Daily Cast Archive

To follow on from the Nasty Charlie last week I'm going to look at the Gotcha, because if the Nasty is the OG bonefish fly, maybe the Gotcha is the G.O.A.T.

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These boots, the Bestard Canyon Guide boots, are simply the best wading boots I’ve owned. Seven years!! Not seven years on the river every day, but a lot of river fishing, a lot of jungle bashing, and I left the boots outside in my boat when not wearing them. Extraordinary!

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Labour Weekend is this weekend. Three days. The first long weekend of the trout season for most of the country, and the roads out of Auckland will be straining with a volume of cars. I'm heading to the Hawke's Bay. Last year I did the same and fished a Hawke's Bay river. Lowland water, down where the tide makes a difference. The river was low and clear, mid twenties in cumecs on the Saturday morning. Low and clear usually means hard fishing. Not this time.

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We are suffocating here. We have a war with Russia in Europe. Multiple front wars in the Middle East. Artificial Intelligence has a 20% chance of wiping out human existence within 10 years, and a 100% chance of destroying what’s left of humanity. We have global warming threatening to turn Earth into Venus Two. And a US government changing the World Order so that bullies can screw everyone else with impunity. It’s complete chaos down here.

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I’m overextended. I glommed on to every fishing adventure that presented itself, leaving a trail of unfinished tasks and languishing obligations. So far this year I fished Malaysia, the Bahamas, Hawaii, Virginia, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida (twice), and Louisiana. I’ve caught snakehead, bonefish, trout, stripers, bonito, carp, corbina, surf perch, bass, sunnies, ladyfish, and redfish. Even now, I’m off to Argentina to fish for golden dorado. Because some of these were new places for me, juicy new locations, I extended some adventures with touring, which has highlighted other issues. Jackie has ants in her pants and always hits the ground running. I have a plumbum - lead in my pants. It’s fear-based and infects everything. I have to fight it - always, the struggle between planning - and dreaming - and doing. My nature always favors the dreamer. To get along is to change. 

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In one interesting topic on the board I saw this, “Instructors are keen to deliver a fishing cast because they think the end product is where you start, and majority of students wants it. Shitty spiral!” But the problem is that they don’t even do that I think. If the start with the pickup of 30’ of line and do some false casting and putting the line down, both the student and the instructor is into a lot of pain. The student won’t see the back cast so everything is shitty, the instructor gets panic and starts to instruct even more. Telling the student to stop bending the wrist. And we have a total shit show. Even worse if the instructor starts to talk about stopping hard and loading the rod.

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My nephews came to Kuusamo for fishing trip.  They are truly hooked now. I didn't have possibility to fish with them. Yet I have to admire that they did few days in around zero celsius. We had also first snow, so conditions were not best possible, even if sun was shining now and then. I got news that they caught few graylings and saw photo about extremely high water in one river, never seen that before on this time of year.

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As I've been on a bonefish kick recently I thought it would make sense to do the fly that we owe most of the others to: the Nasty Charlie.

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It's a busy time for the BFCC team as after the Essex casting day, we had a weekend with the GAIA team in Derbyshire, and we're now preparing to go to France for a fly fishing show with casting competitions. Personally, this is bitter-sweet as I can't cast as much as I would normally do due to the lump on my right hand. At Brentwood, I only cast the light gear and double handed outfits, so it was the first time in many years that I didn't complete all seven events.

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Paul wrote yesterday about living in a haze. Smoke from Indonesia, thick enough that he got lost on a lake he has lived on for ten years. Mine is the other kind. This week has been an onslaught of problems, one after another, none of them to do with fish. You can’t see the hills in that either.

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I feel a bit like I’m living in a mental haze at the moment. Certainly my brain is foggy when I wake up in the mornings. I think this is because I’m training hard and the body is constantly recovering. It’s not because I’m drinking booze, because there is very little of that! But I am actually living in a literal haze too. Indonesia burns off at this time of year. There are thousands of fires, most started intentionally. The haze was so bad last Friday that they closed the schools here in Malaysia because the air quality was deemed so unsafe.

