It's friday morning, and tomorrow, Neil and I will be fishing on Verdigre!  We've got my brand new twin Perfectionists to test out, maybe hoppers will be out, and the weather promises to be near-perfect: hi in the 70s, low in the 50s, mostly cloudy with a chance of rain.  Can't wait!

Here are the 2 Perfectionists in question:

Lee

CRR this year was at Chair Mountain Ranch, in Marble CO.  (BTW, Marble is named Marble because, yes, they mined white marble there.  Mining remnants were thrown in the stream (the Crystal) and they stand out in the streambed, bright white blobs, as you drive up the canyon.)  Great people at the meet, a good location with plenty of casting room, nice modern accomodations for those staying at the ranch..

I'll just list some highllights of the meet for me.  (Fishing wasn't one of them, as most streams in the area were still blown out by late and high run-off.)

Using programs to convert tapers from 2-pc to 3-pc or 1-pc, as well as converting a 4wt to a 5wt.  Harry B shared his expertise on this one.

A cool demonstration on nickel-plating ferrules by Alan K.  How many rodmakers have over-cut a male ferrule while fitting it?  most everybody.  This is a way to save that ferrule. 

A tutorial on rod finishing by Ron B, editor of the Planing Form.

Taper variations: 5 Dickerson 8013 clones, by 5 different guys and from multiple taper sources.  Yes, they cast differently - some I loved and one or 2 I'd be disappointed to own.  Just goes to show that reading about a taper, or buying a rod sight-unseen, is a crapshoot!

Rod evalaution: 5 rods representing different broad "styles" of rod design, with the taper info covered, identified only by a number.  Enlightening discussion of "experts" regarding the 5 rods - all were EXCELLENT casters, but they didn't always agree about the rods - far from it!

Bob Taylor showing us how the Leonard ladies wrapped guides, by hand, fast and accurately.  If we only could emulate that we'd wrap a rod in a half-hour!

Best rods of the meet (for ME, subjective as it is):

Rick H's Para 14.  It was one of the 5 Rod Evaluation rods, and casting it, we thought it might be a Driggs - light, easy, accurate.  I loved how it would drop a fly on a dinner plate at 40-50 ft without thinking about it - not once but repeatedly.  I had had a long-standing prejudice against the Para14, unfounded as it turns out!  7 foot 9 is a great length.

Immodestly, my Tri-hex 8013 (initially called "the weird triangle") was a one of the best rods there - smooth, powerful, delicate...  It's great when experiments come out well.

I won't cite any specifiics, but there were a few beautiful rods there that casted exactly like S*%T!  FOR ME.  I know some other guys liked them.  Good for them, but I don't get it!  Just goes to show that beautiful rods don't translate into casting pleasure.  (See below comments on the Dickerson rods.)

The great surprise of the meet was a collecter who showed up with a bag-ful of original Dickersons,  And moreover, not your "vanilla" tapers (if such a Dickerson exists) but rare-as-hen's-teeth tapers:

The rumored 8012 (it actually takes a 13 ferrule!)

an un-heard-of 7011

a 3-pc 6-1/2ft 661510 (never heard of that one either)

and an 8014 Hollow, marked as such.  Anyone ever heard of Dickerson making hollow rods before this?  I hadn't.

Finally, a classic 9016.

We saw, but didn't have time to Mic, a 961712 (if I remember correctly) which is the only rod out of the group known to have belonged to Lyle Dickerson himself. 

What a treat!  We mic'ed the rods, and their tapers will eventually be published on the CRR website.  One of the things I most enjoyed about seeing those original rods ($40,000-worth?) was the "fit and finish" of them.  Any one of the 40 or so rodmakers at that meet would have put a rod looking like those Dickersons out on the rack, only with an apologetic comment like, "Well, it was my first rod, and I've learned a lot since!"  I won't go into details, but by modern standards, their finish was far from perfect.

I have not one iota less respect for Lyle Dickerson for having seen those rods - rather, I think it points out the weirdness of the current cane market.  Moneyed clients at shows inspect rods with 10X loupes and point out "flaws" and "errors" to rodmakers, without ever casting them.  Rods get sent back based on apparent thickness of varnish, or thread color...  Here's one of the most respected and revered rod-makers in American history, and his rods would be spit upon by many modern buyers, if his name were covered up.  So I ask, what's really important?  It's a weird world we're living in.

I'm hoping to work on one or 2 of the new Dickersons soon, very interested to see how any of these rare tapers actually cast.

All the best,

lee

July means the Colorado Rodmakers Reunion near Glenwood Springs, and on the way out I had a chance to fish a couple days with friends on the Yampa, near Steamboat Springs.  Seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out the new Perfectionist, which I am going to swap with a couple other rod-makers.

  Under Stagecoach reservoir, the Yampa is a smallish tailwater, packed with large-ish rainbows sporting bright red stripes you could see 4 feet down, in the pools.  The place gets pounded, particularly in that period where the weather is nice enough for fishermen to want to be out and about, but the run-off is still heavy enough to render freestone fishing dangerous or impossible.  That was the case while we were there, and the fish, for the most part, were picky, jumpy, or both.  It takes a while to get dialed in to that kind of conditions but by the second day, things were starting to make a little more sense.  Try lots of small flies, and cast over the same water multiple times.  Somewhere in that routine, you might hit on the right combo, and then big fish were around.

The second day, things aligned, and for a couple hours, my PMD dries worked wonders.

The Perfectionist was, well, perfect:  cast fast and tight into little whirlpools for that 3-second drift, or excute these big under-powered roll casts that would cross 2 current seams and drop 10 feet of line and leader straight down in a puddle, leaving time for the the fly to drift down that far bubble line.  What a pleasure!  I decided then I'd have to make a twin to this rod - that way David will have his pick, and I'll get to keep the other.  I've said before how I think one of the great advantages of bamboo is the feel that it transmits to your hand, and it's tendency to protect tippets, while you are playing a fish. and I think the Perfectionist has that in spades.

