Daily Cast Archive

"Let me tell you a couple of reasons why I have loved to wade fish all these years---it's the greatest way in the world to stay to stay in good physical condition and have fun while you're doing it! Hours of wading in shallow, boggy, grassy water will build strong legs and back. At eighty I am still in great physical shape, and I attribute it all to wade fishing." ---Rudy Grigar from his book Plugger

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It’s that time of year that I start planning the BFCC casting days around the UK; contacting venues for suitable dates and comparing with the availability of the instructors. Over the last few years, we’ve had limited days arranged, but we’re hoping that this year we can get back to providing the normal range of meetings and maybe even arrange another one in Jersey, Channel Islands. I normally also deconflict with fishing shows and events, although the previous couple of years, this sadly hasn’t been a problem. This year, however, I’m also hoping that we’ll have fishing and casting events to support not just in the UK, but also abroad.

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I’m back out from Sungai Tiang. I spent five days fishing with my good friend Juan Wei (who guides for Sailfish on Fly out of Rompin, as well as hosts other Flyfishing trips in SE Asia). It was Juan’s first trip to this river and the first time they’ve had a guest. The real test for this trip however was to assess how practical it would be to pull a whitewater raft upstream, behind the angler/s with all gear, in order that one could raft out at the end of the trip and fish without carrying a pack. There are lots of really good reasons for having a raft, not least the ability to float someone out quickly if there is an accident! Fingers crossed this will never happen but we are pretty remote and have to be prepared.

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That is how many days it is to my next birthday. It is just coincidence that it is from this day same amount of days that winter war last in 1939. Normally that 105 glory days is combined to winter war and how Finnish could hold over Russians. It is same like never forget 1995. That is when Finland won their first ever ice hockey world Champion.

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It's been a slow fishing start to the year we've had barely any rain for months and the rivers are critically low, the seabass have been away spawning over Christmas. I'm still waiting for rain, but as we get into the end of January the bass are coming back. I took Canadian John out on Monday night for his second boat trip.

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I’m tying pike flies at the moment as the last Saturday-pages have shown. In recent years, small glass rattles on pike flies have been quite a trend. I’ve only used them a few times, so I really can’t report on any noticeable difference in catches (at least none I can attribute to presence or absence of a rattle).

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This week I’m up in Sungai Tiang. I’ve you’ve missed it this is an interesting project where I’m helping to organise a C&R FFing only stretch of river here in Malaysia. The guides who I’ve been training are the indigenous Orang Asli, the village community owns and operates the business making all profits. My involvement is strictly non profit of course. It’s been throughly enjoyable. This will be the last training trip and we are finalising camp positions and establishing how feasible it is to pull a raft upstream.

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Last week I sent a message through Facebook to Viking Lars expressing how much I enjoyed his piece on dubbing loops. We exchanged some ideas regarding our dubbing loop set up, and then somehow found our way in to a discussion about fitness and health. Turns out Lars and I are about the same age, and find ourselves in a similar position of trying to shed a few unwanted pounds and regain some lost strength and mobility.

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There have been a couple of discussions lately on the demands of competition fly casting accuracy as well as the standard required by various casting instructor organisations, in order to achieve a certification, and the applicability to actual fishing scenarios. When I think about accuracy outside of a competition event I instantly reminisce about sight fishing on tropical flats. I guess this is because the feedback is equally instant, instead of someone calling ‘five’, ‘three’ or more disappointingly ‘one’ after each cast, the fish tells you straight away whether your cast was any good by either taking the fly or not.

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I’ve spent more time making and tying with dubbing brushes. So far only big bait fish imitations for pike. Mainly because I really need to replenish the boxes of pike flies. I’ve given away almost all of the old ones. Now the ambition is, as far as it’s reasonable, to stick to this tying technique for the subsurface patterns.

