I recently finished a couple of new rods.  One is a repeat of a rod I made last year - the experimental D8013h Tri-Hex which, instead of being a standard hexagon, is more like a triangle with the corners cut off.  It still has 6 strips in it, but 3 are small and 3 are larger.  it's a more complicated rod to put together, but the geometry seems to offer some distinct advantages - more power, less weight, smoothness, and very "uni-directional".  The reelseat on this rod is spalted ash, which goes very well, i think, with the straw-colored cane.



The second is a Dickerson 8615  8ft6 6wt.  My recent trip to the Gray Reef persuaded me of the value of a rod in that length.  Got a very nice Dickerson replica up-locking reelseat from my friend Alan, full wells grip.  You don't have to make too many rods to learn that some rods come together easy and some try to fight you.  It doesn't have anything to do with how good the rod turns out in the end, either, it's just some cosmic quirk in the process.  Anyway, this rod just seemed to jump together almost on it's own.  Now it needs to be fished.

Start on the next rod will likely wait until after the Colorado Rodmakers Reunion in mid-July, to see if any taper jumps out at me among the hundreds that will be there.

Lee

As I’ve noted many times here, the first time fishing on new waters can be an exercise in frustration – you don’t know the flies, or the techniques, or how the fish are going to behave. And it’s plenty easy enough to get skunked. Which stinks well enough when you’re near home, but stinks even more after you’ve driven 700 miles to get to “the best water in the lower 48”.  In general I’ve concluded that it’s best to enter new waters with reasonable (read: lowered) expectations.

So, what do you do when you fish a new place, different water, different techniques, and… you have a great time, and catch more big fish than you’ve ever caught in one outing? Well, the first thing you do is to say “Thank you Alan!” Alan who has been a rod-making mentor and friend for years, and who took the time to re-rig my leaders, hand me a box of flies, show me the spots, show how to mend for the tricky drifts, and finally, take pictures of me holding big fish. This is the first one I caught. It’s fuzzy because the camera just came out of the water…


Gray Reef is a tailwater on the North Platte, and in that respect it’s maybe a typical tailwater: millions of small bugs, virtually no rises, fast water, long leaders, heavy weight and small flies, and big, fat fish. You spend all your time watching an indicator, and the takes can be subtle, or vicious, more often subtle. Aside from egg patterns, the biggest fly we used was a size 20, and black was the name of the game for us. Another character on the river, “Automatic Bob”, was slaying them with a tiny sparkly green midge concoction, about size 22. Once you have the flies, weight and depth down, then it all seems to come down to drift. The first day, I couldn’t get it, and I was cussing Glenn who was pulling them out of the same run I was uselessly casting into again and again. Here’s Glenn with one on the line.


I don’t nymph that often, and basically not by preference, but one thing I do know about it is that sometimes, and it will happen eventually if you stick with it, you get into a groove where you’re just tuned in: you’ve got  your mends down, you set the hook when the indicator ticks, or it sinks where it hasn’t before, or you often do it without knowing why, and virtually each time a fish is one the other end. Alan was in that groove, and I don’t know how many fish he netted. Here’s one of them:

Check out this video of Alan with another:


On the subject of netting, before arriving I was told that if you’re counting fish, you count hook-ups, because you might only net 30% of these fish. The rest of the time, they’ll wrap you around something underwater, or jump and get off, or bend your hook straight, or loop downstream from you in the fast water and shake their heads until the hook pulls loose (which they do consistently). My observation is that the big boys are better at getting off than the “small” fish, and you end up having to be pretty good in all aspects of the contest, when you’ve hooked one of the big ones, if you’re going to net him. For instance, one of the guys fishing while we were there seemed to lose all his tackle every time he had a fish on. Was he playing them too hard? Or were his knots weak, giving out as soon as they were put under stress? In the fast water, and with the big fish, I think a 30% netting rate is excellent – in the slower water, I think the guys did better than 30%.

So how big were the fish? The biggest fish I saw caught was 27 inches or so. Plenty were between 16 and 20. Here’s Alex with a nice fish.

And one of the striking things is, the SMALLEST fish I saw was maybe 14 inches. No dinkers here, boy.
Even the small guys were built like linebackers, with big shoulders and slabs of muscle.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the longer bamboo rods (8-1/2 foot and longer), once I cast some of the best 7- to 8-foot tapers out there, but this is one piece of water that requires some length – not just for mending, although that helps, but also because you need leverage to lift 10 feet of leader with 3 or 4 BBS on it, out of the water, before you can even begin to cast. Not to mention the Wyoming wind, that can tie your leader into a Gordian knot with one extra false cast. The more efficiently you get the leader out of the water, backwards and forwards where you want it, the better. A Dickerson 8615, which Alan swears by, is now in the plans.  Glenn was casting one of Alan's Payne 104s, and that was a beautifully-casting  rod for those waters, as well.

