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Been a long time coming!

The author was pretty happy with this catch. While it is not an overly large barra, the area it came from made the capture pretty special. To his knowledge, no one had caught a barra in this location previously. Catching it on fly made it even more of a highlight.

I have a confession to make and it doesn’t have anything to do with breaking any laws. Well, at least none that I am aware of anyway.

You see, it has been over two months since I have had my boat anywhere near the water. I blame the three W’s. Work. Weather. Websites.

Since early January this year, my work, the weather and the websites I run have pretty well kept me on dry land. Don’t get me wrong. I have still been fishing. Things aren’t that bad, but on the occasions I have fished they have either been in other people’s boats or they have been land-based, due to time constraints. Read more…

Fly Fishing Purchases Grow

flyreels

FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. — Sales of fly fishing gear continued to show impressive gains with 59.3 percent of anglers reporting they bought fly fishing tackle in 2010. That was an increase of 4.1 percent over 2009. These findings, along with detailed information on the most purchased fly fishing brands, type of specific fly fishing gear bought, types of fish sought and fly angler demographics, are all reported on in Southwick Associates first ever comprehensive Fly Fishing Market Survey.

Additional key findings of the 2010 Fly Fishing Market Survey: flies were the most purchased type of fly fishing gear accounting for 60.9 percent of fly tackle transactions, Temple Fork Outfitters was the most purchased fly rod (15.4 percent of purchases), Orvis was the most purchased reel (23.5 percent) and trout remains king, sought by 66.3 percent of dedicated fly fisherman.

“The data we are able to collect specific to fly fishing each year continues to grow as part of our overall efforts to measure angler habits and purchases,” says Rob Southwick, president of Southwick Associates, which designs and conducts the surveys at HunterSurvey.com and AnglerSurvey.com. “Given the increased interest in fly fishing and the types of information we have collected, it was time to release a more comprehensive report dedicated to the sport.” Read more…

Fishing ‘Shady’ on Fly

Glenn Hubble with tarpon

The road down is quite good although getting chewed up rapidly. Launching involves a fair bit of drowning your vehicle particularly for those with heavier boats but not too bad by Shady standards.

We spent the day up around the top end, not even venturing as far as the S-bends.

After a while hanging around the 2nd barrage right up the top we only found a few rats and some big tarpon despite it looking incredibly fishy.

Luckily we were able to find some hungry barra in a number of locations by looking for colour changes where the water was flowing strongly off the floodplain. We fished mostly along the stretch down from the old boat, along the left hand side going downstream.

The very gusty conditions (combined with our lack of skill!) made fly fishing difficult so we were fishing on the dark side for a fair bit of the day. Read more…

Fly Fishing in Arnhemland

Recent footage from Arnhemland.

Violence after dark

Posted recently on “Overboard Boater” website.

If you kill your engine you can hear the violence from afar, the tiny plips of tide-swept shrimp and baitfish trying to escape—and then the disquieting crash of snook in pursuit. Inch closer and you can see it all go down in the glowing water lit by docklights, and then imagine what will happen when you drop in your fly.

Casting to snook in docklights was one of my first real experiences in saltwater fly fishing and today it is still one of my favorites. It’s sight fishing, but you don’t have to be perfect. When the fish are in ambush mode, the takes are as aggressive as you’ll ever see. But despite outward appearances, night fishing for snook is not as simple as it seems. Here are a couple of points passed onto me by veteran guides and night-stalking snook vampires. Read more…