Tying for 2010

We are now tying flies in ernest for the 2010 fly fishing season, so I thought I'd share one of the flies I've been tying with a little twist.

This is our "Korn's Spent Wing Caddis" a great fly and one of my favorites. I've been tying hundreds of them in tan and olive green. We fish it as a trailing fly tied about 12-18 inches behind a dry fly, like an X-Caddis or a hopper. But while I was tying all those flies I got thinking about last fishing season and how well we did catching fish on pink bodied hoppers. So the next thing I know I'm tying this variation.

Why not pink? Pictured is my prototype with pink body and head, I've named it the "Pink Cadillac Caddis". Think it will catch fish? I do, but then again, I might just be a little "spent" from spending too many hours at the tying bench!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and is looking forward to the new year!

Trout Lake

The 15th of June is really when our "big fish drought" officially ends. There's Yellowstone Lake, with its monster cutthroat and chance at lake trout to help the cutts and fill the smoker, but the better bet is Trout Lake. There are a lot of 16-20 inch fish in this lake, and a few in the 24-30" class. In the 1980s an angler brought a 10lb rainbow he caught from Trout Lake into our shop to be weighed. He caught it using a Popeil Pocket Fisherman rod.

Okay, we'll be honest here. This blog entry is mostly an excuse for me to brag about the 24" rainbow I got from Trout on 6/25. It ate a #18 BLM nymph trailing a #14 Adams Parachute. The first run was 100 or more feet, way into the backing. That's it above.

We are running guide trips on Trout now. With the Gardner in great nymphing shape and Trout fishing well in the morning, combining these two makes a lot of sense for anglers who don't want to attempt the joke show down on the Firehole.

New pages about our custom flies, request for Youtube video suggestions.

Two items today. First, I've updated our Custom Flies page to have a photo and description of ALL of our currently-available custom and local fly patterns. Some of these are both tied and designed in-house, some are stock patterns we tie locally, and some are patterns we designed that have either been picked up by wholesaler Montana Fly Company or that we have MFC do since we struggle to keep up with demand.

Here's the main page: www.parksflyshop.com/flies.htm.

Here's the special page I made for our 2009 new patterns, both custom and "standards." We have A LOT of new flies this year, and I just gave Doug a new order for several beyond what we have pictured... and I have a lot of ideas percolating in my brain for when I finally finish the main fly order. www.parksflyshop.com/newflies.htm.

Finally, I have a request: please comment below on what sort of videos you'd like to see posted to the new Parksflyshop Youtube channel. I am planning to do some fly tying videos, videos of rising fish, videos of spawning trout, and of course promotional videos. What in particular would you like to see? Requests for particular flies to do full how-to videos for would certainly be welcome, based on the links above.

Opening Day Reports

Here are four quick mini-reports from Yellowstone Park's openeing day.

Yellowstone River
Angler: Walter Wiese
Locations: Tower Falls area and upstream from the Roosevelt Bridge
Time: 11:15-4:45
Weather: 70 degrees, occasional hard wind gusts, partly-mostly cloudy
Water: 2 feet to 18" of visibility, tannin-stained, no more than 44 degrees and probably colder.

Well, I got one day of pre-runoff fishing in the lower Grand Canyon before it went away. The lake is rising like a rocket and it's been rainy, so this water is probably done until July 4 or so. Fishing was good, but not as good as I actually expected. I kept count and caught 30 fish at Tower, most on streamers and most of these on small black Sparkle Buggers. I probably could have caught more fish on nymphs, as the fish weren't in chasing mode. There were a lot of bugs in the air, but I only saw 5-6 rises total, which was disappointing. I was hoping for Mother's Day caddis. I just think the water (which was in Yellowstone Lake under an ice cap a day earlier) was too cold for the fish to rise. My second spot was between 1/4 and 1/2 mile upstream from the Roosevelt Bridge, where the canyon walls get tight. I only got one fish here, which I think is an artifact of the cold and very deep water. I expect this will fish better come Salmonfly time. The clarity was starting to drop while I fished.

Gardner River
Angler: Matt Minch
Locations: Several stretches below Boiling River
Water: Super high, six inches of visibility, around 48-52 degrees.

