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 …
… 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 …
Only in California …
I 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.
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 …
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.
The idea shows occasional flashes of brilliance, and no one should give you that tired old catch & release lecture … it just seemed so much easier on the X-Box …
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 …
Let’s make hair extensions out of them …
The process wherein you become your father is long, memorable, and completely horrifying. One day you’re dutifully changing your oil at 3000 miles, only to be reminded that no one does that anymore.
… or your painfully enduring some meeting that’s prolonged by the speaker feeling it necessary to answer his smart phone at every ring, holding the balance of the table a yawning captive.
The phone may be smart, but the SOB using it has the IQ of a cucumber.
What was once the childish wide smile with face pressed against the fly shop glass has become the “Bah, Humbug face” – worn only because you own everything good already, and the only thing missing is new, which may or may not be good.
Once we broke the fifty-bazillion modulus barrier, we listened patiently to the superlatives and dismissed ownership out of hand, we’d fallen for that lure back when we could achieve modulus at the mere sight of a sale, or just a fistful of red saddle hackle. Now that we’re in our dotage it isn’t cutting edge carbon technology we’re seeking, it’s just a quiet moment on the john.
And if it has a remote, heated seat, hidden bidet, has quadraphonic stereo, and has the suction power of a Death Star’s tractor beam, including all air in the bowl treated by carbon filtration, the price is goddamn academic …
After a lifetime of icy duck blinds, frozen limbs due to prolonged immersion in icy steelhead water, suffering all manners of discomfort and poor sanitation, handfuls of leaves that prove less so, I’d consider dumping six grand on a bonafide engineering marvel.
The touch screen controls may not have been such a good idea, at least not for us fisher-types.
Invariably someone asks me, “what’s the hardest thing in fly tying?”
Most expect me to mention the multiple hours it takes to complete a fully dressed salmon fly, or a knotted leg attempt at realism – involving lots of glue and much effort, but those are simply mechanical tasks and may be time consuming, but are easy once you’ve done them a couple thousand times …
What’s the hardest thing in fly tying? … giving up your reliance on other people’s patterns, showing a little confidence in yourself and your own critical eye.
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if you think about it critically, but fly tiers and baseball players are the last bastion of weakness and superstition – the only difference between the two, is that one carries a rabbit’s foot for good luck, and the other dismembers rabbits and carries all four should the good luck run out …
Fly tiers will invariable take some form of instruction to get them started and then rely on books and magazines, or the Internet, to continue the learning process. Over time they learn never to trust a photograph and always refer to the text recipe – knowing that lighting and focus can change the hue and color of the fly, making the components less recognizable.
Lacking all the printed materials in the pattern means the finished fly is damaged goods. It’s Awesome*, worthy of mention with Barry Bond’s steroid enhanced home run record.
Flies worthy of publication have magical properties, each having killed thousands of fish – and therefore chosen by editors for their killing qualities – not to be tinkered with by mortals, or anyone else having just finished an Intermediate class.
It gets in our head early, and lies there like a leaden weight.
As the seasons whiz by we’ll occasionally venture out and develop a bug for some favorite venue we’ve fished for years. When someone spies them they’ll be a lot of pursed lips and raised eyebrows, once their origin is known, and we’ll get a half hearted shrug before they move onto the brightly colored monstrosity in the next compartment, whose pedigree includes magazine covers, the latest synthetics, and an offshore source requiring a new rod, new leader, and the reflexes of a Cobra to fish it …
Yet the lackluster was our fly, it was us, the sum of our deduction and science merits only a raised eyebrow and a shrug.
… and as our flies begin to look like the magazine flies, and we start to surpass them in quality we’re emboldened. We select a handful of prophets, whose flies and articles resonate with us and we mimic their work and science.
At some point even that’s cast aside and we’re no longer following the rest of the crowd. Magazine flies are revealed to be nothing more than some fellow’s anthropomorphic idea of what a Damsel fly looks like – and it’s tied poorly to boot.
Now a fishing trip becomes a snack food; you’re swept up in all the dark nymphs that worked so well on the last trip, and how we’ll invent new dark nymphs just for the occasion – and we’ll marvel that they outfish anything tied from a magazine and anything commercially available in the store.
…and with that discovery, you’ll realize that fly tying is many years of learning different fly styles and their construction, whose colors are not set in stone like the picture – but are waiting for you to enhance and define.
Now that you’ve mastered the AP style, the standard dry, the cripple, the big stonefly nymph, the leech, and parachute, only now does science, art, and fishing come together, and your muse is a tuft of dander, or a clump of sparkle.
Those anglers that don’t tie flies wish they did. All of them, without exception.
