Thursday, September 30, 2010

You can't beat old fashioned great service.

I ordered some fly tying materials from Scott's Fly Shop through their eBay store and I honestly couldn't be more pleased with the service.

I ordered the stuff about mid morning Monday and that evening I received an email that the items were in the mail. I received them today and when I opened it there was a little something extra as well as a note on the invoice from the owner thanking me for my business.

I am impressed with the turn around time of the this transaction and surprised and appreciative of the bonus material and the note.

I can say that Scott can look forward to taking my money in the future. Keep up the good work!

When it rains it pours.

Woke up this morning to the sounds of rain. Pouring rain. We're talking barrels here. Which is good, because in this part of PA we are desperate for it.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Barbed or Barbless, the debate continues.

I just read an interesting blog article from several years ago. You can view it here.

The blog discusses the effects that barbed or barbless hooks have on the mortality rates of fish. A study by Westerman is mentioned as finding that barbed hooks have a higher impact on mortality rates than barbless, but that there is no analytical data to show such. A study by Taylor and White agree with Westerman's findings using meta-analysis.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A horrible day fishing but a great night on the water

I live in SE PA and we have had almost no rain all summer. The last two days it rained all day and put the water levels up a little bit. I thought I'd go out and swing some streamers. I was hoping that the extra-murky water might get some catfish cruising around. I grabbed my 8 wt (which I wanted to dust off before my steelhead trip next month anyway) my reel with sink tip on it, and hand full of streamers and nymphs and went out the door.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Getting Strapped

While this may not be technically considered fly fishing gear, it's certainly a great outdoors item from a company that is doing some pretty great things.

The company is called Survival Straps. They use 500 lbs para-cord to make bracelets, belts, gun slings, etc. The idea is that you keep it on you and then if you are ever in some sort of a survival scenario, you unravel it and use it as you need it. They even claim that if you use it and send them the remains, with your story, they will replace it free of cost. (I've been tempted to take mine apart and send it back with a note "Shoelace Broke"  to see if they would send another one, but thought that might be abusing the system.)

Ant's Special Streamer

It's a dreary, rainy day so I thought that I would catch up on tying some flys. I noticed that I was low on one of my favorite streamers, a pattern I created and called Ant's Special Streamer(very original name, I know.) I've had luck with this one on panfish and bass, and some limited success on trout. I'm going to pit it against some steelhead at the end of next month; we'll see how that turns out.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

The color of my parachute

Not sure about you, but I usually have one bugger of a time tying parachute wings. Maybe I need to take remedial fly tying again or something, but I find this "easy" way to tie on wings more difficult than the traditional way.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Protect your weapon... on the cheap.

I was getting things ready for my Lake Erie steelie trip at the end of next month and realized that I don't have a tube for my rod, just the sock. It's a 4 pc, 9' 8wt from a big-box store.

So I did what I did for a few of my other rods that are shield-less. I made one from PVC!

And in the beginning......

It seems kind of silly to be starting a blog right now if only because the waters here in southeastern PA are so low due the lack of summer rain that they have been pretty much unfishable for several weeks. But I need to find something else to do with my otherwise-would-be-fishing time, and a man can only tie so many flies without going buggy (bad pun intended.)