Wednesday 13 June 2012

Chucking the fluff and shooting the breeze with yanis

Chucking the fluff and shooting the breeze with yanis
  
So this is yanis whose yanis well yanis is a guy I’ve know for probably more than a year or so from work, if you follow the blog regularly you’ll know that I have a tendency to tie flies while I’m at my desk there , so it was while I was doing this one fine Sunday that yanis came in to my work for his regular ballroom lesson he and his lovely lady have there and he spotted me tying up a few so of course he asked me what I was doing and I explained to him these were pike flies , turns out yanis was a bit of a fisherman and wanted to get out and fish and was really interested in fly fishing so we decided to get out together sometime and I show him the ropes
So nearly a year later everything comes together and the weather plays ball and we get out, yanis hadn’t done too much fly fishing before but after a few tips and pointers he started to get a good line out and within 30 mins of being out on the water he had his first ever pike on the fly and you can tell by the picture he was pretty bloody excited about it
Sometimes a picture says a thousand words and this picture I think says it all a very happy camper and he couldn’t wait to get it back and get fishing again , I was also very impressed with his casting skills I’m no instructor and could really only show him the basics and correct him on where he was going wrong , so after around an hour yanis seemed to have picked up the basics and was actually casting a nice straight but short line and we all know that you don’t have to cast to the sun to be in the zone
The pressure was on now for me to catch one and a couple of casts later bang fish on
Not the biggest of fish but im not in the big fish at all costs club I really don’t care what size they are because they all put up such a great scrap on the fly something that’s lost on the big lure or dead bait gear, and of course another reason why around the country lure and bait gear is gathering dust in corners it really is amazing the scrap you get on a 3lb fish  
So feeling a bit more relaxed I had a few casts towards the shore and bang another take this one felt a bit different though as it all of a sudden had some weight to it and it started to kite away from the boat  I put a little side strain on and although it still stayed down id started to come close to the boat about 10 feet out a small jack surfaced , strange I thought that didn’t feel like that , I then suspected that a bigger fish had mabey grabbed it as it took the fly , just as I thought that a big pair of jaws came out of nowhere and clamped around the unfortunate jack  , the jack came back up to the surface and I managed to get my camera out and take this picture below , if you look closely you can see a dark shadow to the right of the jack that was the other pike , I then got the smaller fish in ASAP but not before the bigger fish had a few more goes at it .
I always feel privileged to see stuff like that, nature in action and all that but I got the lucky jack in and despite all the thrashing that was going on it only had a few marks on its tail I then realised it on the other side of the boat and it swam of none the worse for its scrap
I tend not to usually hook fellow anglers but sometimes a series of unfortunate fast change wind direction caused me to hook yanis a good one in the back it really was just one of those things the wind gusted across and down just as I was about to shoot forward and I literally didn’t have time in the split second it happened to do anything about it luckily yanis saw the funny side , I must have a word with will at www.lineslinger.com to see what to do in that situation probably drop the line I think  

The morning was quite productive we had a lot of hits and had fish I did manage to hit into one very large fish that threw the hook that was a real gutter but just one of those things that’s happen not really much you can do about it except lick your wounds and try again although I was smiling I was not very happy bloody fish, interesting that the fish weren’t interested in big flies all they wanted was flies of an inch and two and a half inches  long and as you can see from the picture when they wanted it they hit them hard


Yanis doesn’t have his own fly gear (yet) so I kited him out with a greys reel loaded with a 10wgt rio pike/musky floating line and a pikesaber fly rod from piketrek  I’m now into a good few years of using this rod and still I say it’s the best pike fly rod out there light but powerful fantastic rod yanis certainly enjoyed it and as is tradition I let him keep the fly caught his first fish on im getting the feeling after today even though with only 6 fish to the boat he is itching to get out again and im happy to take him great company and a pleasure to fish with look forward to getting out with him again soon

So with that I’ll leave you with a photo of the fly that did most of the damage for me and I also think a great shot, so for now it’s back to the vice  
See ya next week folks
Mcfluffchucker
A cave in scotland

Saturday 9 June 2012

the joy of summer

Well been somewhat busy lately, hence no posts and doesn’t time fly when you’re well busy, unfortunately it hasn’t involved any fishing due to crap weather, I mean what’s up with the weather just now I mean were in June and it still feels like bloody winter really strange year so far and to make things worse I managed to drop a pack of hot orange beads (for perch flies) in my hot chocolate drink, well there you go right there if it was the weather it should be for this time of year I wouldn’t be drinking hot chocolate id have a nice cold water on my desk which by the way the packet of beads wouldn’t of fallen into the bottle top and even if they did they wouldn’t make the same kind of mess as the picture below , and to add insult to injury one lonesome bead had fallen into the cup which , yes you guessed it I swallowed ………

So the main reason I’ve been quite on the blog is the new hook myself and an old buddy have launched has been doing very well and with all new baby’s it needs tender care and plenty of hours work  if you wish to check us out we are here


  It was kinda strange having to tie all this small stuff for the site as ive not done it for a while it’s all been big predator stuff so delving  back through my coarse fly boxes for patterns was an eye opener

I really enjoyed doing the small ant patterns on the carp talons these have always been great for roach especially the one with red tag and also had a few grayling with that one great pattern

Of course when it comes down to fly fishing for coarse species one of the best flies you can get is a plain old maggot pattern yup there pretty much no fish that won’t snap up the old maggot when it floats by, you can either fish this just floated down a river or stream or fish it in slow moving waters or lakes under a float indicator or inched back dead slow along the bottom , the great thing about this pattern is that by using a very thin coating of deercreeks tack free uv gives it a slight wet look which in the wild is very natural but overall a great fly and having a few in your box will help save the day especially on slow days give em a try oh and did I tell you they are a killer on trout waters in the uk ………J
Back to the meat and potatoes

Just really messing around with a few pike patterns based on the Bart o minnow mixing up a few martials just for fun .off course playing with patterns is great but as always work gets in the way and I have to get some flies made for a client this time in the form of some big crease flies, with crease flies for pike I like to toughen them up a bit, because if I just left them stuck together with the adhesive they would only last a couple of fish before being ripped apart but by using a good glue that goes rock solid like croc glue and by gluing them together with croc glue you get a solid and longer lasting crease fly as you can see I use plastic pegs to hold them together while the glue expands , if I didn’t use pegs the glue expanding would just push the sides apart this is a cheap and easy way to hold the 2 sides together
These below are tail less versions and to be honest it really makes no difference if it has a tail or not the only time I usually stick tails on is when I need bigger snax to give the illusion of something bigger, but these work very well especially on sinking lines in deep water inched along the bottom deadly, I love em   
A larger version with a little tail and a bigger eye the hook is a 6/0 the creasers above are on 4/0s
Below is the view of my desk im still busy at it, I do weather pending have a couple of days booked fluff throwing but it all depends on the weather but im really itching at the bit to get out hopefully next week will be good the long range forecast is looking ok so fingers crossed
My son visits me quite often in the cave , plenty of things for him to look at and of course sowing the seeds for a future fly tier I really hope he gets an understanding wife ……………

Have fun
Mcfluffchucker
(a cave in Scotland