Daily Fly Fishing News

The framed and matted original cover art for Gary LaFontaine's Dry Fly: New Angles -- including a shadow-boxed fly tied by the author himself -- is up for auction at The Book Mailer Web site. The art has been in the home of the artist, Gretchen Grayum, for eighteen years. Grayum said of her "assignments" for LaFontaine: "After getting an illustrating assignment, it became quite normal to find myself crawling around river banks trying to find nymphs emerging [which I managed to find!] ... so that I could better illustrate that sequence for Gary. He would talk in depth to me about the different water patterns which occur as a fish jumps or surfaces to take a fly. I was continually amazed by the complexity of Gary's observations of the natural world, and the microscopic perception they would encompass." Bidding closes in a week, and the top bid currently stands at $500.

"The trick with this ploy is to wait until, at the end of the day, the others have made their claims about the alleged sizes of fish caught or numbers landed and then to cap each by a telling, yet credible amount. Something in the range of 15 to 20 per cent works well for me, although a straight doubling may be possible if only beginners are present." U.K. Times fishing columnist Brian Clarke suggests multiple ways to take prevarication to the level of high art.

Once a year at MidCurrent we're swamped with new product info. It almost always happens in September, because that's about the time of the annual Fly Fishing Retailer show, when shop owners are enticed to order all the goodies they'll need for spring. Sorting through it takes effort: a trip to Denver, uncountable emails and calls, and perhaps most challenging of all, getting manufacturers to explain exactly what they mean by words like "fishability" and "stump-pulling power." The result, though, is that we end up with a guide that even we refer to for the next nine months or so, until the cycle begins again. We hope you'll also find something of value in our annual new gear review, "Four Feet of Anything."

Fishing with terrestrials for fall trout in Wisconsin's Driftless Area elicits a wry comment from Steve Engelbert. "'If you are landing a beaver, you're fishing too stout,' says Engelbert." Maybe that will help us set the upper limit for performance on the new stump-puller-style short fly rods. In the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Abel has two new special edition reels available online. The slate-colored Super 7 and Super 10 are engraved with a Western Rivers Conservancy (www.westernrivers.org) logo, and Abel will donate a portion of the sales to the non-profit group, which buys land alongside important western U.S. rivers in order to protect critical habitat.

All that's missing from this news out of the Iranian Agriculture News Agency is a plea for more and better translators. "'This number of child fish has been released in the foresaid rivers. 10 thousand in the first river and 10 thousand in the second,' said Rezvaani, the head of the center of repairing fish reservoirs of Kolaar Dasht."

In Gray's Sporting Journal, John Larison writes a golden fall tale of fly fishing for steelhead after being called by the smell of blackberries. "About when the wild blackberries drip their sweet purple honey onto the emerald leaves below, and the east winds sweep off the Cascades carrying the stoning smell over my little Willamette Valley town, we know it's time to take a day off. Summer steelhead, in the rivers since May or June, will finally emerge from their heat-induced comas and take our dry flies."

Gordon Wickstrom recounts weaving his way through lascivious hippies in the sixties to find his way to the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club, and then returning more than 40 years later. "It was thrilling for me to revisit this fabled shrine of angling where during the 1940s and '50s, fly-fishing would take on an indelible and thoroughly American character. Here was codified the double haul cast, shooting head lines backed to monofilament, big-water, heavy-river distance casting, and a new dispensation in flies, the big 'attractor' flies capable of irritating steelhead and big trout into savage strikes." In the Boulder Daily Camera.

Curious about what manufacturers mean when they throw around terms like 'mandrel,' 'scrim,' 'pre-preg,' 'resin,' and 'modulus?' Here's a quick overview of the basic techniques used in the manufacture of a modern carbon graphite fly rod. New on MidCurrent.

"The biggest cutthroat of the year come to my egg flies when the chinook salmon do their dance of death and life in South Sound rivers. The Nisqually, the Skokomish and the rivers that flow into Hood Canal also offer great cutthroat trout fishing during the salmon spawn. I usually lose these big cutts to the snags or my own excitement." Chester Allen writes about fishing egg flies for big cutthroat in the many Washington rivers where salmon spawn in the fall. In the Olympian.

Nearing the end of trico season in Wyoming, guide John Schwalbe gives Wes Smalling some advice about how to end the nightmare. "You need to present your fly each time in a motionless drift right to the trout's snout, timing the arrival of the fly to the fish only when the trout is ready to come up for another bite." In the Caspar Star-Tribune.

A Swedish company is using the ideas of a twentieth century Austrian forestry expert named Viktor Schauberger about water flow through trout gills to manufacture water purification devices. Schauberger was an early environmentalist, and his theories about "self-organizing water flow" met with a lot of skepticism in his day, but Watreco, based in Malmo, Sweden, now makes a chemical-free Vortex Generator based on the same fluid dynamics that a trout uses to trap and expel water. Michael Kallenos writes about it on GreenTechMedia.com. "Water gets poured in the top of the generator, swirls through an ever-tightening coil of channels, and then spits out the other end fleeced of harmful chemicals and microbes. Water mixed with coffee grounds? Toilet water? It comes out clear."

The worldwide release is not even scheduled until January 27, 2009, but American Laundromat Records (ALR) has already raised more than $22,000 for Casting for Recovery through pre-sales of its "Cinnamon Girl - Women Artists Cover Neil Young For Charity." (You can pre-order the 16-track CD here, and you can purchase the tracks for download from iTunes.)

"The Double-CD focuses on Neil Young's early work (1969 - 1979) and features 21 new cover versions of Neil's most popular songs by artists Tanya Donelly, Britta Phillips, Lori McKenna, Jill Sobule with John Doe, Josie Cotton, Kristin Hersh, The Watson Twins, Darcie Miner, Elk City and many more." From PlugInMusic.com.

This is a fascinating story in more ways than one. ALR is a one-man operation run by Joe Spadaro out of his Connecticut basement ("I have a day job," he says.) Spurred by the death of his mother from breast cancer, Spadaro created the compilation to help support Casting for Recovery's counseling and fly-fishing retreats, which it offers free to women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

After sunset, those in search of the brown trout of a lifetime hunt the shorelines of Colorado's North Delaney Butte Lake, hoping to catch a fat fish before the state begins netting egg-filled fish for hatcheries. "As darkness grows, more monsters join in a display brown trout share with their close cousins, the Atlantic salmon. The late Lee Wulff compared this anxious surface leaping to a hyperactive boy kicking a can, a stirring that expresses some deep emotion, but no real purpose." Charlie Meyers in the Denver Post.

This coming Thursday, Friday and Saturday the Southern Council of the Federation of Fly Fishers will hold their annual conclave in Mountain Home, Arkansas. While some seminars will take place on the White River, the bulk of Friday and Saturday's events will be held at the Baxter County Fairgrounds.You can find more info on the Southern Council FFF Web site and in this summary by John Berry.