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Thursday Review 03/04 |
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The posts below and articles listed on the left are from the 2003 and 2004 season. Hope you enjoy some of them. To see current post visit the
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Thursday Review |
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04/29/04 Well, fishing
season has started and now the fish have even realized it. Fish are
being caught here and there but not consistently and there are not hatches
to speak of, but that is changing fast. Shawmut is wadable and the
water is about 45 degrees. With that said I am shutting down the
Thursday Review and switching back over to the
Friday Updates for
the rest of the season. Check out the Friday Updates at
http://www.maineflyfishing.com/Friday.htm 04/22/04 - Put Downs -
So how do you keep from spooking them or "putting them down?" Well, there are the obvious things you should avoid like falling down and splashing around trying to get up. Wading fast towards a fish pushing a wake in front of you is another obvious no-no. Other things are more subtle. Drag will put a fish down. Combine drag with an early lift off of your fly line and you can almost guarantee a put down. I always try to wait until my fly and line are well below a feeding fish before I lift my line to a back cast. Movement is another bad thing – that’s why so many good fly-fishers fish upstream. Fish lay facing the current. If you approach from downstream they aren’t going to see you – they really don’t have eyes in the back of their head. It just seems that way sometimes. Of course it’s never happened to me, but flubbed casts have been known to put down a fish or two. Well, maybe it’s happened a time or two to me. Anyway, worst than flubbed casts are those that line the fish. Many who pond fish cast at the “ring of the rise.” It is a method that works, at least in still waters. Not so in moving water. If you cast to the ring in moving water your fly will land behind or downstream of the fish. The fish will never see it. Aim above the ring by one to three feet – depending on current flow – and the fish should get a look at your fly. The fish may refuse it but at least it will see your fly. If you cast a little beyond the fish while aiming at the ring and have the fly line instead of the leader and fly land near the fish and you will almost certainly put the fish down.
The things
I just listed are ways I’ve managed to put fish down. How about sharing
some things you think people should avoid doing – some things that have
spooked fish while you were out on the water. It would make an interesting
thread on the forum.
04/15/04 FISH WHERE THERE ARE FISH. Sounds simple doesn’t it? A little to obvious and reeking with common sense right. Well, maybe so, until you probe a little deeper and think about what that rule really says. Take the Kennebec River, Shawmut section – an area I’m fairly familiar with. There are fish there, many people will attest to that. Yet many people will fish Shawmut and come away fishless. Why - because there are fish in the river at Shawmut but not all of the Shawmut water holds fish. Shallow water in the middle of the river may form riffles and hold many, many insects which provide food for the trout. At one time or another fish will be seen there and caught there but not always. If fish just stayed there all the time the Ospreys would have a field day with them and soon there would be no fish. However, at times the light is such that Ospreys have a hard time spotting fish or the flow comes up a little and the water depth increases providing more shelter, by way of increased depth, and so feeding there is safe. Somehow fish seem to know when they can feed safely and when they can’t. They are often wrong about that though as evidenced by the number of fish seen taken on any given day by Ospreys. So where are the fish? How do you know when they are at a location? Here are some needs fish have that should help you find them. Shelter: Place one of these current breaks below a riffle (riffles are the grocery store of streams and rivers) and you have a good feeding lie. A fish has only to hang protected from the current and wait for food. When it drifts by the fish darts out into the current, grabs the food and darts back to shelter. Nice setup. Shelter: Food: Food may be and often is found where there is no shelter from either current or predators. Hungry fish will go there to feed but won’t hang there. That’s why places like shallow water riffles often produce even though trout are vulnerable there. Fish, like us, just gotta eat. That’s the way of it.
