Tracy&James | Thursday, 31 January 2019
My fly tying for the Bahamas is now underway, progress is relatively slow however due to my limited time outside of work hours and the fact that I’m an incredibly slow fly tier.
I’m sure I could drastically improve my tying speed by instigating some batch processing, for example tying and gluing the chainbead eyes on in advance. Currently I wait for the superglue to set before continuing with finishing the rest of the fly, thus there’s a pause where I sit and think about all the fish that each particular fly is going to catch. Locking down the weight solidly is obviously key to producing a robust saltwater fly so perhaps the extra time spent is worth it in the long term, I know there’s nothing more frustrating than having a successful fly unravel on the flats, although this is pretty inevitable if you are going for species with teeth.
Whilst I’ve been fly tying Tracy has been updating our notes with the data we collected last time. There’s a lot of fond memories of some great days fishing contained within them and it’s amazing how these bring the whole day back into focus. We actually did pretty well on our last trip in terms of bonefish landed, we’ve managed to increase the number on each successive trip to that particular island so far. Not that we’re particularly interested in numbers and we certainly don’t set out with a figure to beat, however it does imply that we’re learning as we go along.
Other than that it’s been a pretty quiet week for us. I practiced my #5 distance twice at the weekend, once with a pretty poor result and the following day with plenty of 40m plus casts. The main difference was obviously the weather plus an unknown contribution from a new line. I guess when you can hear it sawing as you haul and you can subsequently see the evidence of wear on the rings, then it’s time to change.
All the best, James