They’ll learn the same truths as tiers only it’ll take them longer. They have much less to chose from then the rest of us, and little to unbalance their loyalties to the commercial giants; Adam’s, Humpies, Zug Bug’s and Elk Hair Caddis. To them a black nymph can be the AP Black, or the Black Martinez, and nothing else is possible in black and size sixteen.
Probably why the average age of the beginning fly tier is nearer forty-five, and the stray kid is taking it because his dad is trying a second time. A decade or so of fishing ensures those same truths, newly self evident, means without an indentured servant for supply, art and science will compel him to submit to moths and head cement, and the hardest thing in fly tying will be the easier.
It’s the singularities surrounding fishing that builds the really juicy legends and keeps us humble, all at the same time. All we can ever agree on is nothing is a given, nothing works consistently, and as soon as we claim something to be true, some rival convert claims it’s a falsehood.
Our experiences a long chain of singularities wrapped in accident, swaddled in chance, never to happen again.
Prevailing theory about what fish see, what they perceive tasty, mixed with a leavening of what we think we’d eat were we a fish – has armored countless bookshelves with massive tomes, all with a shelf life of a century or less, wherein they’re promptly discarded for the real – real, which naturally costs twicet as much.
Of all these mass shifts in thought, the traditional married wing salmon fly has to be the most gaudy and eye-opening of all these feints at understanding stream biology. Even non-fishermen can recognize the intricacies and labor needed to craft the flies, and the many jungles pillaged to construct just a handful.
It’s likely that all that painful rigor extended the “noble salmon-butterfly” ideology far past its supply lines – given that terrestrial biology and Darwinism were dancing close behind sherry and cigars, whose mustached practitioners “harrumphed” their way through this and other topics of their day.
While Blue Chatterer and Macaw had their proponents, it’s a given different camps would evolve to argue the merits of round tinsel versus the tawdry French oval, and good English iron versus that unwieldy Irish O’Shaughnessy …
… while downstairs in the kitchen, legend was brewing …
“AooOW,” Me Da is going to get us all pinched, see yourself what he’s holding…”
“Hush, daughter, my supper is what done this fine salmon in. I was only thinking a bit of herring might tempt a roach or barbel, and I wakes up to this feast flopping at me feet.”
“AooOW,” ‘Tis what’s meant, when Hisself upstairs finds out it weren’t a Green Highlander what done it, we’ll all be off to the Hulks …”
Considering us fishermen and our lack of social graces, even computer nerds have better luck with the fair sex than us.
Six or seven marriages later, you’re handing over everything that wasn’t spent on backing and fly reels, and asking your buddies to help move your fly tying desk, as it’s perched prominently on the lawn, along with your comic book collection.
The advent of social media makes the missus all that more visible, and long distance friends will eventually want corroboration of them tales of daring do …
Consider the Perfect Girlfriend, synonymous with the Perfect Crime. You make her, refine her until she’s everyone else’s dream fisherperson, and benefit from “I was there and seen it” for even the most egregious fishing fantasy.
She tweets, she facebooks, she’s lithe, witty and stunning … she’s your Cloud Girlfriend.
She knows what to say and when, since you control her every move, she knows how to make your buddies wives bland in the comparison, and she’ll never mention the skid mark after your bear encounter, never give up your secret fishing hole, nor correct your 14” estimate, to the 6” inches it really was …
Consider that embellishment is part of your base nature, and for believability’s sake – you may want to go light on the manacles and automatic weapons, the nun’s habit is already over the top.
Tsunamis must be in fashion, given my last 48 hours crouched under the bed hoping a tree limb isn’t headed for the roof – and with it, thousands of gallons of California’s freshwater variant…
Now as the water district trucks snarl and slide toward the abyss, counting the remaining feet from the lip, I’m wondering whether this’ll all be gone by shad season, or whether I’ll be shaking fist like last year.
The 10-day forecast suggests it’ll rain constantly, and my sleepy little backwater is already running 73 feet deep, so there’ll be little respite from gnawing fingernails and hoping the creek starts to recede given it’s less than 20 feet from flooding Interstate-5.
Those oaks are on an island thirty feet above the creek, evidence that the last couple of days have added generously to the drainage burden, and we’re looking at an additional 40 foot of water over last weekend. The I-5 bridge in the distance has about 13 foot of freeboard before it’s flooded too.
The familiar bridge view is obliterated, the creek has filled in the normally dry areas and is nearly 200 yards wide. A flood of this magnitude will moves hundreds of tons of gravel, and nearly all the root balls and debris remaining in the flood plain.
Good for cleansing purposes as it’ll flush all the chemical spills and nitrogen fertilizers into the ocean, along with a couple more truck chassis and a horde of rubber tires.
With flood stage a scant 11 feet distant and 10 days of rain forecast, it’s liable to be close.