Matt figures he caught around 40 fish in this section, all on his double stonefly combination. The Golden Stone was actually the bigger producer, probably because the black one was too hard for the trout to distinguish from woody debris in the high flows. Most fish came from within a foot of the bank. Most tourists would have caught nothing, as the river is very difficult to fish at its current flows. The real upside here is that the fish seem to have filled in many of the lies vacated during last summer's gullywasher of sludge that significantly degraded habitat and thus fishing last summer/fall. A lot of the silt has been washed out already, and the river still has a good 750-1000cfs to rise before it peaks. This will add up to good fishing come July.

Firehole River
Two guys who were in the shop this AM joined the Firehole circus and said they did well on Pheasant Tails and other mayfly nymphs. They also mentioned some Nectopsyche caddis were in the air, although they saw no rises. Another guy did well on small olive buggers. I think the lesson is that the Firehole is fishing well, but only subsurface.

Joffe Lake
A pair of German tourists we sent there caught "a lot" of brookies on small spinners.

Signs of Spring

The other day somebody asked the inevitable question, “Ready for summer yet?” Well, in one sense yes, I think we are all getting just a little bit of cabin fever waiting for the snow to stop. On the other hand, that's the water we need to keep our streams in good shape come the dog days of August so I can’t feel too bad about it. My usual answer to this question is more along the lines of, “I’ll be ready for summer about Labor Day,” and there is some truth to that too.

There are some standard rituals though that tell me summer is coming, however reluctantly. Tax day. Put away the skies and snow shoes day. Restructure the display gondolas for summer stuff - T-shirts and such day. Periodic check in new inventory days. Oops, need to get an order into this vendor or that days. Earth Day events, not always on Earth Day, days.

This year Ben and I took a boat and participated in the Yellowstone River Clean Up day organized by Trout Unlimited Chapters to cover the river from Gardiner to Billings. Over all there were more than 200 volunteers out who collectively picked up several tons of trash. That's the good news and the bad news. Our segment was the right bank of the river from McConnell Access to Brogan’s Landing, about 5 miles, and we collected what looked like a boat load. The good news is that it really wasn’t as much as it has been in years past. I think that segment of river got the most use it has ever seen in 2008 yet I remember in the 1960’s we always carried a trash bag in the boat and always filled it every day. That trash bag may have been the Livingston TU Chapter’s very first conservation project, we got a couple of hundred onion bags screen printed with the TU logo and handed them out to cleanup volunteers all up and down the river. Woodsy Owl is slowly getting the message across.

Earth Day itself market another mile stone for Bear Creek Council, our local chapter of Northern Plains Resource Council as we participated in the commissioning of a solar power panel at the Gardiner school. This project was the result of a grant from Northwest Energy to the school which was facilitated by BCC. In addition we are putting up cash to fund a teacher’s development of curriculum around the solar panel for each grade level. Today Gardiner’s carbon footprint is just a little shallower.

Spring is promised to return next week. Richard 4/29/09

Streamers for the upcoming week.

Right now the weather outside is frightful (35 plus snow), but when it's not so nasty and the river has at least 18-24" of visibility, the streamer bite is on in a big way. This should remain true for the next week or so, shading into the Mother's Day Caddis and then the spring runoff.

Our go-to streamers are the usuals: Woolly Buggers in a variety of sizes and colors. Early in the day, try a PT-Bugger or another bugger with dumb bell eyes to make it ride upside-down, and fish it dead slow. Later, strip and rip. With the dirty water, the fish may well be in six inches of water tight to the banks, so don't hesitate to launch the bugs into cover.

Here are some more esoteric patterns to try now; save the Stacked Blonde for summer. We don't stock any of the patterns below, but if you would like to special order some, I could probably do some direct retail (aka not through the shop) --otherwise they're too time consuming to be worth doing commercially and they won't come cheap anyway.

Blogger is screwing with the pictures, so it's best to just post a link to the album: http://s557.photobucket.com/albums/ss16/Kesserendrel/Streamers%20April%2009/

Enjoy!

Tan EZ-Sculpin
Hook: 2xl nymph, #2.
Thread: 3/0 tan Uni.
Wing: gold variant standard rabbit strip, leave long as shank.
Body: golden brown flash chenille.
Gills: red Flashabou.
Head: tan EP streamer brush, trimmed into a wide/flat shape and with top colored with a brown Prismacolor marker.
Other Colors: olive, golden brown, black.


