MRBoatBlog

Back from the Bahamas

2008-04-16T10:38:00.001-07:00

"51?" "You look 35," I said to Shine.
"Clean livin Saahndy, clean livin, workin hard, eatin conk and one woman Saahndy, just one good woman all these years!" replied Shine.
Shine turned to Marvin Miller and said, "Marvin, this the maahn I been tellin you about. Of all these guys that come down here from Montana, this the only one give you 80 90 feet all day long, in this wind. I look one time and he throw the whole fly line: strip strip strip and he hook a big bone 90 feet out. Ainever seen a maahn cass like that before."

Strip Striking Green Drakes

2008-04-16T10:37:00.003-07:00

Sammy Knowles--bonefish guide par excellence and his wonderful wife Jenny came to Montana this summer for a short vacation. Life is good. Sammy basically works seven days a week for 8 months out of the year. Which leaves him plenty of time to do things like travel to Montana when he wants to. Half of Bozeman wanted a chance to take Sammy fishing. I was lucky enough to get my chance on a really good day. We got a late start after partying pretty hard the evening before. And we had another dinner party coming up that evening, so I decided to forgo any boat trips and take Sam on a short wading expedition at the mouth of the Gallatin Canyon. When we started in at about 10:00am the fishing was already good. It was mid July. The sky was dark with seething clouds. It was about to rain at any minute. Green Drakes started hatching. This was an omen I thought. This was meant to happen. It's not uncommon to see a few Green Drakes in July, but usually not in such numbers. They were such incredibly huge mayflies. Their abdomens were thick and dark green, and they twitched like little snakes on the surface of the water. The fish were going nuts. Green Drakes don't float on the surface for long: either they fly off within 20 feet or they get eaten. Sam is a champion with the fly rod. He won the Bahamas bonefish tournament once or twice and came in runner up a few times too. Sam's the real deal. But trout were rising everywhere and he couldn't seem to hook a fish. He'd spot a rising fish, make a perfect cast, mend his line and strip in the slack as the fly floated down to the fish. But when the fish took the fly he'd wait a half a second and then strip strike the fly...as if he were bonefishing. And that's just about a half a second too late for trout. After an hour or so of frustration the hatch ended, almost as suddenly as it began. Sam looked at me with a big grin. "Now I know why all you guys come down from Montana and strike those bonefish too soon!" he said.

Shallow Water

2008-04-16T10:37:00.001-07:00

I had a friend Bruce Jacobs visiting from Maryland over the weekend. Bruce has come a long way (as a fly fisherman) since visiting a year ago. He can cast well now. But he still doesn't read the local water right yet. I like to move quickly, so I marched out ahead of Bruce yesterday. I was fishing a small foam hopper with a #16 bead head dropper.
I passed up a lot of good water so Bruce would have some prime untouched spots to fish as he came up behind me. But every time I looked back he was either fishing in the wrong place or wading right through what I left behind for him. It got me thinking about holding water. I started a half consious piscator/viator dialog in my head. I imagined trying to explain to Bruce what to look for and where to fish as I gradually worked my way upstream.
Every time I made an upstream step or two I took a moment to look the water over. Then I started off by casting to the shallow water next to the bank. Good fish are the least likely to hold there, but you do find them there sometimes, and when they are in shallow water it's because they're feeding. That means they're hungry and ready to strike at anything interesting, but it's important to remember they'll be extra spooky there too. That's why I always cast there first and why I do it with so much care.
I noticed an 8-10" deep current circling back out to the main channel after detouring around a bankside boulder. The internal dialog was already chattering in my mind as I made my cast--I was trying to imagine how to explain to Bruce why I was casting so carefully to such an unlikely spot. And then bang, snap, gone. My rod was still flat to the water, pointing straight at the shallow channel. The fish had taken my nymph the instant it hit the water. I did see the fish. It as well over 20" long. I caught a fat 22" male brown on the Missouri a few weeks back. And this fish was at least that big, probably bigger. And it was lying there in water no deeper than he was.
It pays to pay attention. And it pays to fish shallow water. They're usually not there. But when they are, they're almost always ready to bite.

