Daily Cast Archive

Last day of September, season is really coming to its end. If lucky there could be one or two days with good fishing weather.

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I was working from home yesterday, so decided to take a walk up the river to see how things were after the typhoons of the last couple of weeks. The little river by me is more or less back to normal except for some damage to the bankside vegetation.

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“It’s not a Scrabble word,” Steve insisted. I laughed and argued that “Doink” is a word. “It’s the sound the first nymph makes when it enters the water in a tuck cast.” I lost that argument. We’ve spent the last few days exploring NW Montana, fishing, hiking, camping and playing Scrabble at night. It started with a drive to the Kootenai River near Libby. Libby is the site of a notable toxic mining contamination. Vermiculite was mined and very fragile asbestos was in the surrounding rock. Many residents died and others still suffer from mesothelioma. The town became an EPA Superfund site, and the asbestos was almost entirely cleaned up by 2015.

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I had a fantastic Zoom casting lesson this morning, but very nearly didn’t. After a chaotic week of nursing Ashly through Covid (I’m a terrible nurse) we came back to the Battleship late last night. Somewhere along the line I managed to get my days mixed up and had forgotten that I had a student from Chicago at 7am. Fortunately, by some bizarre coincidence, I was up and when the message came through at 6.56 that Nick was looking forward to his lesson but couldn’t find the Zoom invite; I moved faster than I’ve ever moved before. And what a lesson!!

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“Punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.” — Iggy Pop

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I can’t believe it’s nearly the last BFCC meeting of the year – only next Saturday we’ll be in Brentwood Essex running a series of casting competitions and organising instruction. As usual there will be some amazing instructors who have given their time for free to provide excellent advice to anyone who attends, whether they are beginners, anglers who just want to improve their fishing, or casters who want to go that bit further and cast over 100 feet easily.

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Shooting heads are often a choice. For me, mostly when it makes my fishing a little easier and very often also for the flexibility of changing line density in two minutes. That actually makes a difference in my fishing, both in still- and running water. Sometimes shooting heads are also a necessity to fish a certain location effectively. Shooting heads excel where you have limited back cast room and obviously for repetitive distance casts.

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but I can check. It is kind of same like, I don't know anything about this but I will gladly give my opinion. You probably know someone like this.

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Well, I think my mullet ambitions are getting put on hold till next year. At the weekend, Japan got hit by one of the biggest typhoons in living memory, it really seems to have brought the change in the season which means the mullet won't be up in the shallows. The good thing is, the cool nights mean it's time to start on the seabass again.

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A four-mile hike in waders and we didn’t find the way to the mainstem creek. Rather than trying to bushwhack over half-a-mile in unfamiliar territory, we decided to hike down a closed forest road. It was not the way less traveled, but it wasn’t traveled much. Surely it must lead to the creek. Four miles later we realized how stupid it was not to (a) ask if there is a guide map to fishing local creeks and/or (b) buy a map app for the phone, like Onyx. We seem to learn things the hard way. Back down the road a mile or so was a local trail system that we knew led to the creek directly with little bushwhacking. We succumbed to the way more traveled.

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There is a type of fishing that involves casting a long line, stripping it in, casting a long line, stripping it in, casting a long line, stripping it in and repeating and repeating and repeating. The problem with this method, is that every time you do it you lose a little bit of intelligence… until one day you wake up totally braindead. I sometimes think that discussions on head length revolve around this type of fishing, which explains the arguments involved and… well, whatever.

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When I started fly fishing back in 1996, it would be an understatement to say I became obsessed with casting. I purchased books, watched videos, and spent thousands of hours on the local football field honing my technique. Because of the casting attributes that saltwater sight fishing demands, I have developed a lot of drills and exercises over the years to sharpen those skills. One of which was demonstrated by Carlos Azpilicueta right here on Sexyloops in 2004. You can find it under the Fly Casting exercises titled "Andy's Game"

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There is a discussion on the Board regarding line weighs and the AFFTA table, because as hopefully everyone should know by now, flylines are often overweight and sometimes by 1, 2 or even more ratings. In other words your 6WT line might really weigh a 7, 8 or more! While we can talk about how this has happened, what I really want to talk about is why it matters and is a serous problem… for fishing.

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Halfway through September equals sea trout run. It’s been going on since the middle of summer (the tradition says that the first sea trout enter then rivers at summer solstice), but now, there are enough sea trout that they disturbed one another in their lies. The longer they are in the rivers, the harder the become to catch, so a little disturbance from fresh sea trout and stir things up a little, every now and then making them easier to catch.

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Last Sunday we fished our private lake with nets. We put 2 net in, each 30 meters, to have some fish to eat and also to see if we still have some whitefish there.

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Last week I wrote about spending time scouting marks rather than actually fishing, I had hoped to have a report containing multiple fishy successes, unfortunately it's typhoon season so nothing has come of it yet.

