Fly Fishing BS thread

I have an old Litespeed that has served me well. I have caught Stripers, Albies, Blackfin tuna, Black tip and Lemon sharks with it just to name a few. The reel has not given me an issue yet. I would imagine the drag would be plenty adequate for anything you may be targeting with an 8 wt.

 

Thought this would be appreciated here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1Db6moaCuk8

 

Bass here at home and Redfish and maybe bones down south.

 

Borrowed this from another site, one in which I've not posted up the goods so I couldnt tell the guy who posted it there that I was borrowing it. But I take no credit for it... Per him.. Posted 15 years ago in Montana Magazine.



I had no choice about becoming a fly fisherman. Like a recessive gene or latent virus, there was something buried deep within me that needed only to be triggered to become an active living entity. Just as I had no ability to determine my own left-handedness or red-headedness, the desire to flyfish has been with me, twisted deep within the double helix of my DNA, since my conception. I'm absolutely sure of it.

I don't even remember the specific event that triggered the desire to wisp bits of hair and feather in a graceful arc over my head in pursuit of piscatorial bliss. Perhaps it was some long-since-forgotten episode of The American Sportsman with Curt Gowdy and Jack Dennis. Maybe it was walking through the sporting goods section of the local Sears and Roebuck, and noticing that the flyrods towered over the shorter (and hence inferior) spincast rods. From the perspective of a seven or eight year old kid, the taller things are, the more respect they commanded. Teachers, parents, and other legitimate authority figures were all taller...

So, while it=s true that I don=t specifically remember the events leading to my current beloved affliction, I do remember when my yearning for the heights of fishing pleasure became unbearable, and thereby no longer able to be borne mutely.
It was September of my tenth year. Christmas was still three forever-long months away, but I felt that it was time to start dropping hints regarding the more-blessed-to-get-and-receive season. I was a kid, after all.

It's important here to understand that, at least in our home, asking for a specific gift was about as acceptable as farting in church. It just wasn't done. The direct request for a particular gift was the surest way known to the Palmer kids to negate the very likelihood of ever receiving it. It wasn't that my parents were cruel or unusual; rather, it was that they held to certain time-honored parenting values, like spoiling the kids can make living in the same house with them a hellish nightmare of an experience. My parents were generous on their own terms, and we all lived happily together for it.

However, very carefully-crafted hints could be dropped much like verbal stealth bombs, delivered with laser-like accuracy and detonated after one was safely out of range. While the risk of collateral damage was significant if premature detonation occurred from a poorly constructed hint/bomb, sometimes risks had to be taken.

Oddly enough, particularly clever hints elicited a peculiar form of parental pride, as if to say "Wow! We really did produce a bright child!" While I cannot quantify any increase in gifts received as a result of ultra-clever hints, the glow in my parents= proud faces was a reward unto itself. However, my guile may have grown in retrospect, just as the caught fish gets larger with years of reflection.

But a flyrod! Throw caution to the wind! Brave the risks, curse the darkness of misunderstanding, and double haul directly into the howling gale of previously-failed hinting efforts! I needed to restore a sense of equilibrium in my life, to point my compass toward a bearing somewhere west to where the cold, clear waters held living rainbows. Good hints, bad hints, I needed them all to aid me in my quest for fishing self-actualization. Pretty lofty stuff for a fifth grader, and I was young for my class.

So starting in September, I hinted. I borderline wheedled, offered passive observations, allowed my attention to wander with supposed casual coincidence, to all things flyfishing. As the weeks passed, leaves fell from the trees like spinner falls, snowflakes clustered like midges....yeah right. I didn't even know what these things meant at the time. I just wanted to be a flyfisherman.

So, when the Christmas season arrived, I, like most children, found it difficult to do anything other than to gaze longingly at the tree, to look at (but not touch) the gifts underneath it, and to try to decipher by the shape of the packages what might be contained therein. Had the folks caught my three-month, drag-free drift? It was maddening.

