….is finished, printed and ready to add to your library! A fly fishing Solutions Book on casting, presenting flies and mending fly line. Various types of casts and drifts are explained based on water types, food organisms and iitations trout eat. Presentation 101 has 96 pages, 85 pictures, 3 useful charts!
Presentation 101 A new SOLUTION BOOK
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..is finished and available to purchase. This is the first in what promises to be 10-12 SOLUTION BOOKS.
Fish! Bugs! Flies! focuses on trout that live in streams, the insects they eat, and fly imitations that fool them.
Anglers who fish with flies on trout streams become trout centric. Where do trout live? How do they survive? What do we need to know about these wary fish in order to fool them with flies? These are a few of the questions we’ll begin to answer in Fish! Other answers, which result in more questions, come with time spent on trout streams, while fly fishing for trout.
Since most stream trout feed primarily on aquatic insects, the Bugs! part of this Solution Book introduces the basics of aquatic insect entomology. What we began in the Getting Started Solution Book is expanded. We’ll follow the year long life cycle of one particular mayfly; anglers call it the pale morning dun.
But we can’t glue natural insects to hooks and cast them to hungry trout; therefore, we tie and buy flies designed to imitate food organisms trout eat. In Flies! we’ll talk about their design, types and other important characteristics.
Fish! Bugs! Flies! has various useful charts, descriptive pictures and an appendix that follows the body of the book.
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Hi. I’m Dale Darling – Christian, husband, father, musician, learner, teacher, composer, author, fly fisher and publisher. But please don’t try to make me fit into a preconceived buttonhole, okay?
Most of the information I’ll share here will have to do with writing and fly fishing. I enjoy sharing all things fly fishing and have done so for many years in many ways. Of course other topics will appear as we discuss them.
A basic tenet that I hold is that fly fishing is fun; it takes us to beautiful places. While we’re out there we experience an odd combination of emotions from frustration to joy. I think fly fishing is a pleasantly addictive affliction; I’ll write more on this later.
There’s plenty to say and to share: this should be fun. Please join me!
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The Blacker Compendium came about when Bob Frandsen started posting salmon flies based on those described by William Blacker in his book The Art Of Fly Making, which was published in 1855. My friend Chuck Vestal decided the flies should be recorded and shared. Bob’s wife, Lorraine, took individual and group photos of Bob’s flies and the three of us decided on the content for this book.
We added tying instructions based on how Bob interprets Blacker’s style, comments on hooks used today and those used by Blacker, copies of original Art Of Fly Making pages, and all of the flies and recipes as Bob tied them, along with each fly recipe as described by Blacker in his own words.
The Blacker Compendium is $44.95. Buy it here!
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..and other freestone streams is my new book, completed in May, 2012. Today – June 6, 2012, I’m waiting for the proof to arrive from the printer. I’ll look through it and hope all of the previous edits are correct. Mostly I want to see if the book has the right “look and feel.” We’ll see. Here’s the cover.
It’s a short book by design because I wanted to help folks understand about basic freestone trout stream fly fishing. While there is a lot of detail in the book, it is clearly and concisely stated. It has over 130 B&W pix and several charts to illustrate what is being discussed. Black and white printing allowed me to keep the price low – $14.95; I’ll put all of the pix on this site in full color. Of course the best way to color the book is by going trout fishing soon, and then again!
I use my home stream – The Big Thompson River as it flows through the canyon named for it – as the trout stream template, but the information within will hold true for most western freestone trout streams. For over 30 years it has for me. While every stream or river has its own character and clock, all of them have most of the insects I present, and most of the fly patterns will work on most streams up here. I write with the idea that solid fundamentals apply to good fly fishing practices.
Chapters cover The River, Fish! Bugs! Flies!,Technique, Putting It Together, and Access and Ethics.
Fly Fishing Colorado’s Big Thompson River And Other Freestone Streams is 128 pages long, costs $14.95 and is available in stores or buy it here!
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It’s Wednesday, June 13, 2012; 8:30am.
Two days ago the T was flowing 125cfs; yesterday it came up to 386 and was murky, washing debris from the streambed and its sides; this morning it’s flowing 270 and clearer, which is not a level I’d like to fish.
The high water cleaning is welcome for the river and her denizens, though. Before today the flow has been pretty low – summer flows of 124 for some time without a surge to clean the stream. I’m glad it’s come up, and wonder if the added water is going to fill Horsetooth Res because of the fire fighting going on up that way. It could just be that someone downstream made a call for water that can only be met by – gasp! – putting more water into the river.
At this flow, it would be fun to fish streamers. Shorten a leader to 6 feet and/or 1-2X; add 3-4 feet of 2X tippet. Tie on a #4-8 streamer pattern – a Bucktail, Zonker, Platte River Special, Hornberg or other favorite – and stand at one bank, cast to the opposite and let the fly drift with the current. Now and again, give the fly a 1-4 inch twitch. After 2-3 good drifts through one area of the bank – a good drift might be 2-8 feet long along the bank – take 2 steps downstream and repeat the cast/drift pattern. Cover the water.
When the water has some murk to it, a darker pattern will work best because trout can see it.
Have fun; wade safe!
dd
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