You shouldn’t have to pay for poor quality control, take the time to visually inspect any fancy fly tying hook purchase

Tying these fuzzballs reminded me of all the notes on competition hooks and their efficacy I’ve been scribbling over the last couple of seasons. I find myself having so many defective hooks of late, and at thirty-five cents a hook I keep trying to make up for poor quality control and fix them with tying thread, simply to get a bit of service before cursing, snapping the thread, and hurling them into my waste can.

Over the last three years, I’ve accumulating a couple thousand Knapeks, Grips, Dohiku, Skalka, and Hanak’s – and the common thread among all of these seems to be how many poorly wired eyes exist in the small dry fly sizes.

I switched over a couple seasons ago because most of these newer manufacturers use the Redditch standard versus the Mustad/Tiemco extra-long shank variant.  Much of the early angler commentary I had read mentioned quality control and too-soft wire, but at the time was directed at the Czech nymph styles, which by nature are fast sinking, rock pounding, heavy abuse flies.

While I’ve had no wire issues over the last couple of seasons with nymph, Czech nymph, streamer, and dry fly hooks, big problems exist for nearly all the makers of small dry fly hooks.

Small being size #16 and below, which isn’t all that small …

Knapek has been the most egregious offender, and despite multiple purchases over the last three years, show little change in their quality control. Many of the 25 packs of dry fly hooks #16 or smaller have 8 or 9 hooks with incompletely closed eyes.

… suggesting that for each $6.50 spent on the hooks, $2 or more is wasted.

Low Profile Midge

This is one of the Low Profile Midge prototypes I’ve been fishing last month, using a Knapek #18 dry fly hook. You can actually see the butt end of the incompletely closed eye and how much thread it took to get some use out of the dang hook.

For those interested in trying these hooks I have no issues with the larger sizes and styles in all flavors and models. The larger hooks (#16 and above) have far fewer eye defects, but I would also recommend a visual inspection of the container contents.

Most of these are sold in transparent packages. Take the time to shake the hooks onto the bottom of the container so you can visually inspect the eyes. Purchase those boxes that contain the fewest visible defects.

The fly above is something I’ve been refining for the last couple of months. In Black, I used it as a Trico spinner with mind-numbing success rates on local coarse fish.

Underneath the hackle is a double shellback of moose fibers. When married with a dab of slightly undersized hackle you get a low profile, high floatation, midge-spinner shape.

Note the slim profile of the body, how the dubbed shank is almost the same diameter as the bare hook. This is my Free Range Dry Fly dubbing, natural floatation combined with fibers so fine as to make a fly tyer drop to both knees and weep aloud …

No, you can’t have any … yet.

More on the hooks and their qualities after this season …

There was no badge for lippy kids bent on time wasting or sloth

A brief article in some Fishing Wire spam caught my eye and I thought to pass on the tidbit for any proud father whose child might be planning on achieving their Fly Fishing Scout badge.

A cursory eyeball of the exam suggests fewer than half of the anglers I know would pass it, given there’s no section devoted to beer drinking or how to tell falsehoods. “Proud Papa” might have to bone up on some topics ancillary to fishing, and mighty damn quick …flyfish_safety

Then again, some canny lawyer’s son might have a thing or two to say that might update the exercise, but with a couple grizzled scout leaders staring me down, I’d cave and opt for the expected answer myself.

As you may have guessed, my struggles with authority as a young lad precluded my taking part.

Women are fine, girls never, and pals maybe

I’ve warned you plenty of times – yet still I’m the recipient of your extended digit and pronounced raspberry. The Pied Piper of Taut Flesh keeps you thinking you can mix pleasure and sacred avocation, yet us old guys know better – we tried it and perfection can’t be improved on ..

Large fish sipping naturals, a light breeze rustling aspen leaves, the burble of cold water over slick rock, and the gasp of pent up carbonation released in a rush …

… or in the case of us oldsters … never mind.

Girls don’t mix with fly fishing. Women might – but that tired old cliché of sub-twenty year olds roasting bottom on the sandy borders of some mountain freshet, eager to share a meaningful tryst with old guys that haven’t showered all weekend, that is a complete falsehood.

Same as the notion that you don’t need little blue pills for your … um …indigestion.

Slow learner?

Bachelor Episode

– via US Magazine

Click the picture above to watch all that flesh and giggling tautness sneer at one another, complain constantly, backbite-fu, and generally piss all over our beloved sport and their Bachelor host (when he can’t hear) …

Remember, I watched it for scientific reasons, you’re the one with the penchant for complete (gag) trash.

Take that Mister “We’ll just add a hatchery”

There are so many absolutes, so many unequivocating terms in the below as to be downright scary:

A new study has revealed that the impact of a hatchery environment on steelhead trout is so profound that in just one generation genetic traits are developed that cost fish the natural ability to be able to survive in the wild.

