standing the test of time

STANDING THE TEST OF TIME 

AND MY WIND PROBLEM

I had an afternoons guided planned , probably the last day i could access the boats on my favourite loch and i was well looking forward to it , although i had to scale stuff down to a mobile bag with basics , wallet of flies , unhooking gear , etc , and that let me tell you is no easy feat with the amount of gear i have  , but when i packed the bag i found i had a spare pocket what do i do with that well obviously chuck in another box of flies just in case as we as anglers do , never have too many flies in your box so a box of gurglers and bangers was chucked in, well you never know when some top water sport will present itself 

so headed off and the weather was showing blowing a westerly at 25mph . now although this sounds like quite lumpy for boat fishing its actually fine when fishing this loch and not really an issue , so full of excitement at the thought of some airborne fighting fit predators going nuts on the fly i arrived with client at loch. 

what i hadn't bargained for was getting there to find the wind had shifted to an easterly gusting to 45mph this is probably the worst conditions for this loch and there was no way i was going to risk going out in that let alone chucking big flies about . again ill say no fish is worth risking your own safety and life just don't do it folks there's always another day , but ive rebooked so hopefully ill get another one in before the boats come out. 

THE BEST GEAR TESTS ARE THE TESTS OF TIME

the biggest question I always get is to my leader set up , back in the early days we used pretty much standard pike dead bait traces without the hooks opting for a cross lock swivel instead of nasty trebles  , then we started using fox soft steel wire to make our traces which was ok but you did find they suffered from chaffing on the wire from fish and you’d have to change it quite often , then the titanium revolution happened and to be honest it was great stuff until you discover that it acts like a cheese wire on the fish and if a fish takes a fly deeper in the mouth then you’re going to slice up its lips so that’s now been binned (saw it happen once to a lure angler not nice) please don’t use this for fly fishing it’s just not good for the fishes health .

We then had the range of wire from America hit these shores by forward thinking fly anglers , things like pro leader , surflux etc. , but even these came with their problems , being expensive to start with and most of the time when I used it I found that it was a bit to shiny in the water although it probably doesn't mater to the fish , it bothered me as an angler as I was sure it was off putting to the fish I may be wrong but that was my general thoughts and I ended up colouring the stuff with black marker pens to take the shine of it  ,

This obviously aint the ideal thing to do as it takes a lot of time and is a pain in backside , so I had priviously been using fluorocarbons in the 90 to 120lb range for most of my pike fly fishing and before the “you can’t do that” brigade start I can tell you I did not lose any fish to bite offs with this method , but and it’s a big but , I always had in the back of my mind it could happen although it never did and at the time it was top of the tree where traces were concerned for pike fly fishing .

That was until I came across Authanic wire , I was quite amazed at the quality of this trace material it handles like a braided line which makes it completely knot able which is really quite incredible just check the video , ive now had countless fish on Authanic wire and to date I have not needed to change it to another product , this really is a breakthrough material when it comes to trace material and I can’t think of any product out there that is better than this stuff you may think it’s expensive but actually its bloody good value for money as you can catch multiple fish on a length without having to change it so it actually works out better value than wire , if you haven’t tried Authanic then give it a go and it will change the way you think about leader materials for predators ,ive now been using it for nearly six years and i still have the utmost confidence in its ability that pretty much speaks volumes in my book , do yourself a favour and get some  

Available exclusively in the UK though fastflies
http://www.fastflies.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=165&products_id=768

MARABOU MUNCHERS

bog standard plain old marabou flies, you know when i started tying pike flies all those years ago we had nothing in the way of synthetics no not even ep fibre marabou was the best thing available to us along with chicken feathers and rabbit strips but as you know chucking wet rabbit strips is like chucking a wet sock around , oh home times have changed .

marabou has great properties in the water and has fantastic movement when paused and is the ideal fly to get you started when tying there's a few step by step on my you tube channel you wanna check em out , but marabou still on its days will out fish all other flies .theres a massive range of colours out there and endless possibility's in design, give em a shot  

 so today i have the choice of doing housework or tying flies bet you can guess the outcome there folks 

see ya on the water 

mcfluffchucker 
(a cave in scotland)