Daily Fly Fishing News

Tom gives five reasons there are so many flies and fly variations out there to choose from. He also reveals his favorite, go-to fly in this latest podcast.

Excerpt: "There God knows how many fly patterns sold in the world today, and that's just the ones that are sold commercially. When you add fly patterns that may not be commercially any more but are still listed in books somewhere and that fly tiers tie themselves, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fly patterns. Why are there so many? First of all, the good ones never go away. So if you look at a pattern like a muddler minnow, a crazy charlie, the Clouser minnow, Royal Wulff, Dave's Hopper, pheasant tail nymph... these flies have been around for fifty years or more because they work."

Tom's favorite go-to fly? The parachute adams, in sizes 10 through 24.

Some of the best lodges I've ever fished at were sticklers for details. Not details like whether the boats were always the most current or the fly selection fully stocked, but the important ones like whether the guides would break from the daily grind to go after specific fish, or whether the beer was cold at the end of the day. Choose your own questions -- like "Can I bring my dog?" -- but be sure to ask them well ahead of time.

On New West, Bill Schneider comes up with a pretty good set of questions to ask before deciding where to deplane for your next fishing adventure. Example: "Ask if guides fish. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm paying for a guide, he (and it's almost always a he), should not fish. Instead, he should help his clients catch fish, period."

On his new Unaccomplished Angler blog, author Kirk Werner suggests "If you don't spey, don't start" (he even offers a link to the bumper sticker). "I was becoming convinced that I didn't enjoy standing in a river in January during a cold, steady rain, fishing in vain for a fish that only existed in the history books. What I didn't realize at the time was that the thing I didn't enjoy was standing in a river in January during a cold, steady rain, repeatedly casting a heavy single-handed rod in vain for a fish that only existed in the history books." A very entertaining read, even if you could care less about fishing in face-numbing weather.

But if you really must, casting instructor Rob Kolakowski offers a good introduction to picking the right spey line for the job in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune."Skagit lines are quite aggressive and used to cast big flies and heavy sink-tips at closer ranges. These lines are available for single or double hand rods. They were first available as shooting heads, but now I also see them as a full lines with running line attached."

Video: Steve Rajeff describes the three main styles of spey casting

Tagewahnahn (pronounced tag-a-wa-non) is a native American name for landlocked Atlantic salmon, which live only in parts of Maine, New Hampshire and the eastern Canadian provinces. If the species itself wasn't exclusive enough, imagine a book that talks only about 2.75 miles of river that is famous for its landlocks and the heritage that surrounds fishing for them. As is often the case, though, the microcosm provides a perfect perspective from which to look at fly fishing traditions as a whole, and Dennis Labare's Tagewahnahn: The Landlocked Salmon at Grand Lake Stream (www.glssalmon.com; hardcover; 216 pages; $65) does a great job of making a single location meaningful to a much larger audience than local guides and anglers.

Since Labare's book came out last year it's gotten plenty of media attention, so there's no need to heap on praise, but I will add that the book itself is very well produced and that it has added more then $5400 to the coffers of Trout Unlimited and the Grand Lake Stream Historical Society -- both good reasons to give it a closer look. A review on DownEast.com is especially worth reading, and you can find an excerpt on the Fly Rod and Reel Web site.

Soul patches are out. (Actually they've been out for about three years.) So what's next?

According to Jeff Lund, the 1800s provides a perfect answer in the neck-beard, a "Thoreauly" independent and fishy expression of personal style. "This-dude-is-so-sweet-we-say-all-three-of-his-names, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned, 'Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.' Is there a better way to live than letting the wild air get stuck in your throat beard? I think not."

One of the biggest challenges in fly fishing photography is something you have the least control over: the weather. Fly fishing will take you to some sweltering locales and some downright frigid ones. No matter what the extremes, all can cause a problem for cameras when transitioning from your tent, cabin, or motel to the outside environment. Typically the temperature and humidity is such that simply taking your camera out from one to the another can cause lens fogging and internal condensation.

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, one solution is simply leaving your camera in the outside environment for a couple of hours before shooting. But another way -- favored by many pro photographers -- is to make a permanent home for silica gel or desiccants within a waterproof pack or bag.

These products can be bought at most high end camera stores and are fairly compact items, easily slipping in a camera bag. They range in price from anywhere from a couple of bucks up to $30 or $40 dollars and work by sucking the moisture off of items and containing it within themselves -- kind of like rice does in salt shakers.

But if you're like me, free is always better. I've found that my local pharmacy has an endless supply of silica gel and desiccants in every shape and size you could conceive of. Apparently almost every drug in the world comes packaged with them and pharmacists just throw them out. Next time you're in need of some camera drying magic simply roll on down to the pharmacy and ask for their extras.

Brian Milne reports on About.com that local pro George Daniel topped the rest of the field in last week's U.S. Fly Fishing Championships held in State College, Pennsylvania. "Utah's Lance Egan, who finished first during a difficult session on the Little Juniata, earned the overall silver medal, and New Mexico's Norman Maktima finished with the bronze."

You can read the full results in Milne's report.

So you want to get an article published. You finally have a piece you think the editors will like (complete with hi-res photos and detailed sidebars), but you don't know the first thing about how to start the process. This week on "Fine Lines," Phil Monahan tells you how it all works, from the initial query to working with an interested editor.

"THERE ARE REALLY two levels of information involved in answering this question: first I'll explain the simple mechanics of the editing-and-publishing processes, and then we'll get into some ways you can increase your odds of having a story accepted for publication."

As winter draws nigh, many anglers set the rod by the door and call it a season. But some don't. If you're the kind of fisherman who keeps an "ice line," then you already understand the importance of keeping warm.

Traditional layering wisdom focuses on the importance of using only synthetic fabric: after all, if you put a pair of cotton long johns on under even the most expensive polypropylene shell, you're still going to be wearing a sponge by the end of the day. However, thanks to some new (old) technology, we now need to add an important caveat. Not ALL organic fabrics are verboten for layering. In fact, wool is one of the best baselayer fabrics known to man.

Perhaps as a result of too much good fishing, Chris Ward, the brains behind the MSN news website and the MSN portal has decided not to return to Microsoft. "A keen environmentalist, Ward said in an interview before his sabbatical that he planned to travel with his family to the US for six weeks and then visit the Costa Rican rainforest, as well as indulge in his passion for fly fishing." On Domain-B.com.

Combining the constant-motion softness of marabou feathers with a woolly worm fly, Russell C. Blessing's Woolly Bugger did what most great flies do: it improved on an already workable idea, and it helped those of us less apt to make a perfect presentation catch more fish. Blessing passed away at the age of 74 last Wednesday at his home in Pennsylvania.

Tom Rosenbauer recommended the Woolly Bugger as one of eight essential patterns in his The Orvis Fly-Tying Manual, "the Woolly Bugger was first tied in 1967 by Russell Blessing of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who added a marabou tail to a Woolly Worm in an attempt to imitate a hellgrammite, a big mean larva of a dobsonfly. I saw the fly about five years later on the upper Beaverkill. I was sitting on edge of a deep pool with Ron Kusse, a bamboo rod maker who was running the old Leonard Rod Company at the time. It was one of those midday breaks in August when you realize you won't catch a fish for seven hours, when the sun leaves the water. 'Wanna see something amazing?' Rod asked."

As Gary Soucie wrote in his book Woolly Wisdom, Blessing had some specific advice on how to fish his favorite pattern, starting by "dead-drifting the Bugger, 'to see what happens.' If that doesn't produce, he will add jigging motions on the strip, jig it back at the end of the drift ... and across the current and let it swing, use hand-strip retrieves. 'Sometimes,' he says, 'it takes fast strips. Some of the guys around here will strip it as fast as they can.'

'Almost everything works, some of the time.' Amen to that."

For all of you science nuts who happen to also love cooking, researchers have come up with formulae for all the important (if you live in England and enjoy biscuit dunking and tasteful slurping) food recipes. Apparently one of these food geeks is a also a fly fishing nut. "To make a pancake you need to know how to crack an egg. Enter Glasgow University's Poultry Research Unit. Researchers found a palette knife is ideal, combined with a fly-fishing action and 30 Newtons of force." Kate Youde in the U.K.'s Independent.

Filed under "Things to Do In Cleveland On Your Day Off" (or, "I Need to Get Out More"): Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Dan Ferry been too busy working to indulge in fly fishing in his own backyard (which anyone familiar with Lake Erie steelhead will tell you is fantastic.)

"Off the top of my head, I would like to go fly-fishing again. I have fly-fished on vacation a bunch, but last year I went here in town. I have lived here for almost 15 years now and did not know you could fly-fish in Cleveland." Sarah Crump on Cleveland.com.

From the New York Times's April 3, 1988 edition comes this gem in which Joan Salvato Wulff describes how her infatuation with fly fishing began: with the sudden realization that ''It's better to be the fisherman than the rower.''

"In those days there was no way I could have made my living at tournament casting, but I didn't want to find myself happily teaching dance at age 75, without having fulfilled my fishing dreams. So I turned professional as a caster, giving sport show demonstrations, and a line manufacturer gave me part-time work as a good-will representative, calling on its Eastern dealers. I had no ambition to be rich - just happy, in the fishing field."

John Holyoke reviews Randy Spencer's new 316-page book on life and fishing around Maine's Grand Lake Stream. "Spencer never uses three words when one would do. And the result is a stunning portrait of a truly special place, illuminated by the people who live for their yearly visits to those remote Maine woods." In the Bangor Daily News.

Where Cool Waters Flow on Amazon.