It’s been and still is a busy week - ever since I announced the SL Casting Challenge I’ve been flat out - that will teach me!!! It’s good of course; had the opposite happened then I’d have gone fishing and the fishing around here is pretty crap at the moment.
Over in Malaysia, our good friend Stu is in Penang waiting to head back to NZ with a good set of eyes. I’m not sure if he nailed a Gourami in his last days but I’m thinking not - which is great news because that means he’ll be back.
Ashly - my very understanding wife - is getting ready for a two-week trip to Europe. There will be fish and a lot of fun besides!
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At last weekend’s mini Sexyloops gathering in Coggeshall, Essex, Paul got round to demonstrating how quickly a Bimini loop could be tied. I must admit it was impressively fast, even though I had to hold a ‘post’ around which the twists could be tensioned – apparently Paul normally uses his big toe for this but thankfully he was wearing shoes at the time. What was less impressive, however, was the strength of the knots.
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Fly Fishing for asp often means to get very aggressive takes. Using a thin nylon tippet easily can result in breakage. Using a shock absorber allows you to fish even thinner tippets without breaking off any fish - not only for asp. Here is a quick solution.
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Just running off the back of a Sexyloops casting weekend - thanks to everyone who came! Piffen Daniel and I have just arrived at Grafham - hence the late FP. Eighteen years ago around yr2000 I went diving in Thailand and took both Open Water and Advanced PADI diving certificates. At the time I thought that this would be a great model for flycasting instruction for fishermen. Something that you may have realised about Sexyloops is that nothing happens fast. However it does happen eventually!!
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Feeling a bit lazy and technically challenged this week, so I'm linking you to another spot for my FP contribution.
I would like to say that my time here on Sexyloops, and all that I've learned here over the years, is really what made this blog post that I put together for Big Sky Anglers possible. The great casters, instructors, and anglers on here have inspired me to improve, and also to try and pass on the passion for fly casting that everyone here seems to have.
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I while back, I wrote an FP on trying out a new slingpack instead of a fishing vest. I've tried many different packs, and yet, I've always returned to the fishing vest. I've been using a slingpack for my salmon fishing since June, and when I got back from Norway, I transferred the gear back into the vest. Let me elaborate...
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Yellow tail Kingfish (Kingies) are one of the most ferocious and powerful fish that fisherman (particularly Kiwi) dream about. They are spectacular surface feeders, and generate immense power when hooked. They can be recognised by their dark green skin, silvery white bellies and a golden stripe that runs laterally along the body. They are also easily recognized by the bright yellow fins “hence called “Yellowtail Kingfish”. Their smooth stream lined bodies and strong caudal fin gives the kingfish its speed and power. They can grow to more than a meter in length and to over 45 kgs. The largest kingfish in the world are caught around New Zealand. The bigger kingfish can be identified with their fading colour while the younger fish have the distinctive green visible on their bodies. Kingfish are active predators preying of other fish, squid and crustaceans. Juvenile fish start their lives eating plankton, but soon graduate to larger prey. Big kingfish are quite capable of eating live fish weighing several kilos.
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What a great weekend the world fly casting championships in Millom, Cumbria turned out to be. Many, many thanks to Lee, Angela, their family and friends for organising the event. Also a huge debt of gratitude is owed to the volunteer judges for their hard work over the three days of competition. My busiest day consisted of 8 minutes of casting (in two events) followed by standing around spectating and drinking, and I was shattered, so I can only imagine how tiring having to judge all the events was.
It was fantastic to meet up with some old friends, make some new ones and to put faces to names that I’d only previously ‘met’ on the internet. I think it would be difficult to find another sport that was friendlier and with a genuine ethic that everybody would like to see everyone else perform at their best.
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Last weekend I was in Cumbria (UK) at the Fly Casting World Championship 2018. I'd like to share some observations and conclusions about some of the key figures.
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When I was young and enthusiastic about becoming a scientist I was warned, sternly, to suspect and avoid the common error of assigning credibility to two observations simply made at the same time. Only repeated confirming observations and then the ability to accurately predict an outcome proves a correlation. Coincidences happen all the time and only fools or charlatans assign them significance.
On the other hand, take for example an eclipse. The syzygy (lining up) of the sun, earth, and moon happens occasionally, and at first, was likely thought to be simple coincidence. (Well, after our ancestors probably shit themselves and assigned it as a sign of doom or wrath of the gods, etc.) The fact that an eclipse can be accurately predicted well into the past or future proves it is not simply a random coincidence.
