Steeldrifter

Glad it wasn't worse Bryon. We've dodged a few pretty bad wind storms here in the lower part of the state this year as well.

Go to Ammoseek.com and search for Ginex primers. You can get 1000 of them for about $55-$60 from Republic Ammunition. RA has the best hazmat of anyone. Hazmat is about $15 from them so usually hazmat and shipped comes in around $25 range. So you can get 1k primers shipped for just under $100. And the more you order the ship/hazmat stays the same so its worth ordering larger quantities . I just got 5k spp's and srp's shipped to me today for just over $300.

Beautiful work Mark! One of these days I am gonna have to get one from ya to add to my collection.

Nice smallie. That's a good looking river as well.

If you ever want to build one again on one of those blanks let me know, I can get them from my supplier and save ya a ton of money.

It is one of the saltwater series (faster action) that I bring in directly. But honestly I would not doubt it is the same as the Batson one. I know for a fact that they use the same company for some of their blanks as I get mine from. Only they bring them in, rebrand it, and then mark them up 600% more than I do lol

Those are some pretty cool species to be catching on the fly Mark. Johnathan needs to incorporate a 1/2" universal into that somehow and he'll have the first vise-grip rotary vise 😁

Last fish of the trip. Water is still a bit high for wading all the spots I like, but I went out this morning to catch one last trout before I head home. Time to pack up tonight and head back to the world tomorrow. The past 10 days were rough with the heat & then high water, but that first week I got here with good night time hatches and numerous browns from 20"-25" made the whole trip a great life memory. Time to go home and start looking forward to next year's trip

Nice work. Really cool looking pattern in there.

Norm I tell ya what, I'm glad that as we get older we start to really learn to appreciate things for what they are, and not what they aren't. This 3 week trip I'm on has had extremes to both sides of the scale. The first week was amazing where I caught the biggest brown trout of my life, and a total of four browns between 20"-25" with lots of smaller 10"-12" ones, good hatches, and good water conditions. Then the 2nd week that heat wave hit and shut my trout fishing right down to nothing. Now this 3rd week the rain has the water level almost un-fishable. When I was younger I would have been upset because I would have viewed it as 2 weeks ruined of the 3 week trip. Thankfully now that I'm older, I view it as a great trip where I had one fantastic week, and two weeks of just making the best of the conditions. But I'm very thankful that I am able to do this trip and to enjoy it. I guess with age does come some wisdom. Went down and pulled streamers again for about an hour this evening just to kill some time. Water is still real high, but good news is that it is coming down. Dropped 2" since this morning. If it will drop another 2" overnight then by tomorrow evening I think I should maybe be able to actually get back to doing some serious fishing again hopefully.

Even with the high water I couldn't stay away from the river. Went down for a couple hours tonight just pulling streamers with the spey rod at the boat ramp and caught a couple bows.

Well it wasn't big but it felt good to actually touch a trout after 4-5 days of not fishing for them because of the water temps. Water temps are back in good shape now, but flow is still ripping pretty good. That 2" of rain has wading extremely hard. I think it will be tomorrow night before I can wade fish comfortably again. I did manage to jump in one spot and hook up on two trout with a nymph/indi rig this afternoon though.

My last week starts tomorrow. It's been great, but the past few days were rough. We had a massive heat wave with temps in the mid 90's which made the water temp climb to 74f in the trout section. So I haven't fished for trout for 3 days now till it cools back down. We got a huge all day rain storm which dumped almost 2" of rain on us yesterday, so the water temp is starting to drop now, but the river level is about 6"-8" above being fishable right now today. So I am hoping that by Monday night it might be fishable again in the trout section.

That's actually not as bad as I figured it would be these days with the cost of everything now.

That's a good looking mount. I like that he added some smaller twigs to the main wood piece, that really adds a nice visual to the whole mount. What do they charge for mounting these days if ya don't mind me asking? I use to have a place that did a number of fish for me many years ago, and I think back 20yrs ago I was paying $10-$11/per inch back then. So just wondered what the going rate was these days.