What's in your vest?

I have gone through multiple phases in my fly fishing career in terms of dragging along gear and jiggery- pokery. My first vest wasn't- it was a nylon creel that slung over your shoulder. The drain holes were incredibly useful at allowing water to seep in and soak everything. It sucked, and whatever I needed quickly was always at the bottom of the junk pile. I graduated to a Simms vest- a gift that the person who gave it to me could not afford. I loved it, and still have it. Myriads of pockets, and over 10 years I got to the point where I could find anything in the dark. But the vest was problematic in the sense that fly fishing vests are not designed to house more than a few pounds of gear, and there really is no room for more than a modest sized canteen. And if you carry a raincoat and lunch you have to stuff it in the big back pocket where it pokes into your back all day. By the end of the day your shoulders are pretty stiff. I then went to the simple little vest pack with a tippet spool, clippers, and a single fly box. This was light and easy to pack, but it ruined trip after trip: rain and no rain jacket, hunger and no food, thirst and no water, and mad rises to a blizzard of caddis when there wasn't enough room for that particular fly box. And a lot of stumbling around without a light being eaten by mosquitoes because there was no bug repellent.

Last year, I went back to the kitchen sink approach but picked up a fishpond vest-pack with a hydration bladder. This thing has tons of room, and is designed to carry heavy loads. I resemble a pack mule on the stream, but this approach has saved the day so many times that I now swear by it. That fact that I am on the wrong side of 50 probably influences this: I can't go for hours without food or drink, and I have some prescriptions that should be with me. I would probably live, but why tempt fate? And I am not out there to rough it- things are rough enough back in civilization. And furthermore, I now do a style of fishing that is fairly new. I usually fish with a friend, and we spot cars at different access sites so we can do 8 hour wades to get less fished areas. Once you are on, you are on and there is no going back.

A reasonably complete list:

Rain jacket: I always carry one. The kind you can wad up in ball. But this occurred after three trips in a row where I got dinged. One storm was so bad that my socks were soaked from hat runoff. It also keeps off the chill when the wind comes up.
Hydration bladder: I once ran out of water, and was getting desperate enough to just take a few sips from the river. Was thinking seriously about getting a drink when I looked upstream and spied a huge dead beaver that had been ripped open by a predator. It was on top of a big log, and had been eviscerated. The remaining guts were hanging in the current. That ended that. Went back to the car for diet pepsi. Now I carry as much as can pack in the bladder. Everyone drinks.
Food: Time is too limited to waste going back to the truck. I eat on the stream and can fish longer and harder.
The first aid kit: waterproof matches, firestarters, a space blanket, bandaids, painkiller (aspirin for when the old guys have their on-stream heart attacks), chapstick, antibiotic cream, sting-stopper, gauze, a bit of tape, butterfly bandages, needles and thread, prescriptions, and a foot of flyline to extract hooks from humans using the pop-it-out method. I have never had to use any of this on myself, but saved an angler from a long journey to an ER to have an adams removed from his palm.
An LED headlamp- hardley weighs a thing and the batteries get replaced every spring.
Bug repellent: I once left this behind thinking it was too early for mosquitoes. It wasn't.
The leader kit: a ziploc with a bunch of tapered leaders, a knot tool, ferrule wax, and steel wood for polishing sticky ferrules on cane rods. Tippet spools. Amazing how many young anglers lose their entire leader and don't have a spare.
A beeswax candle (a reed curry trick) for lubing ferrules and maintaining a flame when you need it. Sometimes a small scissors. The scissors are an A.K. Best trick and can be used to trim flies and rebuild leaders.
Hemostat for unhooking and debarbing, and a ty-rite for holding small flies.
Magnifying glasses- the plastic kind with a leash that you hang from your neck. I stick them on my nose in front of the sunglasses. Looks stupid but saves time.
A bunch of wet lens wipes. It is amazing how your glasses can get crudded up with sunscreen and gink.
The split shot and strike indicators together in a wee little box. It is surprising how often these get forgotten, so it is on my double-check list.
Clippers on a lanyard- did you know you can sharpen clippers easily on a wetstone?
A hook sharpener. Again, easier than tying on a new fly after you hook bottom or a tree.
Tippet spools, including a 0x or 10 lb. tippet spool for whipping loops in the end of other guys fly lines who have lost their leader. See leader kit above.
Gink, and that shaker powder to dry off dry flies. The shaker stuff is amazing and saves you a great deal of time changing flies in good hatches as darkness approaches.
A fleece neckwarmer- amazing how this helps when the wind comes up or the sun goes down.
And the fly boxes. these will be dealt with in a separate post.
A small white towel for hand drying, and removing slime, gink, and effluvia from you and your gear. Amazingly useful.
Toilet paper in a ziploc bag. Forget this once and you will learn it's usefulness.
The single fine cigar in an aluminum tube. I can't smoke cigars while fishing, and my friend Dave H. burned through a brand new fly line. But there is nothing better that a $13.99 cognac-flavored Gurka smoked while sitting on a log in the sun, especially if you just released your first big trout of the year.
Cell phone: OFF. In a ziploc. Gee it was on all day, I guess we were in a dead zone. Sorry I missed the conference call.