Paradise Valley Spring Creeks

2008-04-16T10:35:00.001-07:00

Is this the end of the Paradise Valley Spring Creeks--O'Hairs and DePuys anyway? I haven't been over to Nelson's in a long time, and I've heard good reports about Nelson's this summer. But O'Hairs (aka Armstrong's) and DePuy's spring creek are definately in trouble. DePuys has been in decline for five or six consecutive years now. The first two or three seasons after the last big Yellowstone River flood, in 1997, where banner years on the creeks. The late June and early July PMD hatches were so thick you were afraid to take a deep breath, back then. The fish were everywhere: big browns hiding under the edges of moss beds and willow branches, pods of cruising rainbows sipping the yellow-bodied mayflies as the trickled off the riffles, solitary cutthroats hiding in weed pockets at the tail ends of the pools. I remember one eary July day in 1998 when my wife Adele must have caught 30 fish in Dick's Riffle, out in front of the DePuy mansion, right below the swan pond. The PMDs used to start like clock work: at 11:15-11:45, and hatch continously 'til at least 2:30 in the afternoon. Longer on cloudy days. Since that last great year, however, the hatches have thinned out every year and the number of fish in the creek has dropped off correspondingly. Six or seven bad years isn't such a long time. Perhaps this is just some unexplained phenomenon. Perhaps the long wet June and July rains we've had this year mark the end of a long drought. Perhaps all will be well again soon. But I doubt that...for some reason. Is it New Zealand mud snails usurping the habitat? Too much spraying of leafy spurge with chemicals like Roundup? Too many years of low water (why is Nelson's still good?). No one really knows, least of all me. But the bottom line remains, regardless the cause: with the hatches this thin and the fish this sparse, it just isn't worth a $100 cash to go fish there anymore. I've been paying for creek time every year since I stopped guiding in 1995 (when I graduated MSU at the age of 45). But this is the last year for me, at least until the hatches come back. The Yellowstone River free and it's just too good this time of year. The creeks used to win that race, years ago. But they don't anymore. The river is a better experience now, and the price is hard to beat. Ten years ago you couldn't get a July time slot on the creeks. Now you can. That says something.

Why Make Flies and Lures?

2008-04-16T10:34:00.001-07:00

Like a lot of fly tyers I started when I was about 12 or so. I had to tie flies in order to fish. Good flies were hard to find and too expensive to buy back then. But I'm almost 60 now and good high-quality flies are cheap to buy and easy to find. Rather than a threat to creative fly tying, however, I see that as a great benefit. I don't need to tie any more Elk Hair Caddis, Woolly Buggers or Royal Wulffs because I can buy those flies for not too much more than it would cost to buy the materials.

That means I can spend all my time fiddling with new designs--tying odd-ball specialty flies I can't buy at any price. It also means I don't have to worry about tying time efficiency. Because I buy most of the traditional patterns I fish with, it suddenly becomes perfectly sensible to spend a half an hour or more each on the flies I do tie.

Now that I think about it, worrying about production efficiency can take the fun out of almost anything. I used to work think and fret about new and ever faster ways to build driftboats. Now I pride myself in taking longer than some of the first time boat builders I sell my boat blueprints to.

Time is money. The more time it takes the more valuable it is. And my fly boxes are filled with powerful, valuable, good-looking flies nobody else has.

Bob Jacklin

2008-04-16T10:33:00.002-07:00

I just saw Bob Jacklin do his fly tying show again, today. This time at the Bozeman Troutfitters store. Wow. I've been going to a lot of these shows this spring. They're all good. But nobody ties as fast and as accurately as Bob. Amazing stuff. You can't get that good unless you spend a liftime doing it--no matter what it is. I've seen Bob's show before. I'll go again the next time. Among other things, Bob tells a damn good story.

What I noticed:

This time I noticed Bob almost always ties a bit of dubbing onto the rear end of the hook first, before mounting the tails. Then he mounts the tails. The dubbing makes it easier to spread the fibers and position them however you want. Good stuff.

I also noticed that for all nymphs and dryflies, that have ribbing of any kind, Bob winds one wrap of body dubbing underneath and behind the ribbing, before winding the dubbing forward. Then the ribbing seems to dissapear into the body, at the rear end of the fly. Nice touch.

I also noticed Bob use a peacock herl technique I've never seen before. In order to make the green body of a medium sized green drake nymph, Bob got four peacock herl strands tangled into a dubbing loop. Then he spun the dubbing loop to make what looked like a yarn strand, made from herl. And then wound that. Also a nice technique.

Bob made a little grab-out-of-a-box ticket lottery at the end of the show. I won a copy of his latest tying DVD plus another March Brown Nymph. That was an an afternoon well spent.

Mayflies and Vampires

2008-04-16T10:33:00.001-07:00

Mayfly duns are the classic design problem in fly fishing and fly tying history. If you wanted to design a new way to make mayflies you could try to chip away at all the usual design goals and criteria: faster and easier to tie, more realistic, better floating or any combination of the previous three, but the new fly still would still to work well and catch fish, else what's the point?

Unfortunately, at least for the ambitious mayfly designer, most of the good work seems to have been done already. I haven't seen anything both new and practical in a long time. Some of today's best practitioners, like Rene Harrop, Craig Matthews and Shane Stalcup are now making what look to me a lot like the best mayfly imitations ever made. Being the best ever is no small achievment. But their work is still mostly derivative: new color and material combinations combined with unparalleled craftsmanship--not fundamental design change.

Another interesting although not necessarily popular concept is the idea (especially for small mayflies) that pattern design doesn't matter that much anyway. I do tend to think pattern makes a lot less difference than many people think. If you're fishing a Pale Morning Dun hatch in July, well yes of course, you do need to fish with PMD imitations, else you won't do very well at all. But which one or ones? The answer, I think, is lots of patterns rather than fewer. Changing flies, from a rich variety of patterns in your box, matters a lot. When you're casting over a fussy riser on the far side of the spring creek who has aleady sniffed and refused your best efforts more than once, the best thing to do is to change the fly. And it doesn't necessarily matter so much which fly you choose, as long as it's got a different look than the last one. The multiple-look idea, if you believe it, inevitably tends to discount the importance of any one particular pattern over another. The undeniable success of Neal Streeks' bare bones thread flies definately provides strong support for that position.

When I was still guiding, some years working 20-25 days on Montana's Paradise Valley spring creeks, I'd usually begin a spring creek day at the fly bins at George Anderson's Yellowstone Angler. I'd ask my customers to show me their fly boxes and then I'd start picking out flies. I always had some favorites--usually the latest and greatest stuff from Rene Harrop--but the favorites did seem to change from week to week, even if the bugs didn't. For spring creek and tailwater fishing over fussy small insect eaters, I do believe in the multiple look idea. I really don't think any one pattern is necessarily that much better than the next.

If you stand in the creek at noon in July, during the peak of the Pale Morning Dun hatch--if you can bring yourself to stop fishing and just watch for a bit--you'll see the bugs present themselves in a wide variety of states, postures and sillouettes. Some never seem to get their wings open and drift by crumpled up on their sides, hopelessly tangled in their entrapping nymphal skin. Some are upright but still trail a shedding skin while others lay drowned and dead, with spent spinner-like wings. Many do ride the surface tension completely upright. You can watch the fish cruising along elliptical circuits in shallow water, often racing each other to the next arriving dimple in the surface tension. On heavily fished waters the fish can be spooky and hard to catch. A Royal Wulff isn't likely to work well during a Pale Morning Dun hatch. But an incredibly wide variety of yellowish wet dry and floating/sinking nymph-like patterns will work just fine.

Despite all that, tying complex mayflies is still one of my favorite things to do. I do have some unusual mayfly designs here, flies that are indeed creative new ways for making mayflies. But I can't really argue they accomplish much more than fly tying amusement. My bottom-mounted parachute ParaNormal Mayflies do float well, and they do catch fish as well as any other pattern. But I can't honestly say they catch fish any better. I make them because I like to.

