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According to a study by scientists at Canada's University of Alberta, wild salmon are not safe from diseases spread from salmon farms. "They add more fuel to the intense debate over the wisdom of turning to aquaculture to replace stocks of wild fish, many of which have crashed in recent decades under the pressure of commercial and even recreational fishing." Cornelia Dean in The New York Times.
Kauai, Hawaii is not the first place folks think of when they imagine great rainbow trout fishing, but in fact rainbows were introduced there in 1920. Deane Gonzalez gives the lowdown on a hike-in fishery on the Koaie on FlyFishingConnection.com. "One of the many things you will notice about Koaie stream is the color, it looks like tea. Yea, dark tea. The water that forms the stream starts as rain fall on mount Waialeale, it’s 5080 feet high and is known as the wettest spot on earth. The rain filters through the Alaiaki swamp and takes on the 'tea’ color."
Martin Joergensen of GlobalFlyFisher.com offers this fine evaluation of wading jackets and a list of the must-haves he feels are necessary components of a well-built waterproof fishing shell. "My latest venture is with last years Scierra Aquatex jacket, which would be an excellent jacket if it was not for a few things: the side (hand) pockets are far to far out on the side of the jacket and for some reason close with a zipper."
We get a lot of inquiries about how to construct low-cost stripping baskets for use when fly fishing from a boat. Until recently, you could stop by most Target or K-Mart stores and pick up a collapsible gardening basket that could be easily modified into a stripping basket (see our article "Leaf Bucket Stripping Basket"). But apparently these aren't as easy to find as they used to be. The good news is that the Fiskars Web site still has leaf buckets (or "gardening baskets") available online.
"This fishing is all about the eye and its voracity. A barracuda can unnerve everyone in the vicinity with a sideways glance. Bonefish, in turn, are like antelope, in the sense that they seem to live on the light they move in - the thin, infinitely refracting currents of sunlit surf that pour over the coral flats. Barracuda, bonefish - they see each other without looking." Verlyn Klinkenborg fishes an atoll off of Belize and enjoys the visual feast we call bonefishing. In The New York Times. (Thanks to reader John DeVault for this link.)
Fly tiers are indeed notorious for scrounging up materials from the oddest places and are often surprised with the results. "I once tied great looking black and white streamers with strands of my dog's coat only to discover that springer spaniel fur is extremely buoyant. Even with split shot added to my line to pull down my flies they did not swim straight in the water column. Perfectly placed lead wrapping might remedy the problem, but I think a better option might be to use the same hair for tying black and white dry flies." Jeff Samsel in the Huntsville (Alabama) Times.
"After innocently mentioning some of Davie’s less traditional tactics in an account of our difficult day’s fishing, emailed around some trusted members of the angling fraternity, all hell broke lose. First, a message from my fishing companion: 'Get yourself a lawyer, Wilson.'" Scotsman.com's angling columnist gets himself in hot water after mentioning his partner's tactics on windless day on Loch Venachar.
Perhaps due to the fact that litigation management consumed almost all of his agency's resources during his tenure, Steve Williams resigned as U.S. Fish and Wildlife's director last week. President Bush will name a replacement. Cross your fingers. Though Williams did a fine job for the agency, his influence was diminished by the increasing effectiveness of property and water rights advocates and the decreasing effectiveness of scientists in affecting administration policy.
"Thirty yards of fly line and a couple hundred yards of backing was pulled from his reel in mere seconds. I grabbed the net and ran down along the shore as quickly as possible, but it was too late. The fish broke loose behind a large rock several hundred yards downriver. That steelhead was about 30 inches long and would have weighed nearly 12 pounds. It’s fish like that, and the few minutes of action, that draws us into the cold later until our feet are numb." Rick Brockway writes about cold-fishing for steelhead in the Salmon River near Pulaski, New York. On TheDailyStar.com.
Reminds me of my "one large tarpon per year" rule. This Delaware guide would rather not spend his money on chiropractors and heavy tackle. "Orchestrating such a trip is a lot of work in itself. If or when a big fish is actually hooked the lucky anglers charged with fighting it to submission is likely going to learn a few things about what sweat and sore muscles are all about. It's not uncommon for me to have customers travel hundreds of miles and spend thousands of dollars to catch a fish that, while fighting it, they continually cuss and swear at, and then part-way through it all hand the rod off to someone else to finish the battle because they're too exhausted to do it themselves." On DelmarvaNow.com.
