Author Archives: KBarton10

The fly fishing will be better now that you’re gone

This weekend I’ll be painting Didymo on them rocks with a spatula.

I’ll be the fellow whose 4 X 4 axles will be glowing white hot as I mash my way through cottonwoods and willows and into your favorite pool – there to dismount the smoking wreck while it dribbles petroleum products into the Pristine.

… and all of my flies will be tied on treble hooks.

Just a reminder that this weekend you can toss all that nose-inna-air bologna while you’re laying waste to whatever flavor of Sweet you’ve  felt threatened by … As Ms. Claudette mentions so eloquently below, everything’s peachy if you can catch a church service sometime before Saturday …

… and if you aren’t a Good Christian like me and the rest of my yellow eJournalist pals, we’ll be taking our chances with Cletus, his 4X4, and a couple icy 24 packs of Go-Girl.

We’ll be pounding your favorite riffle with “Dagwood” sandwiches made of Triscuits and alternating layers of cream cheese and Bighead Carp roe.

Suck it, wimps.

It’s okay for us trained professionals however

 Delicious and Relaxing

I figure the claim should be “a delicious and relaxing way to alter your graphite casting stroke to the pace of fiberglass and bamboo.” All the rest is just window-treatment to make the kiddies think they’re scoring a baggie absent the stern gaze of John Law.

Kids, these are your arteries …

artery

… and these are your arteries after Mary Jane’s brownies fights for your immortal soul and your LDL – and your thighs rub together when you walk …

Brownies done it

Only in California …

My gal could use a Mink coat and a big dinner too

Monroe in Mink, every scotsman's dream I remember the elevated tempers and harsh language when they contemplated NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Senators would pound fist on podium insisting it wasn’t fair to us and how the abolished tariffs and transparent borders would benefit our neighbors much more than ourselves.

Now, I find myself in a similar precarious position, how commerce between us and the rest of the world doesn’t seem aquatically balanced, especially so with invasive species.

Them nice fellows in Scotland are pissed senseless and on a war of extinction with the American Mink, how it’s eating cats and dogs, pillaging defenseless salmon, and scarfing all their water voles …

Heaven forbid we should lose a poodle or three …

Meanwhile the rest of Europe is declaring Jihad against the American Signal Crayfish, which any sportsman knows is %$#@ freshwater lobster – requiring nothing more than kite string and a rancid chicken liver to catch all .. you .. can .. eat.

Now that all them Scottish dames has scored a coat our vermin are no longer good enough. Ditto for crayfish now that all them rich sauces have laid both French & Danes low … that red wine immunity overcome by bushels of Mud Bugs and all the butter they swizzled while sucking them down.

Meanwhile we’re dancing around Rock Snot, Rock Vomit, and the leftover ichor from forty years of  horror movies as unwanted guests.

You can’t eat them, nor can you wear them, so where’s the equity in this trade? I’d suggest that while we had the best interests of our eurotrash cousins at heart, they haven’t repaid the favor – at least not in like coin.

… perhaps some invasive Dutch Chocolate, or at least a scone or two.

Out of Coq de Leon – and you’re wondering why you can’t find Pardo?

Kater Bosworth wearing Coq de Leon , well - we might addI wouldn’t worry too much unless you tie dry flies or fish for steelhead. Your prayers of this being an overnight fad are simply not working …

The drain on fancy hackles and ostrich plumes will be growing in the foreseeable future, rather than winding down. The fashionistas have spoken and both sexes are scrambling to get on board.

The crescendo has been building from 2009, first with fringes and edging and eventually encompassing the entire garment. Hair attachments being an accessory to the larger trend, “Tribal” …

Tribes around the world used bird feather hair extensions for many different reasons such as acts of bravery and or sexual prowess, particularly for men the bigger and longer the hair feather etc.

Expensive is when you’re fashioning a dress made entirely of the oldest strain of genetic chickens known to Man. Coq de Leon can run to $0.30 per feather, but Hollywood has never been overly concerned with cost overruns or animal fashions …

We’re assured the wild birds that they come from aren’t harmed in any way. That the hair feathers are simply gathered cleaned and colored.

Best of all they assume they’re wearing shed feathers. All those Grizzly chickens, Pheasants, and Ostriches shedding feathers like a mangy pooch, so there’s little karmic damage and no blood throwing PETA mercenaries to disturb your exit should you wind up with a drawer full.

Feathered Eyeglasses by Ete

They’ve been in earrings for years, and now that Men are as keen on power fashion as the ladies, dressing for success means you need to know pecking order and men’s ties …

For Guys too ...

Don’t worry too much about the scent of mothballs, as it’ll soon become an aphrodisiac in the workplace. The power tie is raptor, baby – only food groups wear stuff that chirps.

When fly design comes together it’s a complete surprise

It’s the simplest of all games really, each Saturday evening I sit down at the vise to invent the next great dry fly series that will revolutionize the surface game, and make everyone forget them ancient fuddy-duddies like Skues, Halford, or Ronald McDonald …

Rules are simpler yet; it has to be as fast or faster to tie than a traditional dry fly, and it has to use at least one waste byproduct of fly tying – some butt end or common scrap we’ve discarded routinely.

That way I can insist mine’s better than Theodore Gordon’s halting imitations as my fly is “green” as well as guaranteeing an early supper …

Green_Jihad

I’m not sure I was supposed to come up with anything at all, it was the challenge that drew me to the vise week after week.

