Fly Tying the Emotion Detector

Birthday Surprise

You know your life is pretty peachy when an unexpected package shows up on your doorstep, a long, 4" square package. And, even though it's a plain, unmarked package from an unknown address, as an angler you know what's in it. That old familiar shape that says, "you've got a rod!"

My buddy Nick had been talking about the new Moonlit rods he's been testing out and catching a lot of redfish, speckled trout and bass with. He's also been testing, and catching the majority of those fish, with the steady stream of flies I've sent him, no strings other than some honest feedback.

When he mentioned I might like the 8'2", 6 weight model, there's been talk of a quick-shot streamer rod, I shrugged it off thinking "that would be nice, but a new rod isn't in my immediate future".

Then a few days later the box showed up. When I texted Nick his reply was "Happy Birthday".

Hot damn!

I got out and lawn cast the, sleek, burnt orange rod. I normally won't take the wrapper off the grip of a rod until I've had it for a while and feel like it's something I'll want to use. The wrapper came off the grip after 4 casts, the last of which I stepped off at 72'.

But then there's always the question of how it will handle casting with a heavy fly in addition to the line weight. This morning I got a chance to test that.

Living in the City of Billings has its perks, one of which is a surprising amount of bass and carp fishing for being within viewing distance of the Rocky Mountains, something that's a welcome perk when all the rivers in the vicinity are in the "chocolate milk" stage of run off. I chose one of the bigger ponds in the area because of the carp possibilities knowing a chunky carp would tell me what I wanted to know about how the Moonlit rod would handle a formidable fish.

I will admit that it didn't start out well. Graphite has been my fly rod material of choice for over a decade. My go-to 6 weight has been a self-built, 9' St Croix Legend Elite since 2010. It's a thunderstick with the power of a cannon, and the speed of a sling shot. Adjustment had to be made, but once they were I was firing 60-70 foot casts with relative ease, just at a slower pace.

The trick with a new rod, especially one with a completely dissimilar action to the rods you're used to, is to let the rod speak to you. Forget about the last rod you spoke to and just listen with your hand. The Moonlit spoke.

The outing was looking like a walk around the pond with a fly rod. The carp were in that ever too frequent F U mood, that mood when they seem to say "I've saw better than that from the 10 year old with worms man, come on!" they give you the fin and skedaddle for deeper water. 10 shots, 10 misses. That's fishing.

Giving up on the golden frustraters of freshwater fishing, I switched to my new old standby a Scimitar Minnow, it catches everything, except the F U carp. A couple small bass grabbed the 3/0 fly but couldn't quite get it in their maw around it. There had been quite a bit of commotion in an area of adjacent to some cattails all morning. I'd blown that shot the first time I approached by sliding on a substantial pile of goose poop, they're beautiful birds but man what a mess they leave! Anyway..........

With a "what the heck" attitude I laid the scimitar out beautifully, just to see if anybody was still home or they had drifted out deeper with the thinning of the clouds. Somebody was home, Mr Smallmouth. Unaware of the presence of smallmouth bass in this pond, I was surprised by the fight this fish put up, until I got a really good look at it and realized it was old Mr Bronzeback!

The Moonlit rod did a great job of handling what turned out to be a substantial smallmouth, especially for a shallow pond. Quite the extension to a great birthday. A new rod, another personal species caught on the Scimitar and my very first bass in Montana happened to be good sized and a smallmouth.

Despite what's going on across the country, life is pretty peachy, if you can just shut out the noise and get on with a little relief for a while.

Peace, Love & Fly Fishing,

J Wood

Feeling Lucky- Hello Again

Wow! It has been a long time since I posted anything here but not for a lack of adventure or happenings. It has been more a lack of time and probably just as much, if not more a lack of motivation.

A Fine Ending to a Week on the South Platte

September was a stellar month for fishing. Sharon and I pulled into Woodland Park, CO on September 15. A few days later Besnik “Nick” Haxhijaj (hi-gee-eye) flew into Denver and met me on the Dream Stream. The next day we hiked into Cheesman Canyon with Jon Easdon and Justin Brenner from Angler's Covey in Colorado Springs. Cheesman is one of the places I've had on my radar for a couple decades but for one reason or another never made it in there. It was well worth the wait and I'm thrilled that I got to share it with a great friend and two new friends that I hope to spend much more time on the water with in the future. I can't really give a play by play at the moment. Look for that to happen next spring in Southwest Fly Fishing magazine.

The next couple days Nick and I hit the Deckers section of the South Platte just downstream of Cheesman. Wednesday evening Nick was able to land his first Colorado dry fly trout. Appropriately enough it was a cutthroat! The next day we got an early start and hit it hard but the fishing was tough due to the brutal winds. It was still a great day shared by great friends.

