Daily Cast Archive

Of course I went fishing! I woke up at 8 (in the morning - yes, I am not Paul) asking myself what to do today? Half an hour later I was in the water! I came out when the darkness arrived. Is there anything better in this world? Not for me!

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I found the fishing rather difficult last week. It might be because I'm not now highly tuned for these difficult shots and so not making the important ones count (and I missed some easy shots) or perhaps it's because I haven't been on the fish for the past four months and so have less active locations that I know that definitely hold fish. But the fish also appear to be spread out, not as active as I'd like mid-morning and there are no baby shots to be had when things are tough. Finally there has been quite a lot of boat organising done and rod sales have prevented me exploring the far south! However...

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Kamchatka, the "small" last piece of Russia, is 5% bigger than Germany but in contrast to Germany there are only around 350,000 people living there. So you have already a little impression how wild that part of the world is... We fished the river Ozernaya, a gin clear river nearly in the middle of the peninsula.

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I am an acoustician and work with alls sorts of noise. Music is the better of them, depending on what you like of course. The human hearing is extremely accuse. The only sense we have working in 360-degree kind of fashion. I guess our ancestors would know whether that cracking branch at 67-degrees behind them on the left side, about 128 meters away was caused by a bear, a friend or just the wind. So how noise is perceived is very much dictated by what we associate with it. The sweet old grandpa in his flat is certainly not amused by the darth vader type growling coming from the death metal festival stage. It´s all in the ears of the beholder so to say. So why on earth should a little clicking sound be so annoying? Well, when happening in a fly rod it s even annoying to a fly fishing death metal fan.

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Unfortunately Tracy’s birthday fishing trip to the River Dee last week had to be called off due to the conditions. Because of the forecast of heavy rain and strong winds we decided there was no point in driving up to the area on Wednesday night and staying over, so we instead elected to travel in the light on Thursday morning. When we arrived we made for one of the many bridges that span the river, the sort of bridges that fly-fishers find it almost impossible to drive over without getting out for a peer into the depths. The water was already the colour of my morning latte and substantially higher than normal. As Tracy and I stood and mulled over whether it was worth trying in various areas, where there might not be so much flow, a tree floated downstream! (Ok, perhaps not a full tree but definitely bigger than a large branch or a log). This made our minds up for us. As I’ve previously mentioned, the Dee isn’t the easiest wading in the world and trying to dodge substantial parts of the local scenery would only make it worse.

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Pike are freshwater fish, which can also live in brackish water. Well, upto some degreee of salt level that is. At this moment the salt level on Rügen island seems to be critical for the pike. They almost stopped feeding for about two weeks now!

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You know how it goes: You’re headed out for a big trip. Your buddy wants to come along. He’s never held a rod before and can’t tie on a fly, but he’s ready to go. Now. So you’re going to take him.

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It's been an interesting start here in the Jungle! I had some boat repairs - casting platform welding and a fresh paint job that needed doing last week. Then finally we launched the Titanic Condom from the public jetty (always an event this, requiring the help of three or four random locals/ visitors/ whoever may be passing by, as well as 5 or 50 people just watching). Boat in the water, I gave her a quick start and she kicked into life. So we proceeded to pack the boat with all the fishing gear, camping gear, electrical gear, wet weather gear, tarps, clothes, Ashly - the usual stuff that one might need for a serious fishing exploration in the Temenggor Rainforest. Ready to depart and the engine decided it would not start, despite being pulled no less than 10,000 times. Now we have a interesting problem, do we unpack everything from the boat and remount it to the top of the truck (with 3 or 4 people's help - or do we paddle it 6km around an island to the resort and then find help to lift the outboard up 100 steps, one at a time, have it fixed in the local town 40km away and then carry it back down the 100 steps? Naturally we started paddling....

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The State of Montana has become virtually synonymous with fly fishing in the years since A River Runs Through It hit the big screen. And for good reason. The angling opportunities here are astonishing. But there is another outdoor pursuit in Montana that I believe incites greater passion and excitement than even fly fishing. Big game hunting.

