Daily Fly Fishing News

As we all know, one of the privileges of being a king is that you receive regular and expensive gifts meant to encourage good will and international discourse. If one of those gifts happens to be a two-handed salmon rod, all the better. Hardys' involvement with the royalty goes way back to 1890, when they made a custom rod for the Emperor of Germany, who had just returned from salmon fishing in Norway. According to the press release we received yesterday, Hardy still believes in the royal treatment: they just gave a newly designed Double‐Handed Salmon Fly rod, the Hardy Angel2, to His Majesty King Harald V of Norway.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

A new study commissioned by San Francisco-based fish and watershed advocacy group California Trout says that two-thirds of the state's native salmon, steelhead and trout may be gone in one hundred years. "'They are all in serious danger of extinction,' said Peter Moyle, a University of California at Davis ecology professor who wrote the 350-page report. In danger of extinction in the north state are redband trout on the McCloud River; coho and spring chinook salmon on the Klamath River; and winter, spring and late-fall run chinook, as well as the Central Valley steelhead, on the Sacramento River." Dylan Darling on Redding.com.

In a related story, a deal was struck yesterday between the state of California and two environmental groups to severely limit the stocking of hatchery-raised fish. "The deal prohibits stocking where 16 native fish species and nine frog species are found. It allows stocking programs in all large reservoirs and smaller ones not connected to rivers." Samantha Young for the Associated Press.

Author and fly fisher Peter Matthiessen received the National Book Award for fiction last night, almost three decades after winning his first for the non-fiction The Snow Leopard (1979). The award was given for Matthiessen's Shadow Country (Modern Library, April 2008, 912 pages), a reworked trilogy of novels from the 1990s that includes a retelling of Lost Man's River. "Matthiessen, a world traveler, naturalist and founder of the Paris Review, is one of the great names in modern letters, but few -- including Matthissen -- expected to see him nominated this year. His novel, neither new nor old, condenses and deepens his previous work about a ruthless landowner from the Florida Everglades."

Shadow Country (Modern Library) on Amazon.

Egg patterns, as common wisdom has it, are most effective during the fall and early winter when trout and steelhead feel the impulse to gobble up anything resembling roe. But devotees will tell you that they turn heads almost any time of the year. And when you consider that they are among the most easily tied flies, yarn Glo-Bug-style egg patterns are well worth considering as you sit down at the vise this early winter. In this week's video, Charles Meck shows how to tie one of his favorite Glo-Bug-style flies, the "Steeler."

Excerpt: "Two professors from British Columbia did a study in 1973 and they fed trout eggs in a trough, and they put in different color eggs. When they used one color only, they found that trout hit a blue-colored egg before any other color. But when they put a combination of colors in at the same time, trout fed more actively when they were fed black and yellow at the same time."

In the Chicago Daily Herald, Mike Jackson sings the praises of Muskie On the Fly, one of those sleeper titles that he thinks might not be getting the attention it deserves. "Tomes preaches a different mantra. He's as committed to 'de-snobbing' fly fishing as I am, as well as convincing a novice fly caster that thrills are not limited to just a largemouth bass attacking a surface plug and then taking to the air."

For a taste of what Tomes's new book is all about, read our excerpt on "Top-Water Retrieves."

Muskie on the Fly (Masters on the Fly series) on Amazon.

New on MidCurrent this week is Robert Morselli's review of Ross Essence FC fly rods, a line which Ross Worldwide recently expanded to include more models. Morselli, who is research director of the popular "How It's Made" TV series, notes that the Essence FC is a great example of how much value can be built into an under-$200 rod.

Excerpt: "The FCs will handily cast flies in far to mid to short distances. And just five years ago, few would have thought of taking a 3-weight to any place but a trout stream with smallish fish. This just isn't the case anymore with the better-made mid-price rods. The FC is responsive and delivers the strong sense that you can land an unexpectedly large fish if you have to."

