Peterjay

A friend of mine had one back in the 60s, but after hooking himself a few times, he tossed it and switched back to a standard reel. Those things can be dangerous if you accidentally bump the trigger with the fly in your hand. Automatic reels didn't stay on the market long, and that's probably why. Even back then, they were more of a curiosity than anything else. They had their (brief) day, and they didn't cut it; more or less a solution looking for a problem.

They still buy articles, Bob, but there are so few outlets these days, that it's difficult to get anything in print. Several of my friends are regular contributors to national fly fishing magazines, (and most have books to their credit) but it's just something they do for the hell of it during the off-season, and it's hardly worth the effort, money-wise. Too few (expensive) magazines, too many aspirants, and very little $$$$. Not many people are gonna plunk down hard cash for something they can read in an hour when there are so many free resources online. Time marches on.

Nice bugger, Jack. Hey John - speaking of cobia: my lawn guy says there a lot of them around right now out near the CBBT. He also says that a friend of his got nine dolphin and released three white marlin out on the canyons one day this week. I'd love to give the whiteys a shot, but I'd worry about the water getting into my waders.

Bob, that's not exactly encouraging. The only turtles we've got in the estuaries here are terrapins, and if a small tiger ever figures out that the best way to become a big tiger is to eat outdoor enthusiasts, the demand for prosthetic limbs is gonna skyrocket. Seriously, there's a sandy island in the middle of the Wachapreague inlet that's one of the few accessible beaches in the area. A lot of people swim there, but the bottom quickly drops off to 60 feet, and absolutely anything is apt to come close to shore. I'm not particularly paranoid about sharks, but I'd think twice about getting in the water. We've got a mainland-marsh-shallow bays-barrier island situation here, and the water inside the islands stays in the 80s all summer. Once the warm-water critters get inside the islands, they tend to stay until September. When we first moved down here in 2012, I made it a point to ask the folks who were fishing the tidal creeks what they generally catch, and the answer was invariably "sharks." We sure have an interesting mix in these waters. Hey John; I was talking to my doctor Monday, and it seems a friend of his was fishing for stripers on the east side of the upper bay, where he saw quite a few puppy reds. I don't know what it means, but the source is reliable. If they also come up the seaside, we should see something on the flats in a couple of weeks. We'll be getting some good tides early next week - it might be a good time to take a hike out there and see what I can see.

Luckily, they weren't after my fly. It was just one of those cosmic convergences that happen once or twice in a lifetime. If one of them had grabbed the fly, I probably would have fallen off the rocks. The Coast Guard guys from the Wachapreague station used to swim off a dock at the abandoned facility out on Parramore Island, until the day they were sitting around out there and an eight-foot tiger swam by. That was the end of the swimming excursions.

John, I have seen anything up this far yet, but I've been meaning to get down that way and check out some of the flats I've found on satellite maps. There's a state wildlife management area adjacent to the National Wildlife Refuge that has some likely-looking spots, and I hope to hit it as soon as the holiday's over with. (Hard to believe, but I was actually stuck in a traffic jam out on Rte. 13 the other day.) I'll keep you posted; there are some other promising spots down there that I want to check & see if there's public access. Info has been hard to come by; I asked on Tidalfish if anybody'd seen any pups south of here, but nobody's responded, far as I know. Speaking of sharks: I went over to the Machipongo at Quinby Bridge last week to swim a few new flies, and as soon as a cast hit the water, I thought somebody had dropped a cow out of a helicopter. I mean, the water just exploded 30 feet in front of me. Two big dorsals popped out and disappeared behind the crab shacks before my jaw had time to drop. That was a real knee-shaker. I know bulls and sandbars come in there often, but I've never witnessed anything that violent before, and I check that spot virtually every day. I won't be swimming there any time soon. As soon as I learn anything, I'll give you a holler.

Thanks, Bob. Everything eats mummies around here. Stripers, reds, flounder, even crabs. I like to sit on a school at low tide, when they're huddled up against the shore. Sooner or later, something will show up and take a whack at 'em.

This one works. I didn't have any decent spinning hair in the right color, so I used body hair on this particular fly. Sometimes I put oversized eyes on them, sometimes not. Whatever fits the mood I guess.

I've seen lots of big carp spawning in the Bashakill wildlife management area in Sullivan/Orange Counties. I never fished for them, but there's a lot of shallow water that would be good for canoes or kayaks. I'd guess it's exactly what you're looking for.