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While we’ve only been residents since August 19, we can see the effects of climate change on the waters in Montana. The string of 90⁰+ F days has been record, similar to last year. Hoot owl closures (closing the rivers at noon-ish due to water temps) is becoming more normal rather than being the exception. Montana has always been hot in the summer, but it’s typically been in the 80’s. Now it’s seeing more upper 80’s and into the 90’s.

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It was nice to get away. First day I slept 11 hours!!! So I missed that particular morning session! It’s an interesting fishery here, on the lake. It’s quite possible to put in 13hr fishing days, which is first light to last light. And with guests we usually do that or close to it. I think that’s the big difference between fishing with guests and fishing alone. Alone I normally fish 7-8hrs over two sessions. Sometimes storms prevent the afternoon session and I’ll fish around 5 hours. Which leaves time for other things in life. I do put in the full days of fishing on my own too, but if I did them every day I would burn out pretty fast; fishing all day every day here in the tropics is simply too draining. Apart from which, like everyone else, I have to earn a living too. I also have a time-consuming hobby and spend 90mins to 2hrs/day triathlon training. There is more to life than fly fishing, it’s just that fly fishing is what matters most!

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Early yesterday morning my family and I made the 40-minute drive over to an adjacent town called Bandera. Bandera is the self proclaimed "Cowboy Capitol of the World", and is one of the few places where you can still see men and women donning traditional western wear and riding horses down main street on any given day. This morning, however, we were there not for fishing, or horseback riding for that matter, but to watch my son Jackson represent his high school in a cross-country race.

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This weekend James and I are in Jersey, with Mark S. Today we started off the morning with a good breakfast at a local café, then checked out the trout hatchery on the island and fed the fish. After this we went on a fantastic vineyard tour where they provided us with cider, several glasses of wine, chocolate and a brandy cream liquor – all before lunch (thankful we had a good breakfast) so we were all pretty merry when Bob picked us up to go salt water fishing. Or rather for Mark to go with a group of anglers and James and myself to go sightseeing by walking to Gorey to wander around the castle, have a few more drinks and an ice-cream as the weather is currently lovely and sunny. We couldn’t go fishing as we could only get the club gear into the cases within the weight limit, so our fishing gear was sadly left behind – next time we’ll bring an extra case!

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Some materials have been in hundreds of years, so long in fact that most of use have come to take them for granted. One is Golden Pheasant. A Golden Pheasant skin yields many different, beautiful and very useful feathers that are used in salmon flies, trout flies and salt water flies. The most popular ones are the long, red breast feathers and the yellow, slightly shorter ones from the back of the bird.

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There are saying thay things are getting worse before getting better. It means exactly what it says. Just don't know how worse things have to go before getting better.

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I've not strung up a rod or wet a line this week, but I've still fished a couple of days so far. Tomorrow I'm going again and I'll most likely be making some casts. It didn't occur to me that this might seem odd to anyone until I spoke to Canadian John the other day, he just couldn't get his head round the idea.

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I don’t know why you fish, and I’m sure like me you have many reasons. One of mine is to get away from everyone else and spend quality time alone appreciating life and occasionally, to spend time with very good friends. I do like people, really, well mostly anyway, but not all the time!

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Yesterday, while flying the Rocket Condom back to the Battleship, we noticed a herd of elephants. It was no doubt the same herd that had kept us awake partying the night before. So we went over to film them. It’s normal to see elephants maybe once a week during the early Wet Season and I think we are coming into the Wet pretty fast now. Which is great because we will see more Snakehead babies action! But it’s the first elephants I’ve seen around the lake now for some months. And there were seventeen of them!

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Banner Day---A day marked or characterized by great success or good fortune.

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Last weekend was a busy one for Tracy and myself; we fished the river Dee and the next day had a casting practice session with some friends who came over to North Wales, Nick, Callum and Chris. It’s clear that the character of the fishing is changing on the river due to the change in season, the fish are no longer evenly spread out and are starting to shoal up for the autumn. This was clear when I wandered up to find Tracy after a couple of hours fishing (actually I was wandering upstream to find Tracy’s fishing bag as this contains the drinks, sandwiches and snack bars). At this point I was struggling, having only managed one tiddler, and was expecting Tracy to report a similar experience. However, she was already into double figures of fish landed, including a number of good sized grayling.

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When fishing new destinations and waters, are you the type to spend the winter researching hatches, relevant to the time of your visit? I am. In general, I am fairly meticulous in preparing for a trip, especially if involves travel and the following expenses. I can stand being somewhere and missing opportunities because I didn’t prepare. That begins with weather and making sure I have the appropriate gear to stay warm and dry. Having the tackle I find necessary. Knowing the hatches and what the fish eat and making sure I have the right flies. Practicing the casting. And of course finding out as much as I can about the rivers or lakes. I might also hire a guide for a day or two to get the latest information on what’s happening and an introduction to the waters and fishing.

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Main rivers were closed on last of August. Some rivers are still open for grayling fishing. Fishing will be good still during September even there will be short time in mid that fishing will be difficult.

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Last weekend I headed West from Tokyo to Shizuoka prefecture with my mate Hiromiki to fish Hamanako with for black bream. It was much more fun than I expected.

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