Cleavage

I went out for a quick trip with the floattube yesterday afternoon. First time out in the mutated rubber duck by the way.... The sun was shining and there was not a cloud to be seen. When I arrived at the water my initial thoughts about today's fishing were confirmed. No surface activity. I decided to show the fish some cleavage to wet their appetite. Tied on a pink Boobie and fished it static on an intermediate line. The end result: 3 fish caught (around 1 kilo), a few long distance releases and quite a few nibbles...

Don't you just love it?

I learned a lot this weekend. On saturday I attended the small fair at trout lake "De Ronde Bleek" to show my rods to the world for the first time. I got some nice response on the rods and learned a great deal about what works best for me as a way to promote the ideas I have about the things I make.
Apart from that I met a lot of nice people and I the reception and hospitality of the owners of "De Ronde Bleek" - Jan and his wife- was great. After the fair I fished for an hour or so and hooked but missed a fish on the dry fly. Next morning I also tried my luck for an hour with buzzers and a slow sinking line, before I took the drive over to Germany to fish on the river. Even though I caught no fish I think I will be back to fish De Ronde Bleek for real one of these days.

Back to the river a was also at two weeks ago. I started with checking out a part of the river on which I had never fished before. Apart from spotting some brook trout and scaring the living daylights out of a few carp (yep, spooked them), I didn't find any active fish. Casts under the overhanging branches with various dries didn't work. In fact it worked so bad that I even considered nymphing.
In the end I decided not to and try my luck on another part of the river.

After relocating to another stretch I finally found a few fish which were picking flies of the surface every now and then. On the first stretch I saw a lot of different insects.
Rhodani spinners, Soldier beetles, a few bibio's lots of midges, baetis muticus duns were taking off, sand flies and so on. But over on the second stretch It was just muticus duns and sand flies.
A cast in a small hole between the branches and a downstream drift (upstream was impossible) with an imitation to represent the B. muticus ended in a rise to the fly, a hook-up and.... a straightened hook.
Needless to say, the fish stopped rising.
A bit upstream from this fish I found a shallow pool were I saw some fish moving into position at the tail end and start rising. Small duns were floating on the surface and I saw a couple of fish a bit further up making splashy rises ("aha! sedge hatch !", I thought.)
The fish closer to me were clearly working on the small baetis duns I had also seen.
Because off the shallow water (about 20 cm deep) I got a very good at the way the fish reacted to my offerings. The shallow water also meant that the trouts window of perception was very small which called for some very accurate casting. On the first few drifts my fly started dragging after about 10cm.
With some fancy casts I managed to lengthen that to about a meter which was more than enough to get a drag-free drift over the fish. But low and behold.... nothing happened with the dun. Tried an emerger for the same species, with exactly the same result. A few fish had a look at the fly but rejected it at the last moment. For me an excellent example of the importance of presenting the fly in the right way.
A fly that dragged within the trouts window, was completely ignored.
A fly that didn't drag got a good look, but was rejected; both the dun and the emerger.
After another splashy rise from one of the fish further upstream, I tied on Gary LaFontain's Emergent Sparkle pupa and cast it at one of the fish at the tail of the pool. The fish locked on to the fly as soon as it landed, let it drift over its head and grab it at the very last moment it was in its sight.
The fish was a good 30cm and turned out to be a brook-trout. My first one on this river.
Nice. I caught another two fish in the pool, also on the Emergent sparkle pupa.

In the evening I caught another two fish, both on a small (size 18) baetis spinner. I saw the fish rising gently, sipping up something that was not visible. I gathered it must a spinner. Both fish took on the first drift over their head making the catch a very pleasurable experience.
Like Hannibal from the A-team used to say:"I love it when a plan comes together!"

Small update

For those who didn't already know it I am in the proces of starting up a small business as a rodbuilder.

vanderMeer Flyrod design

All the official papers have been signed, mr. Taxman already send me a letter to say Hi an tell me how glad they are that I am going to make them some money. A website is in the making and I will be attending my first fair this Saturday at De Ronde Bleek in Sterksel. I will be showing my latest builds and give everyone who's interested a chance to cast the rods, ask questions etc. etc.
More info can be found here

Just had some fun casting an 8 ft. #3 as research for my next rodbuilding project (lets just call it operation creeks&small streams, to keep the theme going).
The rod I tested, is a CTS Affinity MX 8ft 3wt. I build (allmost) al my rods on CTS blanks. In my opinion they make some of the best blanks in the world. After a while making short cast, some presentation stuff and rollcasts I ended up distance-casting....
Completely pointless (that's not what this rod is meant for) but a lot of fun.

Attractors

I went out to my local troutwater on Saturday and had a realy nice time with Chris and we even caught some fish (five in total, between the two of us). Three of those fish were caught within 10 minutes during what you could call a hatch if it wasn't a big exaggeration of what was going on. 

Let's just say that the fish were actively feeding on the surface for half an hour tops.

Chris and I had a little chat about what to do between hatches. We, snobs as we are would rather not dig out the streamerbox so we decided on fishing attractors is much more fun.

So, sunday morning I decided I should stock on attractors and tied up a few classics.

The flies in the picture above are the famous Royal Wulf (bottom left) and Gary LaFontains Double Wing pattern (top right). There's actually a lot to tell about the double wing, which I will do some other time.

Oh yeah, sunday afternoon I went back to the water and tried to attract some of the resident rainbows.

But nothing much happened. A stiff breeze and an upcoming change of the weather (cold) probably put the fish down. In the end one fish devoured my hopper and broke me off.

It's all fishing.