At last, the final few drawings for Fishing the Film should be done today. I have been inserting the drawings into layout as I go (and doing captions at the same time), so that means that the book should be ready to go to the printers within a week or so. That pleases me to no end. Then I only have 19 more books (plus the second edition of Nature of Fly Casting) to get a handle on. It’s going to be a long five years….

One of my famous archived “placeholder” pix while I think of something better to post (or at least more wordy—fish are always good, words or not).

This was from a video-shoot at Tarpon Cay a couple of summers ago. This day was fantastic—with babies, juvies and bigger boys up to about 80 pounds—until we noticed “some clouds” between us and town. Within an hour or so of this photo being taken, we were heading back through a savage series of storms. We were in an open boat, on open water, lighting striking the ocean on either side, and with rain so heavy that all visual and GPS references vanished. It got a little spooky at that point.

A couple of very close lightning strikes as we sat in an idling boat (no directional references, so we were all stuck) made it even spookier. Then, the rain slowed just enough for our guide to see a beacon light on a nearby island, and he went for it full throttle. Got back just in time for another wave of storms that dumped more rain than I have ever seen come down in the space of an hour. That’s what we get for pushing the filming a little too long. Not going to push it like that ever again!

Next morning, all had cleared and the fishing was hot all over—but a hurricane changed its course, and we had to get out of Dodge (well, the Yucatan) 48 hours later.

In case you want to see the end results (we missed out on a day and a half, but still got good footage overall), here you go:

Spent most of Friday at North Fork Composites doing CCS and flex-board testing of rod blanks, while paging through patterns and doing some mix-and-match. The goal was to get three specific sets of blanks: 905-4, 906-4 and 864-4 for one of North Fork’s European clients. Got quite close on 5 of the 6 total blanks, so will hopefully be testing refined versions of those next week.

Been great to be working with Brad Loomis on this project. His technical know-how and ability to build great rod blanks is exceptional. This project, among a couple others, has lead to some pretty slick efficiencies in patterning, ferruling and so forth. I’ve also gotten to play with some of the latest, greatest resin technology. These projects have been pretty intense in terms of getting all of the building tech up to speed, but it’s great seeing it come together.

So here’s to 12322-13′s future, as well a few other 123xx series blanks that will be making their way into stores and onto streams this year.

Drawing Flies 52 Leadwing Coachman. This pattern caught my father his first trout back in the day (when GB was 11). A lot happened after that! Actually the Leadwing Coachman features prominently in the first story in the upcoming Fishing the Film book, and is the second illustration in Chapter One.

I drew several Leadwings for the book, and all took me less than 30 minutes to complete. When Jeff said “Let’s do a Leadwing,” I flipped back through my collection of FtF illustrations and found this one. It was my first attempt and it was fast (just a few minutes). I liked it, but it ended up being too “heavy” in terms of line for the text. So, I decided to use it here.

I may be “cheating” a bit with this (not my intent), but the drawing does technically adhere to the 30 minute rule, and I thought that it was something special considering all that surrounds it. Hope you all don’t mind me using it for the DF52 project.

Notes: This fly was drawn with my #1 and brush tip Pigma pens. I went at it fast, loose and with the idea that it would end up in a book. Two out of three isn’t bad. The fly took only a few minutes of pen-time, and another 20 or so to scan and clean up into this form in Adobe Illustrator. Its companion drawing—the one that is now in a book layout—took a bit longer, but would have also met the 30-minute deadline (at least in terms of pen-time).

Tech info: Pen on paper. Scanned and finished as vector art in Adobe Illustrator.

Jeff’s Leadwing is here. Looks good! I really like the whole approach to the fly and the background. Especially liking that wing and the subtle blocks of background color. Nice work, my friend!

Yep, it’s late. We had to chop out about two dozen pages, and adjust content as a result. Once we got there, and I got my final marching orders on drawings (which I was behind on by at least four weeks anyway), we decided to just re-set the release date to end of summer. We had originally intended for an early summer release, but now will have a release date targeted around the time of the Fly Fishing Retailer show in Denver (second week of September). No point in killing myself to get it done for a mid-summer release when no one is interested in books during that time anyway.

So, I am now in the final week of drawings and layout. It looks good, hopefully won’t require much tweaking prior to print, and is still on-track for US$24.95 and 192 pages of goodness.