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We found some last Sunday and Monday. The weather was still pretty lousy -  an overcast of widely varying density, painted glare in inconvenient places - embedded cells dumped rain. We got soaked a few times. The wind was up and down and it was tough to find clean water. So it was all about finding shallows that would show pushes, backs and tails. All this was made more difficult by a tide cycle without minus tides and less than a one foot swing. There were no visible fish in their usual places. We usually use the boat ramp at the Delta Marina in Buras which provides uquick access to some quiet, lonely fishing when the flood control gates are open. Delta Marina is on a channel, connected through a massive gate to the bays and marshes to the west and reaching toward a levee to the east. The Mississippi runs on the other side of the levee. Big tankers and even cruise ships sail up and down the river looking a little taller than they should be. The channel serves big working craft, shimpers, and pogie netters. None can get out to the open water unless Jimmy Floodgates says so. He has a magic number (I’m remembering +0.61 feet) above which he keeps the gate shut. We were shut in till 10 am over the weekend but usually they’re open all day.

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When practicing your casting you probably want’s something at the end of your leader. Sometimes it should be a the flies you intend to fish with, with the hook bend cut off. But most of the time you probably go for just some “fluff”. It hurts much less to be hit by fluff. Hurts your rod less to be hit by fluff. Hurts your leader less to have some fluff attached. If we start with casting without anything. You’ll soon crack the tip of your leader. The good thing is that it makes it much easier to do a whip crack with your cast. I’ve heard one teacher using this  as a teaching tool, if you hear a whip crack you’ve done something wrong. I’m not totally convinced this is a good idea. One reason being that casting without anything at the end of the reader feels a bit strange. I would say that I can feel a big difference when casting distance and the fluff is gone. It feels off. I have the idea that you want a balanced size of fluff. I don’t think a very small piece of fluff is an advantage in a distance competition. It is like it helps keep the line stable. So a bigger piece of fluff than you normally use can be worth experimenting with.

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Last weekend was rain and poor weather. Saturday I was building fence again outside of farm. I'm useful idiot with all tools. Sunday morning we could do little at farm even in light rain. We are not made from sugar yet tools like drill, impulsive nailer etc are not huge friends with rain. Monday we finished fences at farm with French helper. He did one gate and small finishing on Tuesday.

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Squimps this week, aren't you lucky! Actually I might have written about squimps before, but even if I have, they're so good I don't mind doing them again.

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Sunday saw the last championship event of the BFCC season and we had fantastic weather considering we're in October, twenty plus degrees C and enough sunshine to warrant putting sunscreen on. The distance casters who were competing would have appreciated more in the way of a consistent breeze, however you can't have everything. Though the conditions were good for accuracy and we had a new record with a score of 59 for the Veterans 80+ category – well done Mick.

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Three trips to the same tidal water. The first was wind. A 10 weight and Martin Langlands' white smelt. Two sea-run browns at dusk, both after the evening tide had turned and started out. I talked about this last week. The second had the better forecast. I turned up at midday, later than planned, to a light wind that was getting stronger and a tide coming in. This time I was fishing my HT 8 and 6 weights. Four swirls at streamers. Two fish rising in a lull. I spooked the first. The second got a long cast, bang on. It looked at the buzzer and left. Encouraging, but not as hoped. Then the wind went east and a sludge started moving across the surface.

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When I was a young boy, my grandfather said that we would drive across the Middle East on a motorbike with a sidecar. He would drive and I would arm the machine gun. I believed him. I thought I’d be pretty handy with a machine gun. A few years later I remember being absolutely enthralled by Robinson Crusoe — I still am. Being shipwrecked and living on a desert island. How wonderful. Just imagine how extraordinary the flats fly fishing would be!

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The weather here has been challenging this week. It’s gonna rain everyday. Windy too. Bad luck. It’s early in the season. This year it appears it’s possibly too early. I’ve been fishing the “shoulders” all year and have been punished for it. It’s really quiet here - The weather has scared the locals away. 

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So it’s been another week. I wonder where all that week went. Work and extra work, but that’s the usual things. I’m not far from just quitting it all and running off into the jungle and never to be seen again. A little casting and a little fishing I’ve been able to squeeze in. And some quick visits to the gym also. 

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It is December and Christmas, which means days are getting longer again. And so we are going towards summer soon. You have to find something positive on this time of the year...

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Ronan has been visiting Tokyo this week and we've had a great time fishing the bay and trying to create a beer shortage but I'll leave that for his report. I'm going for a variant fly this week, it's still in keeping with the minimalist flies I've been giving you recently.

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