To Huck or not to Huck

I have long been against hucking streamers while fly fishing. Why, you might ask? It's not a very good reason, but it's simply that I have always felt like I should just be using a spinner rod if I'm going to do that. It's basically the same thing, right?  For those of you who don't know, streamers are large bass-like "flies" that are cast out and reeled back in...like bass fishing.

Well, after being heavily engrossed in the fly fishing world for about 10 years now I finally found myself hucking and chucking and loving it. With that enjoyment, though, came a bit of shame and embarassment. Not for throwing streamers, but for not having done so before!

But I should back up a bit and give you some context. This revelation was part of my recent fishing trip to the Bighorn river in Montana, which has been an annual trip for 6 years now. The Bighorn is a great tailwater chock full of fish, gets fished 24/7/365 and yet still is a pretty easy destination to catch fish even for newbies. During every visit here we have floated and fished the first 13 miles of the river, but every time we we fish the first 8 or 9 miles pretty hard and end up just floating or rowing out the last 4 miles, maybe half-heartedly fishing it. This is what I became a bit ashamed of this year. Apparently this lower section is fairly good streamer-land with deep runs and lots of cut banks with overhanging brush--great territory for meat-eating cannibalistic monster pigs. We've seen people tossing streamers here but never did so ourselves.

That all changed this year and I now find myself asking myself "why not before??" Apparently chucking streamers is a blast! Not because you catch tons of fish because you don't. But because when you do get a bite it's full of the excitement of bass fishing where a fish nails your streamer, often near the surface with ferocity beyond the fish's size. Beyond the obvious excitement of harsh bites out of nowhere streamer fishing adds in the art/skill of fly casting. It's a ton of fun to try and toss streamers to targets just a foot in diameter, sometimes with overhanging trees, grass, and bushes (not to mention not hooking yourself or your fishing partners who are all confined to the small space of a drift boat). Sure a few bugs get lost in said trees, grass, and bushes, but who cares? And when you're fishing with people who don't row boats all the time, like those in our group, you also get the chance to test your distance casting when the boat ends up 60 feet from that amazing spot on the bank you HAVE to fish.

To prove how much fun it is, this is how the trip went: first half of trip, mainly bobber nymph fish with occasional dry fly fishing when rising pods encountered. Second half of trip, no more bobber nymph fishing, only dry fly fishing, Czech nymphing, and streamer fishing a lot of the places we had tried bobber nymph fishing before as well as streamer fishing the last 4 miles every day.

And I now consider myself a pro at double hauling a 1/4oz bug on the end of a 7wt pretty much the entire length of the fly line and hitting that hole at the bank within a couple inches. It only took a handful of lost bugs too!

Who Doesn't Like a Nice Pic?

Every once in a while a picture actually turns out nicely. It feels good and is a nice token to remind me of a good week out fishing.

Yes, it was pretty cold the first couple days.


More to come soon.

How Do You Do It?

I've wondered for a while which is the better way to mount a hook in a vise. It seems most people do it like this:

 or this:

In fact every single one of the images I encountered in a Google search were some variation of the above. But I have always felt it works better this way, with the hook point slightly recessed behind the vise tip:

Why my preference for this (apparently incorrect) mode? Because this way you don't have to worry about accidentally cutting your thread with the point of the hook. The only reason I can think of to mount the other way is to maximize the available space to wrap...except you aren't actually gaining anything here. If you mount the hook in the vise so that the point of the hook is just inside the tip of the vise you still have the same available space to wrap. By sticking the hook point out of the vise you only lose the ability to be careless while thread-wrapping. Unless I am missing something.

How do you do it? And why?


P.S. - This is a bit of a ghost post (scheduled ahead of time) while I am living it up fishing in Montana. Be jealous. Be very jealous.

Dreams and rivers

Either in the river or in our dreams, fun will be had.

And I'm Off...

I'm off to the Bighorn River in Montana for a week. Maybe I'll manage an in situ post, or maybe you'll have to wait until I get back in early April.  We'll have to wait and see.

Here's what I'm looking forward to:

Sadly our esteemed boat rower and wind fighter will not be there this year.  :(  We'll miss you Chadly.

And if you're bored at work on a Friday, you can do what I'm doing and put a fun vid on in the background:

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

I don't always dream, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis.

Wait, no, that's not right.

I don't always dream, but when I do it's often about fishing.

That's more like it. And every year during the run up to an annual Montana fishing outing, I am blessed with interesting and fun fishing dreams. Last night, however, was a bit different from the norm. Typically my MT fishing dreams involve me floating down the river in a boat with friends, surrounded by zillions of huge colorful fish easily visible in the water. Oddly I don't usually dream about catching anything but that's beside the point.

As I was saying, last night was a bit different. This one was a bit less of a dream and a bit more of a nightmare. Fortunately in my old age I tend to know I'm dreaming, so even when it's bad stuff it's not too disturbing. Last night was disturbing though. Everything was somewhat normal out on the river, except we hadn't made it out to the water yet. People were piddling around taking their sweet time, and I was trying to not let it bother me.

Aside: I am usually the first one ready to go every morning on these trips in real life.

As I was trying to herd up cats to get people ready to hit the water, I suddenly noticed that the sun was setting. The day was over already! No! Ok, it's not the end of the world. We're there for a few days so we'll get more fishing in the next day. And that's when I looked at my watch (I haven't worn a watch in years) and saw that it was 2:37 (why exactly 2:37 I don't know, but I do remember it). That would be pm, not am, and that was the disturbing part. It left me thinking/whining/crying that if the sun goes down that early I'm not going to get much time on the water! It's not fair!

Then I woke up screaming in a cold sweat and realized it was just a dream, thank god!

With all that said I'm really looking forward to all the fishing/beer/whiskey and good times next week. And it should bring some more life to this blog. I know you are looking forward to that.

In the morrow

Can anyone guess what I'll be doing tomorrow? Fishing of course, but for what? Pretty obvious to me...