fishing, casting, and recruiting

wow- what a day! hit the streams with my son, (18), who is here for the
summer. stopped in appalachian anglers first, to pick up a couple of new
flies- god, i could go nuts in there- and after inquiring as to theo, whom i
found out is in alaska, i think, we headed out to the waters of the watauga
river. there were a couple of other anglers out there, who reported little
action, and after about an hour there, with the same result, we headed to
another stream up on the parkway. you know which one i'm talkin about,
opie. nice trout waters, and beautiful scenery. hung out there for a
couple of hours during which time i fell into some fairly deep, very fast
moving water- no injury to report, and i was saved from being swept away by
the rocks that locked me in! i really thought i had good footing, and i
knew there was a little pool of deeper water there, but my efforts at
caution did nothing to help me. came out with a couple of scratches on my
leg, and that was it. actually, the water felt pretty good, but i stayed
wet the rest of the day. after that adventure, my son and i decided it was
time to eat some lunch, and so we layed out our food on a rock, and sat
down to eat. a few minutes into lunch, i noticed a prolific hatch. i got
all excited and put down my food, and picked up my rod. however, another
half an hour didn't help zero catch score for the day thus far. but my son
witnessed his first hatch, and appreciated the significance after i
explained it to him.
we then decided to head to price park, so that i could practice casting, and
while doing so, a young man came up to me, and struck a fly fishin related
conversation. turns out he is a guide who lives in michigan, and is down
here for the summer to teach fly fishin to some kids at camp. i told him i
was just learning, and so he asked me to show him my cast. he then spent
about half an hour with me, workin on my cast, and by the time he re-joined
his friends to play ball, i was casting with great confidence, and pretty
well. i heard one of his friends say to him that he was a really good
teacher, becasue he had taught me that well, that fast. (so, you were right
mark-good suggestion, only it didn't happen on campus G). anyway, my
son wanted to try it, and damned if he isn't a natural. he was casting that
line out, with nice loops, and layin it down straight, and before we left
the park, he was hooked. all the way home he kept talkin about how much he
wants a fly rod, and he wants to go back out tommorrow. he just fell right
into it. good stuff! all in all an exciting, satisfying, and exhausting
day. *and* i feel good about my casting. ;-)


snakefiddler- can't wait for october........

"snakefiddler" wrote in

.....snip an obvious fine day for ol' snake...

Good on ya Jen, you're actually moving faster at this flyfishing thing then
I imagined you would. Getting casting lessons, observing hatches (I ain't
never identified a hatch, btw) and now your son is getting the itch. You
have embarked on a long, expensive, interesting and satisfying hobby, where
will it all end? Maybe for you, the rest of your life I would hazard a
guess. See ya in Oct.

Frank Church

"Frank Church" wrote in message
9.11...
"snakefiddler" wrote in

....snip an obvious fine day for ol' snake...

Good on ya Jen, you're actually moving faster at this flyfishing thing
then
I imagined you would.

i am *so* diggin it. i'm looking forward to doing a lot of fishing this
week, while i am between sessions for summer school.

Getting casting lessons,

folks seem to be very willing to help..

observing hatches

we saw two today, at two different locations.

(I ain't
never identified a hatch, btw) and now your son is getting the itch. You
have embarked on a long, expensive, interesting and satisfying hobby,
where
will it all end? Maybe for you, the rest of your life I would hazard a
guess.

i reckon you're right about that. this is really good stuff. and now that
i am beginning to feel good about my casting, it is even more exciting.
i found out from my aunt the other day that my great grandmother was an
avid fisherwoman- did a great deal of fishing in indiana, in the white
river. i'm sure you're familiar with it.

See ya in Oct.

lookin forward to it :-)

snake

Frank Church

Babylonian Proverb: "The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the
hours spent in fishing."

Sounds like your gaining time.

"snakefiddler" wrote in message
...

"Frank Church" wrote in message
9.11...
"snakefiddler" wrote in

....snip an obvious fine day for ol' snake...

Good on ya Jen, you're actually moving faster at this flyfishing thing
then
I imagined you would.

i am *so* diggin it. i'm looking forward to doing a lot of fishing this
week, while i am between sessions for summer school.

