So, Paul has a new truck! What is the world coming to?
On the associated thread on the Sexyloops Board there was a video of a similar, apparently street-legal, 4WD vehicle climbing up what looked to be a dried out creek bed. The video was impressive documentation of the vehicle’s capacity to conquer almost unbelievable terrain. It makes one wonder if any sacred place is inaccessible these days.
Watching that truck video made me want to follow that trail to see where it goes, but then, on the second thought, I realized that I have a weakness for such things, and I questioned just how I would get back if the unthinkable happened?
It also brought to mind one of my favorite sayings. It is a rhetorical smart-ass question I usually offer up, after the fact, when some endeavor has turned out poorly for someone else. Where, in retrospect, the error was obvious and quite likely…
“Gee… what could possibly go wrong?”
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Well that’s another year fast drawing to a close... they appear to be travelling at light speed at the moment! First up it’s been a really enjoyable year reading and following all of our contributors; Gary in Florida, Bernd in North Germany, James and Tracy from Wales, Mika from just above the Arctic Circle in Finland, Viking Lars from Denmark and Andy from Texas. We’ve also seen regular and excellent FPs from Martyn who’s living in Japan. And what, with Ronan’s report from New Zealand and my contributions from the Malaysian Jungle, I don’t think we can be a much more worldly bunch! I don’t think we’ve ever had a regular contributor from South America on Sexyloops, but we’ve certainly been around the Globe pretty much everywhere else and many times! Many thanks guys; I enjoy every page!
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2019 was an banner year for angling and exploration here in South Texas. Despite a few minor environmental related anomalies, Jackson and I were able to put checkmarks beside most of the items on our " to do" list. And the ones that are still unchecked have been marked HIGH PRIORITY for 2020
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I’ve had excellent vision all my life, always being able to see far, near, discern details and colours, excellent night vision and generally never needed any aid in seeing what I needed to see. From tying the tiniest of dry flies to seeing details on corroded, medieval coins to identify them.
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So year has past again. Time seems to fly when you look afterwards. Waiting something to come and it is long time. Summer 2019 was difficult with weather but fishing was okay most of the time still. There was some periods when all good size fish had dissapeared somewhere. And you needed to work harder to find them.
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So Christmas is over for the year, I hope you had a great time whether you were celebrating or not. I’ve eaten too much and drunk too much on occasion, so I feel I need to have a healthy few days. So between now and the New Year Tracy and I plan to go on some long walks, eat lightly and drink moderately.
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Probably is something, that many of us fly fishermen are dreaming of, aren't you?
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Well, it’s the holiday season so my free time has mostly been diverted into non-fishing endeavors, but the weather hasn’t been very inviting either. It has been damp, grey and windy for some time now. The air temperature hasn’t been all that bad though, even for South Florida standards, so its still better here than in most places. Most of my fishing- oriented time has been spent on tying flies and prepping gear.
So, with little to report, instead, I’ll link some recent videos that have come to my attention, and hope they are worth thousands of words.
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Here in Malaysia lots of people don’t celebrate Christmas because it’s usually seen as a different religious experience. Me personally I’m not religious at all but I’m happy to celebrate all holidays, even religious ones. Have you ever noticed how similar Santa is to God? He knows if you’ve been good or bad, has a huge white beard, climbs down chimneys… I know one thing; I find the whole idea that God sent a son to the Earth completely ridiculous, so I suppose that makes me not a Christian! In fact a God, or even a number of Gods, creating the Universe also seems a bit far fetched to me. However I do believe in the difference between good and evil, karma, things happening for a reason, synchronicity - if that’s what God is, a connectivity that we can’t see, then fine, I can run with that. But all the religious stuff… well I think that’s mostly about control. Control, fear and usually power. After all, religion is run by Man - so what else can we expect?!
That said: I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and if you believe in any or all of the other stuff then I wish you a meaningful and joyous time with that too! It does seem particularly odd that for the past decade or so, people, particularly in the USA, often wish each other “happy holidays’, or “season’s greetings”, because the notion of wishing someone a Happy Christmas may be inappropriate or even offensive? Blimey! What is the world coming too? I’m an atheist but I’m more that happy to be wished a Merry Christmas!!! I blame the Internet for making people a whole lot less tolerant, a whole lot more sensitive and giving people who don’t have anything good to say a platform on which to say it - in fact I don’t blame the Internet; I blame Facebook, YouTube, Twitter - all the pretty much unregulated, unmoderated social media platforms, that are themselves being manipulated by political parties and other entities in order to divide people. It’s also why we don’t allow any politics on the Board!