In addition to late winter fly tying amusement, complex mayfly ideas and designs wield great power in the editorial realm. If you write anything even vaguely new or original about mayflies, no matter how obscure or even bizarre, you will almost certainly get your work published somewhere. But if you write anything related to what might be referred to as lures or lure-like flies, on the other hand, like a vampire before a cross, the fly fishing editor will fall back in horror, cowering behind a raised forearm. Like a fly fisherman's yin and yang, the mayfly and the lure model the very depths of the contemporary consumer age piscatorial soul.

I present the following mayflies for what they are: complex but fun patterns for the fly tier: not essential patterns that catch any more fish than than any other. When I'm fishing over a pod of slurping spring creek or tailwater rainbows, I do like to fish with my own fancy mayfly creations, along with a host of other more traditional flies as well. Impractical Mayflies

Folded Tail Fish

2008-04-16T10:32:00.001-07:00

Last sunday I saw something I don't see very often: a trout so old it had a folded tail. I've caught and seen some pretty big trout over the years, but only a few so old their tails looked like the end of a folded dishrag.

I had a customer once, an old guy who knew Starker and Aldo Leopold. I took him and his daughter on an upper Yellowstone float in late hopper season. My customer (can't remember his name) was cheerful and enthusisastic, but so old he couldn't stand up in the boat, and he couldn't really wade without help. It was so windy that day it was almost hopeless. Late in the day, just as it was getting dark, the wind stopped. I parked the boat and helped my guy stand about 3 steps away from the boat.

On the second or third drift he hooked a fish that at first glance looked to be about 15 pounds. It took forever to get him in. The fish looked that big because the only real look I got was the fish's head, which was enormous. When we finally got that fish to the net it was the first time I was ever dissapointed to see a 21 - 22 inch fish. It was a old male cutthroat, whose head was half the length of his body, somewhat like the old but growth-stunted brook trout that sometimes come out of high altitude lakes. His tail had so many folds in it too looked like a dishrag. I got a $200 cash tip for that fish: the best day-trip tip I ever got.

Last sunday I went over to O'Hair's Spring Creek (aka Armstrong's Spring Creek) to photograph Blue Winged Olives and to do a little fishing. But the hatch never happened. By 2:00 oclock everybody had gone home. There didn't seem to be any bugs or many fish in the creek. I walked up to the source pool above the top-end culvert. After fishing nymphs blindly into the deep water, without success, I put on a small wiggler and pulled it through the frothy top edge of the pool. A huge bright yellow brown about 24" nipped at the wiggler. I didn't get him hooked. But I got a real good look at that fish, from end to end. That fish too had a folded tail, and a huge hooked lower jaw. I've seen bigger fish than that one, but only once before (the afore mentioned cutthroat) did I ever see a tail like that.

I'd love to know how old those fish were.

Memento Memories

2008-04-16T10:31:00.001-07:00

How would you explain it?
My long lost fishing buddy Patrick, who lives in Australia now, was visiting here in Montana last week. We wanted to float the Yellowstone during hopper season but the river was blown out: chocolate brown after several days of strong evening thunder storms.
So we hiked in to the lower end of a well-known cutthroat creek in the park and worked out way back upstream. We absolutely wacked'em. We must have nicked 30-35 fish apiece. I did find, however, that each fish would rise up and inspect my foam/deerhair hopper only once. They'd either bite or reject it, and then that was it. So I moved fast, drifting my hopper over ever good looking riffle drop and bank-side eddy and then moved on upstream, without spending much time at any given spot.
And then I suddenly realized I was fishing out in front of my buddy Patrick, who I was supposed to be entertaining. I strode quickly back downstream with my hat in my hand and apologized to Patrick for not hop-Scotching pools with him. Patrick laughed. "You always do that," he said. And then he added "but it doesn't seem to matter. I've been wacking a dozen fish at every pool too. But they only look once," he added. "Any more that two casts at any given spot is a waste of time!"
Patrick was fishing a small, hard-to-see black caddis pattern. This was really perplexing. They'd only look once at my hopper, but they'd still come up to look at Patrick's black caddis. It made me wonder if some else could have come up behind the two of us and wacked'em with a Pale Morning Dun, or a wet fly, or whatever.
When we finally turned around, about 2-3 miles upstream from where we'd parked the car, we agreed to hop-scotch back downstream, fishing over the same holes we'd banged on the way up.
We fished quickly but carefully. But we rolled only 2-3 more fish on the way back downstream--between the two of us. Those same fish still remembered the hopper and they also remembered (or at least wouldn't bite) the black caddis.
What kind of Memento like memory is this? I have a strong suspicion we could have returned the following day, and repeated the same scenario. How would you explain it?

