Back from the Bahamas

"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

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

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

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?

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

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

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