Once again, thanks Alan, Glenn, Joe and Alex.
Lee

Last weekend we visited friends in Ft Collins, so I had a little time to explore Front Range fishing streams.  Timing wasn't great, as run-off started that week, but you do with what you have.  The guys at St Pete's told me the Cache la Poudre was now running at 3 times normal, and they were pretty discouraging about it.  The Big T was lower, given the dam above it, but still higher than it had been a week before, and off-color.  Given the choice between the 2, they said ",Well, you can fish the Big T and deal with the crowds, or you can fish the Poudre alone and not catch fish..."  The answer to that is "Duh!" 

So on saturday we fished the Big T.  It's true, every pull-off that had some quiet water near it had a truck in it.  No wonder Colorado friends suggest a person drives up to the (relatively un-populated) North park.  But we did find some water on the lower half of the Big T that was all to us.



The water to the right was awful fast for fishing; to the left, there were fish between the 2 almost-submerged rocks in the foreground, then in the seam between fast and slow water all the way up to where the slick starts.  It took lots of casts, but fish did take the sparkle-back pheasant tail, hung behind a heavy nymph and under an indicator.

Mid-day these guys started to hatch, explaining why small pheasant tails would work:

Except in one small slow channel next to an island, the fish would not look at our BWO dries however.

A couple browns came up out of the cobbles to take the nymph I was using as "weight": a size 14 bead-head black squirrel nymph.  That fly works pretty often - which explains why I'll swerve the car on the road if I see a black squirrel on the asphalt!   This rod, by the way, is one of those Martha Marie's Perfectionists - 7-1/2 ft 4wt, and it was a joy to cast - tight loops upstream into the wind, softly under overhanging bushes... just a great rod.

I can't say fishing was great (I am sure I could have caught more and bigger fish on Verdigre in the same amount of time), but it was new, pretty water, we were in Colorado after all, and it so often seems true that your first few times on a new water, you don't do very well.  Usually, you stick to it and things eventually "fall into place" for you.  Each place is different, requiring that you learn about it, and after all, isn't that part of the fun of fly fishing?

Lee

 

A couple weeks ago we were up on Verdigre, the first time since last Fall.  Being a spring creek, it is possible to fish the stream all year-round (if you're willing to put up with the cold, wind, and ice in your guides...), but honestly it's more fun when it warms up a little.  In the Spring and Fall, the weather is great, the vegetation is down, and particularly in the Spring, there is the prospect of a few hold-over fish.

Having fished the stream for pushing a decade now, this trip we decided to spend some time trying places in the watershed that get less pressure, that we have usually ignored.  It's not that a person gets bored, but sometimes you do ask yorself what you might be missing.  Which of course means "Is there a big lunker, tucked away in an unusual spot, that I've been missing?"  This time, every new spot was a bust.  Not only no lunker, but no small fish, no anything.  Really.  Honest.

So we fished the regular spots, and there were fish.  For the most part, they were hold-overs, not the usual 11-inch silvery stockers, but beautiful fish with dark green backs, red-striped sides and some size to them.   Here's one:



The rod I was using is one made last year, a 7-1/2ft 4-wt Perfectionist, really a lovely rod for that small stream, where you want delicacy, strength to cast into the ever-present wind, and not too much length.

On this particular trip, we kept a couple of the stockers and smoked them, and cleaning them set the agenda for the rest of the weekend:  fish any fly you want as long as it is a scud.  They were packed with them.  The streambed is littered with caddis cases and most of the year, a peeking caddis will draw strikes, but this weekend, it was all about scuds - small, dull colors, dead-drifted or stripped.  Pretty soon, the mayflies and the caddis will be out, and the menu will change, but this early weekend, it was all about scuds and beautiful hold-overs.

I donated a rod to the local Trout Unlimited chapter this year.  TU does good work, and I was happy to be able to contribute for their benefit.   Actually, I took 3 rods to the event, and the winning bidder got his choice of the 3 rods.  The rod that went home with the winner was a “Mitey midge”, a 6ft3 4-weight, based on Paul young’s famous Midge taper, but with a slightly steeper slope, so as to speed up the rod just a little bit.


 I cast a couple Midges based on the original taper, and although they are great rods, I wanted a short rod for tight streams, that still had the muscle to project a dry-dropper rig upstream, and I thought a slightly faster rod would do that better.  It worked out really well, doing exactly what I wanted.  Fans of the original Midge don’t care for the slightly quicker pace of my rod, but it is a very useful rod for its intended purpose.  This particular rod was kind of special to me because it was the first rod to sport ferrules I made myself.  At one of the Southern Rodmaker gatherings a few years ago, Alan Kube sat me down in front of a Sherline and showed me how to make ferrules out of nickel-silver tubing.  That ferrule set went onto the Mitey Midge.  (The next couple I made, without Alan looking over my shoulder, weren’t quite as perfect, which is the way it usually works.)  I hope the rod gets years of good use.