I’m tying flies. Hairy Drakes, size 10, 1280. Subbing Dirty Bug Yarn for dubbing, ribbing with copper thread, palmered body, parachute post. Modifications? Of course. Two-tone body, with pheasant tail pulled over the back of the fly and held by the aforementioned copper thread. Tails then are pheasant tail instead of my normal Coq De Leon. Palmered hackle is standard grizzly, but the parachute is from a sweet golden/grizzly neck I found stashed away. It’s the kind of neck that smells of mothballs and is probably 50 years old. I have these treasures buried all over the my house and garage. I’m using a light brown synthetic wing instead of white deer hair. The result of this substitution is a slightly less robust thorax/head. There are no deer hair ends to cover with thread, thereby adding bulk that makes for a more balanced fly. This skinny head is bothering me right now, but didn’t bother the trout this past summer. It’s also nice and fast to tie. 3 minutes on the stopwatch. Every once in awhile I’ll sit down to tie a pretty fly or two. But most of my tying is pleasure in efficiency. A half-hour of cranking and I have a fly covered for the summer. Night comes early in November. It’s definitely time to start thinking of next season.
But I’m not overlooking the start of the post-spawn season. There are many who think the next month or so isn’t great fly-fishing, and that’s fine with me. If it were truly great, it’d be crowded. It’s okay. But okay is far better than slow. In the afternoons the fish will move into the current to feed on things like eggs, and nymphs, and leech-ish flies, and minnow flies. Usually it’s black streamers. One year it was chartreuse and white. Root Beer and copper. There have been some dirty yellow years. But the general trend is big food fished at a deliberate speed or small food fished on a dead drift. The trout will stage in the bottoms of the pools or in the soft water. Some can be sight-fished to. They will be on the insides of the big bends. They are spooky and wily and catching a few during an afternoon is a true pleasure.
We rehabilitated our side-channel this summer and had a bunch of exposed gravel ready for spawning (the side channel behind rooms 9-17 used to be full of beds) but a beaver came in and dammed it up! The best laid plans of beavers and humans often go… Oh well, will make some adjustments and get it ready for those rainbows this spring.
We are enjoying the quiet season around the lodge. We should have our Holiday Catalog — in digital form — ready for Thanksgiving and we are working on our online store everyday. We just got in a new shipment of Burkheimer rods and will be working on a winter Skwala order next. Check us out at www.GatesFlyShop.com.
Mark those Saturdays in January and February for Free Fly Tying Saturdays, and enjoy the start of the holiday season.