If you look to the quiet spot in the water to the left of me, you can see this fish, not yet ready to give up.

The Colorado Rodmakers Reunion itself was good as usual, punctuated this year with the appearance of a handful of rare original Dickerson rods, which we had the opportunity to measure and record.  More of that later.

Lee

The rod I'm working on now is both unusual and interesting.  It's a 7ft6 Paul Young Perfectionist, usually for a 4wt, sometimes a 5.  This taper has been lauded in many corners, but I have to say that in general, it's one that has not tripped my trigger. Several of the clones I've cast have seemed too soft.  The best by far was a twisted Perfectionist that was crisp and clean-casting, MUCH better than the equivalent rod that wasn't twisted.  By "twisted" I mean that when the rod was glued up, it was twisted exactly one-sixth of a rotation between each guide, so that it looks like a lazy corkscrew as you sight down it.  This is a decades-old technique to give a rod more "energy", and having cast 2 rods made at the same time, one straight and one twisted, I have to say that the technique works.  Besides the troubles of glueing up the twisted rod correctly, there is also the problem of having the twist slowly "unwind" itself over time, as the formerly-straight splines try to get that way once again.  Then your guides no longer line up.  But that rod had magic built into it!

Anyway, this rod is unusual for at least 2 reasons.  First, it is an unusual Perfectionist, a taper taken off of a Perfectionist that Paul Young made for his wife, Martha Marie.  She had a heavier, 7ft6 rod named after her (the PY Martha Marie 5/6wt), but this particular Perfectionist she fished herself.  This taper matches no published taper of a PY Perfectionist; it is marked by a very unusual section of the taper, at least 15 inches long, where the taper essentially doesn't change at all.  Since the basic theory of a taper is to amplify energy from the hand down through increasingly-thin bamboo to a quickly-moving tiptop, the idea of having a relatively large section of the rod with no taper is anathema.  I have never cast this taper, and as you may know, I have sworn never to invest 40-50 hours into a taper that I have never cast, but I broke the rule for this rod.  2 well-known national rod-makers, having cast the original, have made copies of it, and its praises have been sung by those who have cast it.  So we'll see.

The unfinished MM Perfectionist above.

Second, this rod is not for me: it is part of a 3-way rod-swap between me and 2 other rod-making friends of mine, one in Arkansas, the other in Tennessee.  David is going to get this rod, and I will get some rod (I don't know what) from Rick.  This Perfectionist will not be twisted.  it's flamed a la Paul Young, and it has a custom hand-made 14/13 step-down ferrule (Paul Young regularly used Super-Z ferrules which are not step-down).  Wraps will probably be a bit more bright than Paul Young originals, which leaned towards the understated.  So there you have it.  I hope to have it done for the Colorado Rodmaker Reunion, so that I can get some feedback on the taper before I hand the rod off in October at the Southern Rodmakers Gathering.

Lee

Winter is finally over here in the midwest, and it's about $&^$( time.  This hasn't been the worst winter we've ever seen here, but it was consistent and long - the first time in several years where, between Nov 15 and April 15, there wasn't one single reasonable day. Usually, we have a warming spell that will get into the 50s or 60s for a couple of days, and the urge to get outside overwhelms.  Not this year, and it felt looooong.

Last week, the tail end of April, Neil and I managed 2 days away, and we visited our favorite trout stream, Verdigre.  We had the good fortune to get away in mid-week, and we were the only guys fishing the entire creek.  Plenty of turkey hunters around, but no one on the stream.  First day, temps were in the 60s, but the wind was howling out of the south.  I was glad I had brought a 5wt, the 8013WT.  That's a new un-fished rod, 8ft, based in the Dickerson 8013, but made with weird geometry - a big triangle rather than the standard hex.  The rod is light and strong, and I was glad to have it's power to push flies into the wind.  Neil was using his Driggs and as usual, it was omnivalent.  We both caught fish in the morning, me out of the weir pool, using a long downstream drift and one of Neil's beautiful little wire midges hung under a dry...  Neil took a beautiful rainbow out of the top of the Phd pool.  45 minutes in the smoker, and those trout were lunch.  BWOs were hatching, but the fish would only hit small nymphs on the rise - no surface action at all.

A couple of 16-inch stream-born browns came out of the secret pool in the afternoon, and you always feel pretty special to catch a couple of big native trout in such a tiny stream (also, to put them back to keep the cycle going...)

A storm came through that night, and the next day proved to be consistently drizzly and gray.  You'd think that would make the fish happy, but they were jumpy and wary.  A small gray scud attracted attention in the Phd pool, but as is sometimes the case, it only worked for me, not Neil - the fish were out to snub him that day. Other days Neil rakes them in and I am the skunkee.   Neil stayed with his Driggs, while I tried out my second new rod, a Payne 98 clone, with bamboo ferrules.  I feared it might not have the muscle to project line-and-fly into tight spaces, but it was great, one of the lightest casting rods around.  The surprise fly of the day was a small sparkley streamer given to me by a friend - he ties them for use in Arkansas, and I had tried them there and here with absolutely no luck, but this day, it was a hot fly - just dangling the fly in the water downstream, getting ready to cast, rainbows would dash out from under a bank, look you in the eye, then ignore you and grab that glittery thing.  That sort of behavior carried through on different sections of the stream, fished upstream and down.  I've got to find some of that sparkle stuff!

It's always a good time on Verdigre, but when you can catch a few extra-nice fish, out of a couple of the most difficult pools on the stream, that's special, and a nice way to start the year.  Long live Spring!

Lee