Well, at least I can say it was a nice day

I was amped to fish today. It was supposed to be a high of 55 degrees, and I was going to meet my stepdad and fish all afternoon up at the Little Lehigh. Well, he wound up not being able to make it so I started off fishing solo, and then ran into a buddy of mine who joined me for a few hours.

The first time I ever fished the Salmon River in NY and met Melinda at her fly shop in Altmar, she told us that she could always tell the guys from PA because they always wore camo. I had a camo knit hat on that day. Busted. When I got to the water today, I started laughing because she nailed it. The stream was full of the camo wearing crowd, many even with their bright orange vests. I think it was most likely the guys who were out of deer tags and decided that since it was nice they would try fishing instead of hunting. Needless to say, the fish were very pressured. People were hitting just about ever hole and trout were darting up and downstream all afternoon.

I fished for two solid hours without a single hit. A few guys I talked to said they got 1 or 2, but they were earlier in the morning, and they were on size 24 and 26 black midges. The ones I tied last night were 22s and the fish weren't having it. I saw swarms of midges flying around but no rises. The fish were aggresively feeding towards the bottom, but they didn't like what I was offering.

With no luck on midges, eggs, or nymphs, I started moving to bigger things. San Juan worms, nothing. Slumpbusters, nada. Finally I threw on a glass bead woolly bugger I tied very sparse with a black dubbed body and thin dry fly hackle and started reach casting across stream and stripping from one bank to the other. That paid off and I landed a nice 13 inch wild brown trout. I would have loved to post a picture of that fish, but I was upgrading the OS on my i-phone tonight and it wiped out ALL of my pictures. I'm upset about losing the fish pic, but more upset about all the awesome shots of my son at Christmas.

I absolutely hate my i-phone since upgrading to OS4. If you have similar pains, this video will crack you up.



I was sick of all the camo wearing weekend warriors getting snagged in trees and wading in the non-wading section to retrieve their Wal-Mart flies, so I moved a mile or so downstream and fished some water I haven't fished in about a year. The sun started to set and with no more hits and only one fish siting, I called it quits. At least I avoided the skunk and had a nice day on the water. Fishing with only a sweatshirt and jeans on during this time of year is awesome.

In other news, looks like our next trip to the Salmon River is happening in two weeks. We did 3 trips in 2010 and I got the skunk on two of them. To be fair, the 2nd trip was during the big flood and it's not fun to land a King Salmon with a river running at 25,000 CFS. With less pressure and fresh Steelhead in the water, we should hopefully do ok.

My Steelhead box got pretty wiped out during our two later trips last year and I'm going to spend the next two weeks stocking it back up with more black stones, eggs, and sucker spawns. I definitely lose a ton of flies there bottom bouncing, and I feel that tying for a steelhead trip is definitely quantity over quality. Keep it bright colors with some contrast, or some solid black. It's a work in progress, but here's a pic of what it currently looks like.



Expect a lot more updates and patterns over the next few weeks. I'm going to start tonight on some BFS (big #*%#ing stoneflies).

You know you fish too much when..(first of 2011 edition)

You know you fish to much when you're tying size 22 midges as the ball is dropping. Did anyone else watch Dick Clark? I feel bad for the guy. It's kinda depressing. Also, watching him make out with his wife was somewhat disturbing.

Anyway, yes I was tying flies as the ball dropped. My wife and son were exhausted and asleep, and I'm getting ready for an AM trip with my step dad in the morning. I've heard people say that the fish have been taking tiny (22 or smaller) black midges over the past two weeks in all of the creeks around the Allentown area so that's what I focused on. First, I knocked out a few midges with black goose biots. I've never seen these before, but I'm sure someone else as tried them.

Mustad shrimp/caddis hook, size 22
8/0 Uni-Thread, iron grey
black dubbing
one black goose biot


I'm going to try this fly, but I don't know how much I like it. I then started digging through my material and found some medium black rubber legs. I tried those for the body, both with a black dubbed thorax and a pink ice dubbed thorax. I must say that I really like the looks of these.



Just to give you an idea of how small these things are...


Well, that's about it. Once again, happy new year. I'm getting together my 8x tippet for tomorrow morning and heading to bed.