Nineteen years of research on the Hood River in Oregon will have both scientists and anglers in an uproar once it’s common knowledge that we’ve been unknowingly selecting for big sea-run trout that like concrete ditches and prefer the taste of dried kibble …

… and will we be able to look that thousand dollar spey rod festooned with black nickle and dripping acres of rare and exotic dander, without feeling less the Man and so very shortchanged … perhaps dirty even?

We’ve known for some time that hatchery-born fish are less successful at survival and reproduction in the wild,” said Michael Blouin, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “However, until now, it wasn’t clear why. What this study shows is that intense evolutionary pressures in the hatchery rapidly select for fish that excel there, at the expense of their reproductive success in the wild.

-via Worldfishing & Aquaculture

In short we’ve been catching the social moths, the trollops, and the used car salesmen of the steelhead world.

What’s worse is the potty mouth diet we’ve been catering to … These being the Twinkie eaters, the migrating fish that dine at fish ladders and Chinese takeout rather than forage for a meal, and all those wonderful and intricate patterns that have proven so successful have been a colorful representation of the hatchery ditch followed by a shovel full of desiccated dog chow.

We sure showed them, opposing thumb and big frontal lobe really proving the difference this time.

I’m going back to salmon roe goober and florescent marshmallows, food befitting some fat-bottomed fish struggling for breath on the cobble, trying to gasp out more fart jokes …

Your Grizzly neck is more follicle than feathered, and it will have to last you another season

It was a Northern California ritual, get a whiff of the dairy outside Redding, then slam on the brakes for the obligatory “The Fly Shop” pilgrimage. The excuse being to replace aging tippet which quickly morphed into fondling most of the upstairs plumage.

While I was never able to exit the premises without blowing that extra hundred bucks, those expenditures have kept me from feeling any real trauma over our recent lack of genetic hackle.

With the new year and rumors of hair extensions on the wane, thoughts of chicken production and delivery keeps circling through the ranks, enough that I thought I might dig into the retail side to separate fact from the fiction, and determine what 2012 holds for the fly tier whose necks are more follicles than feathers …

… and no, you shouldn’t exhale yet, the prognosis is quite bleak.

Many catalogs and online stores have a markedly reduced presence of product, some offer hints at long delays, and orders I placed via online websites were followed up with politely worded cautions and cancellations …

Thank you for your order.  The Metz Microbarb Saddles will be out of stock for at least a year.  Please let us know if you would like to wait that long or longer.

Which for most of us is about as plain as it gets.

Both J. Stockard and the Fly Shop were kind enough to make mention of what they’re seeing from inside the vendor food chain, but many of their comments reflect uncertainty with delivery and which vendors have committed their 2012 production to the hair industry.

From J. Stockard & Co. :

Metz advised us several months ago that they will have no
rooster saddles for dealers this season. On the other hand we are getting delivery of some product from Whiting in all of their lines that we carry. Admittedly, some colors are unavailable from Whiting and their shipping is still slower than usual although it has improved slightly since the Fall.

… and from the Fly Shop a similar picture …

Other than Keough, neither Whiting or Metz has given us a definitive answer about availability.  Keough won’t have any necks or saddles until 2013, that’s assuming he doesn’t pre-sell it all to the hairs (it looks as if the fad is starting to wane).  Metz has always been hard to deal with and even if they didn’t sell their whole supply to the hairs, they probably wouldn’t be able to deliver anyway.  Whiting is the only one that has been really good to us.  While they haven’t delivered everything, we have received a steady supply of saddles, necks and 100 packs.

I would expect the shops are keeping what little supply they’re delivered for the endlessly long waiting list generated by regulars and walk-in traffic, and perhaps to make a bare wall seem less so. Us online shoppers being lumped in with the “hairs” and forced to wait a bit longer.

This premise was given more credibility when orders placed with the Fly Shop via their online store were cancelled, with the reason given as “product unavailability.”

J. Stockard doesn’t list anything larger than a 1/4 saddle and while full necks are mentioned, both come with a substantial warning of delays and outages.

Availability of this product is extremely limited. If no colors are listed below, we have none in stock. Colors will be re-listed on this page when they become available. Availability of colors listed below is not guaranteed and we cannot accept backorders for this product.

What we can conclude is that the fad seems to be on the wane, but it’s not disappearing fast enough for any return to normal deliveries for this season.

The Bad News being those threadbare necks and saddles will have to serve you another year, the good news being that hurling a few shot and something heavy enough to splash will chase most of the Metrosexuals from the sport, leaving the rest of the dry fly purists to grow a bit of hair on their chests …

… but only if they stop waxing them …

Note: I solicited a response from the Whiting Company, but they failed to respond. I find that none too surprising given that they’ve likely endured a lot of angry shopkeepers and anglers over the last twelve months, and can’t blame them for being close to the vest with commentary.