Heavy hatches will bring fish up from the depths and they will surface feed
making themselves easy targets for fly-fishers and birds. Heavy behavioral
drift by subsurface nymphs will bring fish out into the current to feed
despite the effort. But when there isn’t a heavy hatch or drift going on
fish will seek shelter from both the current and predators. Remember this
and it will help you locate fish. 04/08/04 By fishing well I mean a rod should play big fish on light tippets without breaking them off or that the rod should talk to you by providing feedback telling you how it is loading. A fly fishing rod should mend line easily without ripping line off the water. It would also be nice if a fly fishing rod easily presented a fly delicately onto the water with a minimum of disturbance. Those are things I look for in a fly rod and they are things I start to lose as the casting stroke for fly rods gets faster and faster. Since we became an Orvis Dealer about nine years ago there has been a change in all of the rods Orvis builds. They revamped each and every rod they make except the Superfine Series. Those are their slow rods and they were slow in getting around to them. They did make one change during that time to the Superfine rods they stopped calling them slow and started calling them Full-Flex. It didn’t make them cast any differently but at least they weren’t slow anymore. Well this year they redid the Superfine Rods. Fortunately all they did was cosmetic. What was a rough finish blank is now sanded. What was a natural gray colored blank is now painted a beautiful deep Chestnut Brown. And the best part, what was a great fly fishing rod is still a great fly fishing rod because even though they dressed them up they didn’t change the action of the rod. They are still slow – I mean Full-Flex. Orvis introduced a new fly line designed to be fished with the Orvis Superfine rods or Orvis cane. They bill it as “the ultimate in delicacy with a weight forward taper” which got me wondering what was different about the line. So I got to poking around in the Tech Pages and found out some interesting things about fly lines and why one line presents a fly better than another. It all seems to boil down to the taper and weight of the fly line. The weigh factor is obvious. A five-weight fly line has a more delicate presentation than a nine-weight but when you start to compare a five-weight, weight forward fly line to a five-weight, double taper is there a presentation difference? The quick answer is yes, actually not yes but “yes, of course” for that’s just the way of it. But is it? When weight forward lines were introduce they were aggressively weighted to the front of the taper and the heads stopped at thirty-feet back from the tip and the line reduced to a small diameter running line. That aggressive head would roll out straight every cast and the small diameter running line allowed you to shoot lots of line. All of a sudden you could shoot out to fifty-feet or more with just one backcast or false cast. They were a revolution. There was a cost to this and that was presentation. The aggressive weight forward head had a tendency to slap down on the water and spook fish. So fly line manufactures backed off on the aggressive taper to provide a softer lay down of the fly. I didn’t realize how much they backed off until yesterday. Today there is no difference in the tip length and front taper length of many double taper and weight forward fly lines. For example the tip and front taper of the Orvis Wonderline Advantage, double taper is 78” and so is the tip and front taper of the Orvis Wonderline Advantage weight forward. So where’s the difference between the two lines? The difference is in the length of the belly of the line. The weight forward line still drops to a running line back around thirty-feet and the double taper doesn’t. That was and still is the big difference. The Weight Forward Superfine however has a different taper. The tip and front taper are 90” in length. Now you might say heck that’s only another 12” and can’t make that much difference but there’s more. Contained within that 90” of front taper are two tapers or what Orvis refers to as a “compound taper.” The first taper is 28” and the second taper is 56” and that’s what makes the difference. What they have done is stepped down the front taper just like you step down your leaders to make the presentation of the fly as delicate as possible. So that’s what I found
and I thought I’d pass it on to you. I am quite interested in this topic
and will expand on this Thursday Update and make it into an article to post
up on the left with the other articles. In the meantime if you are looking
for presentation and want a line that will lay a fly out gently think about
compound tapered fly lines and the benefits of them. I’m willing to bet
they will even help those fast, I mean Tip-Flex rods. 04/01/04 My nephew and a friend of his have been going down to the Hathaway Parking Lot and trying for Sturgeon. I've told both of them several times that you can't legally fish for Sturgeon here in Maine but they say that aren't breaking the law unless they catch one and they don't really expect to catch one so they keep trying. They have heard that Sturgeon show up earlier than Alewives and Stripers so they started trying last week. The method they use is as suspect as their intent. They have watched the Jaws movie rerun to many times and so have been tying a big chunk of raw meat to a rope with a treble gang hook driven into the meat. They figure if it worked for a Great White it should work for a Sturgeon. They have been there each morning for a week. Yesterday they had a take and whatever it was broke the clothesline they were using for their illegal fishing activities. So they got a bigger rope and went back.