My parents had the good sense to hold to a family tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve. (It is interesting to note that now that I am an adult with children of my own, I too hold to this tradition, primarily so that I am not obligated to wake up at five o=clock on Christmas morning to the insistent urging of eager children.) As we shared our meal and acknowledged the Gift we received in the ancient manger, I found it impossible not to wonder about the gifts we were yet to receive. How could I focus on an event two millenia past when there was such electric anticipation attached to the two-hour future?! I didn't intend to commit sacrilege-- I was only ten!

In order to preserve some semblance of order and add to the mutual anticipation of all participants, we opened gifts in turn, from the youngest to the oldest. With each gift opened and new article of clothing revealed I found myself torn between an increasingly heightened sense of excitement and an equally growing dread that maybe my dream would not be realized. However, the next gift placed in my hands was obviously not a new sweater. The tag taped beneath the bow indicated that it was from my younger brother, and, upon opening, revealed the yellow brick road to my dreams. In my trembling hands I held the Fly Fishing Digest by Bill Wallace. I must confess that I did not (and still don=t) know who Bill Wallace was, but to my young eyes, he must have been a fishing prophet. The subtitles of THE BOOK said it all: LEARN to FLY CAST in 30 MINUTES, NEW METHODS to GET ALL FRESH WATER FISH, OLD MYTHS EXPLODED, BEST FLY FISHING SPOTS IN U.S., CANADA, ALASKA. So true was my faithful allegiance to Mr. Wallace that it never even dawned on my young and eagerly-impressionable mind that ALASKA was part of the U.S. when the book was written in MCMLXXIII.

In my adrenaline induced euphoria, I was acutely aware that a second fact was only minutes away from being actualized. Somewhere, perhaps cleverly hidden behind the drapes or beneath the sofa, there was nine feet of fiberglass bliss awaiting my long-suffering caress. There=s no smell in the world like fresh cork, and, given my prepubescent state, no fragrance more seductive. My pupils were dilated, my breath came in short gasps. It was difficult to maintain consciousness.

However, slowly, painfully, reality marched into the room with bone-crushing finality. As the last of the gifts was opened and the wrapping paper collected and stuffed into the trash, I knew that my dream wasn't to be. Something deep within me scanned the small mountain of presents before me and the similar one before each of my siblings, and I knew, without even counting, we each had an identical number of gifts. Christmas was over.

I'd like to think that I was grateful. I hope that I remembered to look each of my family members in the eye and sincerely say, "Thank you." However, I'm not sure that I did. My best bet is that I automatically brushed my teeth, perfunctorily hugged and kissed my mom and dad goodnight, and bore my weary soul off to bed. Twenty five years later, and that is what I would guess I did . What I know is that I cried myself to sleep.

************************************************************************************************************************************************************

I spoke to my dad on the phone the other day and told him that I was writing this story. It really was one of the pivotal experiences of my life, and I wondered how he recalled it. Oddly enough, he doesn't remember it at all. I find that really ironic because it was his actions (several months after that Christmas) that stand out in my mind as one of the most singular experiences in my young life. I'm thinking about referring him to a good neurologist before he does the same to me....

************************************************************************************************************************************************************

It was early spring, perhaps March or early April, after "The Christmas." I had read Mr. Wallace's book, but truthfully, my heart wasn't in it. It really was more than I could bear, to see those seductive black and white photographs of huge, dead trout held by men --real men -- with cigarettes dangling from their unsmilingly proud mouths. My dream had flickered like the flame of a candle, suffocated in the molten wax its own heat had created. I would never take my place in the sun, somewhere "out west" where the streams held trout as big as your leg.

As I shuffled home from the bus stop after school, I noticed something strange. Dad's car was in the driveway, and when I entered the back door, I could hear the TV in the livingroom. From the back steps, looking through the kitchen into the livingroom, I could see the back of Dad=s recliner and the top of his head as he relaxed in front of the tube. His position wasn't unusual, but the timing was way off. It was only quarter to four, a full ninety minutes before he normally assumed his current position.