I reversed the wing from a Quigley Cripple using deer hair trimmings as the discard material. His Cripple uses the trimmed stub over the body, and the long end over the eye of the hook. I added a dab of tacky wax to the wing … just enough to add a bit of clumping (for the mayfly version) and allows me to pull the wing down over the body to turn the fly into a caddis imitation.

Pull the wing up for the mayfly hatch and down for the caddis grab – neither requires you to retie the knot when it’s near dark.

What’s not to like in a fly that can imitate two of the major trout food groups?

The real test of a great fly is not in its design or function but in the hidden meaning of its name, which will naturally be lost over time, yet adds mystery and illusion to a pedestrian effort.

There were two royal coachmen for each carriage, so which inspired the fly?

I call it the “Hovering Predator” which we’ll know as the drone that’s kept Osama behind them high walls and rooted to the compound, and the rest of history will have to guess at – while wadding handfuls of #16’s into their fly boxes.

Better yet, I’ve shown you mine, now I want to see yours …

The end of the unwilling outdoor blood donation

Under the counter sales to them as can reproduce As most of you already know, mosquitoes ferret us out due to the CO2 we exhale. Ditto for anything else that sucks blood, and why entomologists lay dry ice on a white blanket and run for their lives …

Now researchers claim they can render us completely invisible to the hosts of blood sucking insects by giving us a repellant that will cause complete sensory overload to all the creepy crawly things that are determined to make the out-of-doors experience miserable and demeaning.

… to the gals mostly, us real woodsmen delight in bleeding profusely, and show our scars at the least provocation …

The good news is that it’s “1000 times more powerful than DEET.” Which was removed from shelves due to its propensity to lower your kid’s IQ and cause numerous birth defects. A thousand times more powerful suggests that probability may be inching towards certainty, which may make sales to those under 65 illegal.

… not to worry, fly shops will sell little crack vials to them as able to reproduce, for six or seven times the normal markup … Or I will, in the parking lot … for even more.

How many can you produce a year, and how painful is the extraction?

Sure I get death threats, and when I mentioned household pets there was a brief spike over the weekly contingent of, “if you tell them about Lake X, or stream Y, or if your shadow darkens my refrigerator ever again, I’ll  …”

I was unfazed at the outpouring of hatred when I claimed the household tabby was a disgusting invasive and why Jihad was necessary. Most of the email was scented, so I’d obviously touched a nerve somewhere.

Now that some lass is making jewelry out of cat fur and it’s going viral,  sending every female cat lover screaming to purchase them by the gross, I’ve got an even better idea …

Cat fur necklace

Let’s make hair extensions out of them …

Free Range dubbing proven to exist in other dimensions

Much of Saturday was spent sending out all the sample packets of dander I’d been promising those that had requested “Free Range” dubbing.

Reed Curry, author of The New Scientific Angling, Trout and Ultraviolet Vision, received his and was nice enough to send their UV footprint back for those interested in such things.

I was assuming that anyone receiving something other than they were expecting, and knowing they hadn’t ordered it, would pounce on the package and begin using it … I hadn’t thought that some households awoke to Christmas without the accompanying screams and rending of paper …

Visible light …

Free Range dubbing in the visual spectrum

… and the above under UV light …

Free Range Under UV Light

Visual.

Free Range visual light

… and he was starting to play fast and loose with the names, but I managed to catch “Dog Doo Brown” and “Focke Wulf Gray” before you lads started complaining you hadn’t seen that … and how I must be withholding the good stuff …

(Dusky Green above is actually Medium Green, my Bad.)

Free Range UV Lighting

Dusky Green seems possessed of the most striking signature, given its lightness in direct light and darkness under UV. That’s surprising, although it’s got more than a fair share of yellow, which seems to react to UV with ferocity.

Free Range under visual light

.. and UV ..

Free Range UV light

Still looks like Dusky & Pea Green possess a similar UV signature of Black & Claret, which I find surprising given the obvious yellows in the third grouping – I would have expected them to be darker under UV light.

Considering the UV component was completely ignored when constructing the above, it’ll send me to head scratching and scanning the negatives should some unnatural lust for Mystery Meat possess any known gamefish.

While I think it looks a lot like Livermush (Scrapple to them North of the Mason-Dixon), there’s no telling what our finned quarry thinks …

It’s okay, it’s a fly fishing lifestyle thing

Me? I punted.

All that bold talk about being desperate and braving inhospitable water flows and bone numbing chill was for show. As soon as the feminine half sped away, I did the cursory check of flows, 8K when fishable was 4K, and opted for “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” and the oodles of brownie points that would result from removal of the encroaching wilderness from the backyard.

… and while the sweat dripped off and the precious fly tying fingers were put in harm’s way, scratched and clawed, blistered and bloody, my thoughts drifted to the whole lifestyle fashion conundrum.

Naturally, the email soliciting me to adopt some oyster pink scarf to go with my matching golf visor gave me the damn creeps. Logos do not prevent clothing from announcing errant sexual preferences no matter how good the artwork.

Singlebarbed_Flats

Yours truly is only capable of modeling sinister unfortunately. Old World style, shipped straight to me from Afghanistan. What it really needs is a big ORVIS logo across the brow, it’ll give the Seals something of contrast to aim for …