be no ‘tithing’ – no ancestral blood right, no imminent domain issue with the goodies, deal?”

I glanced back his way and saw him with a fish on, “See, I told you!” He paused long enough to call back, “hell, this ain’t the first one, this is the fourth fish..”

It was the scene from “Dances with Wolves” – two fellows separated by an insurmountable gulf of sugary citrus infused plunder, thinking, “Good Trade.”

That little voice we shrug off is always right

There are always warning signs that we choose to ignore, in part due to boundless enthusiasm, in part raw courage. Non fisher types cannot understand our premonitions, as it’s counter to everything they’ve experienced.

We wake up to a traditional western dawn and appreciate the riot of colors and hue, but it starts that unsettling little voice that whispers, “fishless” …

sunrise It’s not that we can’t appreciate beauty, it’s only that we’ve been here so many times – knowing that if everything falls into place, the fish will be absent.

I’d rather wake up in a torrential downpour, or forget my reel, needing something bad at trip’s start to build the karma for something good to happen later.

I peered over the railing of the bridge and the little voice started clamoring – in the absence of all the crap from the horse stable, the water was gin clear and the fish were visible.

Too good to be true, often is just that – and I’m attempting to temper my enthusiasm with unwelcome reality.

No horse crap means clear water and visible fish I tossed everything I had, every oddball experimental and all the proven patterns; weighted, unweighted, dead drift, and stripped, and there was naught to show for my industry.

It was yet another reminder of the perverse nature of fishing, dealing me all aces up until the other fellow caught his flush.

The fish weren’t feeding and likely were on high alert. Without the protective blanket of horse crap from the stable upstream, they weren’t interested in anything thrown their way.

Tomorrow I’ll start by launching my old water heater over the bridge, flies are for sissies.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Me and my muddy puddle aren’t a demographic

2009 Sage rod It’s all surmisal, but I always blamed BMW for the fetish over the lower case “i”. Rod makers are nearly indistinguishable due to exponential numbers and consonants. “Herd Beasts” as first one, then all of them engage in the practice – not to be outdone.

I’m sure hundreds of slides and dozens of Powerpoint presentations (replete with dancing frogs) show unequivocally that naming a new Sage line, “Bludgeon” lacks the proper fit to the demographic of married women – older than 30, with 2 children, whose median family income was $150,000 and above.

We used to call them “yuppies” in the old days – anyone who gravitated to shiny mechanical objects containing a lower case “i” … BMW was the culprit – and I’m sure marketing genius’s have some telltale statistic proving well-to-do males consider it a pheromone.

If it was that compelling we would have rewritten sizing on women’s underwear, losing the “DD” and adding the “i” – but I don’t ply their craft, so I’m hot air…

I’m Old School, where poetry should rhyme and the letters should mean something. I’ve always been leery of the “Beamer” naming convention, as it’s too close to software versions, “Windows 7 is buggy as hell, but we’ll get it right in Windows 8, trust us…”

At $800 per – I don’t have the luxury of “fool me once” – it’s safer to take a flyer on the Bludgeon 906 (9′ for AFTMA #6) – nomenclature we can feel and understand.

Most of us skipped Math class intentionally, opting for grades less than optimum, yet retaining some small dignity. It could be they’re attempting to confuse us thinking we’ve forgotten the laws governing additive or distributive mathematics.

They’re not far wrong, as asking a fisherman how much his fish cost per pound results in a panic look and vapor lock.

As even the vendors don’t know what their naming convention means, a decision made by some bespectacled fellow from Madison Avenue, here’s a reference guide to aid you in rod selection:

Xi2 (Sage) =  “Xi” is the roman numeral for eleven, times 2 = the age of the advertising executive’s girlfriend. That way he can offer the romantic gesture of gifting her a rod rather than a diamond.

It could also mean “excessive interest” – which is what you’re paying on the card used to purchase it.

VT2 (Sage) = Stands for Vermont, where Sage refiled it’s articles of incorporation. Vermont companies can better resist hostile takeovers via “poison pill” codicles, preventing Shakespeare from eating Sage like a tea crumpet.

IImx (Winston) = (sexual content) not suitable for this site. Gross.

X(raised to the power of)2s (Scott) = (pornographic content). Gross.

T(raised to the power of)2h (Scott) = Stuttering T-t-t-t-aper. Great rod, but the engineer has an outlandish speech impediment.

A(raised to the power of)2 (Scott) = Functioning Alcoholic, on Step 4 of the 12 Step program, likely his sponsor is at wit’s end. The rod lacks taper, as it’s only used as a prop to get out from under the watchful eye of spouse and dependants.

We’ve broached exponents, subscripts, roman numerals, and imaginary numbers, so what’s left other than scientific notation?

The price is certainly worth a second look

Those of you who’ve resisted the Spey phenomenon and are looking for that first rod or subtle nudge to tip you over the precipice, avert your eyes – quickly…

Loop of Sweden

The Loop Rod Company (of Sweden) is one of many rod companies blowing their excess inventory onto eBay, no subterfuge in all of this as they’re actively marketing rod sales via this outlet.

What drew my attention is the Loop Adventure Spey Rod, 13′ 2″, 3 piece, for an AFTMA #9 line. The price is $119, with 154 of them available.

I can’t resist a really good price – and those that are dangling on the edge – unsure of whether the style is suitable for their fishing, and don’t wish to make a multi-thousand dollar commitment – this may be a good way to get your toe in the water.

The rods are mailed directly from the Loop factory in Sweden, and the postage will run you about $30, so the total outlay will be about $150.

I’m sure there are plenty of rods better, this is an overstock of a discontinued model and the price suggests it may be worthy of a second look – something you can smuggle onto your credit card without too much guilt.

Technorati Tags: , , ,