Thanks for your patience, and now that GB and I have the kinks worked out of this whole process, I will be digging into the next book (details soon) immediately after I hand over the print files for this one.

In the meantime, here’s another excerpt to whet your appetite (we hope). GB’s voice here:

Like basically all fly fishers of my day, I largely learned on my own by reading and struggling—often more struggling than not. At first it was only magazine articles. The local, town library had no books on fly fishing. True, the magazine pieces were very good—people like Joe Brooks, Ted Trueblood, Al McClane, the young Ernest Schwiebert, and others—wrote very well, but in the multiplicity of the various magazine pieces, there was not the cohesiveness of coverage that books afford.

None-the-less, it didn’t take long to figure out the “dries up and wets down” mantra.  And I blithely went along, not having any other source of information to counter the accepted norm. Besides, the whole dry-fly-up-and-across thing was still rather new—Frederick Halford’s book, Modern Development of the Dry Fly, had been published only 45 years before I took up fly fishing. It was still a very fresh idea, resonating very powerfully throughout the entire world of fly fishing. And to my young mind, if I was to be a fly fisher, I had to do what fly fisher’s did. So up with the dry, it was.

But then, in 1968, just as I was completing my M.S. degree at Penn State, Richard Alden Knight published his little volume, Successful Trout Fishing. It was an eye opener. He seriously proposed fishing the dry fly across or down-and-across and moving it, a technique he called the “Live Fly.” Wow! It was my first taste of the iconoclastic, and it was delicious. Here was real logic and practical advise, not codified, regimented information that prohibited any deviation from the path. I’ve renamed Knight’s tactic the “Live Dry” because other fly styles can also be, and often are, fished in a “live” manner.

Nancy and I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, that summer, where I began my Ph.D. work. Or should I say, I began my adventure with the Live Dry tactic. The fish of Black Earth and Mount Vernon creeks laughed at my crude, initial attempts, but at the end of the summer, I was the one laughing. The tactic is not hard to conceptualize, but there are some subtleties that need to be developed in order to achieve what Knight was able to do.

The fly is presented exactly as one would with a Down-and-Across Dead Drift (Parachute Mend and all). After the fly is slotted in the fish’s feeding lane, it is allowed to drift drag free, and then moved only the slightest bit when it approaches the edge of the fish’s window. You have to develop a very subtle twitch or movement of the fly. This is the hardest part of the whole presentation, but there are a couple of tactics that are easy to learn and that work quite well….

A nicely matched set of a ‘bow and brown, courtesy of Kel. Just a little distraction while I work out a post with some real content….

Drawing Flies 52 Loop Wing Dun. One of my all-time favorite patterns for spring creek trout (or any trout looking for small mayflies, actually). This fly has done the trick all over the world for me, and it is a permanent resident of my boxes.

Notes: It may be 11pm, but at least I wasn’t asleep on the couch this week! This one went fast. So fast, actually, that I got the brilliant idea of adding a cooler hue to the background—actually not so brilliant! Ended up with murk, but caught it before I did any more damage. Rest of the fly worked out pretty well, considering the speed.

This one is similar to the Connemara in approach, but I wanted to try a mechanical pencil instead of a grade-school number 2. Kinda like the grade-school approach better, but the mechanical allows finer detail work, as expected. Added more color overall than I had anticipated, but the hot orange seems to flow well with the paper. I’ll do some more like this, I think, just keeping as much to pure pencil and white watercolor as I can.

Tech info: Mechanical pencil and watercolor on brown craft paper.

Jeff’s Loop Wing is here. More subtle scribble work like last week—nice choice on technique, I think. PMD hatch, anyone?

Drawing Flies 52 Chironomid (giant lake midge, in this case).

Notes: Five minutes after 11 (pm). Asleep on the couch. Kel wakes me up with “Hey, did you do your fly for today?” So, here it is (at 11:31pm). Update: Went with what I know by heart—a big lake chironomid pupa. Got it done and felt bored. So, went with the comic-book-style “energy blast,” also know as the “pow!” Though the fly was okay, but the “pow” added something interesting. I’ll have to try another like this before the project is over.

Tech Info: Pen and watercolor on Canson paper.