Well this morning they got the surprise of their lives when they caught yet
Anyway, once this thing took the guys had to tie their new thick rope to the
bumper of their truck and use all eight cylinders to yard this monster out
of the water. It was quite a show. They raised so much ruckus
that the Morning Sentinel was alerted and there should be pictures in the
paper of the whole thing tomorrow. The big question now is will IF&W
put a size and bag limit on these fish or will they encourage us to fish
them out and try to eradicate them? Stay tuned and enjoy the rest of April
Fool's Day. Remember tomorrow starts Friday Updates. I'll put a link
to the new Friday Update page here tomorrow. 03/25/04 03/04/04 While I was fishing Monday I was using 2X, Mirage (fluorocarbon) for a leader and throwing a big, heavy bead head woolly bugger, leach type pattern. While tying it on I was thinking about how easy it is to tie 2X vs. 6X tippet. 2X is easier mainly because I can see it. The mechanics of the knot are the same for either but visibility sure isn’t. That got me thinking about big flies vs. little flies. When I started tying flies I wanted to tie big flies. Again because I could see what I was doing. The problem was I couldn’t find size 6 dry fly hackle. That was the only thing that kept me from tying sizes 6 and 8 all the time. The lack of really big dry fly hackle turned out to be a good thing because if I wanted to tie I had to go smaller in hook size. I later came to realize that most of the caddis and mayflies I was trying to imitate were size 14 and so directed my efforts towards that size fly. Then I came to realize that midseason, around when the Light Cahills stopped, the insects got even smaller. The long and short of that is the hook sizes I use for tying just get smaller and smaller because what I want to imitate is, well, small. Now when I put a size 12 hook in the vise I think “man, look at the size of that hook.” The end result of going smaller in hook size, I feel, is more hook-ups. That all sound good and more hook-ups are what I’m after, I suspect the same is true for you. To use those smaller flies though I’ve had to also go to smaller tippets and that brings me back to the 2X vs. 6X problem. 2X is easy to tie but I can’t seem to get it through the eye of a size 18 dry fly. So I struggle with bad eyesight and hold my tippet in front of a contrasting color to make it easier to see or I hold it up to the horizon or I squint really hard. Whatever it takes. So far, repeated use of smaller tippet material has brought my tolerance for small tippet down to 5X and when I go smaller I struggle. The good part of that is I seldom have to go smaller than 5X and there is such a thing as magnification. Now I’m sure you’ve heard people say “I had to go down to 7X to get that fish” and when they say that they are most likely sincere. But here I am saying I can take fish on small flies using 5X – what’s the difference – tippet length.
Yep, plain old simple tippet length. My tippet section is seldom shorter
than 4 feet and it is often over 5 feet. That’s what lets me get away with
5X. The longer 5X tippet gives me about the same drag free drift other
people go to 7X for. Try it the next time you feel the need to go to a
smaller tippet. Instead of stepping down in size go longer – it may be the
answer for you like it is for me. To get some information on Leaders and
Knots follow these links:
Knots ___
Leaders.
02/26/04 02/19/04
01/08/04 Do you fish the water or fish the hatch? Me, I fish the water. It’s habit and seems to serve me well. When I get to the water I take a look hoping to find rising fish. I seldom do and so I rig up with a wet or streamer and start swinging in likely looking places. If I don’t feel like swinging and mending line I’ll move to a riffle and start to nymph. If neither of those tactics produce for me I’ll switch to dry flies and go to some spot on the river where I know fish hang and create a hatch by making repeated casts to the same spot. If you don’t disturb the water with your presentation or line pick-up you can pull fish up doing this and I always get a thrill out of doing so. It is just great fun to bring a fish up that wasn’t coming up. During all this I am constantly looking for an indication of rising, or tailing fish – something, anything to tell me where the fish are. I, like many, think it’s easier to catch active feeding fish. Well, maybe I should qualify that a bit – most of the time it is easier – when they get selective it can be tough. But anyway fishing the water is how I start. Like I said it is habit. Habit born out of having to fish when I could not when I knew a hatch was going to come off. Most of my working life I just haven’t had the luxury of being able to hit the water a 2:00pm when the Hendricksons are hatching. It just wasn’t it the cards. So then and now I fish the water – I search. If that is the case with you I’d like to share a little trick with you that has helped me become a better searching fisherman. I use an alarm clock. It’s a little unit that I picked up at Radio Shack. It’s light and easy to set. What it does for me is keep me from spending my whole time on the water fishing with just one method. I figure if I’m going to search the more methods I use the better my chances. But what would happen is I would start swinging a wet fly and keep swinging it until it was time to go. It wasn’t my intention to do that I’d just get so involved in what I was doing that time would pass and I’d find it was time to go and I may have changed flies a few times but not methods. So if I was going to be
there for three hours then I’d set my alarm for 45 minutes and start.
