critter

My wife’s life is about to change.  Tonight, after a bad day of work, she bought a new fly rod (Sage Flight 5wt) and a reel (Ross CLA 2) and fly line.  Guess the house will never look the same as she will be out on the river with me…for the most part.  She already has  found a substitute for me as she has set up a tentative fishing date with a friend while I am out on vacation fishing in Montana.  I know Right!  Good by old life, good by semi-clean house, hellllllllo FISHies!!!  I’m so proud.  Unless of course she makes a habit out of catching trophies.  Then we may have to have a little chat for my ego’s sake. 

The last four days of the Great Waters Expo was kind of like Christmas for me.

To keep things from getting long winded on this post, I will just note my highlights from the week, so as to not bore ya too much.  So hang on and here we go!

A year ago, at the expo I was not really enjoying it as much as I could have.  With the weight of having been informed that my department was being off-shored and I was to be out of a job soon, having my DVD player stolen at the expo, and wrapping up all the mess that was involved in replacing the engine in my truck, I was having a serious bad streak that was beating me down.

With that in mind, we flash forward a year for the 2010 expo, I am in a different place.  A happier and more appreciative place.

Thursday:

• Thursday night at the club, we had a great presentation by Jeff “Bear” Andrews from Michigan on fly fishing for Labrador Brookies.  The photos and the stories had me dreaming of going on such an adventure.  In support of Bear (and my want for a fresh lesson) I purchased one of his fly tying DVD’s on tying trout flies.
• Thanks to Andy Fiskness’s hard work, we also got our hats and clothing back that night with the new club logo embroidered on them so that we would have them for the expo.

Friday:

• Greg Meyer gave me a nice display piece of driftwood that I can use to display my flies on when I do tying demonstrations.  It’s very cool!
• Mark Tibbetts brought his 105mm lens for me to use to see if I like the results in regards to my macro fly photography.  I can’t wait to set up Critters Fly Studio and start snapping a few pictures to see what happens!
• The Fly Tiers gang had supper at a nice Italian restaurant, called Biaggi’s, that was way too good and way too filling and way nice atmosphere.  I HIGHLY recommend it as a must try for anyone needing a night out.

Saturday:

• I scored three dry fly capes for the price of two.  I only intend on keeping one for myself, and donating the other two as raffle items for our club presentations.
• Then, from the chicken pimp, I scored four nice sections of cock feathers, each different colors, for use as hackle that will be suitable for 18 – 24 flies, along with two hen necks.
• My buddy Jeff Kennedy and artist, came up to me on Saturday morning as I was set up doing some fly tying demonstrations and asked for one of my flies, so I gave him one of my Spruce streamer flies and he headed back to his booth to paint it.  He painted up a very nice water color portrait of it then returned the fly to me along with the water color painting.  I was very shocked and VERY grateful for the gift.  I have purchased some prints of his work in the past along with his recent book, Drawing Flies 365, and to have an original painted by Jeff of a fly tied by me…well that’s something I just can’t describe in words.  Wow.
• I found a nicely made 4wt Pennington bamboo fly rod that felt very good and is going to work very nicely on about half a dozen streams I know.  Not to mention that both Steve Pennington and his wife were extremely nice and wonderful to talk to and talked a little about his home waters in Northeastern Iowa.  The feel was right, the price was right, and now, I am in need to find the right reel for it since I bought it home.
• Another bonus was that I had several opportunities to socialize a bit more with another tier, Bill Heckel, whose flies and personality I really admire.  A Really nice guy, with some illustrative and funny stories involving his friends Lefty Kreh and Dave Whitlock.  He also was nice enough to tutor me on a technique to improve a problem I was having with the wings of a fly I was struggling with, which worked instantly to improve the quality of the flies I that I was tying at the show.

Sunday:

• We started the day with breakfast at the french restaurant across the street.  I normally get their awesome eggs Benedict, but this year I chose to deviate from the tradition and ordered their French Crepes made with salmon and dill.  It was very good, but something that would have made a better dinner then a breakfast as it gave me strong salmon breath.  I’d do it again as there was no need for lunch after that.
• I was able to take a breath from the show and go to two hour-long seminars.  One on fishing the Timber Coulee, a river I want to get to know more about since my last encounter where I had an epic battle of man vs. trout, and the trout won.  The other seminar was actually not a seminar but a open forum workshop for those looking for help with writing and publishing.  I found it very interesting and wished that we could have had an additional hour for the discussion to continue.

So that was my weekend in a nutshell.  I hope everyone that attended had a great time, it appeared that everyone from the club that was volunteering was having a good time.  I think this was the first year that I wished that the expo would have gone on for one more day.  Usually I am completly worn out, this time, I was energized by it all.

So as promised, I won’t get into all the other sub-stories to keep this post short. Time to kick off the socks and grab a beer.

Last night I got a call from my buddy, Canadian-Ben (SWE) to see if I wanted to go fishing Sunday in spite of all the bad reports about how the rivers were blown out by mid-week.  He was watching the flow plummet back to normal and the weather forecast was optimistic.  I was easily swayed since I had my heart set on fishing this weekend since being skunked last Monday.  We set a time to meet at his place for breakfast, and spent the next 20 minutes getting my stuff together for the trip.