Getting casting lessons,

folks seem to be very willing to help..

observing hatches

we saw two today, at two different locations.

(I ain't
never identified a hatch, btw) and now your son is getting the itch. You
have embarked on a long, expensive, interesting and satisfying hobby,
where
will it all end? Maybe for you, the rest of your life I would hazard a
guess.

i reckon you're right about that. this is really good stuff. and now
that
i am beginning to feel good about my casting, it is even more exciting.
i found out from my aunt the other day that my great grandmother was an
avid fisherwoman- did a great deal of fishing in indiana, in the white
river. i'm sure you're familiar with it.

See ya in Oct.

lookin forward to it :-)

snake

Frank Church

"Frank Church" wrote in message
9.11...
"snakefiddler" wrote in

....snip an obvious fine day for ol' snake...

Good on ya Jen, you're actually moving faster at this flyfishing thing
then
I imagined you would. Getting casting lessons, observing hatches (I ain't
never identified a hatch, btw)...

I was going to work this into my Wales TR, but my summer grad school seems
to dominating all my time and that TR seems to be fading, so I'll tell it
here.

I SAW A HATCH! I mean, REALLY saw a hatch!

I was fishing i Brecon, at the bottom of this pool behind a bridge abutment,
and noticed that there were a growing number of little white bugs starting
to accumulate in the 'wind eddy' behind the bridge. The fish (what few there
were) were starting to rise in the river eddy there, so I instantly
recognized that a hatch was going on. I was standing about waist deep in
fairly clear water with a grey-green bottom, and as I looked down at the
water around me, I saw the occasional 'thing' float by.....maybe one per
cubic meter of water. I gently reached down and trapped one, and bygod, it
was a nymph. An honest-to-mergatroyd nymph! I instantly realized why PTs and
GRHEs work so well...at first glance, this thing was the spitting image of a
#28 PT, but with slightly more pronounced legs in the upper half. It was
such a total A-HAH! moment that I was overjoyed. I had always imagined that,
during hatches, the water was saturated with these things, and I never had
any real understanding of how they moved, or why a fish would select my fly
instead of the real thing. But seeing these in the water made the mental
light bulbs all light up.

Two real interesting observations I had from this experience:
1) Contrary to what I have read, not one of these nymphs was floating in the
'head up' position. They were all horizontal, with the head/thorax upstream.
The shape of the body was the exact tapered shape of a well-tied PT, but
instead of rising the way the books all show them, they were rising
horizontally. This might have been because they were getting swept
downstream in the mediocre current, but the fish downstream of me were
taking them more often than the fish in the eddy upstream. That tells me a
lot about the importance of keeping some tension on your line as they drift
in the current, to keep them horizontally. This is also why they get taken
at the end of the drift, when they are sweeping upwards.

2) (this is a biggie): Every single one of the nymphs I saw was at
approximately the same depth as it floated past me. I figure that they were
all coming from the same general source (somewhere near the downstream end
of the eddy, where the current could steal them), and were rising at about
the same rate. That means that there was a very specific 'diagonal rising
zone' that they would be in; deeper down at the eddy, reaching the surface
somewhere downstream of me. If I were casting a PT in the current, it would
be very important to know where this 'rising zone' was so that I could get
my nymph into it. I imagine that a feeding fish would not be looking for a
nymph along the bottom if the naturals were inches from the surface, for
example.

Anyway, I was overjoyed to actually see this thing in action. Like so many
things that you have a rich mental image of....the real thing had absolutely
no resemblance to what I imagined it would look like.

--riverman

"rw" wrote in message
m...
riverman wrote:

I SAW A HATCH! I mean, REALLY saw a hatch!

Cool. Fishing a mayfly hatch is the essential flyfishing experience,
IMO. The day before yesterday I went to the Big Wood a second time for
the green drake hatch. These are big bugs -- size 12 -- and the fish go
nuts for them. It was outstanding.