Last fish of the year

I fished from 3-4:15pm today and it was slow. We've all been there. No action for a long time and just zoning out while doing robotic repetitive casts. I love being surprised by a strike out of nowhere. This little stockie bow went after a cream colored egg. At least I didn't end the year with a skunk.



About to crack a bottle of bubbly, find an OnDemand movie with the wife, and try to make it until midnight. Happy new year and please be safe. Watch out for the drunks and if you're one of them, don't drive.

P.S. To all the PA residents, don't forget to get a new license! I'm about to get mine online. That way you can save the PDF and print a new one whenever you need to!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Egg patterns...over easy

I mentioned an egg post coming on soon and well, here it is. In celebration of eggs, I'd like to point out that this post is being fueled by Pennsylvania Dutch Egg Nog. It's full of rum, brandy, and whiskey, and I'm super glad I bought it today. (The half empty bottle proves that) It's safe to say that I'm definitely enjoying vacation.



So, back to eggs. I read a cool post on Bigerrfish the other day about his sweet looking egg patterns and his thoughts on using eggs. I personally admit to using them on a very regular basis. Many might consider them "junk flies" and that it isn't matching the hatch, but if fish are feeding on salmon or sucker eggs, I think you are representing their natural food selection for that time. What cracks me up about some of the people that frown upon them is that they'll say they would never use an egg or a worm, but they'll easily tie on a prince nymph, which looks absolutely like nothing in a stream. (and don't say a stonefly, because stonefly nymphs don't have two different colored sets of biots and a red collar!)

I'll fish eggs as an attractor pattern about a foot above a nymph or a midge. Most times the fish will take the lower fly, but I do catch a fair share of them on eggs as well. I like to sight fish bright colored eggs because they can also double as a strike indicator in shallower water.

As far as my egg preference, I've tried it all; Glue eggs, glowbug yarn, otter eggs (those pre-molded rubber ones), etc. Glue eggs take forever, glowbug yarn never sat right on the hook for me and it ruins your scissors with a quickness, and the otter eggs always seem to never hold to the hook for me, even though I've tried crazy glue, zap-a-gap, head cement, and hard as nails on them.

I've came to the conclusion that McFly Foam is the way to go. I can tie a fairly perfect egg with this stuff in under a minute. When I first started fishing eggs, they were the ones I bought in fly shops before I started tying and ranged in sizes from 8 to 12. Once I began tying, I thought smaller might work so I worked my way down to 14 and 16, with limited success.

Then this past February, at the Somerset show, I was speaking with a guy who is an Orvis endorsed guide in PA about some of the streams in the Lehigh Valley, and somehow the subject came up about eggs. I told him I was not having much luck and when we started talking about sizes he said "If you're going to fish an egg in the streams around here, go smaller, between 18-22". Well, he was right. I played with varying the sizes and I found that 22s defeated the purpose because they were so small that they were not working as well and an attractor, and that 20s sank slow and required more weight to bounce. I found the sweet spot at size 18. Once I started getting better at tying eggs, I was able to tweak the actual size of an egg on an 18. Here's two eggs side by side, both on an 18 hook. You can see the difference in the actual size of the egg.


Just like anything else, I'll start out with the bulkier egg and work my way down to the smaller ones if they are picky, but I can still get a good hook set on an 18 without having to go down a size and risk losing a strike.

Here's a pic of all I tied last night. Now I have to find room for them in the permanent box (also knocked out some more redneck pheasant tails)



Before I go off to sleepy land from all this egg nog, I'd like to say that if you're in the Philadelphia area and you have young children, go to the Please Touch Museum in Fairmount Park. Michael had a blast today!

One month down...

Well, today marks one month since I've started this blog, and I must say that I'm surprised with how much of a following it's developed already. Thanks to all of you who've stopped by.

By the numbers..

• 1231 - Number of page views I've had in the past month. I have it set to not track my own page views, but I'm not sure if it works or not. At least 100 of those had to be me, but I'm still surprised we broke 1K.



• 10- Number of fishing trips I've made since launching this blog. That's a trip every 3 days. No wonder my wife wants to kill me.



• 70- Percent of the trips I've been on where I caught fish and avoided the skunk. I'm guess I'm doing pretty damn good.