As part of their energetic move into North American markets, Hardy just announced that their 15,000-square-foot warehouse, distribution center and showroom in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was officially opened on October 22. As we noted in our annual review of new fly fishing gear, Hardy is bringing several new fly rods and reels to the U.S. market this year as well as beginning distribution of products that have a devoted following in Europe. Their reintroduced "Perfect" fly reel also won a MidCurrent Best of Show award at the recent Fly Fishing Retailer Show in Denver.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Anyone considering a prenuptial or other kind of agreement with their spouse over baby naming rights should pay close attention to this one. Jackie Sealy gave her husband the absolute choice over middle names. The result: Brooke Trout, Carter Barack Obama, and Cooper John Elway. "Yes, Roger Sealy is a fisherman, and now, so is Brooke, who has caught many a 'huge' bluegill with her Barbie fishing rod. Even so, dad isn't delusional about how charming Brooke may find her middle name when she's older." Laura Snider in the Boulder Daily Camera.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management seems hell-bent on removing protections for sensitive drainages in Alaska prior to the change in administrations. On Friday, they announced they are opening about one million acres near some of Alaska's richest salmon streams to mineral exploration and oil and gas leasing. "Large blocks of land in Southwest Alaska would be opened to development -- for the first time in more than 35 years -- in the same two river drainages as Pebble, the giant copper and gold prospect. One of the drainages is the Kvichak River, which has the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. The other is the Nushagak River, the state's second-largest king salmon producer." Elizabeth Bluemink in the Anchorage Daily News.

To launch his fourth season of fly fishing podcasts, Zach Matthews interviewed Richard Hewitt and Tom Pero on the future of Fish & Fly magazine, which was just acquired by Hewitt's U.K. company. Pero: "We're publishing an issue of the standard format of Fish & Fly at the end of December. I can tell you that it will be a 'best of' issue."

Gamakatsu has come up with a new way of attaching droppers to leaders using a preformed plastic bead that slides onto the leader just above the tippet and holds the dropper line perpendicular to the leader. "The Dropper Bead is a clear plastic oval bead with a hole running length wise through the center that the leader goes through and a second hole underneath it running perpendicular to the other one to attach a dropper line to."

Before the arrival of spinning reels, fly rod owners were mighty inventive when it came to figuring out how to use a fly rod in non-classic ways. Gordon Wickstrom writes about spinners, swivels and artificials of all shapes and sizes that were once hung on the end of a fly line. "There was one thing, for sure, that we could do with this rig, which was to fling fly rod spinners around all up and down our streams. The interbellum period was the great age of the 'fly rod spinner,' and no trout fisherman worthy of his rod would be caught on the water without a few of these distinctly American lures." In the Boulder Daily Camera.

According to the English Fly Fishing Shop, there is a reasonable chance that a fly fishing trip to North America will be your last. Among the possible vectors of certain death: the sun, jellyfish, canyons, bacterium, sea urchins and hunters, not to mention the more typically lethal bears, mountain lions and elk. The authors did forget the notorious gray wolf, which prowls the more famous streams of Yellowstone National Park and has developed a taste for anglers who carelessly dress themselves to resemble small elk. (Look for the link "DANGER - Fly Fishing in America" at the bottom of this page.)

Frank Amato Publications recently released a limited-edition compilation of short stories, essays and photos entitled The Creel: North Umpqua Edition. Edited by Bob Wethern, the book is another in a series belonging to "The Creel" publications by the Fly Fishers Club of Oregon. "'The stories are those of who fished the river for the past 110 years ... their feelings and observations of the river. As far as fly fisher publications, this is the pinnacle. It's not going to be matched. This is the story of the North Umpqua.'" Craig Reed on NRToday.com.

The Salt Lake Tribune's Brett Prettyman talks about his friend and guide extraordinaire Denny Breer, who was killed in an accident on November 6 (see "Green River Guide Denny Breer Killed in Accident"). "Denny apologized for the mess his loft was in, and I wondered how I would know the difference between a clean and a dirty pigeon coop. He pointed out champion racers and talked about the breeding he had achieved. His words became a blur as he talked passionately about how his discovery of a young pigeon on the ground under a tree when he was 5 sparked his interest in birds."

The next time someone tells you that fly shops are a thing of the past, suggest that they read this story about Santa Cruz, California retailer Ernie Kinzli, whose customers are planning to wear black arm bands as they mourn Kinzli's decision to do more fishing. "Kinzli, a native Santa Cruzan, began fly fishing with his father along the San Lorenzo River when he was in the third grade. Back then, Kinzli said, anglers would line up shoulder to shoulder under the railroad trestle at the river mouth during steelhead season. The fish were so thick the river often looked black." Leo Maxam in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Some fly fishers look forward to fall and early winter -- in many places the spawning season for big brown trout -- simply for the chance to throw streamers. You can call it "banging the banks" or "bouncing streamers" or "slinging lead" (sometimes heavy flies and lead-core lines make a lot of sense), but it boils down to a nice change of pace from the technical fishing of summer.

This week on MidCurrent Gary LaFontaine discusses the best strategies for Fishing Streamers and Undercut Banks. As in all of LaFontaine's instructional videos, he shows how best to approach, analyze and adjust to unique stream conditions. "One or two bangs in a spot and move on," LaFontaine suggests. "You're not going to run out of good spots" when streamer fishing.