Fish, Flies & Water » Remembrances

Pour a Sip for Sage…

JB — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:05:07 +0000

This little post is in honor of Sage (seen above, peering over my shoulder with his well-practiced—and very effective—”sad eyes look”). He passed away over the weekend. Sage was the beloved dog of a very close friend in Montana, and he has appeared before on this blog as part of various angling adventures. Sage, in all of [...]

Monday Fish Fry – Black-Water Brown

JB — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:23:10 +0000

Another quick pic to provide a little fish eye-candy here at FF&W. This is a shot I took many years ago, when film was what you put into cameras instead of SD cards. This brown was caught on Bartlett Lake on the Vermejo Ranch property. The combination of the overhead sky and the low angle [...]

Friday Fish Fry – A Fishy Creek Somewhere

JB — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 04:09:09 +0000

No actual fish in this one. I just like this as a candid “my girl and me” shot (thanks, Flynn). Kel’s working a drop-off (just to the left, off-camera) somewhere on some water someplace in western Montana. A few hours after this shot was taken, Kel made one of the most dead-on perfect Puddle Casts [...]

Random Fishing Shot – Walking DePuy’s

JB — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 16:09:00 +0000

No fish, no drama, just a single frame that Kelley took of me one day on Montana’s DePuy Spring Creek a few years ago. It’s really just a snapshot, with no premeditated anything going on, but what it displays just speaks to me rather strongly about my fishing and my life. I’ve fished the spring creeks [...]

Happy Father’s Day

JB — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:01:51 +0000

GB and me at the Vermejo Ranch back in 1977. GB still wears that same red bandana and blue shirt combo, and I still wear a cowboy hat and boots. We also still really like fishing together when we can. Some things never change. A happy Father’s Day to fly-fishing fathers around the world. I [...]

Jack Charlton Dies

JB — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:57:20 +0000

Just got this out of the blue. Jack Charlton, of Charlton and Mako Reels fame, died on June 9. He died rather suddenly, it seems, from what I’ve been able to find out in the last few minutes. I’d been in contact with Jack this past year, talking reels and catching up a bit. We’d [...]

Tyin’ with GB

JB — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:05:19 +0000

GB is busy tying the 39274957287456 flies he’s going to include in the upcoming Long Flies book (actually, I think it’s only 80 or so, but they have to be right), so I figured that a post on tying with GB was in order. One of the most memorable things about the frequent outings that my father [...]

Two Favorite Texts (by an Old Friend)

JB — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 14:07:22 +0000

I recently spent some time re-reading (more than once) two little, handmade texts given to me by my friend, Bill Logan. Bill is a spectacular fly tyer, a true artist/sculptor, and a writer of lovely stories. Some years back (1997, 1998, maybe?), Bill and I met up for a fly fishing show in Paris, and [...]

Random Fly-Fishing Supermodel Shot

JB — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 06:11:16 +0000

That’s Kelley—looking like she just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad—hanging out on the front porch of a friend’s home along the banks of Montana’s Madison River. This is one of my all-time favorite shots of my wife. Not long after this was taken she was into a monster brown that ran her into [...]

GB’s “Reading Waters” Whitefish Story

JB — Wed, 18 May 2011 14:07:00 +0000

With Reading Waters now at the printers, I figure that another little (and hopefully humorous) story from the book is due. This one is from GB’s past, and includes the biggest whitefish either of us have ever caught. Hope you like the (somewhat abridged) read. In the early/mid 1980s, I appeared in three videos from 3M/Scientific [...]

“Reading Waters” Excerpt #1

JB — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:11:51 +0000

GB’s second book in the “Fly Fishing” series, Reading Waters, is planned to be available in time for Father’s Day orders (I’m polishing the index right now). In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from the text. This is basically the first few paragraphs from page one of Chapter One. Hope you like it. Waters have always [...]

A Favorite Place – Madison Morning Between the Lakes

JB — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:00:21 +0000

The sights, sounds and smells of this place are so close to me right now that my mind and body are literally craving them. This is a photo from a day that my father and I spent along the Madison between Hebgen and Quake Lakes a few years back. So warm that morning, with a [...]

“Reading Waters” – Costilla #1

JB — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:02:47 +0000

This morning, I finished up the photo/illustration layout for Chapter Three of Reading Waters. In one spot, GB dictated the use of one of my 1990s-vintage photos of Costilla #1 creek on the Vermejo Ranch property. It is a photo pulled from a series of images that I made one morning when the light simply forced [...]

FF&W Archives – Vermejo 1975

JB — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:08:34 +0000

Other than the fact that I’m taller now, and rarely wear green pants, there isn’t much difference between this shot from 1975 and some I took recently. This is from the first year that father did fly-fishing schools on the Vermejo Ranch property in northern New Mexico. GB was a newly-minted director in the then [...]