Things I just don't bother with:

The hooky thing that slips over your fly rod trip that hooks the branch and cuts the fly free from the tree branch. These are awkward, and putting rod tips up into the shrubbery is a great way to lose a tip and end your fishing, or at least require a trip back to the truck for another rod. Just point your rod at the tree and pull. Carry extra tippets and flies, and you can also learn how to roll cast. Leave tree pruning to licensed foresters.

The little monocular telescope: I always am afraid this will get dunked, so it hides in a ziploc in the back of the pack and rarely sees the light of day. I supposed if there were more topless girls in canoes I would reconsider this. But this is Michigan, it's cold and conservative, and there aren't any usually so it hides back there. And if the rise is not obvious, just wade closer. Same is true with other things you might want to see better.

Reel lube: if you drop your reel in the sand, dunk it then lubricate the moving parts with Gink. You can carry a wee tube of reel lube, but it will explode and render everything slippery.

A fisherman's priest. I do not club trout. Only a complete douche-nozzle would carry a priest. But in fairness, maybe people carry them for protection from drunken canoe paddlers. I can see both sides of this.

A tweed hat. Only a complete double-douche would wear a tweed hat. There is no excuse for this. If you want to wear a tweed hat go to England and fuck around on the Test or Itchen. Or better yet, go to France where you can wear a beret. They have trout there. Really.

A coffee pot. A famous writer (who writes well BTW) often builds a fire and makes coffee. I am usually trespassing so hanging around a smoky fire drinking coffee is not a good idea. Once tried a thermos- the lukewarm soup was almost as nauseating as seeing the eviscerated beaver.

Any laminated card showing knots, hatch schedules, solunar tables, or other nonsense. If you don't know what is going on, at least observe and you might learn something. But don't stand in the middle of the stream reading stupid-ass cards. You had all winter to practice knots and familiarize yourself with stream entomology.

The little trout fish counter: If I have lost count, it has been a very good day.

The stream thermometer. The temp is what it is. So, if it is only 45 F at 1000, are you just going to go home? You can, but I would fish nymphs until you see a hatch.

The silver flask with scotch. To me, being drunk on a trout stream is an oxymoron. Besides, there is rarely enough scotch left from the night before to fill my flask.

Intangibles:

My lucky green Bryn Mawr College hat. It went over a waterfall in the Chattahootchee, and I went after it. It is that lucky.

My little wood giraffe (about an inch high). I found it in a University of Michigan parking lot. Everyone should have a giraffe hanging from their vest. It is whimsical, and amuses small children in canoes.

My eagle claw gold good luck hook. It made it into the leader kit, and stayed there for 20 years. It is now a mass of rust and the little card is illegible, but I still like it.

The net: Every time I forget the net, I hook one of those "oh shit, no net" sized fish. I often leave it behind deliberately to improve my chances, unless I am fishing the UP. There, only a moron would not carry a net.

Screwdriver: useful for punching holes in rental canoes while the drunken frat boys are lying in a stupor up on the bank. Just kidding.

Sooo, if you add all this up it amounts to a bunch of weight, and most of it is used rarely. But it is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Like I said, I rarely use most of the stuff on myself. But I have saved the day for many fishing buddies and complete strangers who found themselves in tight spot. And once on the stream, nothing will stop me.

the great twitch

I was fishing with my friend Matt, who is the greatest hunter I know. So great that he was able to convince other people to pay him to go to Africa for about 5 years and hunt. And he hunts cape buffalo with a single shot .375 magnum. We were fly fishing on the north branch of the Ausable on a very hot day, and decided to fish hoppers. But we did not have any, so that sucked. I tied some by clamping my vise to the only flat surface available- the arm of one of those aluminum lawn chairs with the vinyl weave that gives you a striped butt. These were hideous miscreant hoppers. Misshapen deer hair heads, lousy uneven dubbed bodies, and wings that looked like I was really trying to imitate a WWI Sopwith Camel. But it was what we had. And they worked like a charm on creek chubs. I would do a delicate presentation, and chub would eat the fly. This went on for hours. We were talking about a creek chub fry. I was younger and prone to anger, and finally plopped the fly down as hard as I could on a bunch of risers. One struck, but it turned out to be a keeper brook trout. I realized I was on to something, and tried it again. Another trout. Not being satisfied, I tried twitching the fly across the surface. This worked even better. I finally resorted to fishing it like a popping bug. This got several more keeper fish. Went back to the delicate presentation, and chubs were on it like pirhanas in B movie. Back to the popping, and more trout.