Jeff’s Chironomid is here. I like the way Jeff approached his fly. It’s familiar “Jeff,” but has perhaps a more scribbled hand than usual. Nice work.

This is mostly a re-post of what I sent over my friends at FlyTalk last week, but I will be making some updates to what’s here, so check back again in a few days.

A little intro: There are several ways to go about making bendable bodies, but this technique allows the tying of fairly small bodies (and rather big bodies) all “on the fly,” so to speak. It’s really just a slight expansion of a dubbing technique that goes by various names, including “Extended Dub.”

If you’ve tied extended bodies (minus the bendable part) using either this basic technique or something similar, then this should be a pretty straightforward. If you’ve not done this type of extended body before, it may take a few tries (you may also want to look at a gallows-type tool as a “third hand”). I do so much of my fishing tying in vehicles/hotel rooms/campsites or at streamside, that my approaches to some of these techniques can be a bit “raw.” Thank the “Gary Borger school of fly tying” (i.e. learning the hard way) for that.

So do bendable-body flies catch more fish? That’s a good question—I suggest taking plenty of water-time to find your answer. But one thing that I do know for certain is that bendable-body flies catch more anglers!

Step-by-Step for a typical mayfly nymph (pix first, then the step-by-step):

1) Prepare the hook by wrapping thread over an area the length of the thorax.

2) At the rear of the thoracic region, tie in a three-inch-long piece of copper wire (of equal or lesser diameter than the hook shank). When preparing wire for tying in, first double it back on itself sharply. Then run your scissors into the doubled-section and clip the wire right at the apex of the bend. This creates a miniscule hooked end on the wire that prevents such an inherently slick material from pulling free of the thread wraps (see that first little illustration).

3) Once the wire is in place, tie in a three-inch-long clump of poly-yarn that is one to two millimeters in diameter. The poly-yarn should lie along the wire. This serves as filler material for the abdomen, adding bulk and a surface to which dubbing can better adhere.

4) On top of the poly-yarn, tie in a small clump (six to eight) pheasant tail fibers. The fibers will be the nymph’s tails, and can be trimmed back to three after the body is finished. Tie the tails in so that they are twice the anticipated length of the abdomen. This is easily done via an old trick for legging: Tie the fibers in with a wrap or two of thread; do not be concerned if the fibers are too long. Then, keeping tension on the thread, simply pull on the butt ends of the fibers to draw the tips to length. Once they are the right length, tie the tails down. The wire, yarn and tails make up the body “core.”

5) Apply a thin layer of dubbing to the thread, twisting it as tightly as feasible. It is important to make sure the dubbing noodle on the thread is long enough to wind over the length of the abdomen twice. When making the noodle I prefer to create an elongate, razor-thin dumb-bell shape. Ideally the waist of the dumbbell should be half-way down the noodle (the length required to wrap the abdomen once). This type of noodle will allow for a tapered body that also creates series of tight, core-locking wraps at the rear tip of the abdomen.

6) Once the dubbing is ready, hold all three body materials firmly between the thumb and forefinger of your materials hand, and begin to tightly wind the dubbing up the length of the core, taking each wrap next to the last. Once you get up to speed, you should be able to flip your bobbin over the core, catch it with the middle, ring and pinkie fingers of your materials hand, and then transfer it back to your bobbin hand again.

Note: You may find that you have to adjust the dubbing noodle a few times as you do this. That’s part of the game here. Once you have it figured out, you may be surprised at how quickly you can wrap the body.

7) Once you have wrapped an appropriately long abdomen onto the body (or used up half your dubbing), reverse your wrapping direction, heading back toward the hook. When you have returned to the hook shank (having used up the remainder of your dubbing), let go of the body core and you will have an extended, dubbed (and bendable) body. Trim the excess poly-yarn and wire at the end of the abdomen, and then prune the tails so you have the requisite three (or whatever you like).

Note: If you wanted to wind a rib over the extended abdomen, you could do one of a number of things. Perhaps the simplest is to incorporate the tag end of your tying thread into the body core (after wrapping the thorax, do not cut the tag off). After the body is dubbed, just spiral back down it with the thread.

8) Finish the fly as you see fit.

9) Bend the body up, down and all around as you admire your slick tie-craft.

10) Go catch something!