The alarm went off at 6am this morning, I was out the door by 6:30am.  I got to Ben’s place, it was still dark thanks to the daylight savings time switchover, and he made a great breakfast.  We headed out and found our way to the riverside by 8:30am.

The fog had lifted, the sky was overcast, and the water was very cold.  We headed to a favorite spot of Ben’s and to assure me that there were trout here, he caught and landed a nice buttery Brown trout to show me.  That was very kind of him, but now Team Sweden was ahead of Team Norway in the medal count thanks to a size 20 brassie.  The water was near its previous flow from a week ago and was somewhat stained, but it had gradually got better as the day progressed.  We fished awhile until we thought we pretty much checked out all the possible feeding lanes, then headed back to the car to move on to other possibilities in warmer water.

Along the way, we stopped in at Lund’s so that I could check out the fabled Hardware store that had fly fishing stuff that I had heard about over the years.  That was interesting, they definitely had a large fly assortment.  It was still kind of weird to go into a hardware store and see Filson clothes, Fish Pond fly vests, echo rods, and Dr. Slick tools.  I did my obligatory purchase of some flies, as I try to do at all “normal” fly shops that I have visited and we continued on our way to fish some more.

A short walk later we were back in the water, and it wasn’t long before Team Norway (that’s me) evened up the Medal count with a respectable Brown trout on one of my double secret zebra midge variations, in a size 22.  We made a few more casts and then decided to leap-frog the guys below.  There was a light, but steady hatch all day of little black stone flies as shown in the picture above, running about size 12 to 8 and the fish were not taking them on the surface.

We hit here and there and eventually ran into, Team Sunshine.  Team Sunshine comprised Sid, Joe, and Tom from our fly tiers club.  When we came up to them, Sid and Joe were relaxing and enjoying all 68 degrees of sunshine and a cigar, with Tom just down around the bend.  For those wanting to know, Team Sunshine had no medals earned at this point.  We chatted a bit and continued on our trek.  The air temperature had risen quickly, and all the clouds had left for the day.   It was a nice day, and that sentiment was echoed by the other dozen or so fly fisherman that we came across who all had been unsuccessful.  I have to suspect that it was because a lot of them were just getting on the water when the sun had come out instead of fishing the “better” overcast weather earlier in the day.

So, Team Norway and Team Sweden decided to form alliances to ramp up our medal count and we formed Team Scandinavian.  Which just really meant that we had enjoyed our time out on the water, and that the we needed to hold a celebratory feast at a nearby respectable Wisconsin beer burger joint Ben knew of.  We spent a good 6 hours in the cold water, and we had “earned” it.  It was nice way to wrap up a day where we had both got our first trout of the 2010 season on what was a to be considered a tough day of fishing as far as the trout not cooperating.  For the record, the leinie’s honey weiss tap beer and Spotted Cows on tap waffle fries were very good.

I see that it has been a little while since I’ve posted anything so I have a little update.  This past week I was feeling a little “off” for the first half.  Good or bad, I missed out on the open-tying night at the Fly Angler and couple other opportunities the weekend before, but I got a lot of sleep and filled myself up with lots of vitamins and fluids.  And after the past three days, I think my shoulder is back in where is should be, that is to say it has stopped clicking every time I raise it up now.
I had a blast at the Thursday night fly tiers meeting.  Anderson had a weird sense of humor that night, and it was making us all laugh our asses off.  I mostly just came to socialize and had tied a couple of flies at Feiker’s vise when I decided he had abandoned his tying station longer then I could bear.  So he had a couple more flies in is box when he had eventually returned with a fresh beverage in hand.

Saturday was the highlight of the week for me.  Ben, his wife Amy, and Andy all came over for a Lie-n-Tie.  We had set an additional challenge for the event in that everyone could bring beer or wine, but they all in some way had to be related to fish, fishing, or rivers.  Most of our finds were pretty tasty.  Jen and I had cleared the kitchen table and turned on the Olympics for background noise and we tied flies from 1pm to around 7pm or so.   Amy brought some delicious goodies for the event, including home-made chips in the shape of fish.  How can you go wrong with that I ask?  Well, you can’t!  Jen had also prepared chili in the slow cooker for everyone to snack on as we chatted and tied flies.

Baily checked in occasionally to see what we up to and more importantly to inspect what materials we were using.  I think, after last weeks ‘encounter’ were she found and distributed two full packs of peacock herl throughout the house, she now has a heightened awareness of the potential play things for her amusement.  I’m just glad she didn’t get into the more expensive feathers.

At the end of the day, I set up my mini-studio to photograph some of our flies that we would use for the next four months for the “Fly of the Month” patterns, and called it a night after that.  I am positive everyone had a good time and that this is something we will have to keep in mind to do again.

Hey everyone, I have spent most of my day doing some quick clean up, editing the photos I took last weekend at the expo.  Because there are so many of them, I posted them to one of my online web albums, which is at Picasa.  I hope you like them.  Happy viewing!