• 3 - Amount of times I've fished the East Branch Perk and been skunked in the past month. I need to start avoiding that place.



• 90 - The highest amount of referrals to the site, which came from Eastern PA Fishing Reports, following in a close 2nd by Troutrageous.



• 2 - Number of times we were mentioned on Troutrageous's Wednesday Nibbles. I appreciate the traffic.



• 14 - Number of countries that have viewed the site. This includes the US, South Korea, Canada, Croatia, Japan, Netherlands, Serbia, Belgium (p.s. I love your beers), Russia, South Africa, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Ireland, and Turkey. I guess the French hate me, which is cool.



• 10 - Number of google follower's I've acquired.



• 11 - percentage of page views from a Linux operating system? That surprised me.



• 5 - percentage of traffic that viewed the site from an I-phone. Interesting.



• 22 - minutes I've spent compiling the data for this post so far.

Well, that's enough boring numbers. My fly box is pretty depleted and I have some tying to do. I ordered some things from Angler's Pro Shop and I stopped by to pick them up today. Expect a post on eggs soon.

Coming to you live from the stream

Currently on the EB Perk. Missed a bow on a pink egg but besides that, it is skunkville. I had to hike about half a mile to find open water! It's still a beautiful day on the stream though.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I'm sick, so I went fishing

I woke up today with a really bad cold. I came downstairs and my wonderful wife had pancakes and fresh fruit all ready to eat. Besides feeling like death, that's not a bad way to start the day.

I had cabin fever so even though I felt sick, I still bundled up and headed to the stream for a quick solo trip. I fished the Heritage section of the Little Lehigh. It was very windy, very cold, and the water was gin clear and still really low. For the first hour, I could only muster a few follows but no strikes, so I was changing flies about every 20 casts or so and sight casting to a few fish holding position in some calmer water to see if they'd show interest. I finally had a hit on the redneck pheasant tail and was soon in to a fight with a really nice brown, probably 15-16 inches. Unfortunately, he ran me around a fallen log and broke me off. The worst part was, he spooked the hole where another 4 fish were lying.

Frustrated, I moved upstream about a hundred yards, tied on a sucker spawn followed by the same pheasant tail pattern and started to hit some deep runs. I finally started to have some luck. I pulled a brown and a bow on the pheasant tail, and I also hit another brown on a clown egg.

One thing I noticed is that the 8 degree change in temperature made the fish more active. Even though these fish were on the smaller end, they definitely had my 4 weight Sage reel singing when they hit the faster water, and fought much harder than the fish I got in to on Sunday.

All in all, not a bad 2 hour trip. I had to work hard for the fish I got, but it wasn't a skunk. Sorry for the poor pics, I only had the I-phone with me.






One more thing..
Speaking of pancakes, can anyone explain this video to me?

You know you fish too much when..(a.k.a Christmas recap)

You know you fish too much when you're watching Elf and look at Buddy's shirt collar and think that it would make some nice parachute posts.

Well, Christmas came and went yet again. Only this time, I had a little guy who actually knew what was going on. Your whole view on Christmas changes once you have a child who understands it. He was up at 6:30 am ready to see what "Tan-ta" (we're working on the S's) put under the tree. I think he managed to get more presents this year than I got from when I was 2 through about 8. Keep in mind he's only 20 months old.

He walked off with about a dozen Thomas the Tank Engine characters, a ton of tracks and playsets, a train table, a Thomas Power Wheels car, a Moon Bounce, Little People stuff, a golf club set, stuffed animals, bath toys, a fishing set, DVDs, books, money, clothes, dinosaurs, race cars, a giant tool center, a McDonalds playset, a keyboard, mp3 player, an aquarium, a playskool grill, beanie babies, christmas ornaments, savings bonds, stickers, an easel, etc

I could keep going for a while. By the way, yes, I said a Moon Bounce. What kind of parent would set up a Moon Bounce in the kitchen because there was no more room anywhere else in the house to use it? This guy. That's who.


