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