We finished out the week back at the Dream Stream with a really rough start to the day but a stellar end to the week......another story that you can read about in Southwest Fly Fishing this spring.

Since Colorado things have been hit and miss as far as fishing. Sharon and I met my brother Mark at Lake Texoma for one of the warmest Octobers in decades. The plan was to try for stripers on the fly but a long hot spell just prior to our arrival had the stripers clinging to the deep water edges out of reasonable reach for fly fishing. Instead Mark worked me like a minimum wage laborer running noodle lines for catfish. It wasn't what I had in mind for fun but we did catch a few brutes and hauled in a few dozen in 5 hard days of running lines. On the last day we hauled in one we estimated at easily 40+ pounds and another around 20. Not a bad day especially considering between runs we got into some schooling sandbass -whitebass- and I was able to take a few on the fly. They weren't exactly the 20+ pound striper I was hoping for but it was a great way to end the week.

From there we went through D/FW on our way to meet friends from the Austin area at Lake Catherine State Park in Arkansas. There was no fishing but there may have been a few beers consumed among the group. ALWAYS a great time with these folks!!

The next week we found ourselves in a campground outside of Mountain Home Arkansas.........way outside of Mountain Home Arkansas. We were there to meet new friends that we met at our favorite campground in southwest Colorado. Between the looooooong drive back into town, recuperating from Colorado and Texoma, trying to work and the relentless midge hatches I didn't get much fishing time in there. We were camped next to the White River and believe or not except for the day I went out with Nick (Arkansas Nick not Houston Nick) I found I had little motivation to fish.

From Arkansas we headed east through Tennessee to North Carolina where I had set up some days on the water to research articles for Eastern Fly Fishing magazine. It's a tough job but someone has to do it for your reading pleasure. I got to see a lot of new water, catch some smallmouth and trout including a couple of native Southern Appalachian brook tout and meet some great new friends. Thanks a million to Ken Hardwick of Headwaters Outfitters who guided me on the French Broad Rive and Matt Canter of Brookings Cashiers Anglers who introduced me to the tailwater on the Tuckasegee River.

We showed up in Panama City Beach, FL a little over 2 weeks ago. Though I have been chomping at the bit I still don't even have a fishing license yet but I did get to help 3 of the grandkids catch some bluegills. Between kids, grandkids, trying to catch up on writing and sifting through a few thousand photos it's no surprise. It's been what seems like forever since kids rushed over and called me grandpa. That's almost enough to make an old guy forget all about fishing..........almost. It's also a great reminder that there are far more important things in life than fishing.

The Creek With No Name

For days I’ve been patiently sitting around our campsite at times when I would normally be on the Upper Dolores River fishing. Since we got to Dolores, CO last week it has been raining on and off putting a serious damper on my river time. Today I couldn’t be patient any longer. I may have reached a point in life where I feel good about foregoing fishing now and then just to sit but sitting makes an old guy fat…..well that and all the snacking that goes on while being patient.

We woke up this morning to cloudy skies and a light drizzle but there was that feeling in the air. It was that feeling anglers know as a good day to fish, we feel it in our bones. It got stronger as the morning wore on and the skies cleared. During our morning walk along the river through the campground it was obvious that there wouldn’t be any fishing the Dolores today. It has been raining upstream for days in the headwater canyon which turns the 50 miles of river upstream of McPhee Reservoir to a chocolatey-milky mess. In fishing you should always have a plan-B. Fortunately there is no shortage of plan-B options around here. Today’s plan-B is a creek with no name.

This creek is the perfect spot to air out a Winston Retro 3 weight I’ve had stuck in its tube for over a year. It is 6 ½ feet of pure fiberglass perfection with an action so slow you can almost take a nap between the backcast and presentation. A 14” trout can put a bend in it all the way to the cork but I can still lay out 40 feet of line if the situation calls for it but not today. I scarcely had more than 15 feet of line out of the guides. I strung it up with the smallest reel I have along the other day hoping I could get on some small water. When I first put the Lamson Liquid 1.5 on the reel seat it felt out of balance but when I put the rod together today it felt near perfect with the weight of the line in the guides. The other day I contemplated acquiring a smaller reel but after fishing it that idea has been put to rest. It turns out to be a near perfect combination. If Lamson would just make the Liquid in a size 1 it would make a perfect match.

