Crafty

The weather has been all over the shop, sub zero one day and high teens the next. It's made for some challenging fishing and I've only been popping to my local river for an hour or two at a time, more to get out and easy my sore shoulder back in to action. Still there were a few nice little fish caught.

On Sunday, I was tying at the Fly Fishing Handcraft Fair in Asakusa, Tokyo. I thoroughly enjoyed the day and saw some fantastic fly tying, found a few guides around the country who I'll have to visit at some point. There were also some small scale tackle manufacturers, including some very competitively priced cane rod builders.. One company that seemed fairly unique and pretty interesting was https://solid-octa.com/index.html who make solid, carbon rods that feel caney but without quite the same weight, especially in the larger sizes. Probably not for everyone, but fun for those who like that kind of thing.
My friend Hide, who runs Urban Islander, is trying to get loch style fishing off the ground here and asked me to do a few wets and things. It was interesting to see the reaction of some locals to the various Dunkelds I was tying in the morning, it's a fairly popular river fly here, but everyone ties the original pattern, the first compact palmer I tied was surprising enough, but the muddled Dunkeld dabbler really startled a few guys. In the afternoon I looked at using wets in a hatch and how you could move the same flies on the cast at different stages to keep up with the insect and fish activity. I could definitely see a few lightbulbs blinking on for a few of the guys who fish still waters and look forward to seeing how things develop in this scene over the next year or so.

Now I'm looking forward to the maruta fishing over the next few weeks as they start turning up in the rivers.  And I finally broke down (after ten years) and agreed to go mountain creek dry fly fishing with Hide.. although I did stipulate that it has to be for wild fish ideally yamame or iwana, not some low grade stockies.