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Unless you all let me know to change the subject, I'm going to carry on this leader-theme for a little while - this time covering the leaders I use for sinking lines, and next time, my highly specialised, ultra-complex nymphing leader (irony might be involved).

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James´s last weeks article about shrimp reminded me that we haven´t covered one of the most essential nymphs yet. So I quickly made a little tying instruction for you guys about a simple but effective freshwater shrimp - or "gammarus" in latin. I´m using very similar techniques to the seatrout flies we covered the last few instalments of the SFTS. The main difference though is the use of plastic material for the back. I am quite fond of the Virtual Nymph Flexybody for such uses. The martial comes in myriad of colours too. However, feel free to use any other foil or latex. The god old medical gloves work very well too. Gammarus feed on debris, so they are often found where there are leaves an other organic material decomposing in the water. That´s can be a little helper to find trout feeding places. Look for the vegetation and the leaves in the water. These often pile up in back eddies and such. From there the shrimp are often dislogged and washed downstream with the current. Drop you fly into this food-stream and expect to be amazed. Try various forms of presentation. The little buggers are good swimmers and dart abouts quite actively when running for food and cover. They come in very different sizes too. Anything from 18 to 10 works very well. The example is tied on a Partridge-of-Redditch CZ size 10. Materials needed: Shrimp hook (but you can also use a regular straight hook), Dyneema or any other very strong thread for the second ribbing, copper wire, seals fur (I like natural colour for that fly - it gives this "see through effect I like"), Virtual Nymph Products Flexibody, Partridge feather (wood duck works too). Tools needed - vise, bobbinholder, scissors, needle (to split the thread), dubbing brush. I recently got myself a Vosseler Xpert Bindetool 3-in-1 which is half-stitch tool, a dubbing needle and a small steel brush. Brilliant. I like such useful gadgets.

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Today is Tracy’s birthday, we had hoped to spend this fishing on the River Dee in North Wales however, at the time of writing, the weather forecast for the area is pretty dire, so we may have to delay that a day or so. The Dee is an excellent grayling fishery and we’re hoping to be euro nymphing for them with perhaps a spot of dry-fly work if there is any sort of hatch.

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At this moment I am in the water with my today clients teaching them how to catch pike in a time when our pike almost completely hesitate to take any fly. Unfortunately we got too much saltwater entering our brackish water und due to that pike nearly completely stopped feeding for a week now.

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Fishing up-current is where we as fly fishers often get lazy—lazy in terms of dealing with drag, that is. In fact, in some places, like spring creeks, drag laziness is bad enough to kick off the fly-box game. Not familiar with the fly-box game? Let’s see if you might recognize this:

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There is a real momentum going on with the Hot Torpedo rods. The last month based in Hungary sorting out the Hot Torpedo Owner Club as well as the launch of the amazing HT10 has been keeping us very busy. New tubes, new socks, new rods in the wing. Ashly is busy chasing sponsors for reviews and advertising. Lots happening and we're all working flat out. And today, following our enjoyable and successful trip around Europe, we're heading back to Belum-Temenngor to launch the condom boat and get back to Snakehead/ Gourami/ Jungle Perch fishing in the jungle.

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Just a few weeks ago we had our wedding anniversary, that always remind be about our really crazy honeymoon we had! Why crazy? Because we did a fishing trip to Kamchatka, one of the wildest part of our world at the end of Russia. Sadly it's already 3 years ago but I still remember it like it was last week.