Are the past Masters of fly fishing worthy of a fly named in their honor

beyonce_fly As a means of belittling us fly fisher-types who have spent  a couple lifetimes studying flies and imitating their every move, pop-star Beyonce trumps our ”Teddy” Gordon by getting a horse fly named in her honor …

According to the Australian National Insect Collection researcher responsible for officially ‘describing’ the fly as Scaptia (Plinthina) beyonceae, CSIRO’s Bryan Lessard, the fly’s spectacular gold colour makes it the “all time diva of flies”.

– via PhysOrg.com

… which begs the question, do we need to preserve our living or dead angling masters by renaming the animal kingdom, and what attributes should cause us to petition the Royal & Ancient Bug Society for a name change?

While most of us might want to pass on their legend akin to the Paraleptophlebia RonJeremy, neither your fishing buddies nor science are likely to be that kind …

Reminder: You’re dead and don’t get to pick.

I would think a big “blue bottle” would be an appropriate final tribute to a Brownline master, only because both spent most of their career walking on dung, damp or dry being the only real distinction.

Author and angling great, Ernest Hemingway might get his own Mosquito, given his propensity for sucking on cigars and strong drink, and fishing whenever the aforementioned pairing intersected with branch water or an ocean.

Avarice and ambition have turned fishing’s historically colorful cast from yeasty and wild outdoorsy types – to white collar, politically correct professionals with a passion for six legged sex. Outside of a thinly read book or two, nothing from the last half century is likely to have the personality or the mass appeal for immortalization via bug avatar …

… but there’s hope for the next generation of “sports”. “Them as inherits” are less inclined to follow in our footsteps, and could shrug off a dime stint at a federal penitentiary as light enough to snort …

Only bad boys and born-again Christians being worthy of real fame, given our penchant for looting, gunfire, and confession.

Once a constant companion to the fly fisherman, now on hard times

hostess_twinky I expected most of the angling world to be in mourning, yet nary a mention of the possible demise of Wonderbread and the Twinkie, two of angling’s last remaining superfoods …

Hostess and fly fishing have an enormous amount of shared lore which has been lost on recent generations due to their insistence on healthy streamside fare.

Wonderbread started our interdependence on synthetics, being the first manmade material able to claim “lighter than air” and enjoying  a speedy adoption among the dry fly enthusiasts.

It didn’t matter that “lighter than air” only applied to swallowing the meal, once down it was as leaden as anything spawned of a test tube.

Poptarts and Twinkies ushered in the purely chemical era, where we no longer feared food stains on our vests and could wad sandwiches and delicious desert snacks into the smallest of pockets, there to lie dormant for an entire season.

Flat, round, polygonal, or simply mashed, Wonderbread retained sandwich content in a semi-sterile envelope that allowed sunlight and a sweaty angler to warm it to room temperature and beyond – allowing us extra miles afield without fear of starvation, food poisoning, or empty calories.

Twinkies were synonymous with the notion of the floating strike indicator, as its delicious buttery shell once dubbed, “the Golden Life Preserver of Snack Foodage”, by countless anglers who’ve gone in over their heads yet were yanked to the surface complements of the protective shroud that was Twinkie buoyancy …

Both Ray Bergman and noted outdoorsman and baseball legend, Ted Williams likened the Twinkie to a culinary abomination, yet characterized the desert as the “Bamboo Rod of Parking Area Fingerfoods.”

We all recognize that we’re supposed to fill our vests with healthy fare; 5 Hour Energy Shots, Koolaid, and Pop Rocks, but considering what we’ve built on its greasy foundation, won’t you consider buying a box simply for old time’s sake?

I’d hoped when I finally found the nuggets on a chicken, there would be a couple feathers no one had ever seen

It started out as simply a shoulder shrug, but on a whim I was quickly transported from avaricious angler looking to impress his fishing pals to investigative journalist, then onward to devout PETA flag waver …

It should have been a no brainer, how I was going to impress fishing pals by serving the remnants of a gigantic salmon, with the filets themselves proof of an unlikely miracle while fishing. Pounds of enormous, succulent fish flesh draped across the plate – as all listened open-mouthed to my tale of 4 pound tippet, running at full speed across a slippery Pacific Coast riffle, hours of screaming reels and hard fought yardage, followed by me emptying a .45 into my foe, as he made a last spasmodic move for an extremity.

The proof was to be the simple part. Six or seven slabs of salmon joined using meat glue, to make an aggregate fillet rivaling a world’s record (something I planned on pointing out during the obligatory cigars and brandy) …

 

Instead I find out the joke’s on us me, as the meat industry has been manufacturing the nuggets on a Chicken, rather than them existing in some hidden feathery place not yet discovered by fly tiers.

