A man should tie his own flies.

The other day a relative says to me something like, "There's a fly fishing store by my office and I thought of buying a Christmas present for you there. But what the hell am I gonna get for you; the angler that has everything?"
Two words for you Cousin Earl, two simple words. Bass Bugs.
Most times I do tie my own flies. Even if it means driving to three or four different fly shops to get the right materials for a particular pattern, gas prices be damned. In the long run it's cheaper though sometimes it seems like I'll have to tie flies for a long time yet to realize the cost benefit.
When it comes to bass flies, the big poppers, sliders and divers, I opt for the store bought variety. Too much work; spinning, stacking then shaping all that deer hair. A professionally tied deer hair bass bug goes for something like four or five dollars a piece. It would take me at least an hour to turn out a Dahlberg Diver or Messinger's Frog that looked half as good as the original. Hell even my boss thinks my time is worth five bucks an hour.
So....thanks Mom, I finally used that Bass Pro Shops Gift card you got me last year. Pass the word around, maybe Cousin Earl will catch on.

The Flats Buggy Sails Again

Banks Lake Carp Flats


Nothing more than a glorified barge the Flats Buggy performs its duties flawlessly. When it comes to hauling my cooler, camera and a spare rod nothing beats the Buggy. As it turns out there wasn't much else to take a pic of, brutal day on the flats.

Capr On A Rising Tide: or A Gentleman's Carp Fishing Primer

Despite constantly rising water Ken and I managed to catch arm loads of capr and smallmouth basss.
I landed three noteworthy smallies; 3 lbs, 4 lbs and 4.5 lbs. Ken caught, broke off a huge smallmouth. I guess we'll never know how big it was. Serious carpers consider the smallmouth bass to be the whitefish of the flats but I think they're kinda fun. Some people even fish for them on purpose.
It took the better part of the day to find feeding capr but when we did Ken broke off four of 'em. They were tailing and mudding over the top of the flooded road bed/gravel bar we call The Reef. Me and Ken spent the last two hours of the day out there wading through a quater mile of Grand Coulee Koi.
When Ken figured out his place in the order of things he started to catch capr. By the end of the day he had brought 4 to hand, typical for a freshman carper under my tutorage.
Good times... good times. We were doubled up twice. I Boga'd 8 or 9 of 'em before the winds came up. The biggest capr weighed in a t 14.5 lbs. Fly in the kissa, every time. The first whitecaps rolled in around 5 o'clock, the winds were full on nuclear fifteen minutes later. A good time to leave the flats.

Basss Country

Seep Lakes
After a day on the Flats of Capr I drove another 40 miles into the desert for some more of that basss action.
The cool thing about bass is that they eat surface flies; poppers, sliders, frogs, mice, whatever. Toss your bug into the weeds and give it some action, or not. The basss will know what to do.
There are at least five different ways a basss will take a surface bug; The Sip, The Slurp, The Slash, The Gulp and The explosion. I like the all out fury of The Explosion best but the slurp is cool too cuz sometimes the biggest fish can make the smallest sips. Basss are all about suprises.
The carp flats didn't dissapoint either. Visibility was tough at times, clouds over the flats aren't a good thing. The water was still cool and some of the capr were still in spawning mode. Things should shape up nicely in the next week or two.
Conditions aside I landed almost a dozen. The first few were foul hooked though. I'm always a little twitchy on the trigger the first time out.

Basss

An evening on a bass pond a couple hours east of here, in the desert. Started out fishing for 'gills. Caught a mess of 'em on a tiny frog colored popper. Biggest one might have taped out at five inches.
After sunset I picked up two bigmouth bass. Fished a green deer hair bug, casting it to shore and stripping it back across the mats of weeds. I'm new to the bass thing so I was surprised at just how explosive the takes were. Good stuff. I could get into that fishin' for basss.

Bassss.

One of my carpin' buddies and I scoped out a potential carp flat yesterday. Unfortuantely it wasn't much of a flat and there weren't many carp.
There were however some smallmouth bass and they saved the day. The trick was to find these dark spots on the bottom. Sometimes you would be able to see a bass hovering over one of these dark spots and sometimes you wouldn't see a bass. The idea is to cast a clouser minnow to one of these dark spots on the bottom of the lake in hopes that a bass, seen or unseen, would eat it.
It worked out pretty good as my buddy and I hooked well over a dozen of these basss and landing 10-12 between us. They went from 1.5 to 3lbs, 12-18 inches a piece most of them were right around 15 inches and 2lbs.
So when you're out basssin' look for dark spots on the lake bottom. Bass like to hang out there.