Green heads are one of the nastiest critters imaginable, but I've had pretty good luck with Cutters as long as it's applied generously to every square inch of the body, including clothing; they'll bite right through fabric. At least mosquitos and no-see-ums leave most of your flesh intact. Damned green heads will eat you right down to the bone if you encounter enough of them. If they were as big as piranhas, there'd be a lot of skeletons walking around this neck of the woods. I've actually pulled up to a fishing spot and had them swarm all over the car to the extent that I just turned around and went home. On the bright side, they're only at their worst for a few weeks in July. (here on the Eastern Shore, anyway)

Yeah, FB; Carolina dogs are nicknamed "American dingoes." They strongly resemble each other physically, but there's no genetic connection. My guess is that dogs who fend for themselves have evolved into forms that resemble each other for practical reasons. Big, erect ears, medium size, bushy tails. Our Carolina dog has hearing that's amazing, and has extremely strong pack instincts. (She won't touch her food until the alpha female eats, and she won't let the lower-ranking dogs touch her.) The OP animal could be a wolf that just looks a little different than other wolves. Heck, I don't look like Brad Pitt or George Clooney either, even though we're all equally handsome and irresistible to women.

JC, that is something I thought I'd never see because of the regulations. I don't how how he managed to get the fish weighed, but apparently, he did. I believe he caught the fish near where I live on the Eastern shore. The big reds are in the shallows right now, but the water is warming fast, and they'll be heading out to deeper water soon. A friend of mine who holds the 16-pound tippet class record for snook brought the fish in in a live well, then turned it loose after being weighed, but it was half the size of that red. I'd love to know how he did it out of a kayak.

Mike, dogs and wolves belong to the same species, and their offspring are fertile. Knuckleheads who breed these potentially dangerous animals come up with all kinds of percentages of dog/wolf genes by selective breeding. Horses and donkeys belong to different species; their genes don't match up well enough for mules and hinnies to have complete reproductive systems. Coyote/dog crosses are also fertile, although pups from two coydog parents don't do well in the wild. Tjm; Carolina dogs were unknown to science until the 1970s, when a biologist in a dense South Carolina swamp noticed that the free-ranging dogs he was seeing looked exactly alike. He trapped some of them for study, and found that they exhibited behaviors that are unknown in domestic dogs. Local folks, of course, knew all about them, and just called them "yaller" dogs or swamp dogs. They'd always been roaming around remote areas, and nobody gave them a second thought. To get back to the OP: I'll try to keep track of the story. We should know something by the next full moon, especially if there are any Gypsy caravans in the area. I never missed a Friday night "Shriek Theater" presentation when I was a kid, and I'm well-acquainted with critters that stalk human prey around cemeteries on foggy nights.

The canid in the picture could be anything, though my money's on a wolf/dog hybrid. Research indicates that modern (gray) wolves and dogs descended from an extinct common ancestor thousands of years ago, but they've evolved separately over the millennia. Dogs do not descend from modern wolves; they're entirely different animals, though they're still classified within the same species. (which is open to debate) Canids' ability to interbreed makes tracing their lineages difficult, but with DNA research, the picture is beginning to clear up somewhat. A male gray wolf will occasionally mate with a female domestic dog that it finds in estrus, but it's extremely rare. Wolf/dog hybrids are nearly always the result of selective breeding controlled by humans. They're intelligent, unpredictable, powerful animals that will often escape captivity, or be turned loose by owners who have bitten off more than they can chew. As far as I know, the only strain of free-ranging dogs still in existence in the U.S. is the Carolina dog, which is still out there in the Southeast, and carries a unique DNA haplotype. (I happen to own one; the light-colored dog in the picture is a Carolina) There's a distinct possibility that they're pre-Columbian, although the research is still incomplete. There's no evidence that they've ever mated with coyotes, though they've had the opportunity. BTW - Jack London's "White Fang" was about a wolf-dog, (3/4 wolf) and "The Call of the Wild" was about a dog that was accepted by a wolf pack, but London wrote fiction, and where he got his ideas, nobody knows.

If it has dog features and wolf features, the possibilities are pretty limited. Western wolves in the wild will kill a dog or coyote on sight, which pretty much precludes a wild hybrid. What's most likely is that some knucklehead bought a wolf/dog hybrid from a breeder and turned it loose when it became impossible to handle. I've seen several "domesticated" hybrids out there when we were living in Idaho, and I sure as hell wouldn't want one either. Eastern wolves have dog and coyote DNA, but I don't think you'd find one in Montana. Then again, if you live in that area, it couldn't hurt to stock up on wolfsbane and carry a silver-headed club when traversing the moor at night. And if you happen to see Lon Chaney Jr. walking through the streets with a Chinese menu in his hand, you can probably kiss your ass goodbye.

