never ending winter it seems

LIFE IN WHITE

well here we go into april and it seems winter is only just letting go its icy grip and dear god its been crap , you know most of scotland was hit by the so called beast from the east , which was an icy blast of snow from siberia which pretty much shut down the country , people in the north of america and canada will be laughing at the uk , i know i know 2 inchs of snow and the transport systems go to pot , the very British system of clearing supermarket shelves of bread and milk goes into full throttle 

i mean you know it got so bad there was actually people advertising on social media bread and milk at stupidly black market prices , now seeing how the British love there cups of tea and ham sandwiches this little enterprise may have actually been congratulated as the spirit of making a bit of cash and providing a service to those who couldn't live  without there cuppa but the major flaw was that the country was at a standstill the roads were out of service and nobody could travel , even the buses in edinburgh stopped running for 2 days so somewhere there a bloke with a lot of milk and bread in his freezer...... some people huh 

anyway whilst we were in this enforced snow holiday what was left to do  well tye flies of course  and the downside was that i was ordering materials but they weren't making it through  due to the weather and the same with me sending flies out , the post office had a massive backlog and stuff was taking up to 2 weeks to get to folks and indeed so stuff has still not shown up so ive had to send replacements out which again take time as i have to make them again pain in the butt .

so now all the snow seems to have buggered of and temps are starting to rise again things are starting to look up , in fact so far this year ive actually tied up around 150 new patterns which is great and ive been having a winter of experimentation as well with new ways of tying and creating lighter flies with bigger profile but becoming more mobile in the water which i have achieved so quite happy with that . but i wont bore you with all the pictures or id be here forever.

11th april and the perch is hot  

life in the cave has been great now that after all the building works have been completed , luckily i had taken pictures before  i packed it all away so it all went back fairly easily and i fired into some bespoke orders but i had had perch in mind 

now i love the array of different patterns out there and there is some fantastic looking flies around so i kinda spent a while looking at perch pictures from around the world and the coloration of them then hit he vice   

and you know with the colours a dying perch or a dead perch has a different color to a healthy living perch so i guess what im trying to say and through trial and error in the past i worked out that pike actual couldn't give a shit  and as long as it had stripes , go figure 

so having made a load of perch type things i dully uploaded them to my facebook page (as i do with all my flies because its what i do ) i had some absolute fudnut start moaning that perch dont have red eyes and mabey i should look at a perch before if im selling to the public 

WTF seriously some keyboard warrior dumbnut arsehole is dictating to me how to tye feckin flies er no i tye what i like how i like , if i tye a baitfish pattern its because it has some of the characteristics of a baitfish i.e - size , shape etc so if im doing a perch pattern it will have stripes and the eyes i put on are to complement the colors in the body material so red rag to a bull because look at the following picture 

this is actually his facebook profile picture and well tell you what i can remember shoals of these thing swimming about in the clyde with salmon chasing them er not hahahaha , so mr nelson or mr wilson whatever your name is please dont tell me how to tye flies or dictate what eyes i should be using , fly tying is an artform and how i choose to make my art is up to me and nobody else.

end of rant  

outa the cave 

a slightly new take on the hotcore fly (remeber that pattern i made in the 90s and was copied by an american bass angler in a youtube video) well with all the materials now avalible i decided to do a bit of a re boot on the pattern because actually is a bloody great fly and so easy to make and slays the green , the whole point of a hotcore was to have a core of sparkly material with sparsely tied fiber over the top , now this gives the fly fantastic mobility in the water  as well as the all important target spot , again love this pattern and ill be doing a youtube video on how to make them shortly .

hotcore pike flies

so back to the perch type paterns and heres a few from the cave 

so theirs many different variations in the flies and hey you know who follows rule books anyway and no doubt these wont be the last variations i do but the thing is they catch fish and isn't that the whole point i just enjoy doing what i do .

these days im actually very into blending my own fibers i find i can produce some fantastic color combinations  and stuff that the fish probably haven't seen before  as well as some subtle blending with light and dark (more on this another time).

so what else has been going on well to be honest not a lot of fishing but that will change shortly , one thing i have noticed lately is all the fantastic blogs that i have listed on the left hand side  and i cant belive that some of these haven't been updated for over a year 

you know i blame facebook as people tend to spend there time on there rather than updating there blogs , i actually loved reading these and although a few of my favorites do still update most seem to have fallen by the weigh side but i leave them there in the vain hope that they may spark back to life again , so if your reading this and you have a blog that you havent updated then please breath some life into it ...

as for my blog well i have no plans for it to get tumbleweed going across the screen indeed far from it i usually do try tio update at least once a month and probably more through the summer so please keep checking back 

the next few weeks will also see me topping up folks saltwater fly boxes so expect to see lots more of these next post 

so thats it for march and a bit of april im back in the cave 

see you soon 

(a cave in scotland )