They are coming...

They are coming, deadly, powerful.  Everything you have ever wanted, and feared.  Prepare for a fish that will destroy you're brown trout rods.  They are coming....

All hail the King...

Other people's fly of the week!

A bit about flies that are not mine, but you still need to know about them!

 

Sasquatch!  Out in Utah there is a fly fisherman who has been hunting monsters.  His name is Nick Granato.  In winter and fall he hunts browns, in summer and spring he chases tiger Muskie.  A long time ago he thought about how he wanted a fly that pushed water, worked for both cold water and warm water fish, and had movement.  Unlike most fishermen, it seems, he felt that movement was key in his flies.  This may be due to the fact that he was once a gear chucker, but learned about fly fishing and was then soon sick of nymphing.  After years of chasing things that kill, he decided that he needed a fly that was not out there.  Deer hair headed flies with dumbbell eyes tend to sink to slow and ride upward in current.  Plus most articulated flies, with two hooks, get in each other’s way when fishing for warm water fish, but as I know, single hook flies get a lot of short strikes on trout, so you have to find the magic amount of hook length.  He, like me, decided that he need razor sharp hooks.  The best freshwater hook out there for fly fisherman is a Gamakatsu b10s stinger.  It’s just the sharpest you can find.  I fell in love with this fly the first time I saw it on Nick’s Blog, “Fly Obsession”.  I got largemouth here, in the mid-south, almost instantly on these flies.  Later I would land my first fly caught Brown Trout out of Lake Michigan.  These flies are just the best.  Their craft fur head allows them to sink faster and stay deeper.  From Muskies and Kings Salmon, all the way to tarpon and Brown trout, this fly will work.  I’m currently working on a tube fly version for Gar.  If you need one streamer to take anywhere, take one of these.  Soon I’ll be throwing them at Lingcod out west!

 

This Just In, New Gar Fishing Method!

This just in, rope flies not the best option for gar anymore!

That's right there is another way monster chancers, as it turns out people all over have been looking for the monster fish and found a few things they did not expect. Deep in the true heart of gar country, Texas that is, Casey Smartt made a discovery chasing the gar in his local water. “My best luck has been with a tube fly circle hook set up. The fly I am currently using most is the tube fly below.  1/2" long tube and Fishair body in chart/white or grey/white, plenty of flash.  50 lb leader threaded through and pegged with toothpick on rear of tube.  Hook is a 3/0 Gammy octopus or Mustad Demon circle.  Fly is 4" long.  The long nose I fish for are usually feeding in deep water 10-20 ft, only gulping at top.  I blind cast over area of activity and use a fast sink or intermediate sink line with a steady slow twitch retrieve.”
That is some seriously deep water to chase gar, most fly guys I know don't want to cast to anything that deep. But it makes sense. So how dose Casey fish then, is he a rope guy or a treble hook guy. The answer is neither.   It’s a Circle hook.

Now when I herd this I thought, no way. What if the gar is facing towards you? You’ll miss the hook up right? In reality, no. I found that gar will still go for a side bit!
This idea is simple, the hook slides in and catches around the jaw. If the fish tunes its head, the line is stuck in the jaw. The best part is the hook needs to be pulled backwards to come out, so a barb will stop it, if the pressure in on the hook, it can only go deeper into the fish.
Is this a better hook up rate then rope? I’d say about the same, maybe more so! But there are other things that make it better.
1. Rope flies are hard to cast, if you are sight casting you have hope, but if you have to blind cast, it could be eighty to a few hundred casts before a fish. A rope fly will get heavy and hard to cast. But a tube fly with only a single hook, that is easy.  Think you can make some eighty casts with a 3/0 hook and a five inch fly?
2. Quick release, the first two gars I got on this rig was a thirteen inch longnose and a 29 inch shortnose gar, and both times it worked great. But the best part, one quick pop with pliers and the fish was free. No longer did I spend up to fifteen minutes removing the rope. This time it took a second and boom, free fish.
3. Safer fish: gar are the toughest of tough. They have bullet proof (I mean it I herd of then being shot and it not happening.) scales, and they can breathe air! But nothing can live if it doesn’t eat. Rope flies, if the gar gets away, can keep their jaws shut for a very long time, maybe too long. Most of the time the trick is to use 30 pound test line, but with a circle hook, all you need is some ten pound test and a length of fluorocarbon that is over sixteen pounds to with stand the wear and tear of their teeth. You don’t

even need a good hook set, and if the gar breaks the line, the hook will rot out, and won't inhibit their feeding.
4. Flies not just for gar: since it’s a tube fly, you don’t have to keep it in a gar only box, just change the hook and attack some browns or stripers. The sky is the limit.

