Choose your fishing partners wisely!

You're having a fine day working your way up a favorite creek with a trusted fishing buddy.

And hooking the occasional little fish.

You pause to look upstream and quickly survey the spots on this little stream that are most likely to hold a nice trout.  You spot a nice pool up ahead and know that a good fish has to be living there.

You stop for a second to fuss with your tackle and grab a quick drink of water.  When you look up again, your fishing partner has leapfrogged ahead of you and claimed the pool for his own.  He doesn't even look sorry about it.

You briefly entertain throwing a big rock into the hole to show him what you think of his tactics, but decide instead to see what happens. He is rewarded for his devious ways.

The pool gives up the biggest native brook trout you've ever personally witnessed.  Even though, by rights, this should have been your fish, you are happy for your buddy.  

You think: It's a good thing we're friends.

Down Time

It feels like I haven't been fishing in forever. In actuality, it's been the longest stretch I've gone without wetting a line in several years - almost 2 months. I may be about to lose it if I don't remedy this situation soon. My recent weekends have been filled with house hunting and the task of finding just the right house has prevented me from getting in any stream time. On the weekends I've been free, the weather hasn't cooperated. Oh well, hopefully I'll be back in the game soon. In the meantime, I've been spending a lot of time at the vise trying to get the boxes stocked. So in an effort to not let the blog go completely by the wayside, I thought I would post up some pics of the patterns I've been working on.

Small rubber legged stonefly nymph:

March Brown Para-Wulff.

Christmas Para-Wulff I tied for the weekly tying contest on my local forum:

My take on the Tellico Nymph.  A true Southern classic:


Flashback Pheasant tail nymph:

And my favorite.  A stonefly pattern that I wasted a bunch of materials and hooks on until I was satisfied with how it came out.  I think this one's going to be a killer: