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| Home Waters |
The lakes that are ice-free are becoming numerous. As of this past weekend, any stillwater below about 3200' elevation should be clear. Now is the time to be hitting the shoreline shallows with micro-leeches.
Technique is simple, anchor just off the shallows and cast your flies in front of the reed lines, count down about 'two-one thousand' and begin the strip/pause retrieve. Rainbows are nortorious for cruising the edges of the reed lines (in as shallow as two feet of water) feeding almost exclucively on small leeches.
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| Home Waters |
It's coming... spring and ice off!
A time when the truly obsessed fly fisher breaks the thin shore ice in a path to the open water, just to wave his favourite fly stick and cast a line, retrieve a fly through actual liquid water. How glorius a feeling.
A few hours casting a line out as far as possible, retrieving, casting again, feeling the sun and cool breeze and the heft of a fly rod. Punching that line into the gusts of wind that pick up across the surface of the lake. It feels so darn great to wave a stick over water again. Then, in about an hour or so, depending on what you've been occupying your time with over the long winter, that casting arm and shoulder begin to tighten up ... just a touch.
Bella Coola sea-runs for an early spring pilgrimage
| Home Waters |
By Jack Simpson
The solution for long, fly fishingless winters in this area is to make the early Spring pilgrimage to the drop-dead gorgeous Bella Coola Valley. Late March is the time for a quick trip to the Atnarko, Bella Coola and Salloomt Rivers for sea-run cuttthroat trout.
Tying Chironomids that work
| Home Waters |
The very first aquatic insects to begin moving after (or during) ice off are chironomids. So, if you are tying in preparation for Spring fly fishing, here are a number of patterns I strongly recommend that you have in your flybox in at least two hooks sizes; #12 & #14 in a scud hook or Mustad C49S.
On the stillwater shoals, in depths up to 20 feet, immediately after ice-off, where the water receives the most sunlight (usually in the NW section of a lake), there are two chironomid patterns that stand out as productive & reliable:
It's fly tying time
| Home Waters |
By Jack Simpson
Winter is fly-tying time. A time to sneak off to a quiet corner, settle in with a cup of whatever and begin to replenish the fly boxes that became somewhat depleted over the previous season. A time to remember the shapes and sizes of aquatic bugs that you hopefully took photos of, so "remembering" can be more than an image conjured up by scratching one's head!
'Fly Fishing Stillwaters' seminar with Brian M. Chan coming to Williams Lake
| Home Waters |
It's the time of year, with snow on the frozen ground, -25C with the windchill factor, that writing anything about waving a fly rod over stillwaters would seem slightly more than bizarre. Unless I was in Mexico, casting big streamers for large mouth bass. Which I'm not. Sigh.
However, I will take this opportunity to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a happy and successful New Year.
Home Waters: putting it away
| Home Waters |
OK, time to grudgingly put the fly fishing gear away for the winter.
Just throw it all in a storage bin and stack it in the basement, right?
Never.
Ever!