Salmon Fly Time

2008-04-16T10:30:00.001-07:00

Salmon Flies on the Big Hole

We floated from Jerry Creek to Divide on the Big Hole, yesterday. June 18th. And still no Salmon Flies. That's about as late as I can remember. They're usually thick by this time. It has been cold and rainy for more than six weeks now, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

When the water is high cold and off-color like that, and when the flies haven't started hatching yet, it can be tough. The few fish we caught were good sized. I was fishing an extra heavy bonefish fly with a brown foam Salmon Fly nymph (a Marshmallow trailing off the bend of the Crazy Charlie hook. The Crazy Charlie does the same thing as split shot on the leader, but it catches a lot more fish than split shot. That's a favorite early season way to fish for me.

Jerry Creek to Divide, on Saturdays, is the local yokel float, where no outfitters are allowed. It's a pretty good deal. If you're a Montanan and not an outfitter, you can drift the river at peak time and only have to share the water with a handful of other boats. We saw another couple who clearly knew how to fish. They were drifting small beadhead nymphs in shallow riffles, using red yarn indicators. It looked like they were catching a pretty steady stream of small fish. That strategy works, I guess, but it's not the way I drove two hours to fish. Salmon Fly time is big flies big fish time for me.

Streamers: Big Streamers work surprisingly well during the Salmon Fly time, especially early and late in the day and before and after the peak emergence times. Colorful Bou's (brown orange red and yellow marabou streamers) are a long standing Big Hole tradition, as are the Brown and Yellow Yuk Bugs everybody refers to as Lyle's Specials, after Lyle Reynolds, the veteran but now retired Big Hole guide. I've caught some extra-big fish on Roadkill Streamers at Salmon Fly time too.

Big Wet Flies and Nymphs: They way I fish most often is with a large, unsinkable, foam-bodied dry fly adult, with either a non-floating, drowned-adult pattern or a large foam stonefly nymph trailing off the bend of the dry fly hook. That way you get the best of both worlds: you get to watch a dry fly, and there is nothing more fun that watching fish rise up and snatch those giant floaters off the surface. But you will catch more fish on the wet flies. That's just the way it is. In other words, if the wet flies are the most effective way to fish, but the dry flies are the most fun, why not do both at the same time. Have my cake and eat it too is my life's guiding principal.

Dry Flies: There are a lot patterns. The thing you need most is floatation. Foam flies are the most servicable.

Golden Stones: The golden stonefly hatch overlaps the bigger Pteronarcys Californica hatch some, especially toward the end of the Salmon Fly hatch, rather than the beginning. Fishing the Golden Stone hatch is deja vu all over again, except the flies are a little smaller. Same flies, same tactics, same opportunities, with slightly smaller, slightly yellower flies.

Evening Fishing: Elk Hair caddis and Stimulators become a vialble way to fish later in the day. Salmon Fly time is near the solstice, when it stays light 'til ten o'clock every evening. If you stay out that late, you'll find you can put the big bugs away and fish Elk Hair caddis in shallow bank-side runs and riffles. The fish will still eat the big bugs then too, but by that time you're often ready for a change. And the later it gets, the better the small dry flies work.

Diurnal Periodicity

2008-04-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

If you look at the daily temperature graph of the Smith River in late June in Montana:

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/mt/nwis/uv/?site_no=06077200&PARAmeter_cd=00060,00065,00010

you see a remarkably well defined 24 hour cycle, from coldest water temperature to warmest following a repeating pattern that swings down below optimum temperature (14 degrees celsius) to above (18 degrees celsius). As the season progresses the shape of the daily curve widens around the daylight hours and moves higher, sometimes plunging down into optimum activity temperatures only at night.

