Mikey over at Burl Productions is putting together what should be another classic in Soulfish 2. Belize, BC, Egypt, Mongolia, CA… some good looking footage in there. Check it out.
Archives
12
Dec 10
This River Is Wild.: 14 Months in the Making.
I like this blog… I like this story. Check it out.
Lately, things have clicked for me, at least. I’ve had a few unforgettable days on the water when Zach couldn’t make it and I felt more than a little bad at rubbing in my good luck, knowing that he had yet to land a bone of his own. My success, I think, is more a case of being able to be in the right places at the right times than any major increase in skill. Although, I know my eyes are much more attuned at spotting fish than ever before.
via This River Is Wild.: 14 Months in the Making..
09
Dec 10
Tom Bie, Saltwater Fly-Fishing Reels – The New York Times
While looking for reel reviews I ran across this piece from the New York Times featuring Tom Bie, publisher of The Drake.
Tom Bie, left, publisher of The Drake Magazine, a quarterly journal for flyfishing enthusiasts, took five saltwater reels on a three-day fishing trip through the shallow waters of Ascensión Bay, Mexico, to discover that, when casting for midsize marine life, options are good, having to perform maintenance is bad, but making sure the big one doesn’t get away is the absolutely the most essential asset of a good spool.
Check out the Tom’s thoughts on the reels he took along by going to this link: Physical Culture | Gear Test, Saltwater Fly-Fishing Reels – The New York Times.
Tom… well… he isn’t a fan of my little blog, but I’m still rooting for the Drake. The Drake has appeal beyond normal fly fishing magazines and that can only be good as time keeps thinning the fly fishing herd.
The comments are not terribly substantive, but you wouldn’t expect the NYT to really nail this in their Fashion & Style section…
The tested reels were:
Hatch 7 Plus, Able Super (Tarpon finish), Nautilus NV, Sage 6080, Tibor Everglades
Not a bad stable to choose from. There isn’t a bad word uttered in the very limited reviews, but you really wouldn’t expect anything to go wrong with one of these reels on a week long trip to Mexico. That’s the limit of field testing and life… never enough time.
08
Dec 10
Bonefish Leaders, Bruce Chard and Deneki
Some great stuff from Deneki’s Bonefish School, run by Bruce Chard.
A conversation with Bruce Chard at Andros South a couple weeks back got us thinking that there’s a really a lot to saltwater leader design and construction, so we asked Bruce to sit down and talk us through how and why he makes the leaders that he uses for bonefish.
via Bonefish Leaders | Design and Construction by Bruce Chard.
07
Dec 10
Lee Haskins ties a foam bonefishing fly… and catches fish.
I was on Blanton’s Board, looking around and I saw “Belize Report” from Lee Haskin. Good stuff about permit and tarpon and a little about bones. The pictures though… well… the “Shrimp Neutralizer” pattern… well… what?!?! FOAM?! I certainly hadn’t seen that before. Really creative and it looks as if it caught fish. Now that would have been handy to see before my Belize trip.
The Shrimp Neutralizer was very effective on bonefish and even had an “eat” from a big permit!
Great to use a fly that suspends and doesn’t hang up in the grass or coral!
via Trips, Flies and Fish: Belize-Rumble in the Jungle!.
Lee's bone and FOAM fly. Cool.
Lee... that's innovation. Well done.
Check out the trip report… you’ll see that Lee’s permit and tarpon were a littttttle bit bigger than mine… like… A LOT bigger. That’s what Belize has to offer.
06
Dec 10
Abel, the Super 8 and Rocketry
I have the reels I need to do the jobs I ask of them for about 95% of my angling. Still, most of what little news emerges from the fly fishing industry is about gear… so… here’s some recent news.
Abel has revamped their workhorse bonefishing/saltwater reel, the Super 7/8 and it is now the Super 7/8N.
The Super
Now… I’ve never fished an Abel that I’m aware of. I know there are folks that really like these reels and no doubt these cork-drag demons are tough. I just can’t get past the price though… $700 for a Super N in a large arbor. Compare that to the Nautilus NV ($540), the Galvan Torque ($320), Ovis’s Mirage ($425), the Opti from Loop ($560)… the only thing that is up there as company is the Tibor QC ($780 or so).
From their press release…
What do you call a fly reel that’s lighter, faster, has greater backing capacity than its predecessors and was precision engineered like something on a space mission? Answer: The Abel Super 7/8N for 2011, which essentially replaces the two longtime workhorse Super 7 and Super 8 reels.
Not only is it space-aged, but the price is astronomical as well (see the pun there? did you see it?). I’m going to go out on a limb and say I don’t need my reels to go into space or to be designed as if they were. Could probably knock a couple hundred off the price if they didn’t field test on the space station.
Abel is content to keep putting out products at the very, very, very top of the price range and it seems they have enough buyers to make the economics work. Between $700 reels and $275 belt buckles (yes… belt buckles), Abel is doing nothing to support the strained relationship between Cheap and Bonefishing.
One of these won’t be holding up my jeans from Target.
Abel… your stuff is pretty. The sticker shock is intense.
04
Dec 10
Strip Set
I was happy to see that this whole “strip set” thing is finally getting into my muscle memory. I don’t think I botched a bonefish on a trout set on this last trip.
I got this picture of Shane in mid-hook-set… and yeah… that’ s pretty much how you do it.
Nice Strip Set
03
Dec 10
The Helios – A review of sorts
When out with guide Katchu from El Pescador we had an abrupt stop on our way tarpon hunting where permit rods were demanded. We were not rigged for permit. I quickly got the Orvis Helios 8 wt. ready and was up on deck, casting to my first permit.