Great looking bugs, Duke. Nice to see that somebody else makes his own eyes; yours look terrific. I haven't had much luck with the puffy paint - a bit too thick for my uses. Do you thin it, and if so, do you use water? I've been using cheap acrylic paint from Walmart on polyethylene bags. Once they cure, they're fairly easy to peel off, but I'm definitely gonna try your wax paper method. A little trick I picked up is to put a layer of glitter paint over the base, before adding the pupil. Makes for a nice sparkling effect. I coat them with a layer of liquid fusion once they're applied. I recently watched a Davie McPhail video, where he put a drop of UV resin on each eye to make hard eyes. It's a lot easier to just buy stick-ons, but making them is a lot more fun.

Mike, it was caught in 1983 - that's probably why the numbers crisscrossed in your mind. The same thing happened to me once when I introduced my wife to the Virgin of the Governor Islands.

The IGFA world record is 94 pounds. Try as I might, I absolutely cannot resist this one: not doubting you Mike....but where'd you get this statistic? I can't find reference to this number. Ball-busting opportunities are apt to pop up any time, any place. Failing to seize the moment can result in severe psychological damage later in life, and I've already got enough to deal with.

Their life cycle is fascinating; the exact opposite of striped bass. When the immature stripers are heading out, the immature reds are heading in. Their ranges overlap here; I've caught stripers and reds within a few minutes of each other. There's a place right up the road where there are bunch of buildings right on the river; they keep crabs there until they molt, and the tank drainage and discarded shells attract everything from minnows to flounder to trout & reds to the occasional bull shark. When the tide bottoms out and there's no water on the flats, it's a great place to look for reds. They hang in the channel and make lightning raids on the minnows that hang along the banks. Completely different from flats fishing, but great fun.

Flats, I think a lot of people mirror what they see on TV, and all too often, what they see is some knucklehead abusing a fish that should never been taken out of the water to begin with. I don't know anything about snook, but I've seen plenty of fragile fish like false albacore killed for the sake of a grip & grin. I'd rather see somebody take a fish home and eat it than kill or maim it, then dump it back.

We get the big reds in the 30-50 pound range from late April-June and again in the fall, although there are always some around during the summer. A neighbor of mine got a 47-pounder (estimated from measurements) in August last year on a spoon that was bigger than most of the stripers I've seen lately. I haven't heard them called channel bass anywhere but the Carolinas - certainly not here. They've been red drum or just reds (especially with the younger crowd) in this neck of the woods as long as I can remember. The smaller ones that come onto the shallow flats are puppy drum or just pups. The big ones are called bulls. No matter - same fish, different names. Their abundance is living proof that slot limits work. Everything else is on the decline, but the reds are thriving.

Thought you guys might like to see what kind of reds we have around here. The angler in the pic caught this one out of a school in three feet of water, and they were hammering flies. Damn!

Nice ties, guys. Dave, you've sure got some great gamefish down there. I saw a video a while back of fly fishing the surf in Western Australia; they were catching queenfish. I'd kill to get a crack at those babies. I've always lived near some great fishing, (by design) so I've never had much of an urge to take fishing trips, but Australia is one place I'd love to go.

Hey John; hope all is well with you. I haven't gotten out much the past couple of years, but that's about to change. They're getting some reds right now in the 30-50 pound range, and I've heard of some puppy action in the Va. Beach area so we'll see what develops. I'm gonna walk the beach at Savage Neck this week to check out the scene, armed with the 12wt of course; you never know. Hey, I decided to clean up a pile of algae, lichens, leaves, pine needles, and general filth in the side yard, and lo and behold, there was a 17-foot Carolina Skiff under it. After a week of serious scrubbing, she's so clean that I actually had to put on sunglasses because of the glare. Still got some work to do, but she'll be ready for summer. Operator certification is mandatory now in VA, so that's gotta be taken care of. (I guess those pesky buoys out there mean something after all - I thought they were there just to brighten up the scenery) I'll be sure to keep you posted, especially on the herring.

I've got Dave's email address around here somewhere - I'll have to drop him a line and find out where he's doing time this year. It's always a possibility that he finally married that goat, and is too busy with marital duties to do much fishing. I haven't heard from Ben in quite some time either. I've got his email address as well. I stay in touch with ditz and Tidewaterfly, (Ray and Jim) and Kirk pops up on Facebook every now & then. People come and go here, like anyplace else, I guess. I've been a member for 15 years, and I go on hiatus every so often too. I'll be sure to let you know what I find out.