I also didn't do to bad with the presents. My wife hooked me up with some sweet New Balance Hikers in a 15 wide. They are super comfortable. She also got me a magnetic net release because my old one broke, and a copy of "An entirely synthetic fish" by Anders Halverson. I also received a Dr. Slick scissors gift set with 3 pairs in it, some Anvil midge scissors (which I love!), a few fly fishing books, and $100 towards a new vise. I think I'm going to pick up the Anvil Apex this week.

But the best present of all this year was definitely the Troy-Bilt 2100 snow blower from our in-laws! It came just a the right time! I was so excited to try it out and it worked like a charm this morning after our 10 inches of snow. I hate the white stuff, but it was fun taking Michael out last night to go sledding.



At this point you're probably wondering why you're reading a fishing blog post that has nothing to do with fishing. So, I guess I'll get in to that now. We did a family outing at the Little Lehigh yesterday morning with my stepdad, bro-in-law, and myself. We fished from about 6:45am-12:30pm. The bite was very slow. I hooked in to a small brown on a midge but he popped off as I went to grab him out of the water. I landed a small bow on a zebra midge. I caught a nicer bow on a chartreuse size 16 egg who again popped off the second I tried to unhook him. The other two got the skunk. It was a very uneventful day and it was too darn cold to bother pulling out the camera for pictures. Boring, I know.

And in the world of tying, I was cleaning up my stuff the other day and I came across some olive goose biots. Now, I've never bought olive biots, and I have no clue where the hell they came from, but I figured I'd make use of them. I tried some BWO parachute emergers tonight. I suck at parachute flies, I know. But they will probably work. Here's a size 20.


I have 3.5 free hours tomorrow from 9:30am-1pm. Is it worth driving 45 minutes each way to hit a trout stream that just got a foot of snow last night to fish for about 2 hours in 25 degree weather?

Hare hair galore

Life is good. I'm officially on vacation until 1/3. I'm looking forward to family time, and time on the water. I'm sitting here downing bottles of the Torpedo Extra IPA by Sierra Nevada. I'm not usually a big SN fan, but this is a pretty darn good beer. It's got a nice bitter bite, and at over 7%, you can't go wrong. Although I'm surprised it's ranked so high on Ratebeer.

I finally got a chance tonight to dig through some of the loot I bought for next to nothing at the LL Fly Shop over the weekend. I was rummaging through cigar boxes full of tying material that they were letting go for $1 each. I opened a box that was FULL of rabbit pelts. I got 4 whole pelts for $1. I couldn't believe it. I have enough to tie at least 5000 Hares ear nymphs.



I hate the hares mask you buy in the tackle shops. It's always flattened, and full of brittle hair that's never long enough. I never felt like I could get my nymphs to look "buggy" enough with it. I took some longer hairs off the ribs of the pelt tonight and started experimenting. These things look super buggy and I'm almost positive I'll be successful with them under the right conditions.

3XL curved nymph hook size 18
Body dubbed with some dubbing I made from the pelt using underfur and snipped longer hairs
UTC extra small gold wire for the ribbing
black goose quill for the wingcase
Thorax dubbed with longer hairs
tungsten bead head


Before I go drink more and tying even sloppier flies, I want to give a shoutout to Fin Follower for showing us love on their site, and to the new google followers. We're up to 7! Thanks for reading.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to get hare crazy.

Master Chief catches mad brown trout

So, one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that I'm a total nerd and I've been fairly obsessed with playing Halo on XBOX Live for the past 5 years or so. I've been through Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST, and now Halo Reach.

One thing I hate about XBOX Live is the huge amount of annoying, racist 12 year olds with potty mouths. To avoid them, I joined 2OLD2PLAY. It's a community for older gamers (25+) who all log on together to avoid the the little bastards (or in geek speak, the Timmies)

I felt that it was time for a new signature on the web forum. I felt like it was time to combine my two favorite hobbies so with the help of google image search and Photoshop CS2, I came up with this.



Yeah, I know. I suck. If you play XBL, especially Halo or COD, feel free to add me. My gamertag is PHAZESMASHER.

Now if only Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo would make a fly fishing game. I think it would be great with Kinect.


See you in the pregame lobby....