"So, barring miracles, the die is cast. Even on the biggest and most robust streams of all — rivers such as the Itchen and Test in Hampshire, the Kennet in Berkshire and the Avon in Wiltshire, famous waters that attract anglers from all over the world to fish them at up to £300 a day — the prospect is for steadily falling levels, silting gravels, a dearth of water plants, a further decline in aquatic flylife and dour fish." Like parts of the northwestern and western U.S., southern and eastern England struggles to adjust with lower water levels this year. Brian Clark in the London Times Online.
"While rivers that meander behind shopping malls, subdivisions and freeways might not have the grandeur of the Skagit or the wilderness feel of Olympic Peninsula rivers, Seattle-Tacoma-area rivers nonetheless provide productive and nearby winter steelhead fishing." David Rose describes great steelhead fishing to be found in the not-hard-to-reach waters of the urban Seattle/Tacoma Washington area. In Game & Fish magazine.
"Also talking about trout in early spring, I tend to high-grade the pools and runs much more than I do in the summer and fall. I only fish the best habitat and tend to stay there longer. I don't fish the real fast water that I'll hit hard in late summer and fall." Mark Henckel talks early spring tactics in the Billings, Montana Gazette.
In what might be considered a "tangential approach" to solving the problem of Yellowstone Park's decreasing cutthroat populations, the park service is proposing rules that ask anglers to kill more rainbow, brown and brook trout. Not only have rainbows and other species entered streams like Slough Creek, but they have begun hybridizing with native populations. Scott McMillion in the Bozeman, Montana Daily Chronicle. (Thanks to reader John DeVault for this link.)
I think it was Nick Lyons who best paraphrased the saying, "Fishing is a endless series of opportunities for hope." In this piece by Gordon Lewis, the author notes that the same can be applied to almost any outdoors ritual. "Optimism finds us watching the quiet trails along the hemlock swamp, reading the body language of our favorite birddog or scanning the sky for the telltale gathering of gulls that signals a bluefish blitz." In the Nashua, New Hampshire Telegraph.
Buried in this article about Alaskan fly tiers is a quote from John McPhee that belies the emergence (pun intended) of effective patterns in fly fishing for salmon: "'He is a New England dry fly-fisherman, and up here his bamboo ballet is regarded as effete. Others taunt him. He will not rise. But neither will the grayling to his Black Gnats, his Dark Cahills, his Quill Gordons.'" Ron Wilmot in the Anchorage Daily News.
More toothy critters on flies. "The strike was hammer-hard. Fly line burned through my fingers and jumped off the deck in serpentine waves. I bobbed. I weaved. I danced around the deck to keep it from underfoot, and from around my neck." Mike Conner talks about the interest growing in near-shore spanish mackerel fishing in Florida. In Florida Sportsman.
"[Leonard] Wright called his technique for putting action on a dry fly 'the sudden inch,' and it seemed simple on paper. Instead of casting upstream, Wright suggested casting down and across the current with an upstream mend and giving the fly a slight upstream twitch as it neared a rising trout." John Gierach talks about the effectiveness of giving flies subtle action in Field & Stream.
"We muscled the driftboat down the bank through dripping spruce and maple and into the river as the sun burned through the morning mist and painted the snowcapped mountains a pantsuit shade of pink." James Babb finds great fishing in Maine's Androscoggin river in the southwest portion of the state — a river once ranked among the most polluted in the country. In Gray's Sporting Journal.
New on MidCurrent: If you are a saltwater fly fisher chances are you've heard of or even used the Slim Beauty knot. That's a remarkable thing to say about a knot that gained prominent use among Key West tarpon guides only in the last five or ten years.
There are, of course, folks who believe that the classic Bimini-to-Huffnagle or even modified improved blood knot are better ways to attach class tippets to shock tippets. Often the choice becomes personal taste, but more often than not — I believe — how well a knot is tied determines its usefulness. The fact is that, of any of the class-to-shock or class-to-butt section connections you might tie while on the water, the Slim Beauty is probably the easiest to tie well.
To help you see why, MidCurrent offers a new video and step-by-step article on Tying the Slim Beauty Knot.
The blue-winged olives coming off on Utah's Provo River are some of the larger ones in years — 16's and 18's — and the fish (and anglers) are diggin' it. "Some call this time of year the 'Awakening' . . . bugs are hatching, fish are becoming more active as a result of the warmer water and fishermen are starting to think about wading in water rather than snow." Ray Grass on Deseretnews.com.
