[Mark Sides]

Just a few more….

[Mark Sides]

I tied a lot of flies for this trip and the guides approved of my improvised/modified patterns…I ended up giving quite a few away to those skilled gentlemen.

[Mark Sides]

The fishing was consistently good, its really rewarding to help someone hook up on their first bonefish.

[Mark Sides]

We had to go in early on the first day as the lightning was making the guides poles and the fly rods “sing”.

[Mark Sides]

The pic above is a first bonefish catch for my close friends 24 yr. old

[Mark Sides]

Thanks again for the compliments fellas.

Zach, the “walls” you make note of are actually what the locals refer to as fire trash. Over many many years there have been many “land clearing” types of monster fires and what you see is the old old leftovers. The ranchers re-arrange the fire trash into make shift corrals for their goats, alpaca or horses.

I have cropped and enlarged another one of my pics that helps to display what I’m talking about…if you look closely you can see man made structure integrated into their rearrangement of the burnout residue, gates, wire etc to help form a corral.
Pretty innovative really.

[Mark Sides]

My dad gave me a bow for Christmas when I was 7 and to this day when fall comes around I still hang out in the lower canopy or sit in dead falls trying to stick some dinner.
Good stuff Neal, a skill she can always keep with her.

[Mark Sides]

I love the creative framing and crops in your photos Mark!

Thanks for the kind words guys, much appreciated.
Neal, most of the framing is in camera as the the X-Pan is a true panoramic format film camera using 35mm stock.
I took a some liberties with cropping on a few shots to “tighten” them up but I frame using the range finder exposing 24mm x 65mm (double width) negative to shoot in a true panoramic format. No zoom lenses for this camera either, only interchangable primes.

[Mark Sides]

Doubles were very common….if you ever get the chance, go.

[Mark Sides]

From the Chilean gauchos to the primordial streams……..

[Mark Sides]

We were told the fishing there was like it used to be in the American west a hundred years ago….we were landing trout like the one below all day long out of the rivers, the lakes and the ditch fishing were quite different.

[Mark Sides]

We were based out of a beautiful little town called Coyahique, a good 1,000 miles south of Santiago.

[Mark Sides]

I have a bonefish trip next week…I’ll make sure to put up some photographs.
In the meantime per moderator’s request I will start another thread on a fly fishing bucket list trip we made to Chile.

[Mark Sides]

We have chased spinner sharks off the end of Ragged Island (Bahamas) and hooking up with one of them is a big deal. We would set anchor, drop a chum basket over the side, and wait 15 minutes. A variety of sharks would come in and getting the fly to a Spinner, specifically, could be a challenge. We targeted the Spinner Shark because of the acrobatic show they would put on once hooked, launching themselves out of the water in a corkscrew pattern or “spinning” and repeating the process until they wore out or threw the hook.
Big noisy poppers were productive as we would strive to keep any “edible” chum out of the water. The sharks would get pretty competitive about hitting anything that might represent something to eat. This included Lemons, Spinners, Black Tip, Sand and Bull sharks along with a few others I could not readily identify.
The flies pictured I built using Rainey’s bill fish heads and the biggest popping head Puglisi had to offer.
The other pattern was a tandem hook streamer with a lot of flash. These streamers don’t cast worth a damn so we would chuck them out as far as we could up-current and let them drift down away and deep.
Retrieval was long, fast strips with pops and jerks….anything to make the fly resemble an injured opportunity for a meal.
I also use hooks that dissolve quickly in salt water as a lot of times getting the hook out of a sharks mouth can be too risky….better to cut the wire as close as possible to the fly and return them back to the water.

[Mark Sides]

I too would be good for a couple….thanks for the offering.

[Mark Sides]

Couple more.

[Mark Sides]

😉

[Mark Sides]

When I first read the title of this thread I thought you were discussing a porno flick. ;D

[Mark Sides]

Some very impressive setups.
Eric B. ……that’s not a tying bench, that’s a fly shop, although I didn’t see the rod and reel or wader section, pretty cool.

Here’s my bench, and I just neatened it up.

[Mark Sides]

I’m pretty sure what Scott is talking about is Dingell-Johnson (D-J) money and it has been around quite a while.  As mentioned it was championed by anglers.  It is an excise tax paid by the manufacturer.  So, the consumer never sees it as they would a sales tax.  

Mark’s reference is to the 1973 Conservation sales tax in Missouri, which is an across the board sales tax, not a tax on certain items, that provides 1/8 cent to Conservation programs.  Those help fun the MoDept of Conservation and the activities of a few other state agencies.  My uncle, as an officer in the Mo Conservation Federation, worked hard on getting that legislation passed.  It made Missouri a model for agency funding, but if I recall from my post college job search as a biologist, it didn’t make their salaries much higher than other states!  

Thanks for the correction, I did manage to transpose the numbers on my intro dates and your call on the salaries of MDC agents is correct, there is so much competition for employment with the MDC the salaries are barely competitive at best.

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