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Another world championships in flycasting has just finished. This one was held in tropical Cumbria in North England. It was windy, in fact at times it was very windy indeed! Surprisingly perhaps not all the distances were as huge as one might expect in such conditions, possibly because many of the casts were made from an earthen spit and the wind curved up from below the caster, not allowing lower back cast trajectories. A great meet, awesome to meet so many truly great friends again (come to the jungle between now and next time!) and another World Championships under our belts.
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A few minutes rain thru the last few weeks was not enough to help our rivers and our fish. Gladly the temperature came under 30° but the grayling population had already big losses. In some rivers it's already fix that there will be a fishing stopp for grayling minimum one year to help to protect the "rest". Also the nice river 10 minutes away from our home has really shallow water...
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I'm writing this from a small cabin overlooking the Gaulfoss, which is rather amazing. The river has been up and down a few times, which should be good, but we aren't seeing loads of fish. None the less, it's all really fantastic.
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not much to say so I let pictures talk
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Our week has been taken up with casting practice for this weekend’s World Championships in Millom, Cumbria. By the time this FP is posted we should be on our way up north, no doubt stuck in a traffic jam on the M6 somewhere. I’m not sure either of us is going to be that competitive (given our poor form in practice) however we’re both looking forward to a great weekend, hooking up with a lot of old friends and getting to meet some we know through Facebook etc. for the first time.
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I am truly looking forward to go to the World Championship in Fly Casting TOMORROW. Fair to say I should have trained my distance casting during the last days (better weeks). But then again NOTHING beats fishing! So I went fishing this morning again... ;)
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I managed to fish down the Everglades mangals a few times over the last couple weeks. I had not been fishing there for a while. I was hoping that time will sooth the situation that Hurricane Irma left us. It is hard to see much improvement yet. The water is still very tannin stained and full of algae, but there are some fish playmates willing to have some fun.
It's not like the water in the brackish ‘glades was crystal clear to start with. The water usually carried some or a lot of tannins depending on the time of year, but sighting fish cruising along in the shallows used to be possible. Not now. It looks like it will take some time for things to settle out. The good news is some fish have habits that allow them to still be targeted.
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It's the final preparations for the World Championships in Fly Casting which will be held in Millom, Cumbria next weekend, events starting Friday. Everyone will be busy doing their final tune-ups to their casting, organising their tackle and mentally preparing themselves. I'm really looking forward to this event, hopefully it will be the fairest event weather-wise and I have of course been making sacrifices to the Wind God for the past week. I've been donating bits of colourful fluff mostly, leaving some in trees, and various parts of the casting field. So I'm expecting a good wind, but also have been preparing for a bad wind, because history has taught me to do this!
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The roar of the river alone commands respect.
The churning white water - powerful enough to carve a canyon through solid basalt.
We came without flyrods to enjoy the sun, and the river.
When the first fish flew from the churning foam, it surprised us.
Then, one after another, they amazed, shocked, entertained, and humbled us with their wildness, power, grace, and determination.
Their devotion to the cause is so absolute that some die trying to make it home - beaten, battered, and dashed on the rocks.
But, wild and powerful like the river they ascend, many make it over.
Some make it look so easy it defies belief.
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For over the past thirteen years of visiting and fishing in Asia a dream of mine was to catch a native giant snakehead ,a black and white coloured one if possible. Every attempt I made was foiled by weather and overfishing by locals. That’s my best excuse and I”m sticking to it. Lucky for me I managed to land my dream fish the other week, though things have changed and my focus and obsession has changed .
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Last week Per from Sweden and Neil from London came to fish Skålestrømmen. They had picked a very good week. It was sunny and warm for he most time. The hatches were OK and the fishing very good too. Despite all the warm weather, Skålestrømmen stayed cool and the fish were active and very fit. It was not easy to keep them on once hooked.
Neil (he is also on the board) was very creative and really explored each and every corner of the area. Very inspiring to watch such dedicated fisherman. He tried everything he knew and also gave new methods a try. Per was game, but had a different approach. Both caught good fish and had great time.
During the day we tied flies, discussed the previous nights fishing and planned the next adventure.
I really missed the two when they had to leave after a very busy week.
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Something that Paul wrote in a FP a while back has stuck with me; it was along the lines of “the fishing now is as good as it’s ever going to be”. I took this to mean that it’s all downhill from here, things will only ever get worse, and the pessimist in me tends to agree.