… and while most of the world is banning it from the table in horror, only in the US would our four star chef’s rise to the possibilities of Frankenfood, generously ladling glue into all manner of odd proteins, while charging us double for the privilege.

Makes you wonder how safe it is when the fellow cautions the reporter not to inhale.

See the Harvard School of Cooking and Chef Wylie Dufresne take your palate to new heights compliments of Meat Glue … which can be purchased from Amazon.com for $89.00 per kilo.

A drab fly among many drab flies

F-18E Bobbing away in some nameless lake last summer, I’d attributed my lack of success to a poorly designed floating midge imitation, and if I combined the air intake of an F-18E Super Hornet with a bit of deer hair, I could  produce a better imitation that could showcase the body color to best advantage.

… that idea turned into me setting the fly fishing world on fire with a new take on dry flies, which in turn spawned other great ideas that sputtered mightily, suggesting the entire branch of thought might not be as great as first assumed …

Dutifully I catalogued each of the truly-great-yet-untested ideas for later development, and refocused on the midge dilemma. Yet after some four months of fiddling I’ve dismissed most of the promising starts as they don’t translate to the small hook as well as envisioned.

… and after another weekend of eliminating even better ideas, I’m back where I started, yet undaunted and utterly convinced there’s still a better mousetrap.

This type of self inflicted pain is a result of fly fishing’s fourth dimension, the freedom and expression that comes with knowing there’s nothing special about a fly pattern. Give any fly a few local successes, and share a handful with pals and you’ve invented another Hare’s Ear, a drab fly in a box filled with similarly drab flies.

Fly fishing being typified by the phases of the angler, how skill is acquired in lockstep with other unsavory habits …

The First Dimension of fly fishing involves listening in bewilderment to the thirty-seven hundred sacred principles of fishing from your initial mentor. Of all those topics only two really take hold; water is cold and bushes eat flies, and everything else showcases your too-limp wrist.

The Second Dimension of fly fishing being the snootiness that comes with clean fingers. How you’re suddenly a scientist amid a parking lot of other scientists, none of which admit to using anything other than flies their entire lives – and half can say it in Latin.

The Third Dimension of fly fishing is the angler as gear whore. Suddenly a kerchief has to be a fly fishing kerchief, clothing labels matter, as does titanium, rare metals and a disc drag shared with the space shuttle, actually fishing being secondary to possessing stuff …

While most anglers make it through the first three dimensions easy enough, few make it to the fourth dimension …

"I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it."

… largely because after many years of fishing, we’re all experts. Patterns are too ingrained, and we’ve enjoyed many successes attributed to flies with no thought as to whether an Adams was necessary or any gray-bodied dry fly would work.  Compounding the issue is our skill with the third dimension, oodles of flies chosen by name or reputation, whose very presence is a safety net, assuring good fortune.

Most patterns can be successfully replaced by any fly that contains similar attributes. Lots of deer hair assures high floatation regardless of other components used, as does lots of Pink, or a down-wing surface film presentation – versus upright and divided. There’s nothing about an Elk Hair Caddis that can’t be turned into hundreds of other variants save angler-superstition and its aura of past successes and reputation.

As a guide and commercial tyer, I ran into this paradox more often than most. Nothing being as confounding or as memorable as an angry angler whose fortunes and trip of a lifetime are tied to custom flies he’s ordered, yet rejecting them because I used natural black versus dyed black hair …

“ … that’s not black, that’s a really, really dark brown, and the sample I gave you had black …”

Or the angler that refuses assistance from his guide with the admission that, “I catch all of my trout on an Adams” – and should double as a fortune teller given it’s the only fly ever to grace his tippet.

Whether skunk hair is black when compared to dyed black bucktail is the angler’s perception that a fly’s greatness rests in its unique pattern, which can be larger than the sum of its attributes.

Us forth dimension types don’t see it that way, but we’re so far gone few listen to our plaintive bleating.

It’s unclear what percentage of fly fishermen tie flies, what is certain is unfamiliarity with “rolling your own” adds to pattern mystique. Likewise with age, how a fly invented a couple hundred years ago must also be a fish killing legend to have survived for so long.

Beginning fly tiers frequently substitute materials as they don’t yet possess them all. Their audience of pals will quickly remind them how a Pheasant Tail can’t be called a Pheasant Tail without the pattern being intact. Later, an accomplished tier can add a pink thorax and the same group will nod sagely as it’s a “Pink Thorax’d Pheasant Tail” a separate and distinct variant that’s untested – yet due to its roots, equally as worthy.

It’s still simply a little brown fly, whose name is well known and therefore enjoys a truly unique power as a retail oriented, angler catching juggernaut.