Although I love fishing this creek and other creeks like it I haven’t hit it in several years even though we’ve made many stops here since I discovered it. For me creeks like this are best experienced on special occasions like fine gourmet dining because something like this can spoil you and eventually nothing seems to satisfy. It’s one of the first creeks I fished in this drainage back in 2003 which is still one of the highlights of my fishing life, today was another. I think the penchant for this type of fishing came from fishing a small creek in New Mexico just like this one. I hope to visit the nameless creek in New Mexico again next year. Until then I’ll just savor today.

I won't go into a blow by blow it's best to just let the pictures do the talking.

Experimenting on the Rogue

It hasn’t occurred often in 15 months of traveling that I am sad to leave a place for the next destination. For the most part when move day comes along I’m ready for the next location and whatever it holds in store. But this last two weeks has been a real thrill and most relaxing all at the same time. Sitting outside our travel trailer typing this I’m about four long casts from the banks of the Rogue River. Staying here has been fun and frustrating all at the same time. Most evenings I head out around 6:30 p.m. and fish until around 9:00 when the light finally fades to a point I can’t see my fly hit the water.

The frustrating part is that of all the months of the year to be here July is the absolute worst for chasing salmon and/or steelhead. I’m not sure how many hours exactly I have spent on the river casting and swinging large flies but it’s been quite a few. Between almost every evening, a few mornings and a pair of afternoons my estimate is around 50 hours on the water fishing. In all that time I have turned 4 fish with 2 solid hits, one fish that just rolled at my fly and one that took solidly. For all that not a single fish has been landed in the river. I’ve done some surf fishing but that’s another story. The owner of Four Seasons RV Resort where we’re staying keeps telling me he feels bad that for all my efforts I haven’t caught a salmon. The truth is that for all my efforts it’s my own fault that I haven’t landed a salmon.

Being an obsessive tinkerer I am always trying different things; some work out quite well others do not. My latest brilliant idea was to apply a handshake, loop-to-loop connection to the end of my leader. The thought process is based on the leader system my good friend Nick Haxhijaj of Nick FlyFishing. Nick is a nymphing fan like few I have ever met and religiously uses a Czech nymphing system that employs loop –to-pool connections to the final tippet sections at the flies. Here is where I say to you that it works great for trout nymphing but does NOT work when dragging an Emotion Detector across the bottom of a big river. Here’s where the reason I haven’t landed or at least had a chance to land a salmon is my own damned fault. About the third day here on the Rogue I hung up on a log after having dragged my leader through the rocks at the edge of the run many times. When I applied pressure to the log my tippet snapped at the loops. In a hurry to get back at it I attached another tippet via the same loop-to-loop connection and kept on fishing.

A few days later I went out feeling jolly about life and being able to fish on a big river with a chance at a big salmon. It was one of those days that just feel right in every way. It had been cloudy all day. Reports were that guides were catching good numbers of salmon at the mouth of the river. The wind was at the perfect direction and speed for the casting angle I needed. Most days I was having trouble feeling any confidence in what I was doing which translated into questionable casts which led to questionable swings which led to a heightened lack of confidence; this day though I was in the zone immediately. Writing about it now brings to mind other days when being in that same zone brought memorable trophies: an 11 pound largemouth, a 22 inch rainbow and my first and only steelhead. On my very first cast I could feel the swing and visualize the fly dropping behind the high-density line with the tail moving tantalizingly in the current. With a classic cast, swing and step approach I felt every inch of the run being covered successfully.

Less than 15 minutes into that glorious rhythm I felt the take. My line stopped in a way that indicated the fly had been interrupted by a living creature. It was the sensation of life that brings an instant adrenaline rush to an angler. I locked onto the line, raised my rod and came felt the other sensation that only anglers know but this one brings immediate disappointment. It was that little tick that tells us our line has parted but this one was the part of a 4 pound line not that of the 12 pound tippet I had attached to my fly. With my line now swing free in the current. All I could do was watch as the fish boiled twice at the surface heading back toward the ocean 7 miles away. Though I couldn’t see the fish I could tell it was exactly what I was after. Having spent nearly 50 years watching fish from every vantage point an angler ever does I could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt it was a BIG fish. The rest of the evening’s fishing was done halfheartedly. My rhythm was shot to hell, my confidence broken in a way it’s taken a week to repair.

Tonight is my last chance to try for one last shot at a salmon on the Rogue River. It has been a week and a day since my tippet parted with my leader. I’m using my old tried and true leader to tippet connection again. No more experimenting. Whether I actually hook into another salmon and do or do not land it remains to be seen and for the first time since we got here it doesn't even matter. This evening I'll just live in the moment, try not to think about what could have been and enjoy being skunked on one of the most beautiful rivers in the country.