Articulated Chewbacca
Rear Hook: #4 Gamakatsu SP11-3L3H
Thread: 3/0 olive Uni.
Tail: copper Flashabou
Wing: gold variant or natural grizzly rabbit strip.
Body: olive speckled flash chenille.
Joint: 15lb nylon coated wire with three golden-olive 6/0 "E" glass beads.
Front Hook: #2 Gamakatsu SP11-3l3H
Wing: gold variant or natural grizzly rabbit strip.
Body: olive speckled flash chenille.
Legs: three metallic pumpkin Sili-legs on each side.
Head: two clumps of Australian possum, flared, divided by three turns of natural mallard flank.


Olive Circus Peanut
Rear Hook: #6 Gamakatsu SP11-3L3H
Thread: 6/0 olive Uni.
Tail: dark olive marabou with copper Flashabou.
Body: peacock Ice Chenille (or similar flashy chenille).
Hackle: grizzly dyed olive saddle.
Legs: 2-3 olive dun Sili-Legs on each side.
Joint: 15lb nylon coated wire and two golden olive or red 6/0 "E" glass beads.
Front Hook: #4 Gamakatsu SP11-3L3H
Eyes: 3/16" black Spirit River I-Balz.
Tail: olive Chickabou spun around the shank to cover joint, with 3 strands of copper Flashabou on each side.
Body: same as rear hook.
Hackle: same as rear hook.
Legs: same as rear hook.
Collar (optional): olive grizzly Schlappen.
Head: body chenille wrapped around eyes.
Other Colors: tan/natural (sculpin), black, white.


Black LaFontaine's Dropnose Minnow
Hook: Mustad 9672 #4
Bead: 3/16" copper, brass or tungsten.
Weight (optional): .025 tin wire.
Thread: 6/0 black Uni.
Tail: black Marabou and copper Flashabou.
Body: black Ice or other flash chenille.
Underwing: black bucktail (to support wing).
Overwing: black marabou, full, with copper Flashabou.
Head: peacock herl.
Hackle: grizzly wound dry fly style.
Other Colors: olive, white, brown over yellow, gray over white, chartreuse.


Olive Love Bunny
Rear Hook: #4-6 Dai-Riki #810 bass hook.
Thread: 3/0 olive.
Wing: olive variant rabbit strip.
Body: olive speckled flash chenille.
Joint: 15lb nylon coated wire and two translucent golden olive 6/0 "E" beads.
Front Hook: #2 Mustad 9671.
Eyes: Gold 3/16" Spirit River I-Balz.
Wing: olive variant rabbit strip.
Body: olive speckled flash chenille.
Hackle: olive dyed grizzly saddle.
Throat: red Flashabou.
Legs: barred olive Crazy or Sili-Legs.
Collar: olive dyed grizzly Schlappen.
Head: body chenille wrapped around eyes.
Other Colors: black, golden brown, white, gray and white, brown and yellow.


Sylvie Sculpin (variation; original lacks front hook)
Rear Hook: Dai Riki #810 bass hook #4.
Thread: black flat-waxed.
Wing: black rabbit strip (push point of front hook through and tie off on bottom of hook).
Body: black Angel Hair.
Joint: 35lb Power Pro braided line.
Front Hook: #2 Dai Riki #810.
Eyes: black Cyclops.
Throat: red holo Flashabou OR Angel Hair.
Head: black Polar-Aire spun in a dubbing loop, wound forward, and trimmed to shape. --OR-- black sculpin wool and black Polarfiber stack-tied and trimmed to shape. Head shape should be close to cylindrical.
Other Colors: olive, rust, white, natural.


Black Scleech
Stinger: #6 Dai-Riki #135 scud hook.
Joint/Body: 35lb Power Pro covered with eight translucent silver-lined black 6/0 "E" beads.
Front Hook: #4 Dai-Riki #810 bass hook.
Eyes: black 5/32" Spirit River I-Balz.
Wing: black rabbit strip, extending to point of stinger hook (push point of front hook through and tie off on bottom of hook).
Collar: two turns of rabbit used as wing.
Throat: red holo Flashabou.
Dorsal: black Widow's Web.
Head: black Widow's Web spun in a dubbing loop, wound forward, and trimmed to shape.
Other Colors: olive, white, brown and yellow, any "sculpin" combination.


