Zach Matthews
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Aaron that’s a pretty good find, man. I wonder if they have a wide-drawer model that would stack with the CD-style drawers.
Zach
Nonexistent, Steve. We were trying to find browns on the upper end of Lake Seed and I can confirm they are not there, unfortunately.
From what I heard that day they open the gates twice a year, once this time of year and once in the spring, so that the playboaters can play. It’s pretty gnarly stuff! The people getting ready to take their turns looked pretty scared to be honest.
Zach
I’ll be in the next weekend, which is too bad. I’m actually quarterbacking a hunting photo shoot on 11/23 in Elkins, Arkansas for Arkansas Life magazine, but I’m doing it from Atlanta. Kind of a weird deal; I would rather write a piece than organize one any day!
Zach
Chris –
GPX would work fine for sure, but this rod also excelled at throwing dry flies on a long thin taper like the SA VPT. I saw guys fishing them on the Henry’s Fork with like 16+ feet of leader and turning their flies over just fine.
That’s the future. I bet in 20 years a twenty foot leader for dry fly fishing isn’t considered unusual.
Zach
Awesome stuff Travis. I bet everyone else in East TN who sees that rod is like, “Is that a fighting grip?!”
Zach
Roy I am just partly parroting what people I’ve shown it to have said (“looks like a hipster camera”) and what Ken Rockwell noted that he feared, i.e. that it would be a limited edition type camera and thus would never come down in price.
I think Nikon is going to be SHOCKED by the demand for this thing. There’s a reason why the F100 design was so popular; having external knobs to fiddle with also means you can access and change things quicker. I hate digging through menus on my D600, which I find to be a clunky camera in use. I was more comfortable with the slightly more pro grade D200, and the difference is noticeable enough that I wouldn’t mind trading up.
Zach
Man, I am not gonna lie: I want one. That camera looks amazing. Maybe when it has been through a cycle and there are some on the used market I can make a move. Hopefully this is the start of a new line for Nikon and not a hipster one-off. I think it has real working potential.
Love it! This post is great! And those bones are HUGE by the standards of what I’ve seen in the Caribbean.
Zach
Hey Roy, c’mon man, by the time you’ve hauled in water, glass, maybe a tripod, plus fishing gear! It gets heavy.
I do a lot of my wintertime fishing in the Appalachians with long hikes on every outing.
Zach
That’s pretty cool. Price is an issue. I am going to predict $1699 for the body. They may put together a kit with a 50mm f/1.8 at $1899.
Anything less than that and they’ll cannibalize their D610 and D800 sales. Which they may do anyway – that looks like the prosumer darling of the next year. I’m interested in how well they’ve sealed it.
Zach
This is actually getting my attention as well, even though I have the D600. The D600 is pretty heavy and its 24MP are overkill. 16MP is perfect for magazines — it works out to a native two page shot. And if the low light performance is there, plus light weight, the form factor isn’t that important, to me. I actually have an F3 body; if Nikon really wanted to make a statement, they would make sure this new form factor has the 100% viewfinder and circular eyepiece of the old flagships. It really makes a difference in brightness in looking through the viewfinder.
Hey Chris –
Mostly I was wondering whether someone had set up a local production facility. It still kind of blows my mind that anglers there would rather buy skiffs and have them shipped from the U.S. than develop a local alternative. Fiberglass is pretty universal and the plans are known. There are guys on microskiff.com — one of them I have interviewed, named Paul Sonnen — who have built their own fiberglass skiffs in their garages based on plans taken from the internet.
I’m just saying, having met a lot of boat builders, it’s a pretty transferable technology that does not take a lot of up-front knowledge or really that much investment, as large scale businesses go, to get into.
Zach
Eric Knowlton of reeltrout.com describes his intricate and beautiful fish carving process and how it is informed by his native heritage.
Finally got a chance to fish my new Radian this weekend in Arkansas. That is a really nice rod. I actually think the thing I liked most, aside from the light weight and crisp action, was the grip. Not many people have mentioned that; ever since Sage made it okay to put a full wells on a trout rod with the ONE, I have been really pleased to see this trend developing. Scott wisely tapered the grip slightly so that the rod rests in the knock of your thumb and first two fingers. The lower end of the grip is slimmer, which makes for a comfortable cradle and also will help anglers prone to misapplying power by weakening their grip on the bottom of the rod (which can cause some inadvertent creep and thus a tailing loop). Loomis did this same thing a few years ago but only the true technicians really “got it.” (Steve Rajeff and John Wilson, both obviously terrific casters, pointed it out to me).
Super great rod–looked beautiful with my old Ross San Miguel.
Zach