Tag Archives: chris raine

The Post-Solstice Fly Fishermen (or, A Short Essay Designed to Prevent Madness)

December 22, 2009

Yesterday was the Winter Solstice – that day when winter officially begins, and the sun shines the least it will all year long.

It’s a day you notice not because it promises any immediate relief from the cold and dark, but because it offers the faintest hope; from now on, each day grows a tiny bit longer instead of a tiny bit shorter.

With winter’s worst yet to come, progress of any kind makes a real impression on those of us who think light and warm and Green Drakes are better than dark and freezing and nothing.

Fly fishing a small stream in mid-summer

Me on a small stream last summer. A repeat is many months away... (photo courtesy Jim Troyer)

And while surviving a mountain winter from the heavily insulated, nicely heated Trout Underground/Man Cave World Headquarters doesn’t exactly qualify me to write a Jack London-esque short story, sunsets at 4:30 in the afternoon do eventually take their toll.

If you’re a short-horizon type like I am – someone who tends to focus on the near-term situation instead of the long-term picture – milestones are the tools that keep you going when the light at the end of the tunnel is dim indeed.

Some fish even when the river’s too high (and going higher), and others decide that writing about something interesting is almost as much fun as doing something interesting, and hole up in their office and type.

Chris Raine – being neither – is (typically) scattered across a half-dozen different bamboo fly rod building projects, while the local guides either work hard on their businesses, or essentially take a few months off.

Others tie flies like obsessed shamans – wielding fly tying tools like talismans meant to ward off madness – and some fools even clean their fly lines and oil their reels for next year.

That we look to January as the start of the year is nothing more than a convenience borne of rigid thinking.

The real fly fishing year begins (and ends) yesterday, and what are you doing to get ready – or simply make it to – next season?

See you in the (growing) light of day, Tom Chandler.

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Fly Fishing the BWO Hatch When You Haven’t Fly Fished a BWO Hatch in a Year (or, Ouch)

November 30, 2009

The bugs had just started and a few trout were rising, and it was suddenly very clear I’d spent most of my summer fly fishing small streams.

Well, somebody caught something. I just wasn't me...

Well, somebody caught something. It just wasn't me...

Fishing a small stream is gratifying, but it’s not the best preparation for throwing #22 emergers at very spooky trout – which tend to stop rising whenever you wade closer than 35′.

In other words, I was rusty.

Rusty enough that I got a little cranky with myself on the water.

That’s a bad thing, because when I’m cranky, I start cataloging my fly fishing failures, and under the impetus of an admittedly self-critical nature, that list can grow very long.

Wrong flies. Out of 6x. Every cast eight inches short. Not sneaky enough. Not piling enough tippet for a good drift. Not focused. Bad karma from prior lifetime.

It can get a little weighty at a moment in your life when a little confidence is a real asset.

The Code

Sometimes, you never do crack the code, and the bugs stop appearing and the fish stop rising, and you stand hip-deep in seriously freezing cold water and wonder why you took up this sport in the first place.

Other times you change one simple thing: tippet, fly, more reach in the cast – and the whole experience resolves itself right in front of your eyes, and the trout do their part by eating the fly.

It’s either the way things are supposed to work, or pure magic.

When that does happen, you tend to forget the first half hour or so; that stretch where some apparently immature fly fisherman would be tempted to imitate his new daughter by stamping his wading boots and whining.

(Thank goodness that doesn’t apply to you or me.)

In this case, I sorta cracked it. Barely.

Well, not really.

I was able to get fish to eat, though before it all came together, I had one actually come up under my bug while aiming for the natural right behind it.

My simply too-big #18 parachute simply slid off his broad back, and I simply stood there wondering at the unfairness of it all.

The answer, of course, is that fairness isn’t a concept often adhered to in nature, and it wasn’t the trout’s fault I was stinking the place up.

The Ugly Reality

Chris Raine – who was ironically fishing my backup rod (an 8.5′ Raine prototype) because he’d grabbed the wrong rod tube on the way out of the shop – landed two nice fish.

Sure, his fish, but MY fly rod. I claim at least half of the trout's 15 inches

Naturally, I claimed ownership of half of both trout, suggesting it was a fool’s tax for grabbing the wrong rod (an obvious symptom of advancing age).

Just as naturally, he replied with a rude gesture.

I fished an 8.5′ Jim Reams hollowbuilt (a rod I love dearly for its smooth nature, but may sell because I’m not nearly caster enough to enjoy the taper when the bugs are on the water and I get impatient and start driving casts).

I had a total of four grabs, one brief hookup, one driven-by-frustration hookset (broke him off), and missed the other two on general principle.

