JSzymczyk

the fish we DON'T catch are the fish which keep us wanting to fish another day....

thanks

since the topic comes up over and over, here is a pic of a common carpet beetle adult. Found it on a piece of molding in my house today. My house is as clean as any, and cleaner than most. Yes I use chemical means to keep them out of my materials and collections, but occasionally I still see one. The adults are not the life stage which causes damage to materials, the larvae are.

not to be "That Guy" but... this is one of those things which beautifully illustrates an advantage of a rotary vise.

Jig hooks ride point up when jigs are molded onto them.... or enough weight is below the center of gravity to offset the mass of the bend and point. You've got to add weight below the axis of the shank for them to ride point-up. ?

As a penetrator in 20mm and larger projectiles... no doubt all sorts of things were available in oddball surplus sales, but DU "bullets"? Also uranium is anything but soft- the penetrators in those projectiles were known as "self sharpening" because of the way they fractured on impact. It is roughly in the same hardness range as many high carbon steels. Irrelevant maybe, but just sayin'.

this again..... if you live in a house or building in a temperate to tropical climate, you have "carpet beetles" in your house. You may go you entire life without seeing one, mainly because you don't know what you're looking at, but they are there. The adults do fly. They are small. They can live in synthetic carpets because after a short time of filthy humans living on the carpets, the carpets become full of organic matter which they eat- particles of leaves and pollen and stuff dragged in on the bottoms of your feet, food particles even if you don't eat above the carpet, dead skin particles, shed hairs from people's bodies and heads, etc. If you have animals even filthier than humans, dogs, cats, whatever, then you have even more scavenging arthropods living in your home. It's just the way it is. IF they establish a beach head in your materials, chemical warfare is the only way to 100% effectively annihilate them. Lots of discussions on this board about it, and if you want the truth, do some searches for "museum pests". Priceless insect, bird, and mammal collections must be protected, and there are numerous studies showing conclusively what works and what does not work. You can protect your expensive dead animal parts with 21st century technology, or you can hope and dream with witch-doctor level oil and dirt and magic spells. I have butterfly and moth collections which I have collected over the last 40 years, since I was a kid. Spent God-knows how much time in the field collecting them in all the places I've been, things which if I had to replace would quite literally be impossible. Worth absolutely zero dollars, but the intrinsic worth is incalculable. All the best hackles and feathers in the world are just dollar signs in comparison. The same scavenging pests which eat our fly materials eat and destroy dead insect collections. These are not protected by diatoms, cedar chips, and prayers. They are protected by the wonders of modern chemistry.

dead drift a brown woolly worm by their face. Helps to put a dab of crawfish scent on the fly. We grew up doing this in the 80's long before anyone dreamed they could possibly become some sort of fad fish. Another weird example of an invasive species that allegedly rational people have come to worship in many places.

if you want it to ride hook point up, you must achieve a cumulative effect of either A) adding enough mass opposite of the bend and point to put the center of gravity below the axis of the shank (this is what a jig does) or add enough buoyancy on the bend side of the shank to offset the mass of the bend and point. That's it. Period. Simple physics. how you do it is up to you. Keel hooks and bend-backs do it with option B, jigs and Clouser Deep Minnows and flies with dumbell eyes do it with option A. It's not rocket science. And it most likely won't matter with your full sinking line, which way you do it.

very nicely done. I like that one a lot. Reminds me of the types of flies I started out with... flies that caught tons of fish, and flies that didn't have marketing companies screaming at me about NEEDING a special fly line to cast it with.

Ring finger of my right hand, then when I cut something just put my thumb in the other loop without even thinking about it. I don't know when or how I picked up this habit, but it must have been not too long after I started tying as a kid. I'm not one to sit at my vise and tie a hundred flies, I'm always getting up and moving around and sometimes I'll put my scissor down, go back to my vise without them and feel stupid.

Contact Mike Vendon (MVendon) on here. A few years ago he hooked me up with a lifetime supply for a very reasonable price. Maybe he still has some to offer. I never viewed the brass Edson-style cheeks as a Jungle Cock substitute.