Gar are fun, but not every outing will be a slam dunk. I spend most of my time fishing them from a stand up kayak. But this is not the only way to target then. Some river can provide sight cast from the bank. You just have to find gar. With a rig like this I can now cast a four inch long gar fly eighty feet, this has turned some spots, that before I just drooled over, into my new favorite honey hole. A 3/0 will work for small or large fish, have faith, and be ready for a fight. Oh, did I mention that the fish seem to fight harder on the hook rather than the rope?

Circle back to the Parie Tarpon.

I have been working at the bench more than at the water’s edge lately, and I have been looking into certain things that I have before deemed impossible.  Most know me for my work with Gar and lack of knowledge regarding a spelling and grammar check.  Gar have been a way of life for me since I  moved far from the home range of Pike and Muskie.  I had once felt gar would fill the void left in my angling obsession buy the biggest monsters of my childhood.

 

Gar have not really replaced esoxs, but they have made themselves out to be a better option than I had thought.  Like all fish, big Gar are hard fighters, but monsters really can be a hand full.  Up until now I have only tried one method for Gar.  The ever more debated rope fly method worked for me for years.  It catches fish, and with some invention is a dynamite method.  But fly fisherman have issues.  Purists say it is not really fishing, or whatever.  But I will give out one thing.  Rope gets heavy.  Casting rope flies is like casting a wet beach towel.  You need rope flies to be in then ten inch size range to tangle the best, and you really need to get out massive size rods to cast them.

 

Rope also is more nice to the jaws of fish, but the back fire of this is that the gar don’t feel like they are in as much danger and don’t fight till the see you.  This doesn’t happen all the time but it does happen a lot.

I went looking at new ways to catch them.  Fly fishing gives us the best chance to set a hook into the solid bone like jaws of a Gar.  The problem is that unlike baby Tarpon, the jaws are thin and give little of a target, you have a decent chance of missing the jaw.  Some decided to use a treble hook.  But if you have ever landed a treble hook in the back of your head, you don’t want to.  The advantage to using hooks is that you can have a quick release, and remove the hook, and say the fly get away attacked to a fish, it will dissolve out and like is back to normal for the fish.

SO I decided to trade in my rope.  I found another option.  Gar fishermen around the country are trying to find new ways to catch fish.   Casey Smartt or Gartooth Outdoors found a interesting solution.   He started to use a genius method.  With a tube fly and a 3/0 circle hook he found the hook caught around Gar’s lower Jaw.  I have been working on this method.  So far, I have had trouble getting to Gar.  Droughts have shrunk my favorite Gar holes.  Now I have to travel or fish the muddiest and dying Kansas river.  Once a gar high way, now a place to forget to memory.  I have a time to make more than a afternoon trip this week.  I’m planning a on a big trip, but here is the flies I have designed.  Here is to hoping they work.

 

Explosive August

An Explosive August:

Fishing the mid-south in August is a tough time.  Trout would be dead in most waters around here.  The few trout waters are packed with fishermen bank to bank.   The rest of the waters have become too hot for even bass, leaving carp and Drum fishing.  But if you are willing to search you can find you’re favorites.

I started the month off with brown trout.

After a solid hunt on the Current River in Missouri, I headed to some closer, more local Kansas Waters.  Here, it’s time to sight fish.  Drum are very under rated.

But the normal summer time heat broke.  Left with temperatures in the high eighties instead of low hundreds, I decided I need to try something a bit more multi species.  I went to the largest out-let river I knew of.  There I hopped for gar.  If you hunt Gar, you do it with big gear, flies either need to be treble hooks or rope. 

But of course they did not want to play.  Instead I encountered dozens of tiny bass, and a few white bass before I found a nice nest of wipers.

Say what now?  Maybe I need to find a new spot!

A day later I found my carp and drum spots slow on the local lake.  But a surprise was in there, the small mouth made my day.

Adapt, change, and add a bit of the Bizarre.  You never know what you’ll find.

Pop fly of the week!

There are a great many flies out there that I don’t tie. This is a new segment meant to look at some of the best.

1: Sculpzilla!!
When you are out on your favorite trout river and things are looking bad, no hatches, no drys, and it's fall. The nymphing is poor, and let's face it, it's not the most fun. But damn, you left you seven weight with the fast sinking line at home. You know the trout are eating something a bit bigger. You still have a chance with that floating line. Gear up that six weight floating line and arm it with sculpzilla Jr. This fly has a great cone head for getting it deep even in current. It in larger sizes sinks like a stone. The cone head with eyes is a great touch, but the soft hackle collar, and the rabbit strip tail make this fly deadly. But the best part is the hook design. Tied with a gamagatsu octopus hook, that is almost all the way in the back, articulated, you keep most of the movement, but have perfect hook placement that is even better for getting a clean hook up. They come to match almost every color needed. These flies will get you the monsters, but also you will not miss out on the tiny guys too. Pack a box of olive and tan today. You will not regret it.

Fly line review!