I finally came to a one of the neatest pools I know- a short run fans out into what is almost a pond, and that late in the summer there were water lilies. In a trout stream no less. There was only one thing to do. I tossed the bedraggled hellion bug as far back in the pads as I could, and twitched and crawled it out. It was like bass fishing. A 12 inch brookie (big in these parts) leaped out of the water, was hooked, and promptly sheared the tippet. And of course it was my last hopper. But it was a good lesson.

The upshot of all this is that dead drifts are great, and often work, but I finally got pissed off enough that day to start fishing the hopper so it acted like a real hopper, and not some stupid-ass moribund ditched Sopwith Camel thing. That was when I started catching trout. Any fool would have realized it- next time you go summer trouting waste an hour of your time catching hoppers and throwing them into the stream. They hate this and usually kick and thrash pretty hard. That day left an impression on me, and after that I always tried twitching the fly whenever I fished terrestrials. It works like a charm. Not always, but I have lost count of the number of times where I have fished a pool for many long minutes with dead drifts, and then had someone rocket up from the deep after the first cast that included moving the fly. And lately I have extended the concept to fishing early season hatches. It doesn't work as consistently, but it can move the odd fish that has refused everything else.

Bonus points to readers who can identify the literary allusion in the title.

The big fat Borcher's parachute

One of my biology professors was a bird guy, and he would often use bird examples. During a behavior lecture he showed a slide of a shorebird incubating a massive football-sized plastic egg that it preferred to its own clutch sitting unattended nearby. This was his way of showing us the idea of super normal stimuli- an object with a key attribute that triggers a behavior. The more pronounced the attribute, the stronger the response. A bunch of people asked him how a bird could be so stupid, and he thought for a moment and asked how many wonderbras and maraschino cherries were sold in the U.S. that year. Anyway, the next pattern may work because I tie it so fat and heavy that trout prefer it to the naturals.

The pattern is the Borcher's drake. It was invented by a guy named Ernie Borchers from the Grayling Michigan area, and that is all I know. It is, ahem, a version of the adams, but a damned fine variation. The Borchers drake represents a wide range of dark colored mayflies, and is especially effective during the Hendrickson hatch. Wow, sort of a dark Adams! Does this sound familiar?

Tail: two moose mane fibers, pretty well splayed.
Body: Several long fibers from a turkey tail.
Hackle: Brown and Grizzly mixed, tied parachute around a white deer hair post.
The trick: tie a giant fat body that would make A.K. Best cringe.

I got to know this pattern via Todd Fuller. My wife had hurt her feet, and was having a hard time wading that year. I wanted to take her fishing, so we booked a float trip with Todd in an Ausable River boat. The day was cold and spitting rain, and I asked him how we would be fishing. He replied, dry flies. I am thinking, yeah, right. So needless to say, we got in the boat, he tied on some Borchers, and we got into fish immediately. The damned things would not float 15 feet before being hammered by trout. It would have been a record for me had I any skill at hooking fish. Her feet got better and we now wade, but still fish with Todd when we can.

The truth was that although I had fly fished for 30 years, I had never fished dry flies to any great extent. I viewed dry flies as a prissy technique practiced by pantywaists who were long on equipment and short on physical strength. The guys in the tweed hats who doesn't seem to get on the river before noon, and have their wives set up a table with wine, pate, and crackers next to the BMW. Our lunch would be something like BBQ flavored Lay's potato chips and ding dongs. They never invited us over, so we fucking hated them. Jealousy, of course. Of course, there was one good thing about them. They never fished more than 100 feet from the access, so once you got away from the canoe launch you never saw them again. And I would catch big trout on streamers and wet flies.