Did you, or have you ever noticed what I mentioned about the 'diagonal
rising zone' of the nymphs on a stream? I always sort of figured that the
nymphs would be rising in a sort of inverted snowstorm: all going upwards at
all depths of the water column. What I saw was quite different, up by the
source eddy, there were none near the surface, and I suppose a dozen meters
downstream, there were none at the bottom.

--riverman

riverman wrote:

I SAW A HATCH! I mean, REALLY saw a hatch!

Cool. Fishing a mayfly hatch is the essential flyfishing experience,
IMO. The day before yesterday I went to the Big Wood a second time for
the green drake hatch. These are big bugs -- size 12 -- and the fish go
nuts for them. It was outstanding.

I lost what I thought was my last green drake dry fly on a fish
(AARRGH!), so I tried a a few flies that I thought might work -- a #12
parachute adams, a very small green-bodied stimulator, and a #12 green
EHC. The fish utterly ignored them. Then I found an actual green drake
pattern in my crowded flybox and again caught fish. It brought home to
me the importance of matching the hatch under these conditions.

--
Cut "to the chase" for my email address.

"rw" wrote in message
m...
riverman wrote:

Did you, or have you ever noticed what I mentioned about the 'diagonal
rising zone' of the nymphs on a stream? I always sort of figured that
the
nymphs would be rising in a sort of inverted snowstorm: all going
upwards at
all depths of the water column. What I saw was quite different, up by
the
source eddy, there were none near the surface, and I suppose a dozen
meters
downstream, there were none at the bottom.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "diagonal rising zone." I've
never seen nymphs rising to the surface. Maybe your eyesight is better
than mine.

One thing I have noticed, and particularly in this green drake hatch, is
that the bugs weren't emerging all over the river. They appeared in a
certain type of current -- fast and deep. The river is still pretty
high, but clear. These were not places you'd normally expect to find
trout holding. The only reason they were there was to feed actively, and
they didn't have much time to nail the big duns.

One cool thing is that you could tell where the mayflies were emerging
by watching birds. Robin, blackbirds, and western tanagers would swoop
out from the back to nab duns in the air, and tree swallows would pick
them off the surface.

You can use the bird situation to model the 'diagonal rising zone'. If the
emergers were coming up at a certain spot in the river, and there was as
light breeze (say, blowing southwards), then the birds would not all be
congregating above that spot on the river, at all heights. The ones who were
feeding low to the water would be right above that spot, but the duns that
got past those birds would be blown to the south as they rose. So you'd
expect the birds at higher elevations to be farther to the south. This is
the 'diagonal rising zone' of the duns.

In the water, its the same. Imagine a deep pool of slow water, with an
outlet on the downstream side. If there are rising nymphs throughout the
water column in the deep pool, then there are nymphs getting sucked into the
outlet current at all levels. But, a few feet downstream from the pool,
there won't be any nymphs at the bottom; they will have risen a few inches,
so there will be an 'empty zone' along the bottom of the river from that
point on down. Dragging a nymph through that zone will be useless. The
'diagonal rising zone' is the diagonal zone where the nymphs are, starting
at the bottom near the pool and rising to the surface several meters
downstream, depending on the current.

In Wales, all the nymphs I saw swhere I was standing were between 1 and 2
feet below the surface: I looked deeper and never saw one go by at knee
level, and (in an effort to keep my sleeves dry) I tried to find one near
the surface to scoop up, but never saw one shallower than 1 foot deep. Also,
there were no fish rising near me, but they were rising about 10 meters
downstream from me, or in the calm pool above me. I suspect the fish near me
were eating nymphs that were 1-2 feet deep, that the fish 5 meters
downstream from me were eating nymphs that were 6 inches to 1 foot deep, and
the fish 10 meters downstream were eating nymphs on the surface.

--riverman

"riverman" wrote in message
...

"Frank Church" wrote in message
9.11...
"snakefiddler" wrote in

....snip an obvious fine day for ol' snake...

Good on ya Jen, you're actually moving faster at this flyfishing thing
then
I imagined you would. Getting casting lessons, observing hatches (I
ain't
never identified a hatch, btw)...