New on MidCurrent: Chico Fernandez describes the best ways to approach bonefish and present flies without them ever knowing you're there. "Because sound travels better through water than air, any noise that comes from inside or outside the skiff is deadly. The constant slap of waves against a hull, or dropping a pair of pliers on the bottom of the boat, or closing one of the hatches a bit too loudly can all send a bonefish to the next flat. Rocking back and forth during your false casting also rocks the skiff, creating a series of bow wakes with every false cast. Bonefish can detect these wakes very easily, even the faintest ones, and may stop feeding or leave."
As anyone who has fished long and hard for permit can tell you, it's not all that unusual to have to endure a long dry spell. Three fish in 48 fishing days qualifies as a "dry spell," I think, and unfortunately it happened for the anglers and guides in this year's Del Brown Tournament, held last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in Key West, Florida.
As MidCurrent readers and participants Captain Mike Guerin and angler Warren Hinrichs reported, the water was cold, the light was poor and a cold front added to the challenge.
Capt. Guerin: "Wednesday of the tournament was one of the three most ludicrously foolish days I have ever spent fishing.... Water temp at 64, full cloudcover and blowing 20-30mph. Had only(surprised to get those) 3 shots all day and the fish looked strange in their black neoprene suits."
Warren Hinrichs: "Of course Simon [Becker] and Steve Dunn caught a fish! No surprise there. Andy Mill and Dustin Huff caught two permit to win the tournament. No surprise there either. We ended up with runner-up...again...and we caught the largest fish of the tournament. Good fish karma in difficult conditions. The tournament will be moved to July per a vote by the group."
Nelson Bryant describes the wide-roaming anticipation of pre-season fly tiers in The New York Times. "Many of us who tie flies choose to compromise, to create some flies and purchase others. We may, for example, enjoy fashioning trout flies down to something as small as size 12 or 14, but balk at working with minuscule Nos. 20 or 22 hooks. Or we may not have the patience to assemble classic Atlantic salmon flies like the Jock Scott or the Silver Doctor."
"The Quill Gordon, Epeorus pleuralis, is our first major spring hatch. The fly, also known as the Gordon Quill, has a long history in American flyfishing. Many people regard it as the first truly American dry fly pattern because it was developed and popularized in the period before World War I by Theodore Gordon to match a fly common on streams in the Catskill Mountains. It is tied with wood duck flank wings, a stripped peacock herl body protected by a fine wire rib, and dun hackle." George Grant talks about the darker patterns of early spring that are perfect for eastern U.S. mountain streams. On Tricities.com.
"'The casting is pretty difficult,' Bowman said. 'You have to make really long, long casts. They're probably on average about 50 feet, although there are some even further.'" Ummm, OK. In Search of Fly Water's Conway Bowman finds that Atlantic Salmon achieve all the promise of their reputation as great fighters and difficult fish. On ESPN Outdoors.
"A guide friend of mine says that tarpon are like Deion Sanders and reds are like Larry Csonka. They are a six-pack of Bud to the Atlantic salmon's Sancerre; a pit bull to the whippet bonefish; a paragraph to the one-sentence largemouth." Charles Gaines goes fishing along the U.S. Gulf coast with our friends Tom Montgomery and Jimbo Meador and finds a fishery that has recovered all of its former glory. In Field & Stream.
Andrew Laszlo is required study for students at most film schools. Born in Hungary in 1926, he survived World War II and later earned Emmy nominations for "The Man Without a Country" (1973) and the 1980 mini-series "Shogun." Now he spends his time writing and fly fishing in northwest North Carolina. Mark Burger in the Winston-Salem Journal.
"No long casts are necessary. Because the water is cold, the trout do not flash cross-stream and strike in wrist-rattling grabs. Instead, the fish sit in pocket water, pointed upstream, waiting for food to come floating by. Cast a short distance upstream and then drift your nymphs right past them, along boulders next to the pockets where trout sit." Open in winter for the first time in history, the Upper Sacramento River above Shasta Lake is a great place for "off-season" anglers have to catch trout, as Tom Stienstra notes on SFGate.com.
Ryan Jordan waxes philosophical about packing light on an eight-day fishing and hiking trip through Montana's Beartooth Mountains in search of high mountain lake trout. Just FYI, this is one of the most spectular regions in the U.S. for high-mountain fishing treks -- but not one you want to consider without careful planning. "Several more hours of rockhopping brought us high into the glaciated domain of some of the Beartooth's lesser-known peaks. Late afternoon brought a waning sun, high winds, and impending thunderstorms, quickly making us realize that we were walking astride a very fine line between sheer stupidity and well, sheer stupidity (I won't say which side of the line, because my mom might be reading this)." On BackpackingLight.com.
