Me and Marv

Marv Taylor and I at the Western Idaho Flyfishing Expo last weekend. Marv is some what of a stillwater pioneer and local legend. He wrote the outdoor column for the Idaho statesman for a number of years and published 7 books dealing with fishing and entomology. I personally have learned a great deal from his literature and he is some what of a hero of mine. He develop a number of flies that I use and tie and was instrumental in helping to popularize many of his peers work in fly tieing and fishing. Marv is now 84 years old and "going strong" according to his statement. He is currently spending his time traveling to shows and conclaves around the west and doing a bit of fishing when he can.......go figure. More on Marv his flies and stories to follow later.

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Boise Valley Woolly Buggers

Tonight I took Rose and Caleb to there first meeting with the Boise Valley Woolly Buggers.The Boise Valley Woolly Buggers is a young oriented fly fishing club that I have been interested in for quit some time. They teach the kids fly fishing skills, fly tying, and conservation. There motto is "There is more to fishing than catching fish". The youth lead the meetings with adult supervision. The group was start by Boise native and fly fishing legend Clayne Baker whom I first met while fishing out on Warm Lake a few years ago. Clayne's hope is that the youth involved learn about leadership and being a team player. Tonights meetings the kids had an art contest and had to create there own picture of a fish. The winner won a small box of flies that had been provided by one of the fathers. The meeting also featured an inclusive update on area fishing trends and techniques to use in winter weather. The kids also shared fishing stories with each other and at the end had a door prize drawing. Caleb won a large sack full of fly tying materials and drew a second time and won some flies. Rose also won a large sack of tying materials. Both of my kids showed excited attitude before during and after the meeting, in fact they were dang near impossible to get to bed! As a father I am excited to see them interested as much as they are and look forward to more meetings. Our next goal is waiting for a decent day to try out a pond recommended by Clayne to catch some bluegill. Probably try some small midge dry fly patterns or tiny chironomid nymph patterns. My over all impressions of the meeting: The kids ran the whole meeting and all the kids were attentive and non-disruptive. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves even the adults who kind of watched while sitting at the back of the room or conversing in the hall way while the kids carried on with the meeting. The youth leaders seemed to be conscience and appreciative and complimented each kid as they presented stories, pictures, and came up to accept prizes. I was thoroughly impressed at how well the meeting ran and look forward to seeing my ids participate in a fantastic organization.

Fly of the Week: Humpy

The Humpy is a good all around attractor pattern. It can be tied in any color. Some people tie it with a very slim body. Not me, I say if you want a slim bodied, high floater, use a Wulff. Humpys should be big and fat. They float like a cork. They work very well in the summer and fall as they imitate a number of terrestrials. They are also a good searching pattern when no hatch is evident. Generally, it is fished dead drift. But, sometimes I like to use the Humpy as an indicator when fishing small emergers or midges in rougher water and a dropper nymph.
The important thing to remember about this fly is that it is a pattern so you should tie it in a wide variety of sizes and colors. My advice go out to where you are fishing and simply copy color combinations that you see! Good Luck and tight lines.

Materials:

Thread: 8/0, to match body color
Hook: dry fly sizes 10 to 18
Tail: Moose.
Body: Thread.
Overbody and wing: Elk cow.
Hackle: Silver Saddle, furnace and grizzly.

Tying Instructions: Humpy

1. Start the thread halfway at the hook shank. This is important, as it is the reference point for the body. Wrap to the bend, tie in tail, wrap to halfway point. (*You can use 6/0, but I've found that 8/0, because of its smaller diameter, "bites" into the material better than 6/0.)

2. Take a bunch of Elk, remove all underfur, stack well, size (correct size is from tip of the tail to hook eye), and cut to length.

3. Tie the Elk to the hook, wrap towards the bend, keeping the Elk on top of the hook. Wrap until you've completely covered the thread wraps for the tail. Never mind the stubs at the tie-in point - they will disappear later on.

4. Wrap the underbody with thread. Pray that it doesn't break, which happened to me... Lift the Elk, give it a quarter turn, fold it over and tie down on top of the hook shank. This should be at the halfway point. After three thread wraps I lift the wing and put two wraps under the wing around the shank, then three wraps over the wing again. I finish with one wrap around the shank only.

5. Divide the wing, put thread wraps around the base of each wing, post the wings. Lay a thread foundation in front of the wing, making a smooth taper towards the eye. Without this thread foundation the hackle will be all over the place due to the big difference in diameter behind and in front of the wing.

