welcome to scotland

Scotland is a fantastic country to live in except for the fact of when the weathers rubbish its really rubbish been like that for the last week and a half now so not been able to get out and fish I'm far too long in the tooth now to go chuck massive flys on 4/0 and 6/0 hooks in near gale force winds er no thanks .....

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my local fish prefer long settled periods of weather so hopefully early next week they will be on the hunt again so in the meantime I've got time to play with some patterns so yesterday was quite a productive day in terms of getting a new step by step done and today i had planned to do a step by step for the easiest pike fly in the world to tie and one of the most deadliest but unfortunately the wife had other plans so i spent today doing some diy stuff that really needed doing so maybe tomorrow ill get that fly done in the meantime here's what i got up to yesterday

here's a little helpful tip for tying with synthetic fibres , once you have whip finished you fly get an ordinary lighter and heat the hook eye for a few seconds what this does is send heat down the hook shank and will melt the inside core of the fly slightly bonding everything to the hook shank as it melts giving you a really strong bomb proof fly

i love these hooks there as sharp as buggery strong as an ox and a great sized hook eye the only downside for me in this this country is that they are bloody expensive I'm paying nearly 6 pounds UK for a pack of 6 hooks but they are really great hooks


as you can see these hooks are perfect for the big baitfish patterns allowing plenty of movement of the fly in the water

a day for mucking about this time ive gone for some white ultra hair belly with a piketrek raptor fibre red core and a blue sf fibre back , blue is a much underused colour for pike flies and its a great colour for deeper water sometimes it just pays to experiment

these also turned up in the post today the thing about it is you travel a long way to fish sometimes and you don't always expect to catch trophy sized fish but it was a blast to do it the first one for the small mouth bass has a great story behind it , id only been in vermont for about 8 hours and 6 of those i was asleep so while i was out on the lake fishing with ken i decided to try a different fly ken shouts over to me "you got one of those things you tied with the dumbell eyes you showed me on skype last week " yes i replied you think they are worth a go "hell yea says ken" and first cast i had a trophy smallmouth on it so I'm well pleased to receive this in the post today

and the white perch caught while wet wading at dawn casting to rising fish with big woolly buggers what a fantastic morning that was but that's another story

so remember if your going out fishing this week be sure to make sure your camera is fully charged and in your bag you may just catch that fish of a life time

tight lines

Dave

(a cave in Scotland)