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Leaders seems to be on the menu lately --- I am a lame bastard, so I just dug out an old article I wrote in 2003 or so. It is, funny enough still true for me ... to some extend. Anyway, what I learned from my old friend Bernie - who sadly passed away this year. That he was pretty old (over 85 or so - nobody really knows) does not ease the loss. Anyway - we worked on a leader which allows very precise control. The waters (rivers Kyll and Ahr in Germany) we fished together were small and we did not want the loop to open until the very end of the leader. Otherwise the fly ended up in the bush above - we are talking tunnel fishing here. I hope you enjoy the old writing and forgive me being lame ;-) attached video is a documentary about Bernie ... my first proper flyfishing teacher

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Upon hearing Katie Melua singing about there being “9 million bicycles in Beijing” I’ve often found myself wondering about the sampling method she’d used to determine her statistic. Did she survey the sales records of local cycling outfitters, assess the second hand market and determine some sort of scrappage rate? Or did she actually count bikes out on a representative sample of the streets and extrapolate the results to the whole metropolitan area? Perhaps she just made up the figure, we all know that 78.4% of statistics are made up on the spot, including this one. Whichever it is I can similarly declare, with an identical (if not better) confidence level as Katie, that there are 440 million ‘killer’ shrimp in Grafham!

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Three days ago the air temperature droped about 5° Celsius. That changed nearly every pikes mood from a feeding one into a none feeding one. Such a change makes it hard to find a few pikes taking our flies. Last week we caught over 200 pikes while within the last three days we caught 2 pikes.

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Ashly and I head back to Malaysia today. We fished Grafham yesterday with Six-Pound Sean, Peter and James and Tracy. Only James and Tracy caught fish, the rest of us caught colds. James' technique was to run around the water over-turning stones so that the Grafham shrimp (it's not really a Grafham shrimp as most of you will know but a highly successful and invasive species from Eastern Europe) would float around. Trout would come along to feed on the shrimp and James would catch them. Of course Ashly and I didn't do this ground-baiting technique, at least not until I borrowed a pair of Sean's thigh waders, by which point James had caught all the fish and they were twice as difficult. Lesson learned! It was a fun day and great to catch up with friends before heading off again to Malaysia.

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For the past 18 years, a group of guys and gals from across the United States has gathered to fish for summer steelhead, fortify the bonds of existing friendships, and forge new bonds around the campfire. Over time, Steelhead Camp has grown from very basic roots to a production that can include as many as 25 individuals, multiple boats, and a portable kitchen that rivals what you’d find in any restaurant. Where the camp actually takes place matters little. What is important is that it is surrounded by beautiful steelhead water, and there is no cell phone service. It is a place where everyone comes to unplug from one thing, and get plugged into another. The timing of the trip is typically set to coincide with some of the most predictable steelhead runs around, and the diversity of water virtually ensures that we find fish somewhere. I was invited to camp for the first time a few years back, and was welcomed as a newcomer in a way that I will never forget. Attending has become a part of my annual routine. It is a trip I, and others, look forward to the rest of the year. This camp is not unique in the fact that it exists. In fact, there are groups of like-minded anglers all over the world who gather in similar ways. What is special about this camp is that it is OUR camp.

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Last weekend, I wrote about leaders, and why I used to tie them myself, and why I don't tie as many myself anymore. To sum up - the main reason is that factory tapered leaders have become so much better the last 10 years that I'm happy to comprimise just a little bit on taper to avoid the big, bulky knots in the thicker sections of the leader.

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Visiting the REEL MAN - Ralf Vosseler in Germany Germany is known for lederhosen, beer, the metric system, football (only Americans call it soccer which is the wrong term), fast roads and a car industry second to none. But it's not all beer & technology in Europe's biggest economy. Germans are and always have been philosophers too. Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, Nitzsche and Marx - just to name a few.

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Last weekend I entered a fly fishing competition on a lake near my home. I’m not an ardent competition angler, this being only the second ‘proper’ match I’ve competed in. [I’m not including the various competitions I have with Tracy e.g. first fish of the year, first fish on a dry of the year, first bonefish* of the year, first brown trout etc. These are highly competitive and sometimes controversial – see below]. Entering, however, ensured I was committed to going out fishing, something that I’ve not been doing a lot of in the last couple of weeks.

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"Why do we have to go all the way to the Flemish Cap?" "Because, that's where the fish are!"

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Another snip from the new book. This time it's about two of the key words in all of fly casting: control and relax.

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