According to many researchers, over 99% of all the plant and animal species that have ever lived on Earth have gone extinct. This is perhaps not too surprising given the ~3.8 billion year history of life on earth, although for much of that time this consisted of simple single cell organisms (the primordial soup), with more complex lifeforms only evolving a mere 600 million years ago (if you’re religious please ignore this and replace with a creationist story where 6000 years ago your god farted out the universe containing this planet, complete with a fossil record as a bit of a jape to test you).
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The Fly Casting World Championship 2018 will take place in the UK next week. The best fly casters from all over the world will battle in both single handed and double handed fly casting from Friday to Sunday.
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A friend recently recommended a book to me that turned out to be a rather enjoyable read. The book is “How we got to now” by Steven Johnson. It is a book that, in layman’s terms, describes the path followed by associated inventions or discoveries and how they led up to the wonderful technological world we live in today.
Some chapters deal with things like how learning to melt sand into glass, and the shaping of the glass into lenses brought us into today’s world of reading glasses, microscopes, and telescopes which pretty much allows us the understanding of the universe as we now understand it. Other chapters explain how the invention of artificial light, through candles, whale oil, gaslight and the electric light has completely changed how and how much we humans now sleep and therefore accomplish so much more with each 24 hour day. The idea of disinfection of our water and our hands before performing such acts as assisting in childbirth or performing medical operations, and idea we take for simply obvious today, was not realized until very late, and it made a huge impact on our mortality. It is a fun book.
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I don't think that there will be many readers here who are unaware, that in less than two weeks the World Flycasting Championships will be held in Sunny Cumbria, England. This will be the fifth such event and the fifth that I have attended. I really go to try to win the 5WT (Trout Distance) event, but haven't done so yet. I've been in three finals and missed the other final by 1/2 metre. Basically almost everything that can go wrong, I have done, apart from falling in (I was thrown in after the last event - so maybe that counts?).
The previous championship gave me my best result - a Bronze. However the original Sexyloops logo is Gold, not Bronze, and that's the one I want. Unfortunately all the finals have been disrupted by winds favouring some casters more than others, and between me and you, if there is a God of Wind then I have done something seriously wrong in the past to upset him. I am not denying his existence any longer and so to Him I say, "Wind God, you are the greatest God of them all, I love your summer zephyrs, I love your Tornadoes and Hurricanes, Your Strength and Majesty knows no bounds. Please give me a fucking good (or at least fair) wind this time. Thanks dude!"
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As everywhere else the hot summer weather let us not only sweat... the water level in many small streams is that low that the local fishing clubs had to start rescue actions and fish with electricity to save the few left fish in the small pools and bring them to bigger rivers or deeper pools. Many local clubs even "closed" the river not only for fishing even for swimming. But not even the big rivers are a safe home for fish, the rising temperatures are only 1-2 degrees away from what we had in 2003 when the half population of swiss grayling died. The good thing about the "fish-situation" is that television, radio and print media found some "food" and write about every day. So people start to realize in what bad situation our water is and even 2 of our nuclear power station have to reduce their production because they heat the river water to much. So we're looking forward to rain and maybe it's a chance to get some chance in the future...
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Let's assume that the summer weather actually allowed for more and better fishing than it currently does. If that were the case, and you chose to fish the salt for any predatory species along the coasts of Scandinavia, sprat is a very important prey. Right now huge schools of mackerel feast on sprat, and so do sea trout, cod, garfish etc.
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Unfortunately the Game Fair casting competitions last weekend were severely affected by the weather, which was incredibly unlucky given the several weeks’ worth of glorious summer prior to the event (and the return to fine conditions after it). The Thursday afternoon set-up was actually in beautiful sunshine, perhaps a little on the warm side for some of the manual labour tasks that needed doing, but no one was complaining. However, once a bit of casting practice got underway in the evening it was obvious that the wind direction was going to become an issue with it blowing into the right-side of the casters arm and, ominously, with a forecast for it to get much stronger.
On Friday morning, with the competitions due to start, we made the decision to combine the two casting platforms we were allocated into a single longer one. We could then set the measuring rope in towards the bank thus giving the casters a chance at missing themselves (we couldn’t really expect entries into the daily competitions to cast off-the-shoulder or back-cast). This worked to some extent although there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm amongst the public for having a go (greatly exacerbated by the very limited passing footfall for the area where the casting was located).
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Let's keep this short: It doesn't matter!
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.jpg "Casting in the Stream of Consciousness: Small Stream Single Hand Spey")