In other words, I kinda sucked, and because I was preoccupied with rising fish, I can’t even save this fishing report with a handful of good pictures.

It was the kind of day that shows you brief flashes of promise, yet reminds you that you’re not nearly as good at this (or most other things) as your daydreams suggest you are.

Or more accurately, I’m not always as good at this as I was on the one day I did it all perfectly – a day which somehow becomes our benchmark for normalcy, which is self-deception raised to a high art.

While I’ll eventually adjust to the demands of the BWO hatch (I’m stocking up on #20 Roy Palm biot-bodied soft hackle emergers), I’ll also embrace the concept of letting the trout win the day without assuming I’ve lost my marbles.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

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Closing Day Approaches; I Whine About Looming Fly Fishing Choices

November 11, 2009

It’s Day 77 of the Underground’s Home Hostage Crisis, and no, it hasn’t escaped the Underground’s notice that if he can hit a tiny, fast-moving clay disk with a shotgun, a fleeing contractor wouldn’t offer much challenge.

Just saying is all.

Fortunately, the L&T and I managed to liberate small parts of our home from the grasp of the slow-moving insurgents, and the end may yet be in sight, though with even the absolutely, positively, drop-dead deadlines slipping away, it doesn’t always feel like it.

Of course, this blog isn’t about home-based acts of remodeling terrorism.

It’s about fly fishing, and with California’s general trout season closing soon, I’m abandoning my newly expanded (and largely sleep-deprived) family for a few hours in favor of a trout stream.

Where Do You Go When You Can Only Go One Place?

As closing day looms, fly fishermen tend to panic, though with many of California’s rivers now open to C&R fly fishing year-round, closing season no longer means putting people like Wayne Eng on suicide watch.

Before Chris Raine almost single-handedly got the Upper Sac’s season extended, you could actually watch Wayne grow more disconsolate as the closer neared.

One year I even brought a battery powered fishing game to Wayne & Myrna’s end-of-the-season party – a desperate attempt to stem the black tide that engulfed Wayne after the close, where he could only look at the river running by his front door.

It was useless of course – like handing a pack of cigarettes to a heroin addict – but it was either that or encourage Wayne to engage in highly illegal acts of fly fishing.

Fortunately, local fly fishing life has improved the last five years, though realizing that most the other local rivers (and all the small streams) are closing soon is still a bit of a rabbit punch to the groin.

It’s as if fly fishermen are faced with their own version of that old question: “If your home was on fire, which thing would you save first?”

Only for us, it’s “If the season’s closing soon, which body of water do you fish last?”

For me – and for reasons I can’t even begin to explain – it’s going to be a small stream.

Stream Y, in fact.

The Forecast: Trout, Followed by Rain

The weather forecast allows as to how I’ll probably see a little rain, and given the altitude and proximity to the mountain, it’s likely temperatures won’t even reach the 40-degree mark.

That, Undergrounders, sounds like perfect soft shell weather, and after this trip, I may be forced to write an addendum to my previous soft shell equipment reviews, where I largely gushed about this embraced-by-mountaineers-and-outdoor-geeks technology.

Since I published that review, I’ve tested the Patagonia “Insulator” soft shell in a steady (and very cold) rain, and discovered it’s not waterproof – but it is waterproof enough to hold up for three hours or so before I noticed any dampness.

And yes, even when it got damp, it stayed fairly warm.

Would I wear it all day in a driving rainstorm? Not on a cold day, I wouldn’t.

But more after the trip, which because it’s a special occasion, will probably see me wielding a bamboo fly rod.

Orvis Fishing Reports

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After We Rid The World of the Orange Flying Menace, We Confront Another – The October Caddis

November 9, 2009

Sadly, you’re not looking at any photographs from the Underground’s sporting clays experience (at Clear Creek in Corning, a course I liked).

That’s because I was absorbed enough by the shoot that I forgot fire off a few frames on the camera.

With fewer of these flying about, the world is a safer place

With fewer of these flying about, the world is a safer place

In one sense, it’s an example why sporting clays is a lot like fly fishing a technical hatch over educated fish; to succeed, you pretty much have to exclude the real world and embrace a sort of sporting tunnel vision.

When either event is over, you look up, blink a few times, and find yourself amazed by the fact the sun has moved, the clouds have rolled in, and the birds are no longer singing.

Time, it seems, only stopped for you.

The Bare Facts

First, the chest beating: Our team of three shooters ended up right behind the third-place team (their team average was 67.8 birds per shooter from a possible 100, ours was 66).