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You probably had heard that fire has been improperly extinguished. It means that wrong person has been doing it, or it has extinguished not by the book. Either way, result has been good enough and fire is not burning anymore. Now it looks like that there is same kind of atmosphere around dam and bypass flows.

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Over the last few years I've been tying more and more flies with snowshoe hare, either as a wing material, dubbing or both. It's a great material that I think is underrated, taking a back seat to CDC, synthetics or deer hair. The more I use snowshoe, the more I like it. I can almost see it replacing all other dry fly wing materials completely in my own box... almost.

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I have had a fantastic couple of days fishing emergers, which I must say, was a lot of fun. The two days were similar, but slightly different, and this was mainly down to the ice placement as well as the temperature. The first day was cold to begin with, but the bright sunshine sky rocketed the ambient temperature which set off an amazing buzzer hatch, and the trout were feeding on the emerging insects (the backs of the fish were breaking the surface). Most of the lake that I started on was frozen, but the rises were pretty clear and concentrated on a clear section, so I brought out the HT4 with a Mastery trout #4 and got to work, tying on a relatively small #16 CDC black emerger on a long leader. The fish weren’t far out, so it was quite easy to see which way they were going, and how often they were feeding. I had 9 residents in a few hours which was pretty successful!

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Just a reminder that we are currently taking orders for the new and very exciting HT5, our latest Sexyloops flyrod, which we will start delivering mid March. It’s a great time to order this, or indeed our other rods, because we are building up quite a waiting list for when the blanks arrive! We do have standard rods in stock, ready to ship, and can currently get straight to work — or at least very quickly — with custom orders. You can also order blanks; we have quite a few blank orders at the moment. Gene, one of our latest Board members to join the throng (from Bermuda), apparently had a good laugh at my video when I said it took 8 years to develop, because as he said “I was fishing in the jungle all the time; of course it took 8 years!!”

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Jack and I wrapped up the 2021/2022 deer season in spectacular fashion this evening. Tonight's stalk was a textbook lesson in why I love fishing and hunting so much....and it has little if anything to do with the harvesting of an animal.

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January here in the Malaysian jungle is usually a slow time in the lake. In fact it can be so slow for sight fishing that I don’t take guest bookings from Jan through to mid-March. That’s on normal years of course, when guests can actually get to me! Here the Malaysian borders are still shut for International guests (apart from Langkawi I believe) and that’s despite a whopping 98% of adults being fully vaccinated! I really hope that borders will reopen this year. I’ve taken on a few more Zoom Casting courses in the meantime. So if you are interested in a course of 6 (£300) or 12 (£500) video conferencing lessons over the next months, then please get in touch. I’m happy to add a few more clients. I have two lessons today (Austria and Bermuda). Two is about the maximum I can do in one day (I don’t want it to feel too much like I’m working! :))

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I’ve never used them. They are available in most shops ready-made, ready-to-go. Available in most colours and colour combinations and different materials to achieve different end goal. Somehow, irrationally as I often am, I’ve always considered them cheating - a bit like buying flies (irrational, I know). Besides I’ve always found that conventional dubbing loop techniques achieve the same.

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It is not 13th and Friday, it is side hit, Friday. It have been insane and busy week. Satu has been sick and had no voice, so I have been working a lot at farm. Yesterday evening I had great idea for FP and I thought that in the morning I can finished it easily. I went to bed at 8pm all ready and woke up at 6.30 ready to write.

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Last week I wrote a bit about Tummel flies and made a video fo Tod's No.1, a friend sent me an article by Dave Westwood from a Dutch website (although it does look have the look of FF&FT from the late 1990s) which seems to be about the only other modern information available. It's fairly good so I thought I'd share it here, the more people know about them the more chance this stuff has to be preserved.

