Trout Bums

Looks like the Trout Bums have been in Mongolia chasing taimen, expedition style. Click it over to the Trout Bum Diaries and see for yourself what the hardest working crew in all of fly fishing has been up to.

This Is Fly: BLOG

My intern has recently pointed out that This Is Fly now has a blog . I beat him about the head with a rolled up newspaper and scorned him for telling me something that I already knew.
Then I took a look at the new blog (apparently the link is on the bottom of the magazine page) and discovered that it has already been around for sometime. Hmmmm.

Hold Still For Your Picture Dammit!

October Caddis

Burning Pram V - The First Cut

From freshman filmmaker Snapdad. He's like, the next Scorsese.

Lone Angler

I don't know who this guy is but it looks like he's standing at the head of a fishy run 'eh?.

Burning Pram V

Beers, birthdays, bighorn sheep, blue wing olives, blue heron, bonfire, brownsauce, bugs, burn, campers, campfires, camping, canyon, dogs, dog racing, flies, fly fishing, food, friends, family, flames, hatches, mahogany duns, nymphin', pram, peppers, October caddis, orange stimmy, pheasant tail, pod, ram, riffles, risers, Rock! Paper! Scissors!, 6X 5X, size 20 poly, swingin', tents, trout, wading, water, wind, whiskey, wine, and wishes.

Son Volt: Windfall

Here I am sippin coffee and fishing the internet when low and behold i-tunes shuffles up some Son Volt. So I click off the shuffle and start from the beginning. Then I thinks to myself that this shit is too good not to share. So here you are courtesy of the YouTube. Enjoy.

The Upper

You sing happy birthday to the kid then you're out the door.
Driving over the pass you see one too many truck/drift boat combos. It's the weekend and seemingly everyone is going fishing.
There's only one "Blue Ribbon" trout stream in this, the second most populated state west of the Mississippi. It has more guides per trout than any other river in the West and they think that they own the water. You've got no love for the sonsabitches.
Just thinking about it depresses you so you decide to head to the upper end of the river, let the sports and weekend warriors (looks you're one of them now) battle it out in the canyon. The Upper, there's fewer trout but they're bigger. That's the rumor anyhow, been on all the bulletin boards and kiss-n-tell fishing sites all year. "The Upper, for bigger fish: more wild, more native."
You pull of the interstate and drive down River Road. Cars in every pull out. Apparently the rumors are true, either that or people believe everything they read.
Read this people: The steelhead rivers are full of record numbers of fish and they're taking anything that skates a wake, go get 'em!
You find some water and wader up. Having never fished this particular section you develop a baseless sense of optimism. "Yeah that far bank looks good, all the way up, right under those trees, through the riffle and right up to the head of the run, good stuff."
And it was good, not great just good. Only one boat floated by, down the other bank. You fished dry flies and rose some trout. Most were smallish, a few were of respectable size and one was what anyone would call a big trout. A good day. You would have caught more down in The Canyon but you hate crowds and besides these fish were more wild and native.

Fishizzle?

My copy of Fishizzle came in the mail today. So I did what any housebound father of a newborn baby would do, I immediately loaded it into the DVD player and watched it.
Fishizzle is not the typical MTV Sports inspired fly fishing adventure-fest that you may have seen lately. It has a plot, a thin one but a plot no less.
A former Alaska fishing guide now living in Seattle, Steve has a job at Wooligan's (Filson) and a girlfriend who he rents dogs and goes on ferry rides with. But he misses Alaska and wonders if having a 9 to 5 for the rest of his life is a good way to go. Though he never openly questions the relationship with his woman I have to think that somewhere in the back of his head Steve realizes that this chick is going to want to get married and have a baby some day. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
To console himself Steve watches home videos that he shot over his 7 year stint in AK. Basically a very transparent way of injecting seven years (before editing) worth of fly fishing footage into the film. Which is totally okay because its, you know, ALASKA! and there's lots of giant rainbow trout and really big salmon. In fact the whole plot is itself just a vehicle for showing us all that fishing footage. Which is the reason of having a plot.
It's obvious that the filmmakers are going to show us a whole bunch of fly fishing footage, that's the point. That's why there's even a market for these things. But it's nice when someone takes the time package it all up in a nice little story. Rife with humor and bonus footage Fishizzle is all fun. Yeah sure there's some cheese in there but this film is laid back, like fly fishing is supposed to be.

Boga'd!

This little baby's gaining weight!

Every Story Has A Beginning

dave perry photo
Thee Originoo Trouthole

And so it is written.

"So, at the local last evening, a plan was hatched... a big yakfest blowout involving all the scud draggers, their dogs, their gals, their probabtion officers, whatevah!"

"WT promised to use his pram as a giant beer cooler, tho he's stopped short of promising to fill the friggin' thing with beer"

"NEW NAME......Burning Pram."

It's been rolling downhill and gaining speed ever since.
See you there.

Burning Pram V

Less than two weeks until Burning Pram V. Start thinking about your alibi.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
Exhibit D

New RCP Movie Teaser - Huge Alaska Rainbow Trout

I found this clip over at the Matadors Blog. Another film from Roll Cast Productions, who are the folks that brought us Fishizzle.
Wild Alaska, big fish, some humor and the Smashing Pumpkins Silversun Pickups. Check out the shot a minute into the trailer where the big 'bow throws the fly, good stuff. It looks like fun maybe Roll Cast will send us an advance copy when it is ready for release.