Odds and ends to wrap up the week

This week went fast. I can't believe it's Sunday night. I have a project I've been managing at work about to come to a close, and as of Thursday, I'll be on vacation until 1/4/2011. I'm pretty psyched and I know that I'll be fishing every day crossing all the things off my wife's to-do list around the house. This includes fun activities such as painting and lots of cleaning. At least it's the holiday season. We took my son to breakfast with Santa today and unlike the post I saw on Troutrageous, my son actually loves Santa. Here's the offical Santa pic with him. He's had about 4 more since this one, but this is my favorite.



In other news, I tried to fish today. I think tried is the right word here. Although, I didn't suck at fly fishing like I did yesterday. I unfortunately don't have the luxury to have a spring creek with a consistent temperature near me so when I have limited time to fish, I hit the east branch of the Perk. I was able to get out for an hour today, but since it's been freezing cold every day, it's starting to ice up. Both sides of the water had about 5-10 feet of ice protruding out from them which meant you had a 10 foot channel in the middle to cast through.

*&#$ing ice


This did not make the fishing fun at all. I did see a small rainbow hugging a slate rock, but he wasn't having what I threw at him and when my streamer hooked in to a chunk of floating ice, I think he had enough of me and took off to hang out with the one or two other stockies still left in the water. Ok, so I didnt get snagged in a tree, but maybe I do still suck at fishing.

Later today, I watched the fly fishing film called "Once in a Blue Moon" and I highly suggest it. This guy heard stories about a giant mouse hatch (yes, I said a mouse hatch) in New Zealand and decides to check it out. I won't give away much more, but you should definitely check it out. I enjoying it enough to get me to sit at the vise and trying to spin some deer hair for my first mouse fly. If I wasnt so lazy, I'd post pics of it. Maybe tomorrow. Here's the trailer for it.



Well that's about all I have. In closing, I'd like to give a shoutout to Mike's Gone Fishing for some added traffic. Tight lines sir! The site has also been add to the Outdoor Blogger Network. It's a great site and I suggest checking it out. It has links to tons of great blogs.

Today, I sucked at fly fishing

There are days when I feel like I absolutely suck at fly fishing. Today was one of them. I hit the Little Lehigh sometime around 1pm and it was extremely cold and a lot more windy than I had expected it to be. I despise fishing with half gloves but they were on most of the day today, even though my hands are still cracked to the point where they are bleeding now. It also didnt help that my guides had to be cleared of ice every 5 minutes.


I started working my way downstream throwing scuds, pheasant tails, and eggs. In the first 20 minutes I was there, I lost 5 flies. I was roll casting and getting caught on branches, getting caught by the wind on my back cast, and trying to free a snag which would send my tandem fly rig rocketing into the trees. I went on to lose a total of 8 flies today. I even had a few wind knots that forced me to re-rig. These are mistakes that I am quite familiar with because they happened to me constantly for the first year of my fly fishing. I've since then had to deal with them less, but they came back with a vengeance today. I just wasn't on point.

To make matters even worse, the fish had lockjaw. I couldn't even get a fish to follow anything I was throwing at them. They weren't spooking easily, but they weren't taking anything. Even size 24 midges could not draw a strike.

I was about to pack it in, and then I saw it. One tiny BWO, about a 24, buzzed quickly in front of me. I only saw one and I didn't see a single rise, but I quickly hoofed it back to my favorite hole when olives hatch and tied on a size 20, which was the smallest one I had.

After ten minutes and not a single rise or bug siting, I decided to pack it in. As I'm reeling in my final cast, I finally see a rise. I immediately cast to it and connect with a 10 inch brook trout. I get him to shore and start fumbling for my camera. Before I could get out the camera or touch the fish, he popped himself off and swam away. Some people consider that a landed fish or a long release, but I still felt skunked.

About to snap my rod in half, I start walking back to the car. I look down and see a fairly deep pool at the tail of some riffles that I've never fished before and something told me to make a few more casts just in case there was a fish there. So, I tied on the Slumpbuster I mentioned in my previous post and it broke my slump on the first cast. I finally connected and landed a 12 inch wild brown trout. He wasn't huge, and he didn't really put a big fight but damn, it felt good to finally land a fish, plus he had beautiful coloring.


I released him after admiring him for a few seconds. I headed back to the car still pissed off, but relieved that the Slumpbuster saved the day.