Stranger still was the presence of one of our green naugahyde kitchen chairs in the center of the livingroom, slightly behind and to the left of Dad's reclined form. Mom kept a neat house, and the chair normally would have been in the kitchen, keeping company with its early-seventies olive hued peers around the late-sixties formica and chrome table. As if this wasn't all weird enough, the chair was occupied.

I walked cautiously through the kitchen toward the livingroom, Dad, and the misplaced chair. As I drew nearer, I realized with heart-pounding recognition that the 4- foot twins on the chair were the butt and tip sections of a fiberglass flyrod, accompanied by a neat cardboard box containing precisely one Martin No. 67A reel and a packet of flyline that was nearly the exact shade of the chair itself. I was only momentarily dumbstruck.

"Who's is THIS?" I cried.

"Who's do you think it is?" he casually replied.

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Twenty five years can change a lot of things. I've lived "out west" since graduating college in 1985, and it's been my privilege to catch a few nice trout, many with the rod my dad gave me. I'm now a father myself, but the recessive flyfishing dream-gene seems to remain most strongly with me. Occasionally I see flickers of it in my children's eyes. It generally is easiest to see when we're floating down a clear river, and a trout takes the offering on the end of their lines.

Dad's surprise gift to me now hangs retired over my desk, its halves crossing over to form a flattened "X" above the brass lamp by which I read and write. It rests there in a place of honor --a place where I can look up and hear my dad say "Who's do you think it is?" from twenty-five years and 1700 miles away. If I listen very carefully, I can almost hear "I love you, buddy" somewhere in there; something like the undertones of stones beneath the ceaseless chatter of the current. I'm absolutely sure of it.

 

You ever made it to the Toccoa yet or made a date for when you're comin?

 

Bass, Redfish and Bones will be no problem with the Lamson reels. There was a corrosion issue with the older Lamson conical drags but that was remedied long ago. Even if you bought an older reel Lamson has upgraded replacement parts that they used to send out for free.

 

Not yet my buddy is taking his last final today, if a local tailwater is generating wednesday theres a chance we'll be there then. But if not, Sunday, unless they generate.

 

Gotcha. They haven't been generating any, but after all this rain we got they'll probably run it for a little while soemtime this week. There's always the Upper Toccoa if they're generating on the lower. As long as it isn't blown out from the rain, anyway. Let me know when you make it down this way. I think I sent you my number in case you have any questions.

 

I would love to start fly fishing but I don't even know where to start.. whats a good starter reel and everything.. take me to school!

 

thanks! that helps so much!

 

Whats up guys, im new to fly fishing and fly tying but am slowly learning!

But here is my first fish on the fly in my backyard...

 

I agree. Buy a cheap set up to see if you actually like it first. No need to go out and spend 3-400 and decide it's not for you and end up selling your set-up for close to nothing. What are you fishin for?

 

I have this in i believe a 5/6wt...
http://www.cabelas.com/catalog/search_catalog_command.cmd?fromProductSearch=true&item1=IK - 320570


I wanted something i can use/learn in salt and fresh with.

 

eh just bass.. possibly take it with me camping and on vacation.. i'm strictly a catch and release guy so pretty much whatever bites..

 

The fisht was ehhh "OK" i cought him about a month ago and the water temp has been dropping, they dont fight as well when the water gets colder.The eat slowers baits and dont hit super hard... still fun tho.

 

I'm blessed with living in an area with world class trout fly fishing. Caught this beauty last fall

 

I live in South West BC, just a hop skip and a jump to Kamloops and Merritt

 

Heres another rainbow trout from the same area, different lake

 

went to Wal-Mart saw three brands of fly rod packages.. Shakespeare, Martin, pflueger... I almost bought the Martin brand but wanted to know which one is best out of the three all three priced same but was wondering about quality..

 

yea mainly bass ...I just didn't know which one .. thanks this helps!