6. Tie in the hackle(s), dull side facing forward. Don't tie the hackle down where the barbs start; leave a short length of bare stem, which will produce a cleaner start of the hackled collar. The ugly spot, where the thread broke, will be covered with the first wrap of the furnace hackle.

7. Palmer the hackles forward, starting with the hackle that was tied in last (here: the grizzly one). Tie off hackles and whip finish.

We need a little history to make sense of fly rod actions. The first so-called fly rods were wood, and pretty crude. Fly lines were braided horse hair, not very effective either. Eventually rods evolved to cane, then split cane into intricately designed casting tools. Works of art - then and now.Split bamboo soon became the ultimate fly rod and still today is used by traditionalists and collectors.
During World War II, many new products hit the market. Fiberglass was one of them. So was PVC. Dacron and Nylon came out of the war effort too. Lots of innovations that ended up in the fly fishing world.
Fiberglass fabric was wrapped on a wood rod. Epoxy finished and the fiberglass rod was on the market. When the inventors figured out how to do away with the wood center the first hollow rods were born.
Considering the choices available at the time, either split bamboo or steel, the fiberglass rods were designed to copy bamboo. Fake bamboo rods. With a similar action ... as close as possible. Cane fly rods have a soft to moderate action. Some fiberglass rods were very soft and often referred to as "noodley" and the longer the rod, the more noodley it became.
Follow through a couple more decades into the space age and we find the fly rod industry taking advantage of new technology again. This time it is graphite and boron. Almost any material can be formed into threads of some sort. Once it's thread, it can be woven into fabric ... just like fiberglass which appeared in drapes, patching material for cars and boats - and flyrods. Boron was tried and rejected because it was considerably heavier than graphite without additional strength.
Here comes the catch. Those companies who had been making fiberglass rods had everything set up to make those rods to imitate or at least be similar to bamboo. Now there is a new material. What will happen?
Most companies had their machinery, mandrills (steel forms the fabric is wrapped on to make the blanks,) and their reputations established. If you bought one of their rods you knew by reputation how the rod would feel.
Some companies replaced part of the threads in the fabric with graphite. That made the rods lighter, but only slightly changed the action.
New companies had the option to make the same slow or medium action rods already on the market - or to do something entirely different. That's where faster action rods started.
Fast rods that are lighter in your hand, use more of the tip to propel the line, and (if cast correctly) do the work for you. One of the major advantages in fast rods is the person casting it does less work. So you aren't as tired as quickly.
Fast rods are primarily designed with the butt and middle sections built to play the fish, the top one third to cast the line. That does make the tip section (which is tiny compared to rods just a few years ago) vulnerable to breakage if the rod is used incorrectly when playing or landing a fish.
Bottom line? What do you want to fish for? Under what conditions? What can you afford? If you are casting well enough to get the fly where you want it most of the time, you also probably have developed a style - a method that is comfortable for you.
From one who has been fishing for some years, a word of encouragement. There is no such thing as a bad graphite fly rod. All of us would have thought we had gone to heaven if we had been offered any of the rods on the market today 25 years ago. The fly rod industry has made giant leaps improving our sport.
Match the action of the rod, and the price, to what works for you. Final word of wisdom: Don't ever buy a rod you have not cast.

Western Idaho Fly Fishing Expo

This will be the Boise Valley Fly Fishermen's 40th year since its conception and this will be our 7th annual expo. Our mission to promote the sport of fly-fishing through education and conservation activities is dependent upon a successful Expo.
Instruction in fly tying, casting, and fly fishing ethics has been our strength over the years. This year's event will feature several new programs as well as workshops in these areas.
This is a gathering that will allow Idaho and other regional fly tiers to show their talents to the fly-fishing public and exchange ideas, new and old.
Saturday evening, there will be a banquet with a program, dinner, raffle and auction. The Boise Valley Fly Fishermen will earmark funds raised at this event for various regional conservation undertakings.
We've nearly doubled the size Expo Hall,and have a large number of fly tiers who are listed on our tiers page. You'll see demos from high floating dry flies to deep sinking nymphs and tiers that will show you techniques that are guaranteed to make your fly tying and fishing more rewarding.

slide show

A Step Closer

The Hunter Family reunion was, and still is, and annual event in my family and we often spent Labor Day or Memorial Day getting reacquainted with family members and having fun in the outdoors. A common place to hold the reunion was in the Hagerman Valley. Hagerman is nestled in the Snake River Canyon of central Idaho. The River valley offers many outdoor activities to those wishing to enjoy the outdoors and the area is an oasis in the middle of the southern Idaho dessert. There a hundreds of natural springs and waterfalls that litters the steep canyon walls as the Snake River Aquifer comes to an abrupt end and empties into the Snake River. One such place that we camped on a regular basis was Thousand Springs State Park which featured some of the same spectacular water features described above. On the far end of the park, there is the Thousand Springs Fish Hatchery, a place where my brothers, cousins, and I spent hours fishing in the hatcheries run-off pond, chasing wildlife, and generally causing some kind of trouble.