That’s a astonishing result given my utter lack of experience, and the fact the Older Bro had fired a shotgun exactly once prior to the tournament.

Despite losing a few birds to misfires on my lower barrel (limited to one type of cheap Remington ammo), I shot a 61, and Older Bro posted a 51.

Propping up the excellent-but-still-newbie-ish scores of the Chandler clan was bamboo rod geek Chris Raine, who has annihilated plenty of clay birds in the past.

Despite a rustiness born of a few years away from the sport, Raine posted an 86, and more importantly, he looked good doing it.

He’d shoot, pop the action open, the spent shells would eject over his shoulder, and he’d have the two new shells in the gun before the empties hit the ground (I’m pretty sure chicks dig that sort of thing).

Lacking those kinds of groupie-attracting reflexes, I was content to muddle along without shooting anyone in the leg.

We all have our goals, it seems.

The Inevitable Comparison…

Being a fly fisherman, it’s hard not to compare fly fishing to sporting clays (after all, to fly fishermen, everything is “just like fly fishing, only different”).

Both are far harder than they look, and the people that make them look easy only do so after many (many) hours of experience.

I’m tempted to crack off a smartass line (”sporting clays is just like fly fishing, only louder”), but if the two really were just like each other, I’d already be good at sporting clays.

And given my tendency to make the hard shots while missing the easy ones, I’m clearly not (though I am fully capable of whining about my hard/easy tendencies in both sports).

Later, Chris patiently explained that the modified chokes on my Browning Superposed 20 gauge probably cost me on the near, fast-moving shots, but helped on the farther efforts.

“Oh,” I said. (That experience thing.)

It’s like explaining to a disbelieving new fly fishermen that their #14 Prince nymph – which successfully worked for them on every stocked trout stream they’ve ever fished – probably won’t cut it during a hatch of #20 BWOs on a catch & release tailwater, and that yes – those tiny bits of fluff actually can hook and land big trout.

“Oh,” they say.

We Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Fly Fishing

Sporting clays was fun, and yes, it’s something I’ll do again.

Older Bro is already threatening to sign us up for next year’s tournament, and with a working shotgun, a little prior warning (and a few days more practice), I plan to send a good 3/4 of those Fido-killing orange saucers to their deaths.

I might even plump for “Team Underground,” though that’s contingent on Orvis or LLBean recognizing the extreme PR potential of the event, flying me to their wingshooting schools in the corporate jet, and returning me just in time to clean the course.

Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason why they shouldn’t do it, which is why I run a smalltime fly fishing blog and they run huge, successful businesses.

But for now, we’re returning our focus to another big, orange, flying object – the October Caddis.

Which, it seems, the trout are really, really on top of.

We’ve had a couple frosty nights up here in Mt. Shasta, and the bugs are dying. Rumor has it the Upper Sac and McCloud are both going big guns on the big dry – provided you’re fishing the right kind of water.

Of course, with the McCloud closing in less than a week, those hoping to put the steel to perhaps their biggest trout of the year (yes, it can happen) had better hurry.

Oddly – and assuming I can escape the constraints of father hood for a whole afternoon – find myself drawn not to the glamorous waters, but a small stream, hoping to get one more shot at the little trout before the season closes, and the area quietly fills up with snow.

It’s been that kind of year for me, and I can see no reason to stop now.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

Orvis Fishing Reports

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2009 Great Western Bamboo Rod Makers Gathering October 30, 31

September 25, 2009

Local bamboo fly rod builder Chris Raine is holding yet another Great Western Bamboo Rod Makers Gathering, and if your tastes run to bamboo fly rods, smoked ribs and crowds of cranky, badly-in-need-of-fiber bamboo fly rod builders, then you know where you’ll be on October 30, 31.

This, Undergrounders, is your chance to fondle, cast, and fall in love with a bamboo fly rod you can’t possibly afford, and that you do so against the backdrop of the October Caddis hatch should make for a few interesting discussions around the dinner table (but honey, all the other guys are doing it…).

Test casting a bamboo fly rod at a previous Gathering (this ain't Raine)

Test casting a bamboo fly rod at a previous Great Western Gathering

In his typically flowery, detailed writing style, Raine gets the details down (Chris, we love ya, but try using an adjective every once in a while):

Save this date:  October 30 and 31.  Friday night at Raine Hollowbuilt Fly Rods.  Saturday morning at the Community Building next to the Ball Field.  Saturday evening at the Lions Club, next door to the Community Building.

Friday evening will be smoked ribs and chicken, along with some beans.

Saturday meals will be on your own.  Coffee and pastries in the AM.

No notice posted yet on Raine’s rod building blog, but expect something soon.

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