Forty-five minutes later the alarm would ring and if I was catching fish
well, the alarm just got shut off. However, if I wasn’t catching fish I’d
switch from wets to streamers or dries. Whatever strikes my fancy. Give it
a try, you don’t have to go out and buy an alarm clock to carry on the water
but you should make an effort to switch techniques every so often.
Especially if you are searching the water because the hatch isn’t on and
fish aren’t showing. Comments and
questions welcome.
Visit our
Forum.
01/01/04
12/18/03 I’m not saying distance casting is a bad thing but I am saying it isn’t the end all factor it has become when evaluating a rod. I have an 8’, 6-weight rod Orvis calls the “Trout.” It is part of the Superfine series of rods and while it will reach out to the 70’ range comfortably it is sweet and easy to cast at 20’. Effortless and accurate, strong in the butt and flexible in the tip; a rod you can cast all day. And, I get the one thing that should be the end all factor when evaluating a rod from it – I get control. The rod is accurate, mends well, has tremendous butt strength and gives me line control for mending, or presenting a wiggle cast that I just don’t get from today’s fast action rods. This similar action is available from the Orvis top end T-3’s and the mid-priced TLS series but you have to pick and choose and be a little more careful about getting the right rod if you’re looking for that comfortable rod. The reason for that is those series also have some very fast tip-flex rods ala “Sage” or others known in the industry as “fast” and the T-3’s and TLS series also have some “slow” or full-flex rods, think Winston, which might be slower than your normal casting stroke. Hence the common admonition “cast before you buy.” Anyway, this didn’t
start out as a Superfine series commercial – I just like the rods and so get
carried away. What I did intend to convey is be careful what you look for
in a rod. Be sure the rod will cast well in the range or distance you
fish. If you are always in the 45 to 70’ foot range perhaps a tip-flex,
faster rod is right for you. But if you are like me and you work pockets of
calm water that drift by or you tend to maneuver yourself into better,
closer casting positions, for targeted trout, before you crank off a cast
perhaps you should look at line control in close before you look at
distance. Which brings me back to the question I started with – do you go casting or do you go fishing? If fishing is your goal look for a rod with control in the range you fish. Generally that range is 20 to 40 maybe 45’ and the rest is the exception not the rule. A golf parallel is “drive for show, putt for dough” – many rounds of golf are won by those who drive short but down the center, chip on and one putt the green. The guy who drives the green but can’t sink the ball because he lacks control often ends up buying the rounds at the 19th hole. Comments and questions welcome - Visit our Forum. 12/11/03 Here it is Thursday again.
Thank you for visiting. I don't have much to talk about today. Things
have just gotten in the way of putting much together for this post.
The dock had to finally come out of the river. The snow storm hit.
Christmas Shopping has kept us busy and life has been hectic. However,
I did get page 2 of the Czech Nymphing article almost done. You can
read it at Czech
Nymphing 2 and if you visit back later (a day or so)
I'll have some more pictures and tying instructions for you. Again -
thanks for visiting and keep on coming back. Comments and
questions welcome
12/04/03 11/27/03 Happy Thanksgiving. 11/20/03 Welcome to the Thursday Review. I guess you could call this a spin-off or sort as it has grown out of the Friday Update I do each summer. A winter thing. My plan is to keep it going until the weather and water allow us to get back to moving water. The format of this page will closely follow that of the Friday Update in that weekly I will post here and the most recent posts will always be on top. If you should ever want to review earlier post you can do so by scrolling down.
If there
is a certain topic you would like to have me cover e-mail me at
ffo@mainelyfishing.com or post
the topic on our
Fly
Fishing Only Forums.
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