The interesting part is the predictability of the cycle--if you have access to the data, that is. Trout are opportunists, so they'll feed when the have to. But it's also widely accepted they're most active beween 14.5 - 18 degrees. So it makes sense to pay attention and plan your time on the water to coincide with those (highly predictable) temperatures.

I remember reading an academic paper about seasonal brown trout activity patterns. That researcher observed a single period of maximum activity centered around midday in winter, a single period of late night peak activity in late summer and two split periods of peak activity morning and evening during the changing seasons. That researcher tried to explain this behavior in terms of circadian rhythms (the 24 hour light dark cycle) as well as diurnal temperature periods.

But he too was--when you get right down to it--talking about highly predicable activity patterns. I'm going to have to start paying closer attention to the USGS water temperature tables. And carry a thermometer too, I guess; to see if they're getting it right.

Flyrod Lures

2008-04-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

Lures: large heavy small and light

I've published 15-20 articles in fly fishing magazines over the years--mostly about fly tying inventions. But I've never had much luck publishing wiggler articles. Perhaps that's why I've written so many of them.

An editor of a fly fishing magazine once told me (in the mid-1980s or so) he thought my wigglers were interesting, but he was afraid "the readers would rebel" if he published my stuff. Another, less complementary editor once said "there is a question about weather it is a fly or not." You could almost feel that editor's chin rising above his keyboard as he wrote that sentance. Another editor said "this isn't the direction I want to take the magazine."

The ground rules for publication in fly fishing magazines are clear. If you write something about developmentally disabled mayfly emergers you'll get published in a flash. In the BMP Duns piece I refered to the BMP Dun as (sic) " an irrelevant wintertime fantasy" and still got published--first try no questions asked. If you write something about lure-like flies that actually catch big fish, however, your chances for publication are a limit approaching zero. Now don't get me wrong. I love fishing a PMD hatch, perhaps most of all. And I do it well; I like Pecan Pie too. But I do get a belly ache if I eat too much of it.

Are these lures, flyrod lures or flies? That's a question I don't know how to answer. It's also a question I don't pay much attention to. All of these wigglers can be made light enough to cast with a flyrod or heavy enough throw with a bait casting rod. You're free to fish the way you like. I've been doing it for years.
G.E.M. Sandy
Editor, MRBoats.com

Soft baits for Fly Fishermen

2008-04-14T16:41:00.000-07:00

In his 1960 classic Fishing the Nymph Jim Quick (in a discussion about exact immitation vs impressionistic fly design) writes: "The plastic replicas of nymphs, either formed in a mold or woven are in this class. To our eyes, they are perfection itself, but from a consensus of trout results reports, at this writing, the desirable keepers look upon this lure, under most conditions, as if it were tinged with arsenic. The reader may get the impression that the author, in asking that the fly fisherman or fly tier observe and study the natural nymph, is a bit off his rocker when he states that perfect lures are not too effective. It is true, and why it is that way nobody knows."
I may be taking Jim Quick a little out of context here. He was trying to make a point about "exact immitation" in general rather than molded plastic in particular. Still, in his day, there were no exact immitation molded plastic flies. In fact there were only a few real fly shops anywhere in those days. Stores like Jim Derren's Angler's Roost in New York, Wayne Buzek's shop in California or Dan Bailey's and Pat Barnes' shops in Montana were the exception rather than the rule. Abercrombie and Fitch, one of the best east coast sources of flies and expensive bamboo rods in the 1960s, sold as much or more spinning tackle as it did fly fishing gear. The molded plastic flies that did appear in fly bins in those days were more like opaquely colored cartoon caricatures of imaginary insects than exact immitations of anything real. I suspect Jim's quick disdain for molded plastic nymphs had more to do with predjudice than experience. In fact I find soft plastic nymphs--made with a few feathers and the same soft plastic bass worms are made from--to be the most astonishingly effective nymphs of all. When properly tied, a seductive combination of translucency flexibility and neutral bouyancy do in fact attract more initial strikes, while the soft squishy texture of the nymph itself tends to intitiate chewing rather than spitting behavior once the intitial strike has been made. My experience with soft plastic flies observes fish behavior more like a taste for caviar than arsenic.