Just backed up the FF&W database, as well as the main theme, and then hit “upgrade.” The 3.0 version of WordPress is now running here and hopefully everything will continue without a hitch. I’ll have a look through things, but if something is really messed up for anyone, let me know.

No water-time for me today. It’s all blog maintenance, emails, and book illustrations. This coming week it is supposed to be h-o-t here, and I’ll try to make up for lost time!

With the Tour de France starting tomorrow (live report), I thought I’d do a little post relating cycling to fly casting. When I was road racing (i.e. when I was younger and faster), I paid a lot of attention to the more “advanced” aspects of things like pedal/cleat interface, body position, gearing, and of course, the fanciest Italian parts that I could afford. All of which did help me go faster, or at least take pleasure in my bike. Only one problem: I never had in-depth instruction on certain fundamentals and I never focused on certain fundamentals, either (“The basics? That’s for slow guys.”).

Then something happened. On a training ride, a rider I knew struck up a conversation with me about form. I don’t remember anything else about the discussion, but I do remember the key point. It was something to effect of “You’d be faster if you knew how to pedal better.” Huh? Know how to pedal? I thought I was already pretty fast. And what did he know about pedaling anyway? More than me, as it turned out.

Eventually, I got a lesson in pedaling. Yep, how to make my feet go in circles (and that was a big part of it—it’s a whole lot more than just mashing down on the pedals with youthful strength, trust me). Some might view pedaling as a no-brainer. Well my no-brainer training got me enough extra power throughout my pedal stroke to consistently get me into a higher gear. It changed my cycling forever, bringing me more overall speed and the ability to finally hang with faster riders (although it never quite got rid of the taste of blood in my mouth on grinding, big-wall climbs). I sometimes wonder about all my time spent with mediocre basics, and how much more I would have enjoyed my riding and racing if I’d known better (and been perhaps more willing to learn).

It’s sort of like fly casting. Get a bit of success fishing and suddenly working on one’s fly casting—especially the foundations—is for “noobs” and once-a-year “sports.” I say think again. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve practiced my foundations, and yes, I still do. You’d think that I would have sought real advice on my pedaling as a teen, having grown up with the concept of foundations being pounded into my fly casting. I didn’t, but I sure worked on my fly casting with some focus. And that focus really paid off.

People at my seminars and clinics often ask me what they can do to increase distance, or improve accuracy, or reduce fatigue, or…. The list is long. I’ll of course give my clients “quick fixes” which can help tune bits and pieces of the cast and garner some useful advances. But then, I tell almost everyone to work on their foundations—great casting comes from great foundations. If there are errors in one’s foundations, those errors can be magnified when extra skills are added. And errors in one’s foundations mean that one’s casting will never be as enjoyable and successful as it could be. Some people take the advice, some don’t. For those that do, it’s not an easy road to travel, since it requires altering possibly years of previous motion reenforcement. But, when the alteration does come, and the foundations are renewed, it changes things for people.

So whether you care much for cycling or not, at least take something from my youthful racing-days past. Give your foundation casting stroke some attention, and you may find that extra gear in your casting that you never even knew you had! (And if you are fan of “le Tour,” here’s to three weeks of the maillot jaune!)

Drawing Flies 52 Damsel Adult (in red, white and blue for the American Fourth of July holiday). I have been fortunate enough to have fished some of the most spectacular damselfly waters in the world. Seen hatches so thick that I can’t really describe the action, but a few epic emergences were enough to get bats out feeding during the day. One of my absolute favorite times to be fishing for trout!

Tech info: Canson tracing paper with Pigma pen and watercolor. Backer board underlay provides the tan color. Based on some preliminary “form test” sketches that I had made. Just laid the tracing paper over the form that I liked the best, and drew directly with pen in a loose hand. Then grabbed my paints and carefully added the color.

I’ve been using this perspective a lot lately in my book drawings, and I’m really liking it for many flies (some flies don’t work well with it, but the damsel does). The “form tests” I alluded to above are quick sketches that allow one to get a concept of how a fly might look from various angles and with various materials in play. I went with the form that had a deer-hair body and basic hackle. Didn’t want to try calf-tail wing or braided body material in the 30-minute DF52 time span. I’m pleased with what I got.

Jeff’s Damsel Adult is here. Jeff went more warmwater with his fly, and the plump foam pattern immediately gets me thinking of Northwoods bass. It’s a good thought!