The run-off pond was actually located in front of the hatchery entrance and wound back towards the camping and picnic area of the park before tapering into a culvert that ran under the entrance road and emptied into the river. At the head of the slew right at the hatcheries front gate was an enormous concrete box with a platform and railing set on top. This was where we fished the most often because the runoff from the hatchery spilled out of the top of the concrete box just below the standing platform. The water cascaded down about a four or 5-foot drop before slamming into pool of clear water below. This of course created a slight current and the fish would congregate at the tail waters of the falls. Even back then I realized this was a great fishing hole because the fish were there because of the food that would run out of the hatchery with the runoff water was easy to get. Therefore, a bunch of kids with some globs of Power bait on the end of their lines could easily make a good day of fishing.

What we would do is stand on the platform, make long casts out past the current section of the falls, and then reel back in to position our hooks in the tail waters and wait. The key to this strategy however was being on the platform so casting and positioning your bait was easy. There were some spots just to the sides of the giant box but these spots where harder to cast from and harder to keep your bait in the tail waters. However on occasion, we would be forced to fish from these locations because other people had beaten us to the standing spots on the platform. There was one advantage though that took a fly rod and some old rusty flies to discover.

After the falls come down off the concrete block and create the rapid something happens just to the sides of the current that you might find more common on a river or stream than you would on stillwater. Eddies! Two of them one on each side of the current that curved back towards the bank and created a couple deep pockets perfect for trout to sit and await food falling and drifting from the falls.. We always saw fish in these pockets of slack water but catching one was nearly impossible since the fish either spooked as you approached the edge of the water or saw your shadow and simply did not take any bait you threw at them.  The fish here often seemed larger than most we caught as well so they were very irresistible to a bunch of fished crazed boys. We had tried several ideas throughout the years ranging from regular baits, lures, and scents to outlandish things like threading gummy bears on the hook. Nothing worked but we never gave up.

One particular year when I was 11 my cousin Bob, who was only a couple months younger than I and often my counter-part in mischief, had acquired an old fly rod and box of old musky flies. As I recall the flies and the rod had once belong to his granddad that had passed on to the other side some years before. The rod was old fashioned with an auto reel and silk braided fly line. The flies were an assortment of wings, feathers, and a bit of rust colored stain blended into most of the fly bodies. We didn’t care however and hurried down to the sides of the platform to put the rod and other gear together. Bob picked out a random fly and lashed it onto the leader. He didn’t really cast it out on the water, it was more of a fling but it gave the line and leader enough distance to put the fly in the middle of the deep slack water. Within seconds of the fly laying on the water the first fish was hooked and Bob dragged in the line contained a very nice rainbow trout. We unhooked the fish put in on the stringer and readied for the next cast which resulting in the exact same result of the previous cast. With in about two or three minutes we had a good number of large fish on the stringer when Bob lost the fly we were using. We tried a couple others but the results were not as good. Instead, we packed everything up and headed back to camp proud as any two boys could be with our catch and feeling triumphant that we had finally cracked the secret to catching those fish out of the slack water.  

A few things contributed to our success that day. The first was just dumb luck I think. We really had no idea what we were doing and this was the first time either of us had used a fly rod or flies to catch fish. The second would be that we were able to get to the fish without being detected. The extra long length of the fly rod, being that it was about nine feet long,  made it possible to stand back further from the edge of the water and thus kept us from being detected by the fish. Lastly, we had picked a fly that was similar in some way to what the fish were already eating. This happened without either of us realizing it but the science behind fly-fishing is duplicating the natural food sources of the fish. Therefore, again by luck, we had simply matched the hatch and the results were, even now, astounding.

It was about this same time that my aunt Holly and Uncle Neil had moved into a house just up the street from where I lived. Neil was big into fly-fishing and fly tying, which was something my dad did not do. On a few occasions, Neil would invite me over to learn how to tie flies. The first was just a generic woolly bugger and some leech patterns. My tying lessons would be short lived however, as just before my 12^th birthday we moved from Meridian to a larger house just off the bench in Boise. This move from familiar territory to a new unfamiliar world with new friends, new surrounds, and many challenges for me personally would actually be the catalyst to pushing me further into art of fly-fishing.