But after fishing with Todd I realized that dry flies can be effective and fun. I decided to get into this. I bought a Mercedes at a garage sale and a wine/pate cooler (I actually bring diet pepsi). I looked up the Borcher's pattern and tied a bunch of them. But they did not work well. I did much better during the Hendrickson hatch when using nymphs or emergers. Several years passed. I ended up on another trip with Todd, and one of his flies ended up in my wife's hat. I did not remember this, and only noticed it several weeks later when finally organizing some of our gear (yes, another day of dry fly mayhem with hordes of trout). I looked at the thing, it it hit me: my Borchers drakes were thin and elegant, his were fat. I could not figure this out and finally cut off the body with a scalpel to see what in the heck was underneath. The answer, of course, was the deer hair that made up the parachute post. It takes a surprisingly large amount of bucktail to make a parachute post, and Todd had cut the hair butts off at an angle and length that left a big fat underbody. So fat that you could barely get the turkey tail fibers wrapped up to the tie down point. His bodies were almost hunchbacked.

I tied some fat ones with a buctail-wing-post underbody, and they worked like a charm.

A. K. Best makes a cogent and persuasive argument in his books that mayflies have a thin and waxy body that in most cases is best imitated with quills. He notes correctly that trout have now been fished hard for over a hundred years, and their descendents are likely way smarter than the original inhabitants and we should tie our flies as close to the naturals as we can. He is probably right, but this pattern works and I think it works because it represents a supernormal stimulus. Trout are watching a parade of bugs drifting over their heads, and big fat one drifts overhead that is simply too big and juicy not to eat. It looks like an extra tasty version of the naturals they are keyed in on, so the leviathan rises ...

I use this pattern in the early spring when Hendricksons and black stones are flitting about. But it ought to work as an attractor pattern in your neck of the woods, or any time dark mayflies are hatching. Give it a try.

The Lake Erie King- some useful information and ranting

Another dry fly pattern that is not mine, I probably tie it wrong, and it has a stupid name in that it has nothing to do with Lake Erie. I learned about the pattern in 1985 when I signed up for a fly tying magazine. It was a weird situation: the mag was having a hard time staying afloat, and issues were sporadic. I think I got three issues, a bunch of letters whining about their problems, and then maybe a fourth or fifth issue about a year later. But one of the articles was about "The Lake Erie King".

The pattern was "discovered" by Chauncy Lively who found a bunch of them in a bin in a fly shop up in Grayling, Michigan. He published an article about it in 1985, and the article was later published again about 2005 in a newer fly tying magazine, thereby hosing my best secret pattern. My memory is going to dust, but supposedly the pattern got its name from the original tyer, who lived on the shores of Lake Erie but would travel north to fish trout in northern Michigan. Stupid name, and the origination is probably apochryphal. But the pattern kicks butt.

This is a simple fly and if you wanted to view it as one of the billion variations of an Adams you can. It is an Adams, but with two changes: a peacock herl body, and the wings are grizzly tips that sweep back at a 45 degree angle. For those who insist, here is the entire recipe:

Tail: brown and grizzly hackle fibers, mixed.
Body: peacock herl
Wings: grizzly tips, tied flat and swept back at a 45 degree angle. Look at a deer fly.
Hackle: traditional, brown and grizzly mixed.
Thread: chartreuse (this was my idea) next time you swat a deer fly successfully, look at it's eyes.

This is the buggiest looking pattern in the history of fly fishing, or at least one of them. It resembles a deer fly, which is why trout probably eat it with abandon. Use it on late summer mornings and you will be filled with joy. There are two things to remember when tying it.

1. You can make the wings longer and thinner (my preference) or shorter and wider. I have seen it both ways and either is correct. Lively tied them longer and thinner.

2. The pattern does not last long unless you use a thread trick. Cover the hook shank with an even layer of chartreuse thread, and leave a long tag end hanging out the back. When it comes time to tie in the herl, twist the herl strands around the tag thread for strength. Wind it all together for a more durable body. It is easier to do than explain. Or just use the chartreuse tag thread in a reverse spiral rib.

Now the rant. One of the things I hate most about fly tying is the vast number of yahoos that get drunk, and devise some miniscule variation of a traditional pattern, post it on the web, and then they then name after themselves. The jim-ed special- an adams with red tail! Or the jim-bob killer- a brown hackle with two strands of krystal flash as an overwing! Such brilliance and innovation demands that their names be remembered forever as tying masters of highly original patterns. Not. Everyone should just stop doing this. But as much as I hate the trend, the Lake Erie King is so effective that I overlook it's obvious relationship to the Adams, and issue a dispensation to the guy who tied it and the guy who promoted it. Tie one, tie an adams, and then compare. What is brilliant about this one is that two or three material substitutions can result in a quick change from an Ephemeroptera to a Diptera. That is a whole different order. And the fly is responsible for one of my best Michigan dry fly days, and it even attracted the biggest brown of the day on Wyoming's Green River.