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Well, I had a new FrontPage all ready to go for you guys detailing my thoughts on the current state of the custom fishing rod industry. Then it dawned on me....this month marks my first anniversary as a full-time writer for Sexyloops. So, I figured the time would be better spent waxing nostalgic about how the last year has changed my life, instead of pontificating about what some would call my traditional (most would say heavily antiquated) views on fishing rod design and aesthetics.
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Viking Lars is off doing some important Christmas pillaging today which gives us a chance to get thoroughly into the festive season with some Christmas trees of past...
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All waters are frozen now. So only way to fish is icefishing. I was guiding last Sunday two person from Germany. Originally my plan was have day off but I couldn’t resist to go guiding when I got request. Also I like to do this kind of small groups and talk with people. When I picked them up I knew it will be nice day. Mom and son, adults, felt like really nice people.
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I'm heading off to the lake; James and Tracy's page hasn't arrived yet, so this is a quick fill in from me! Wow 49!! What a fantastic age this is to be!! Next one will be 50... FFS how did that happen!!! This year I've set myself the challenge of completing 5 long distance triathlons (it's just my way of keeping fit actually). The original plan was five full Ironmans; it's probably going to end up being 2 half and 3 full, but let's see. That would actually be fine with me.
Of course the real goal in life is fly fishing and my goal is to fish more than 20,000 days. To do that you have to live quite a long and active live - hence the triathlons you see :D But also you need to fish virtually every day. I've passed 300 days on the water, but that's very low for me. Next year will be different, come end of January I'll be living afloat on the lake again and I should be able to fish virtually all of them again. Living afloat is definitely the answer for me and the plan is to spend the next twenty years doing so, five or six years left here in the jungle and then 15 on the ocean. I'm not sure what happens after that but I'm sure it will be exciting :D
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As we move into winter, I've started planning an exploration up in Nagano for over the holidays. I've got some info from my mate Hiromiki who fishes up north quite regularly and I'm looking for to a bit of cold weather nymphing.
Unfortunately while sorting out my gear the other day, I discovered that my midge box has vanished. So I'm tying a new box up over the next few days rather than just topping up a few of the trays. The silver lining, I suppose, is that it's the tiny flies that I'm replacing and not my bigger nymphs which would take much longer.
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Recently there was a discussion on the Board about hooks and their barbs. It was almost unanimously decided that barbs are not only unnecessary, but they are a liability, safety wise, for both the fish and the angler. The discussion pretty much stopped there. In South Florida, that discussion would continue, and has continued to this day, as there is a further point to be discussed, and that is about the use of circle hooks.
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Things managed to get away from me over the past three months or so, flat out on the lake, chasing fish and so I’m doing two things with the competition, 1) I’m extending the date slightly to give you a chance to enter (I know that some of you are not even aware that there is a competition!) And 2) for every entry we will be giving away a Sexyloops Stealth Master Cap! So I’m putting in an order for 144 new Sexyloops Stealth Master hats and when they arrive the competition is closed! These hats are a special design manufactured for us in China and I also happen to know that Chinese New Year comes early this year (I know this because my wife is 1/2 Chinese!) And so I’m fairly certain now that our hats will arrive slightly after CNY because everything stops over this period of time. It’s a bit like trying to order something around Christmas-time in Europe!
There you go - you don’t just learn about fly fishing at Sexyloops; you also learn other stuff here too. Things you probably never even needed to know.
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History was never one of my strong subjects when I was in school. Come to think of it, I don't know that I ever really had a strong subject in school. Over the last 25 years though, I have developed a keen interest in the history of the Texas Gulf Coast. And, my recent love affair with the Matagorda Bay complex has proven to be every bit as rich from a historical standpoint as many of the other historic coastal towns I have studied.
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Let me, at least for a while, continue down the path of historic flies. I’m not the only only who likes them and angling history - thankfully. If one wishes to research early, modern flyfishing history, access to the different journals of the late 19th/early 20th century is imperative, and very little of those can be found online. Later fly-history is just as interesting and today I’ll present a book that researches a piece of late, modern fly fishing history.
