secret hot sandwich

Well it’s time to that time when I’m thinking about heading stateside and getting my backside into planning mode and I was sitting thinking about my last trip to the green mountain state and the fish I caught and looking forward to the ones im going to catch this year including lots of pickerel like the one below caught on a subbug

The one thing I did bring home with me last year (besides Vermont fly guys brain prices fluorocarbon recently found in a jacket and few new flies) was a love of the ken capsey  pastrami and cheese hot sandwich , which id never had before hooking up with ken for a fishing trip

 

Ken is the master of this and even with my best efforts I still can’t reproduce the very same taste but then the ingredients are a lot better in kens neck of the woods far better flavours , I’ve tried many different kinds of cheeses for this but so far gouda is the best along with Tesco’s pastrami.

So to make it, simply butter some bread (I like wholemeal bread), add the pastrami and cheese as you would if making a sandwich , then add to a dry frying pan or griddle and hold down each piece with a fish slice till you hear it start to sizzle then turn it over and keep repeating this process until brown …..and you have a damn fine snack that you can wrap in foil and take fishing or as breakfast , for me if im ever felling low and fed up with life I stick one of these on the pan and life becomes a whole lot better ………thanks brother ken 

Now brother fluffs cooking lesson has finished can I introduce you to a shameless plug for our new predator fly hook website (click the banner) this isn’t about becoming millionaires it’s simply a way of generating a little cash for fly materials and fishing trips, but it’s also been done to help new predator fly tiers choose the correct hook for job in hand.

Just think about the number of hooks out there some great some bad, some company’s jumping on the predator bandwagon thinking a hook is a hook so what does for trout will do for pike if we scale it up a few sizes well er no that’s not quite how it works and we are only a away for advice.

We will be adding new hooks and eyes as we test them and tie with them so please keep checking back with us for new patterns for both saltwater and freshwater predators around the world and at great prices from people that actually fish for and have caught and tie flies for predators.

So I had some new eyes sent to me last week and I decided I wanted to go back to my tying roots with them and tie up some streamer patterns ive been meaning to tie up some naturals for a while but to be honest ive been way busy with family and work stuff to think about too much time at the vice believe it or not , doing almost 48 hour shifts over a weekend really takes its toll on you when you have a family as well to look after as well. 

But downtime was needed and seeing these drop through the door and seeing some of the streamer patterns fellow tiers and friends ken capsey and nikki price were putting out stateside gave me the inspiration to get behind the vice and kick some of my own out so thanks guys and gals for that .

What I really wanted was something that looked good and i could knock up fairly quickly but without compremising on the overall look of the fly so , I sat at my vice staring at a hook then looking at the eyes on the desk and then around at all my materials boxes and this went on for a while before my eyes finally fell on my boxes of whitting farm saddle hackles (luckilly steven tyler hsnt been round latley) and once my eyes fell on the barred green feathers , well the pattern sprung into my head and it was a frenzy of bits of buctail, peacock herl and crystal flash with the odd drop of epoxy thrown in for good messure , but the resulting flies looked good and I think they will slay the green........job done

Of course me being me I couldn’t settle for just the pattern above I had of course to do a black one as well and it was as I was doing it that I thought mmmmmm what about white for a belly as well and there you go a whole another streamer is born, I actually quite like this one as it could represent a whole heap of different baitfish dark top light bottom, tied in a few sizes I think that this would be a good all round holiday destination fly from trout and pike in freshwater  to the predators of the sea including bass and barracuda I think this will catch them all , sometimes it’s really nice to play with colours that you don’t normally use so have a dig in your box and try something different you may be onto something

So with the rain still tipping down here in the gods chosen country, although I think god may be a bit pissed with your everyday highlander  I think with the amount of crazy assed weather we are getting just now I think he’s objecting to all that work on the Sabbath (people have been thrown off highly religious Scottish islands for flushing a toilet on a Sunday let me tell you) well im kind of really done with this awful weather don’t get me wrong I don’t mind fishing in rain but really not all day long downpours that’s just horrible to fish in .

So I was browsing through some photos whilst the horizontal rain battered against the door for 3^rd day running and I came across this picture from a few years ago when I was fishing a venue south of London and my friend took this picture whilst I was putting the legendary pikesaber through its paces with some monster synthetic flies, don’t know why I like this picture so much, maybe it’s because ive got a straight line for a change or it’s the way the shadow of the fly is just inches of the water or if you look very closely about halfway down the line on the water you can see where a fish has just risen whatever it is I just love the picture and cheered me up on a rainy day .

Friend rich over at http://pikeflies.blogspot.co.uk has been busy with the videos again , this time he shows how to make a rather nice articulated bait fish and having watched the video it actually gave me an idea for another fly pattern but that’s for another day , click to play below or take a look at his very informative blog in the link above

Hopefully the weather will improve next week and I’ll be able to get out but I’m not holding my breath we are in Scotland after all in the meantime back to the vice …………………….

Mcfluffchucker

(a cave in Scotland)