So many line are coming out geared toward certain fishing situations.  This is most common in freshwater.  No longer is it just sinking lines and floating lines with some in-between.  But what most of us have to find is a line that works best across the board.  SA has General purpose taper, and then good big fly lines, but i want a line i can do it all with.  I just wanted a line that could nymph, drift drys, cast bass bugs, swing sculpin flies, and lay down a cast for a carp.  What i found was no general purpose line in fact, it was a line that was meant to hunt one fish.  Rio's Smallmouth bass fly line.  It might have been meant for smallies, but anyone who has fished them knows, you need a line that dose it all.  Smallies need to be fished with most freshwater technices, and ever a few saltwater tatices are sometimes needed.  I found that when i needed a floating line, almost always this line was great.  Distance cast was easy with it, and short cast where great, it was super accurate, and even was great for sight fishing roughfish.

I love this line

But if you throw big flies for preditors this line is great.  For most general purpose fishing i recomend a six weight line on a five or six weight rod.  Even larger for bigger fish.
Don't let the name fool you, its for everything and dose it all.

Once a year my family decides we don’t argue enough, so we go spend a week in northern Wisconsin, the great north woods; A land of fishing.  A land where all of the mid South’s fishing tactics barley work.  We went to one of the North’s deeper, cooler, clear water lakes, a natural lake full of fish.

In this lake is a bio-diversity most would love to see.  Common are the pan fish, with bluegills and crappie.  The crappie are only black crappie and disappear after their spawn for the rest of the year.  Perch are most common in this lake, and I mean real perch, yellow perch up to a pound.  They live in the dense weed beds and many fallen trees that litter the lake.  But they are not the only food source.  Over twenty kinds of minnows live here and there are cisco, a kind of white fish that school in deep water.

Living more on the cleanup side are three types of suckers, some channel cats, and bullhead.  And for them to eat, are the crawfish, hellgrammites and other little taste bugs.

Feeding on most of these fish is all-star team of predators.  Bait guys will spend millions to try and catch Walleye on these lakes, and with a decent shot at ten pound fish, why not?  In spring and at night even flies can get them.  After them you have the Bass.  Although 80 degree water temperature is rare up there, largemouth live in the shallows.  They feed on it all.  After that come the far Stronger and faster Smallmouth bass. These all fear Pike.  Northern pike are called the water wolf, but in these lakes they are normally stunted in growth, with few fish beating out a size of 25 inches.  Overpopulation is to blame.

But everything in the water, from minnows, to water skiers, fears one thing: The King of the Lake.  Bigger than pike, and known to have more teeth then Gar, it is the Great white of the north, the Muskie, the fish of my nightmares.  And for one of the few times in my life, I choose a fly Rod for it.

But first, our family trips start with a gypsy style packing job.

200 feet of rope later we headed north.  With the North Woods showing what the weather is like, front after front.

We got there in late afternoon.  We decided to put my father’s forty year old boat in the water.

I armed myself with flies I do not use much in the south.  Flashy Ben-backs, and flies heavy with deer hair and buck tail.

Instantly, I discovered the fishing was going to be decent to good.  The largemouth were bedding, regulations said they were out of season, catch and release only, perfect for fly fishing.

Emily was with me as always.  She has an, itch, let’s say for pike.  Pike were a bit harder.  We had a very thin window to take them, and often we struck out.  But with our pike gear we got lots of Bass.

After days of trying, a leech fly got one decent pike, and a bend back got another, sicker looking fish, but nothing near 20 inches.

Dad found out quickly what the smallmouth where doing, and pulled one of the biggest fish of the trip off of a sand flat near a dock.

Before we could run around fishing more fish, we had a problem.  Forty years takes it tool on an engine.  So Emily and I found a different boat.

 

For some reason, Emily and I always do better without a motorized boat.  And now we could go much shallower.  Emily then hooked up on some of the best smallie fishing I have seen in a while.  Not huge numbers, but the size of the fish was unreal, even after the boat was fixed, we still found monsters.

The bass hit strange things, mouse flies, bendbacks, and sluggo flies.

I went on one last shot for a monster I had not seen much of.  A few small sightings, a lot of pike strikes (none tried later for pike flies though, figures) and one small Muskie strike had me frustrated.  I tried one last time.  I got the perfect shot (if you fish Tarpon), head on and the king of the north ignored my fly.  In one week of fishing I got two shots at muskies.  Welcome to the big leagues of muskie fishing (And yes, I casted the 20,000 times).

In total, Emily had the most fish, maybe 70 fish, with 30 or so over 3 pounds.  I had a grand total of maybe 20 fish.  2 of them pike.  Not one of my better pike trips.  But I had one 4 pound largemouth.  Most largemouth and smallies where taken on a 4 wt.  So I had fun.

Emily had one 5 pound smallie and so did my dad.  It was unreal, but a lot of fun.

If you go up north, be ready for the most intense fishing you can have in the so called warm water fishing.