I was pumping the cast out and was carrying the line well in the air and then… then the cast fell apart. The shot was gone. As one or two other anglers may be tempted to do, I thought, well… maybe I need to over-line this rod. Over-lining had proved just the ticket for the Sage Xi3 7 wt., so I put on a 9 wt. line. I missed the next shot, but have no recollection of how that cast went.
Later, in a moment of reflection, I began to wonder if, just maybe, I had jumped to conclusions about the Helios. I mentioned out-loud to my fishing buddy Shane (who happens to be a casting instructor and a beautiful caster) that I was beginning to think that maybe I had just put out a bad cast and blamed the rod.
Shane said in watching the cast that my false cast before the final presentation had been perfect. When he saw me go for the last cast, he knew it wasn’t going to go well. I think I knew it down deep too. I had botched the cast… this was operator error.
Our last morning in Belize I decided to trust Steve at Orvis and I put the 8 weight line back on the Helios and I took that rod out for the last fleeting hours of fishing.
Newsflash… the Helios casts really, really well and an 8 wt. casts an 8 wt. line very well. It is light… that’s the first thing you notice. It feels almost like casting a 5 wt., which may give you the impression it isn’t going to have the power to get you through the wind or the distance you might need (and I think that is why I flubbed the first cast and went through the up-line fiasco). Of course, the ROD has the power to do it and the weight of the rod in ounces does not = the power of the rod.
I’m learning.
At $800, the Helios is in the upper, upper price range of fly fishing gear. It really makes me want to get a Hydros out fishing… a rod that is the twin brother of the Helios… but that twin that was born 20 minutes later and who might not be totally the same. At $500, it is much more in the price-range I’d probably be more interested in. Basically, you get the same technology with a couple of bells and whistles removed.
If you drive a Mercedes that costs $40K, you are probably a Hydros guy. If your Benz costs $143,000… just jump right to the Helios (even though you are probably too busy to actually fish).
02
Dec 10
Here’s an interesting thought… Bonefish on a Dry Fly
I was reading a paper by Dr. Alan Friedlander (out in Hawaii, has been studying bonefish around the Pacific, has a tagging program in Hawaii) about the bonefish in Palmyra and this sentence caught my attention…
The remainder of the prey items consisted of various crustaceans (e.g., shrimp, isopods) and polychaete worms, with a few small fishes and one terrestrial beetle.
Let that thought sink in for a bit. Bonefish. Beetle.
The odds are not with you. It is a one in a million shot. Still… marinate on it for a while.
It would be cool.
Hmmm...
01
Dec 10
Belize Report – The Last Day
We woke up the last morning at El Pescador knowing the clock was running down. We had to be back and packed by 11:45 before we took the boat to San Padro, flight to Belize City and then to Dallas before we’d go separate ways. Since it was 5:00 AM, we still had some quality fishing time to get after and that’s what we did.
We got the canoe out in the lagoon and hit our favorite spot from the first DIY day. When we got there the water was glassy smooth and, as you might expect, there were a few tails working, easily spotted from a couple hundred feet. It was a nice scenario for our last day.
Glassy
I got to the tails first and managed the first fish of the morning, which was nice. Unlike the last time we had fished this spot we didn’t find large schools of fish, but smaller groups. Shane stuck a couple more and then we moved.
In the transition the weather started to change… up came some wind, in came cloud cover and the threat of rain. We came upon a clearing between mangrove chutes that looked pretty good. Shallow. Good bottom. Spooking fish as we paddles. We tied up the canoe and went to work.
Here, Shane managed one of the better Belizean bonefish we saw. It was a single, cruising the edge of the mangroves. Shane pulled some ninja stalking techniques out and the fish ate.
An honest 4 pounder... maybe 4 1/4.
Shane really came into his own here… seeing fish I couldn’t see and then casting to them and catching them. I walked through the muck to get to another spot and managed to have a decent bonefish come unbuttoned. I also managed to have THREE mojarra beat bonefish to flies… damn mojarra. I managed a couple more bonefish, included one small enough to make me think I was fishing a creek back home.
This IS the other side of the rainbow... it ends in Belize.
Not a big fish... but pretty.
Shane ended up catching something like 15 bonefish just that morning before we paddled back. I caught three. This bit of ass-kickery kind of illustrated exactly how much the Grand Slam from the day before was up to fate and luck as opposed to skill. I knew I wasn’t as good an angler as Shane and this re-enforced that belief. The guy can flat out fish.
The release
Soon we were paddling back across the little lagoon, wind in our face. We made it back with plenty of time for showers and lunch. While Shane was eating lunch I took 15 feet of tippet and a small velcro crab out to the dock. I had a hunch I wanted to test out about those dock bonefish. I managed to convince a little snapper to eat the crab and then I saw a little school of 5 or so bonefish. With the wind to my back I tossed in the crab. One bonefish came right up to the little fly and ate it. I tried to set the hook, lifting the head of the bonefish up, but the hook simply came right out. Damn, I thought… that would have been a good end to the trip!
The trip had been a good one… a great one even. I had caught my first ever permit and my first ever tarpon in a magical day that had landed me a Grand Slam. I had caught my largest fish to date… a 25 pound Jack. I had caught many smaller bonefish to add to my overall bonefish knowledge for future bonefish trips. We had fished through crappy weather and good weather and some tense times with Katchu and fun times with Katchu. I had shared the trip with a good friend in a kind of magical place.
I hadn’t caught as many bonefish as I had really thought I would, but then I hadn’t figured on chasing permit and a day on the tarpon flats, which were both great experiences.
Thank you El Pescador for having us. You have a special place and a special fishery.