If your goal was to save money, you wouldn't fly fish or tie flies at all. It's a self-defeating argument. IF your goal is to catch a live fish from it's habitat, you're going to invest something of value into it- whether you fashion your own spear from a streamside sapling- investing time and work or going to a floofy high end fly shop and spending a couple grand for stickers and labels on equipment. You smuggle supplies from "my truck to my shop" but you're worried about justification of your hobby?

A battery is simply a fuel supply. Exactly the same as a gas tank is the fuel supply for an IC. Yes you can keep going further back and getting more defined but for fishing there is no real point. I'm done with motors for the last several years. I am the motor and engine in my kayaks so I have a large reserve of fuel onboard at all times.... I will someday buy another fishing boat with probably both an IC and Electric drive. Agree 100% with Mike- maintenance is everything. Take care of your gear, it will take care of you.

or use a different material on size 16 and 18? if you boil, stretch, or smash foam, the bubbles which make it FOAM and give it buoyancy are compromised. On that smal size fly you can find many other materials which are easier to deal with and achieve the same goal.

this isn't nascar or baseball..... "OH MY GOD THERE IS A CLOUD IN THE SKY !!!"

I followed the advice given above and messaged them on FB- and got a reply in a few hours- in part, "the best way to contact us is email...." ha ha ha. Then Jon at HMH emailed a reply to my email, so in all fairness the folks at HMH do respond, after being reminded.

stainless steel toenail clippers... the ones with a straight or slightly convex, not concave cutting edge. Yes they're larger than most "nippers" but they cut damn near anything, and they cut easily. I forget which brand I bought last, several years ago from a drugstore in the nail care section- but the steel is hardened to the point of being ridiculous. I wanted to drill a hole in the end to attach a retractable lanyard. I broke a carbon steel drill bit without making much of a mark. Then I ruined a "carbide coated" drill bit doing the same. Finally I was able to get through the two layers of steel at the "tail end" of the clippers using two carbide burrs in my dremel tool. Ruined the first one about half way through, and pretty much ruined the second one finishing the hole. The cutting edges are perfectly good after all these years. I was dumbfounded at how hard that steel is. They were something like $4 for a package with the larger toenail clippers and a regular size fingernail clipper. $20, $50, $100 clippers just show the world how stupid fly fishermen can be.

It would be easier and simpler for a company to write a line in their "contact us" web page that says "We don't do e-mail, please call us". It boils down to integrity. On the flip side of your logic, we are ALL busy- email type people may only have a minute here or there during business hours to shoot off a quick, concise, detailed question about a product or issue and don't have time to sit on hold waiting for a person to pick up, trying to explain the reasons for their call, and quite often dealing with multiple transfers to the "right" person. Bottom line, a business should not advertise a product (email customer support) and then willfully not provide it.

shouldn't your friend be telling you what he wants you to tie?

I usually put a hundred yards of backing on my spools, because that's how it comes and only to fill the spool- Show me a North American fresh water scenario where a fly fisherman has a reasonable chance of recovering a fish which has run off an entire fly line and almost a hundred YARDS of backing... maybe one in a billion fish. I've caught 8-10 pound steelhead in Lake Erie, open lake not a tributary stream, and they have not run more than MAYBE 50 yards. Maybe a king salmon at the mouth of a river in Alaska.. Muskies don't make runs like that, nor do big landlocked stripers. I agree with Rocco but would put the number closer to 98%.

there's nothing wrong with a DT line. Most people can't, or at least don't, cast the entire front taper of a WF line and into the running line anyway. If you've got a rod to match it with, just use it. You may find you like it.

very nice work - Have you ever read Joe Bates' books "Streamer Fly Tying and Fishing" and "Streamers and Bucktails- the big fish flies" ? If not, then you should try to get ahold of them.

same here. not in spam folder, I check that daily. Yes the message was sent on 05 March. It's just weird. E-mail is the standard method of communication in any legitimate business model. It is 2017.

Just throwing this out there, I e-mailed a question to the contact info address at HMH over two weeks ago and have had no response. It's not a major emergency but I was prepared to spend a little bit of $$ with them. The "well did you give them a call?" response is irrelevant in this day and age- if a company HAS a customer service e-mail address, they should use it.