Hairballs & Self Deception

I've fished a bit less than usual this year, but according to my notes I'm not doing too badly considering. But even more frustratingly I've not been up a mountain since January, unlike fishing I can't just take my time as I would when walking along the river. Hopefully by autumn I'll have got over the pneumonia and cleared whatever else is lingering and I'll be able to get the fitness back. As a result I've been using a lot of the time practising with hair-bugs. They're getting better and tighter by the bug, but I've also got more bugs than I'll get through in a few seasons. They're such fun flies to tie that I'm sure a lot of people are in a similar boat. One thing I've started doing is wearing a mask while tying them. That might seem excessive, and if you're only doing the odd one now and then it would be. I'm tying s few a day and there's a lot of underfur getting cleaned out and floating around the room, and that's before I get to any trimming. The trimming especially, the later stages where you're shaving off a tenth of a millimeter or even sanding the bugs, puts a lot of particles in the air. Again, on a rare occasion it's probably not harmful but regular and in volume it's probably better to avoid breathing or ingesting too much of it. The barber I used to go to - as a child with hair on his head- was hospitalised once and they pulled a huge lump of hair out of his stomach. Unlike cats we don't have a hairball ejection system!

The other thing that I'd like to mention this week is accepting the evidence of your own experience. I mentioned a few weeks ago that using copic markers is a waste of time because they're not waterproof. Over the last 2 weeks I've had a few vdery similar interactions with people asking about how I colour the Cohen's legs and other parts I've put on bugs. Each time it's started with someone saying they use copic but they quickly wash out while fishing. I generally respond by saying, copic aren't waterproof, use a permanent marker like a sharpie or airbrush them. I then show them a used and beat up fly with still quite solidly coloured legs. Now here's the interesting bit, the response is - considerably more than 50% of the time- but some "famous" angler/tyer has said they're the ones to use! Bear in mind these are people who have approached me because the copic markers they've used aren't working out! It's actually amazing on some level. They're willing to put something that they've seen on a YouTube video or in a magazine above the evidence of their own eyes and experience and evidence from a third party just because it comes from someone who has a bit of celebrity about them. I'm obviously not famous enough to override this so they probably stick with their copic markers. I've long been suspicious of a lot of angling writers and media people, not least because as a kid I was talking with a few of older internationalists in the Loch Leven bar after some competition or other and they were talking about a very prominent Scottish angling writer... "he's maybe grown an afro, but he can still fish fuck all" A devastating assessment that was broadly shared by the rest. Coincidentally as I'm writing this I'm listening to the Larry Dahlberg episode of the Mill House Podcast (a great episode by the way) and he's just said something his dad told him to explain why the fishing articles he was reading made no sense to him; "writers can't fish and fishermen can't write". While I think the situation has probably improved since then, there's probably still a bit of truth in it.

Anyway, don't use copics for anything that will get wet and don't believe the folk that are trying to sell things when they tell you something over things you've experienced and seen with your own eyes. I will always put my own experience above what I read or watch if it's contradictory. Because I can verify one of them.