The Fishes In My Head

Flytimes Foam Damsel
hook: TMC 200R
body: thin (THIN!) strip of 2mm foam, tan
post: tag end of foam body
hackle: grizzly cape, oversized
thorax: antron, hare's ear brown
note: hackle is tied as a parachute, post is then drawn forward over thorax and tied down over the eye.

Its late summer and the days are just now starting to get shorter. Nights are longer and cooler. Trout cruise the shallows of my favorite stillwater. The fish have a sense of the changing season. They feed mostly on unseen nymphs and scuds, occasionally rising to a bug on the surface.
Mid afternoon and the sun is high. There is no hatch to speak of and the wind is starting to blow. Through the clear water I can see well enough to tell the rainbows apart from the browns. There aren't many of them but if I'm patient and range quietly around the bay I find them.
I'm casting through the wind. The fly splats down above a fish. Without hesitation the trout rises to take the adult damsel imitation. I wait for the fish to turn down before I strike but it happens fast and I don't remember when I struck. I land this one and many more. I also break a few off.
The wind blows harder, the trouts continue to rise to my fly as it bobs along in the whitecaps. Sight fishing to big browns and rainbows almost as good today as it was the day I was out there five years ago.

Clark's Fork Pike

Now that I think about it I'm sure that it was a giant pike that capsized my boat last spring.
From the Spokesman Review

Clark Fork pike bite: A few fly fishers have been startled recently to learn something fish biologists have known for years: Northern pike are hanging out in eddies and frog water throughout much of the Clark Fork River.

A fly-fishing guide, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of a shunning by trout purists, said he'd never thought of targeting pike until recently, when he saw a bait fisherman soaking smelt in a big eddy near Superior, Mont.

The fly fisher fetched a 4-inch trout streamer pattern from his fly box, tied it onto his 9-foot, 12-pound leader and gave it a try.

On the second cast with a floating line and a 5-weight trout rod, a pike approaching 20 pounds slammed the leech.

"It was a pretty epic battle," the angler said. "The biggest fish I've ever caught on a fly."

The exhilaration over landing the toothy monster transformed to shock as the angler and his partner eventually hooked 15 northerns (while the bait fisherman caught two).

"I couldn't believe there were so many," he said, noting that he bonked every one of the pike.

"It seems like this is a new thing, but then I ask myself how often I've cast a Bunny Leech into a back eddy this time of year."

Ladd Knotek, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries biologist in Missoula, said he's not surprised at this and similar stories he's been hearing from fly fishers recently.

"Pike have been in the Clark Fork system for quite a while, but in low numbers," he said. "Only recently have more people started to notice."

That's probably because the pike population is expanding.

"In about 2000, pike really took off in Milltown (Reservoir)," Knotek said. "We've been reducing their numbers for the past three years pretty effectively to prepare for the removal of the dam, but every drawdown flushes some pike downstream.

"Pike numbers are high below the dam and we've found pike intermittently all the way to the Flathead."

The good news for trout anglers is that the Clark Fork in the St. Regis region is a single channel that doesn't have much pike habitat.

"But anywhere you find big eddies or backwaters, you'll find pike," Knotek said.

Electrofishing surveys routinely find 10- to 12-pound pike, but generally in areas where they probably aren't a limiting factor to trout, he said.

The fly fisher I interviewed generally confirmed this in several subsequent outings to target Clark Fork pike.

"I've caught pike every time," he said, noting that he's gone to a 7-weight rod and 20-pound leader, but has yet to land a 15-pike limit. "They've been from 4 to 20 pounds. I open them all up and they don't have trout in their stomachs, just whitefish – up to 15 inches long."

BREAKING NEWS

This just in: Wenatchee River to open for steelhead fishing.
From Fishing and Hunting News.

The fishery will be open under selective-gear rules (barbless hooks, no bait, no scents). Daily limit is two 20-inch hatchery steelhead. Wild steelhead must be immediately released, and can’t be fully removed from the water, according to the statement.

At this hour the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife have not officially released a statment but our sources in Eastern Washington indicated that the following rivers in that area will open for steelhead; Methow and Okanogan rivers open this coming Saturday, The Columbia and Wenatchee on Oct. 22, and the Simmy on Nov. 15.
As always readers, know before you go.

Dispatch From Rock Creek

From Ken via the Western Union:
arrived bitterroot flats 0100hrs sat [stop] chet and doc already set camp [stop] site #13 [stop] fishing good lots of baetis [stop] cutts browns and bows to 18 inches [stop] two days without brownsauce now [stop] thanks chet [stop] seen ten swamp donks [stop] no sign of the bull donk [stop] going to the big blackfoot [stop] just me and whizzo for 2 nights [stop] then back to rc to meet karl and colleen[stop] i hope they bring brown sauce [stop] regards ken [over]

Tougher Than Woodpecker Lips

From ESPN via Fishing Jones a story of an athlete turned soldier, injured in the war and back on the mend.