John Merwin describes the ten items that most tickled his fancy when introduced at this year's Fly-Fishing Retailer World Trade Expo. They include the thousand-dollar Hardy Cascapedia MkII reel and Tim Rajeff's Echo fly rods. In Field & Stream.
W.H. Faulkner writes about finding redfish in the northernmost parts of Everglades National Park in Florida Sportsman. "Snook season opens, snook season closes. The tarpon show up and the tarpon disappear. The only constant in the complex Everglades fishing equation is redfish. As stated, the problem is, if you’re fishing anywhere in the Park north of Flamingo, these bronze bombers are not always easy to find and they can often be even harder to catch, no matter what time of year it is."
In the late 1980s "coarse" fishing -- fishing for carp -- began luring many die-hard trout anglers to ponds and reservoirs stocked with giant fish. Brian Clarke writes in the London Times how guaranteed success is spoiling British anglers and threatening the art of fish stalking.
"Casting to these creatures in the primordial surroundings of the park's Buffalo Ford when jewel-like pale morning duns are hatching and cutthroat roil the slick surface of the stream with their gluttonous riseforms is as close as most of us will get to an encounter with virgin America." Anyone who's been lucky enough to fish cutthroat in Buffalo Ford will appreciate Peter Kaminsky's description of the need of protecting the cutthroat in Yellowstone Park. In The New York Times.
"Despite my recent pursuit of grayling, evangelical in its zeal, and evening hours spent with the vice after being converted by The Fly-Tying Bible, my fishing soul’s guardian angel just seems to be out of sorts. My angling mojo is definitely not on the rise." The fishing columnist for Scotsman.com relates the symptoms of pre-season anxiety.
"I thought I was as happy as I had any reason to expect to be. I was living in Alaska, teaching college English, making more money than I'd ever dreamed of making. I was just sitting in my office minding my own business. If anybody had asked me, I might have said I was free of want, free of desire." Bamboo Fly Rod Suite (University of Georgia Press, 1999) is an elegant examination of one man's affair with a fly rod. The only thing I disagree with reviewer Anne Hanley about is that it is a "favorite of mostly men who love to fish but don't especially like to read."
"In the early 20th century, internationally famous rod makers such as Payne, Edwards, Thomas and Leonard had turned the Pine Tree State into the bamboo-rod capital of the world." Ken Allen writes about the growth of the bamboo rod industry in the U.S. and bamboo's surprising endurance as a material of choice (and value). On MaineToday.com.
New on MidCurrent: The spring creeks of Montana's Paradise Valley — O'Hair's, Nelson's and Depuy's — have educated more fly fishers about the intricacies of fishing tiny flies than any other trout fishery in the U.S. (with the possible exception of Idaho's Henry's Fork). Anglers have spent lifetimes figuring these fish out. That's lucky for the rest of us, since the lessons they've learned can be appied to almost any difficult fishing circumstance.
Brant Oswald mixes science with technique and hard-won experience to deliver a great guide to fishing midges in "Midge Fishing in Paradise."
Here's some fascinating stuff hidden in this unpretentious site about fly casting, including this history of the double haul.
Dan Blanton posted Jerry Siem's response to an inquiry about the utility of fighting grips on larger fly rods on his bulletin board. "First of all, rod blanks need to be designed to adequately support having a foregrip and the foregrip should be positioned quite close to the casting grip. Having a ferrule inches above theforegrip isn't a concern if the blank is designed to handle it and if the angler puts the rod together tight. The shaft does bend through the fighting grip, as well as the ferrule, ever so slightly, which does not focus a shearing point at all." For those who don't know, Jerry Siem is one of the modern greats in rod design and casting and has worked for Sage for many years.
"One of Montana's legendary trout flies, the girdle bug, was designed to imitate a large stonefly nymph, or 'hellgrammite,' as the local anglers on the Big Hole River call the big aquatic insects. Lost in the murky currents of time, however, is the original name of the girdle bug. Back in the 1930s and '40s, it was called the 'McGinnis rubberlegs,' after its creator, Frank McGinnis of Anaconda." Now a descendent of Frank McGinnis has authored another killer trout streamer. Larry Gadbow in the Missoula (Montana) Missoulian.