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We tell to our guests about reindeer and what they and us are doing during the year. During summer we have this time called räkkä, it means that we have mosquitos and horse flies etc. Those are gathering reindeers in big herds first time after giving birth to calves. We say that we have lot of them, and then we hear how people are saying, yes and noding their heads. When we ask have you been here in summer, answer is no. The truth is that we don’t have so many mosquitos and if so you can avoid them, but basicly as reindeer herder and fisherman we need them.
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This is the time of year that I tend to reflect on my fishing season. To be honest, I haven’t fished as much this year as I normally do, excluding the month long trip to the Bahamas where Tracy and I fished every day, my fishing has been almost exclusively been confined to the River Dee in North Wales (barring one trip to the River Test). This isn’t a bad thing of course – I can at least say that almost every fish I’ve caught this year has been wild, however I do feel that I’ve missed out on a few things.
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Fishing my home waters (near Hamburg) compared to German Pike-land (Rügen island) means to catch much less and much smaller fish.
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Board discussions of late have got me thinking, and probably into waters over my head, but that is one of the fun things about fly casting: the contemplative aspect.
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Reading Lars' Front Page last week about the surf candy between restocking my rubber candy collection got me thinking about what makes certain flies popular, while others seem to get forgotten or fail to catch on for whatever reason.
The Surf Candy is a very popular fly for saltwater, and rightly so. It's a great fly. It's quite realistic, is reasonably easy to tie in a range of sizes and sink rates, is incredibly durable and works for all manner of species. It's also nice, it feels good in the hand and is pleasing to the eye, it makes you pick it out the box.
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Last night about 9 pm Texas time, I received a Facebook friend request from a young man named Nathan Gonzales. The name didn't ring a bell, so I went over to his page to perhaps jog my memory a bit regarding where Nathan and I may have met. Nathan is from a small town in South Texas called Cuero, and since I've never been to Cuero, I was still a bit clueless as to where our paths may have crossed. The short answer is that they haven't....at least not directly.
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I was looking over the salmon fly boxes to get an idea of which flies needed re-stocking. I have maybe 4-5 patterns I use regularly in my Danish salmon waters, and then there’s maybe 7-8 patterns apart from these that are on rotation being tested. 2-3 patterns I use all though the season, and a few are more seasonal. The flies I use during spring and early summer are mainly black, and I just vary size. They see use all through the season, though.
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Two years ago we took part on king crab safari. It was our annual meeting with other reindeer herders. We always have somekind activity after meeting and not just hanging around and drinking beer. That time we had fishing trip on Arctic ocean. But before getting there it was almost 3 hours bus drive from Finland to Norway, so we had time to have a sleep after long night.
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This is the first year I have had several casting competitions in the UK with other female casters and not just been the sole lady amongst the men. I am hoping 2020 continues in the same thread with perhaps more of the girls casting at the same event so we can start working together in preparation for the next Worlds in September.
I’ve been competition casting for over a decade and whereas a few years back I was happy to cast a 5# over 90ft, I have worked on my technique with some great advice from my coach (James obviously) and others associated with the BFCC, and can now cast frequently over 120ft. Although this year I did not achieve this in competition, and only exceeded 115ft on three occasions (I did however cast 128ft with a 7#).
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Almost 10 weeks in a row fly fishing for pike every day. That means walking 5 to 10 Km in the water day by day, making me stronger and younger constantly.
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Well, this might be interesting? For me anyway! If you are looking to read about fly fishing or casting, you might just skip to the Board as I cannot promise I’ll get there tonight.
I’m writing this on a laptop whilst sitting in front of a fire in my backyard, celebrating the change of seasons. Neither activity is new for me, but the combination is a first.
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Flies have always fascinated me. Once again through misadventure, I find myself virtually fly-less; a mid-summer tropical storm upturned one of my boats about four months back and, of the many things that disappeared, I lost a critical fly box.
It does have a card inside offering a handsome reward but I suppose that the other things in the fishing box were of greater value to someone and/or they couldn’t read the language - no problem; here in the jungle I use very few patterns anyway and now that we are smack in the middle of the Wet Season, I finally have some time to whip up a few flies.
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“Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.”
---Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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