I was going to work this into my Wales TR, but my summer grad school seems
to dominating all my time and that TR seems to be fading, so I'll tell it
here.

I SAW A HATCH! I mean, REALLY saw a hatch!

I was fishing i Brecon, at the bottom of this pool behind a bridge
abutment,
and noticed that there were a growing number of little white bugs starting
to accumulate in the 'wind eddy' behind the bridge. The fish (what few
there
were) were starting to rise in the river eddy there, so I instantly
recognized that a hatch was going on. I was standing about waist deep in
fairly clear water with a grey-green bottom, and as I looked down at the
water around me, I saw the occasional 'thing' float by.....maybe one per
cubic meter of water. I gently reached down and trapped one, and bygod, it
was a nymph. An honest-to-mergatroyd nymph! I instantly realized why PTs
and
GRHEs work so well...at first glance, this thing was the spitting image of
a
#28 PT, but with slightly more pronounced legs in the upper half. It was
such a total A-HAH! moment that I was overjoyed. I had always imagined
that,
during hatches, the water was saturated with these things, and I never
had
any real understanding of how they moved, or why a fish would select my
fly
instead of the real thing. But seeing these in the water made the mental
light bulbs all light up.

Two real interesting observations I had from this experience:
1) Contrary to what I have read, not one of these nymphs was floating in
the
'head up' position. They were all horizontal, with the head/thorax
upstream.
The shape of the body was the exact tapered shape of a well-tied PT, but
instead of rising the way the books all show them, they were rising
horizontally. This might have been because they were getting swept
downstream in the mediocre current, but the fish downstream of me were
taking them more often than the fish in the eddy upstream. That tells me a
lot about the importance of keeping some tension on your line as they
drift
in the current, to keep them horizontally. This is also why they get taken
at the end of the drift, when they are sweeping upwards.

2) (this is a biggie): Every single one of the nymphs I saw was at
approximately the same depth as it floated past me. I figure that they
were
all coming from the same general source (somewhere near the downstream end
of the eddy, where the current could steal them), and were rising at about
the same rate. That means that there was a very specific 'diagonal rising
zone' that they would be in; deeper down at the eddy, reaching the surface
somewhere downstream of me. If I were casting a PT in the current, it
would
be very important to know where this 'rising zone' was so that I could get
my nymph into it. I imagine that a feeding fish would not be looking for a
nymph along the bottom if the naturals were inches from the surface, for
example.

Anyway, I was overjoyed to actually see this thing in action. Like so many
things that you have a rich mental image of....the real thing had
absolutely
no resemblance to what I imagined it would look like.

--riverman



god, i got excited just reading your post, and i wasn't even there! i know
i haven't been at this very long, but i *have* figured out that an
experience like that is what fly fishermen dream about. to have all that
rich information in the water, and possess the knowledge and ability to put
it all together, *and* make it work must be thrilling.
i don't believe in an elitist society, either in the functional world nor
the leisure, but i sure can see how having the ability to understand all the
intricacies involved in fly fishing, and manipulate them to success can
instill a great deal of pride in one's fishing abilities.

great stuff-
snakefiddler

riverman wrote:

Did you, or have you ever noticed what I mentioned about the 'diagonal
rising zone' of the nymphs on a stream? I always sort of figured that the
nymphs would be rising in a sort of inverted snowstorm: all going upwards at
all depths of the water column. What I saw was quite different, up by the
source eddy, there were none near the surface, and I suppose a dozen meters
downstream, there were none at the bottom.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "diagonal rising zone." I've
never seen nymphs rising to the surface. Maybe your eyesight is better
than mine.

One thing I have noticed, and particularly in this green drake hatch, is
that the bugs weren't emerging all over the river. They appeared in a
certain type of current -- fast and deep. The river is still pretty
high, but clear. These were not places you'd normally expect to find
trout holding. The only reason they were there was to feed actively, and
they didn't have much time to nail the big duns.

One cool thing is that you could tell where the mayflies were emerging
by watching birds. Robin, blackbirds, and western tanagers would swoop
out from the back to nab duns in the air, and tree swallows would pick
them off the surface.

--
Cut "to the chase" for my email address.