in a pickle

what a week its been my wife has been taken on as a fully paid tutor at her work (she was a volunteer) which is great news , she has also been working really hard for the last few years to try and get a maths degree that she needed to get into teaching collage , well not only did she get her degree but she also managed to get into the best teaching university in the world moray house here in Edinburgh (below) which is just phenomenal as places are very scarce , she has put the work in mind you she has managed to raise a family and cram 5 years study into 2 years and shes also had to put up with my fishing trips as well so I'm really proud of her well done dear .

also this week i purchased a new laptop when i got my old one funds were tight and got one on a pay weekly scheme OK you end up paying more in the long run but it had to been done not that i needed one just for fishing stuff i needed to keep in touch with family etc , so i was sitting there last week and i worked out how much i had left to pay and realised that i would be far better off just going out and buying another and the machine i got was ten times better spec than my current one and a fraction of the price i had left on the old one er no brainier really

so i called the shop i got my old one from and said i didn't want it anymore they said OK just stop making payments and had it back then easy as that , even with what i had paid already i was still getting a better machine at a quarter of the price .

so i gets my all singing all dancing laptop and i had the foresight to back everything up onto memory sticks , so i hooks in powers up and gets connected to the net and stuff and first thing i do is skype video my bro ken over at pike adventures , man the webcam was really awful blurry picture and stuff i was quite disappointed to say the least as everything else was very good of course after some hours i realised that there was a bit of thin protective covering over the built in camera "duh" so that's that sorted luckily I'm better at tying flies than computer nonsense probably just as well

my thoughts again turn to my upcoming American adventure mu thoughts are turning to making some kick ass top water flies for the large mouths these will comprise of 2 kinds of flies which will be doom bugs and gurglers more on that later next week when I've made some the doom bug is a killer let me tell you ill tie these on the piketrek Aberdeen as simply its strong and lightweight which is what i need for these flies , they do take a while to make but bloody worth it

I've taken to doing most of my bait fish patterns on piketrek oshaugnassys these days simply because for an economy hook they are bloody good and most impressive is how they stay sharp and only very rarely will , and the fact they seem to be a lot better than some of the big name oshaunassys I've bought in the past obviously the fact that the hook stays sharp is a bonus when fishing for bony mouth predators , i used to use pretty much exclusively sakuma mantas for all my flies but i had a great deal of trouble with the hooks blunting when fished on the bottom in fact the mear sight of a rock or shingle in the water and they would blunt ....

however they do make absolutely fantastic popper or surface hooks as they have a good gape on em but just don't let them near rocks and keep checking the hook point on the manta range

my favorite all time hook for big flies is the orvis pike and musky the thing i love about this hook is the hook shank length and especially on the 6/0s give you the ability to build a very big pike fly

the flies below have been tied on the above mentioned hooks are are monster size and I'm very much looking forward to casting these beast's when i hit the states or maybe even local , the amount of material i could get on one of these hooks is really silly , the only downside is the price i could in fact buy 100 of my other favorite hooks for what it costs me for ten of these but aah well you got to have some little luxury's in life and they do make a bloody lovely fly

so back to doin flies tomorrow and waiting for some very cool packages see ya in the week mcfluffchucker a cave in Scotland