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Pet Peeves. C’mon, admit it. You have them. Maybe it’s about anglers who invade where you’re fishing. Or perhaps it’s people who monopolize the launch ramp because they don’t know what they’re doing and create a boat jam. Or maybe it’s that rude raft of rafters who blare music and “harsh on your mellow.” My pet peeves often have to do with anglers handling fish poorly. Why? Because it negatively impacts the fisheries we love. The sad thing is that often the anglers don’t know what good fish handling means. But let’s cut them a break. After all, catch and release (C&R) science is relatively young, and many anglers don’t know much about it.

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So it’s the 11th Jan and I’ve managed to fish all 11 days so far, not all day every day, but every day. As many of you will know Bernd always tries to fish more days than me in a year and for the past three years he has managed it. One year I think he managed 358 or something ridiculous. This won’t do at all of course and so this year I am aiming for the full 365. It’s actually quite challenging to do them all, especially if you have a long haul flight. But I shall endeavour to do my best :))) If I get arrested at Singapore Airport, fly fishing for Koi Carp, then you know the reason why.

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I wrote last week about setting myself a target of beating the BFCC T38 record in practice this year, as well as hopefully casting over 200ft at a competition. I managed to achieve the first part of that this week, much earlier than anticipated, when I recorded my first ever cast over 70 yards with a single handed outfit. Obviously the weather played a big part as I had a great following wind of 15-18mph, but I will say I’ve beaten my PB four times in the last month so I think I must also be improving somewhat.

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I don’t often mention new products, but every now and then something comes on the market that I really like. Something I believe solves something that have not really been solved before, or a real improvement to solutions fly fishers have hacked before.

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Last year was what it was. It is time look forward again. We just finished Christmas season with Spanish. Well we had also , German, Dutch, Belgian, French, Brittish etc guests, still mainly from Spain. Now it is turning to German season.

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I've been tying river wet flies for a friend this week, mostly spiders. I really like tying them and was particularly pleased when he asked me to stick some Tummel style flies in with the rest.

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40mph winds can be quite uncomfortable to fish in, especially when it is followed by rain. I see quite a few people heading to the bank when the wind is behind them (tailwind), but late/early season, the fish are downwind. Now of course there are exceptions, but it’s a good idea to start there first, especially on the larger reservoirs. For some reason, anglers seem to think that the bank with the wind behind them is the easiest. In fact, I think this is the hardest bank to fish, because you have to push that line into a tail wind, and the fish aren’t usually there. Learning to distance cast gives you the skills to deal with the wind better, and switching to either a long belly or DT line will help as it’s incredibly difficult to shoot line into a head wind. With the wind behind they are amazing.

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There are two questions that many people ponder over. The first is what is the meaning of life? And the second is who they are? The answers to both, I think, lead to choices. The meaning of life is of course whatever we want it to be. Similarly, who we are, is whoever we want to be. The number of people who are “searching for themselves”… For goodness sake! And as for the meaning of life, it can be “fly fishing”. The great thing about life, is that not only do we get to choose who we are, as well as what it’s all about, but we can also change one, or even both, at any time. I’ve always fly fished but I’ve certainly changed some major things about my personality in my life. For example, about 20 years ago I chose to become an optimist. This is turn paved the way forward to allow me to become a Snakehead fly fisherman. It would have been completely impossible otherwise.

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I've never been a big fan of the whole "New Year's Resolution" thing that everyone does. I've kind of always believed that if you know you should do something, or if there is something you want to accomplish, there's no better time like the present to do it....no need to wait until January 1st.

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Mine and Tracy’s plans for the New Year celebrations didn’t work out quite as we’d hoped as a friend of ours started feeling ill during the evening. As such, our festivities were cut short and we found ourselves at back at home and pretty much sober as midnight struck. Usually New Year’s day morning is a bit of a write-off however this time, due to the lack of hangovers, we were both up (relatively) early and feeling good. We therefore decided to have our first casting practice session of the year.

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I hope you all had a safe and good New year's evening? We spent a quiet evening at home with he kids, had a nice tapas, a wonderful créme brûlée for dessert and just relaxed the rest of the evening.

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