Yellow Galloup's Stacked Blonde
Hook: #4 Mustad keel hook (hard to find, check http://www.fatbluegill.com/).
Thread: Uni Big Fly, yellow.
Body: 3-4 bunches of yellow bucktail and pearl Krystal Flash.
Throat: yellow marabou tied in along keel.
Head: thread coated with several layers of Sally Hansen Hard as Nails, with black lacquer dots for eyes.
Other Colors: black, olive, chartreuse, white, any traditional bucktail combination ("Mickey Finn" yellow-red-yellow would probably work for lake trout or, in small sizes, for brookies, for example).
See http://www.questoutdoors.net/skills/ftying/patterns/streamers/sb/ for instructions.

Double Wing

Well, like Wally, I'm still tying flies too, right now it's my version of Gary Lafontaine's Double Wing pattern. 

Lafontaine’s Double Wing... tied Dougies’ way... with help from my friend Bill Pitts.

Materials List:

Hook - Mustad 9671 #12-14 dry fly. 

Thread - White 6/0 uni.

Tail - Antron or nylon yarn, ginger.

Tag - White thread cover 1/3rd of hook shank.

Rear Wing - Elk hair, apply super glue to butts.

Body - gray dubbing 1/3rd of hook shank, w/palmered grizzly hackle trimmed “^” on bottom.

Front Wing & Hackle - 1/3rd of hook shank, white craft foam measured to the bend of the hook, with coachman brown or ginger hackle.

Head: color thread w/brown sharpie then whip finish.

4/17/09:  I've also been doing some inland trout fishing here in NY for our local browns.  The Hendrickson hatch is on now and here is one example of the brown trout I caught even though the creek was crowded... could be that it was the nicest day of the year so far with temp's in the 60's that brought everybody to the stream. Anyway, I hope you get out there and wet a line too!

Float Report, Monday April 13

Richard, Don McCue, and I floated from Pine Creek to the 9th Street Bridge Monday. Fishing wasn't particularly fast, though not terrible, and we each boated at least one fish in the 17-19" class. Don and I fished streamers and got two in this range, while Richard fished using "his" method (read: dries) and got one. Half a dozen 12-15" fish and a couple small ones and whitefish rounded things out. We passed a couple foam patches early in the float with noses poking for Blue-winged Olives, although we didn't stop to switch to appropriate flies and so didn't get any on top. After noon the wind picked up hard out of the southwest (gusts to probably 40mph), and that was it for the risers.

Pictured is the longest fish, though probably not the heaviest. He ate a Black Circus Peanut.

We had heavy snow here in town two days ago. It is mostly melted, but the low-mid elevation snow from the system is sticking around. It's supposed to get into the mid-60s through Tuesday next week, and that's going to blow this out in a big hurry. By Thursday or so the river should clear and be red hot from then until the main runoff hits around the 10th.

Location: Yellowstone River, Pine-9.

Time: 11:00AM-5:30PM
Fish Landed: roughly 15, most trout.

Top Flies: #4+6 Black Circus Peanut, #2-4 Black Woolly Bugger, #10 Matt's Golden Stone, #12 Matt's Bead, Hare, and Copper.

Beetlemania

Beetlemania officially begins April 5

Unfortunately, no rock and roll is in the offing. I just get to sit down to tie about 65 dozen foam beetles. We don't like how most commercial beetles look (they're too narrow and don't float right), so we tie our own. Beetles are the only class of fly we produce completely in-house. The somebody that does the producing is me.

One can get bored after a winter of commercial fly tying, and of course I save the stuff we don't need until midsummer until last. Earlier in the winter I was doing three dozen of this and five dozen of that, with only a few flies (some caddis for the Firehole, Glasshead PT Soft Hackles) breaking the 12 dozen barrier. I have to do at least ten dozen of everything I have left to do, with the exception of some streamers. Sigh.

1. Secure hook in vise.
2. Spiral thread to rear.
3. Secure foam strip 1.5X the gape to hook. Glue to shank.
4. Secure peacock or dub thread.
5. Wind body.
6. Secure foam strip at eye. Trim excess.
7. Add a narrow slip of foam as an indicator.
8. Whip finish and cement.
9. Repeat.
10. Repeat
11. Repeat
12. Repeat
13. Repeat.
.
..
...
645. Repeat

Dougie takes a break and goes fishing...

Hi, my name is Doug Korn, I'm a guide for PFS shop during the fishing season and tie flies for the shop during the winter back home here in New York.   Well the other day I had a chance to get out and fish for some of our local brown trout on Oatka Creek.  The creek was high and fast but I did manage to take some fine browns on one of Matt's #14 Bead Hare and Coppers that work so well out West... Well I guess they work here too!  

OK, funs over I gotta get back to work tying.... Dougie.

