Monday 24 September 2012

falling in love is horse dung

And the wind continues to cause chaos
and yet another trip has been blown out , I spoke to conan on Thursday about our Friday jaunt this week and said the wind was showing well blowing and that doesn’t bode well for being out on the water I never take any risks when being out on the water , no fish is worth your life so I said id check back with him Thursday evening and check accuweather which is usually spot on for me , I checked it later and decided that we would pencil in a 7am pick up as the wind seemed to be dying down , so when I checked I decided that actually we would be ok if we kept close in to the bank until the wind died off we would be able to fish without taking any risks . As the wind direction was such that we would be in shelter of a forest all day and we should be able to fish quite comfortably so the call was made and the alarm was set.


As the alarm went off and in my groggy pre awake state I heard a noise that sound like waves crashing down on a beach then I was pulled from that dream when I realised that the noise was actually the wind in the trees , I hauled my ass outa bed and into the kitchen where in the pre dawn haze I saw the trees bending over with the wind “oh bugger I thought” and got on the internet and checked out the weather site and although it said it was blowing 13mph winds at my location I knew that in fact it was more like 25/30 and the tail end of a hurricane I decided that it wasn’t worth risking so I called conan and gave him the bad news but hey there’s always next week .
 
Size 14 wickams fancy er not

you may have seen the above picture doing the rounds on the net this week, I find it quite fascinating that a smallish rainbow trout would have a go at a mouse and proves that what ive long said that if it eats other fish then its a predator so if I turn up at your local fishery and start to throw mouse patterns around please don’t accuse me of poaching the pike I am in-fact fishing for specimen rainbow trout, if there happens to be pike in the water and I accidentally catch one it wasn’t on purpose honest............:-)
 
lots of tying this week

anybody following the blog will know that me and the barbarian are doing bloody fantastic on my fried alive flies , so ive decided to expanded on them a bit as I had a mail from a client who had bout quite a few last week and wanted some in the specific colour above so here ya go with his blessing to sell his colours is the electric yellow peacock flash fried alive fly , I really cant wait to try this one out as the colours and flash are awesome oh you may like to know where my client is using these well although I never give out specific locations he is in south America and fishes them in fast rivers and streams........that’s probably given you an idea anyway heres the link if youd like to purchase a few


SUBBUGS TO THE PEOPLE


most of you also know that the subbug is one of my favourite flies to tie but its not a fast fly to make indeed some of the patterns can take up to an hour to make , I take great pride in these hotter than hell flies and make everyone so the action is perfect in the water , you may also know I dont usually tie them commercially but im actually going to be doing a few very limited editions for the guys over at vermont fly guys this will be the only place in the world where you’ll be able to buy these .
Bug working
 
 

why am I doing these well to be honest I dont supply very many places in fact I usually only supply one shop in any one country with my flies and I only support fellow cottage industries with my stuff im very proud to say I will never tie for the man and my stuff will only go to the hands of fellow fisher folk and ken over at VFG has used and always believed in subbugs so that’s why there going there so should be hitting there store mid October but again in very limited amounts were talking a dozen of each pattern here’s the link to there site(or look em up on facebook) if you wish to bookmark it, you know if your in the market to buy flies here’s what I say and firmly believe , the best quality flies no matter what you fish for come from guys that actually fish for that species and tie flies for them , I mean say you were going trout fishing and wanted some size 18 wickhams fancys making you wouldn’t mail a guy that makes only marlin flies and has never heard of a wickhams fancy would you or get buy a fly for muskies from somebody who has never fished for them you’d go to some guy who has actually fished for them aint rocket science,


old school classics
(the ken capsey fly porn section)


way back in the distant past when I only had maribou feathers and bucktails to play with and ep fibre wasn’t available in the UK and I was pretty much the only guy with a uk pike flies site on msn groups (remember them) there was another guy who did a pike fly called a cronos and had his own group for them, but that was it , well people saw this nifty 13inch pike monster maribou fly called a “mauler” this was a donkey of a fly and a real chuck and duck fly but for all its difficulty in casting this waterlogged monster looked amazing in the water it would hang in the water and puff when you stopped it tied on 2 single hooks with a length of wire in between the 2 hooks to give it the length this really was a killer fly and and my best seller for many years , I think im going to go back and explore this pattern again for old times sake what do you think
 
Hook storage


I get through a lot of hooks I tie a lot of different patterns on different kinds of hooks and different sizes , even different colour hooks , I tie for small predators in freshwater and I tie for monster saltwater predators so I do need to keep stuff fairly organized and ive found that these boxes are perfect for the job , and all they are business card holders bog standard nothing special 7 quid for 50 on ebay bargain and if you use sharpie pens to write on them you can always just wide it with a damp cloth and its comes off straight away ready for the next hook best storage solution ive found for me anyway …...


OK and so to fishing well me and the bearded barbarian finally got a day out without force 20 winds and geared up with great haste when we got to the loch , just before we were about to load the boat another car pulled up and a chap called jj got out and had a chat with us (conans grayling was defiantly bigger mate) he actually recognised me from my you tube tying videos so we had a chat about that and I gave him one of my infamous fried alive patters to try and we parted ways , he was fishing the shore and we were fishing the boat so wed see him at some point

on the loch

the loch was well down as they were working on the dam so a lot of shore line was visible that id never seen before which was quite interesting but the down side was that with no flow out of the loch there was a largish build up of algae which made things a bit hard to say the least , its not impossible to catch fish in fact my biggest from there came when it was like this to a black subbug on a sinking line but you really have to preserver which is what we did and frustratingly enough we actually had a few missed hits which on a slow day can be very frustrating to miss them .

Eventually towards the end of the day I had a small jack which saw pity on me and put up a spirited fight I let out a sigh of relief as I slipped it back into the murky depths , we drifted down that bank and the fish finder found a massive concentration of fish although they could have been anything it was worth putting the anchor down and covering them as there would bound to be predators lurking around them but despite our best efforts we couldn’t catch , as it was near to finish time we decided to troll (purists look away now) a couple of big frankin flies around to the dock in hope of a bonus fish .


Along one of these banks we came across jj throwing fluff so as we levelled with him we slowed the electric down to 1 and asked how he was doing

me – how you doin

jj – had 5 biggest 15lb

me – outstanding what flies were they taking

jj - the one you gave me this morning

me – F@@K

JJ – what did you say it was made from

me – I didnt

no im not bitter im glad somebody did ok and chuffed actually that the fried alive did the damage again but still bloody hard going , there was a few trout anglers out also today and they didn’t do anything either so wasn’t just us I suppose it was a case of all the flies and no idea today and let me tell you I threw some strange looking beasts today including my new dead weird tube fly that’s a cross between an intruder and a baitfish (more on that later)

a fish


actually the barbarian is quite an accomplished angler as this picture of the “ lady of the stream” shows and some of the flies he makes for these are quite works of art ill be raiding his box when we go trouting , although we are pretty much coming to the end of the season for a lot of things but ill still be getting out after anything I can as long as there’s no ice on the water we do however have a whole heap of very cool stuff to look forward to next year and for me a couple of the main ones are chasing dorado in the med and finally getting back out to the states for some serious top water fish porn .

But my next major trip will be the long trip south to take part in the piketrek predator cup on frisby lakes October 20th this is going to be a cracker of an event and I know will throw up quite a few surprises on the fly how do I know that , well I used to have a season ticket for the place so im well aware of what lurks in its depths and the species that will take a fly , get on over to the piketrek site and book your place .

So with that im going to leave you with another of the barbarians brilliant photos which I call falling in love is crap


till next time

mcfluffchucker

(a cave in Scotland)

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