Belated Trip Report: Yellowstone River, Tues March 24

I fished the Yellowstone Riverin the run below a tributary stream on Tuesday. Fishing was weird. The winter ice changed the configuration of the tributary mouth considerably, preventing the river from washing away some large ice shelves deposited all along the mouth of the creek and significantly altering the river at and below the mouth of the creek. Now there's a deep slot right at the creek mouth, and the run 25 yards downstream is a huge, slow eddy, with only a short run right at its top. In previous years, the best water was the run, with very limited fishing right at the mouth, where the river flowed fast, shallow, and without many boulders to create cover. In the middle of summer the mouth was great, since the river is up in the bushes and flows around boulders that are high and dry this time of year, but usually in March the water was just too fast for trout with relatively slow metabolisms to deal with, except when they hit the jets to climb the creek to spawn.

The spawners are why the area is good this time of year. The rainbows are itching to do the deed, and spawn in great numbers up in the creek. They have to steel themselves for the trip, however, so the fat, healthy, strong fish that aren't quite ready wait in the river in deep water, waiting for rain or warmer water or just the overwhelming urge to meet attractive trout of the opposite sex. Once they're in the creek they're safe, because the creeks are sensibly closed to protect them while they do their business. In the big river, they're concentrated even more than they would be due to the cold (which explains the cutts, browns, and whitefish in the same spot), but fishing for them won't hurt the spawn any because the fish aren't on redds yet. Indeed, some of the fish I caught were in six feet of water, not exactly your stereotypical spawning gravel.

Anyway, back to the fishing. It started off slow. Contract guide Don McCue was planning to fish with me but realized a prior committment after we were already parked at the access point, so he just came down to watch me catch a few, wearing ditch boots to wade through the snow and the (fragile and rotting) ice shelves. I had to disappoint him by catching nothing, first by fishing a streamer/dropper combo downstream from then on a Matt's Black Stone trailing a Bead, Hare, and Copper. Score after half an hour was one foul-hooked rainbow. Boo.

After Don left, I kept fishing the double nymph rig up to the mouth of the creek. The sun peaked out from the clouds, and in fifteen minutes I caught four fish, including the reason no pictures accompany this story: the best fish of the day, an 18" male cutt-bow hybrid, turned out to be camera shy and so flopped his tail against my lens right as I was preparing to snap a snazzy close-up shot. I had my good DSLR, not the cheap waterproof Pentax I could just dunk in the river to clean, so photos were out of the question. It took me twenty minutes after I got home to clean the slime off my lens. Jeez, fish. I promise I wasn't going to eat you.

I lost my flies a few casts after the nice bow, then tied on a Matt's Golden Stone above a new Rubberleg Hare and Copper, a pattern I did for the shop for the first time this year. The sun was as bright as it got during the two hours I fished, and the fished seemed to like the illusion of warmth it gave. That or the sparkle off the stonefly's abdomen and the Rubberleg's thorax. Long story short, in the eddy I was death from above on rainbows, cutts, and whitefish for about twenty minutes. I got some more nice fish, including two in the 15-17" range, and most of the trout were chunky and powerful. Then the clouds rolled in again, it started to fitfully flurry, and the switch was thrown. I think I got fish on back to back casts, then didn't get another strike in the next half hour, including another hopeful run up to the creek mouth where the fish hadn't seen the Golden Stone/Rubberleg combo. Nothing doing. By now it was late afternoon, the 38 degree water was starting to get to me, and I started hankering for a cup of hot tea followed by a beer. Such hankerings are not to be denied, so I headed home.

The facts:
Location: Yellowstone River, several miles downstream from Gardiner.
Time: 3:00-5:00PM.
Weather: 35-40 degrees, overcast to partly cloudy, occasional flurries.
Water temp: damn cold.
Water clarity: 3-4 feet in main flow of river, 4-5 feet before the creek water had time to mix.
Fish caught: 10-12 trout, from 8-18 inches, 4 whitefish from 8-12 inches.
Top flies: Matt's Golden Stone, Rubberleg Hare and Copper, Bead Hare and Copper. No known eats on the Matt's Black Stone or the Black Love Bunny.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Parks' Fly Shop blog! This blog is going to replace our awkward and seldom-used River Journal page. We hope it will be more user-friendly and intend to get all of our employees to post on occasion. Walter Wiese will soon be posting about his March 24 trip on the Yellowstone, so check back soon.