Zach Matthews
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Karlin –
I think your photos are too large by file size rather than by physical dimensions. You could either resize them on your computer using Photoshop or (and this might be easier), upload them to Flickr, which allows huge files, then link back over using the Flickr link. In that case you would (a) have your pics online to use wherever and (b) link to rather than attach them to your posts here. There are detailed instructions in the How to Post Photos thread.
Zach
That’s a nice fish Karlin. What part of the Henry’s Fork can you float in a drift boat? The parts I was on were all wading water, but I know there’s a lot more of it I didn’t see.
Zach
Jay –
Mmmm, 800 yards?
I just had some bad news – walked down from lunch to find my pontoon deflated; had a blowout from the heat. It wasn’t hot today so I thought I could get away with not deflating the toons, but looks like I was wrong.
Now to see if it is possible to repair… or find a JW Outfitters bladder ten years after that company ceased operations.
Zach
Great post Matt! That Midget Match sign is hilarious. Do you do any caving? Might be worth a return trip in the winter when those bellycrawlers have gone to sleep.
Zach
In point of fact, Karlin, it was my desire to avoid having this site turn into a mere Facebook page which led me to post in the first place. I was somewhat remiss in contributing to discussion here for a quite a while, and as a result the number of people discussing anything fell off to some degree. That was why I went to such trouble to update the board software, and why I have been posting as much as I can–to try to get the ball rolling again.
With respect to Ben’s comments (and others) above–I am not in the habit of banning people. No one in fact is currently banned from using this site. But I am perfectly happy to invite someone to leave. I’ve run and maintained this site at a loss for years now simply because I like to be able to meet all the cool people here and talk about something I love with them. I’ve learned an enormous amount from pretty much everyone who posts here and I value them extremely.
You clearly see this differently. I see no reason why you should continue to make yourself unhappy by visiting this forum. You are more than welcome to contribute any meaningful thing you want, and I am sure it will be well received. But if you have nothing but negative things to say about me personally, my email address is ZachMatthews@gmail.com–please feel free to write whenever you want. In the mean time, I am going to have to ask you to make a contribution of some kind before continuing with these posts.
Zach
Mike –
I was on the Big Hole very briefly several years back when you guys were in a drought. We had stopped the car by a drainage ditch and I got out to look, flushing one rattlesnake right by the road. I cautiously walked out on the culvert and saw a seriously nice brown sitting in an irrigation channel – probably a 22″ fish.
The channel was all choked with cottonwood saplings on both sides, but I just had to at least try to get a cast to it, so I crossed the culvert-head bridge thing and started bushwhacking down the opposite side from the car to get below the fish. About halfway into those cottonwoods I nearly stepped on a balled up rattler. I got the eff out of there and left that fish alone.
Zach
Mark –
What is this clippy-thing?
That’s pretty cool. I bet it makes the fly go crazy! Tim Pommer is our resident musky expert. All I know is they use some E-normous flies.
Zach
Those are cool, Mike. What are the ones on top called? Looks like that would be a great lead fly in a double-nymph rig with a tiny midge larvae trailing it. I bet it SINKS.
Also the photos are good man. All you really need is a neutral background – try a piece of clean craft felt or posterboard.
Zach
We have been using something proprietary that Andrew Wright cooked up. Personally I have caught fish on Carter’s Rubber-Legged Dragon as well as Crazy Charlies, but as our fishery gets more pressure, the fish have become quite a bit more particular. One thing I will say is you want a fairly heavy fly that will drop right down on the heads of tailers, because those fish get straight-up-and-down vertical on you and you almost need to scrape their bodies to get their attention. That was a very frustrating lesson to learn.
Mike –
The one time I fished the Big Hole I damn near stepped on two different rattlesnakes. You ever run into those in your kayak? I would imagine they avoid swimming, unlike our southeastern cottonmouth.
Zach
Hey Tim –
Like you’d imagine, I wanted to spread the love and the options around quite a bit–and I think I have done that more with this piece than any other I’ve seen, objections like Karlin’s notwithstanding (also I am not aware of any of those magazines actually running Top Ten Fly Fishing Colleges pieces). The only previous incarnation of this one I have seen was a 2005 article also in Fly Rod & Reel, which I didn’t know about until after mine had been published.
That earlier article was a good example of what I was trying to avoid: the magazine was owned, edited and mostly written from the coast of Maine at that point, and something like 8 out of the 10 schools were from northeast of Pennsylvania. Nothing wrong with that area, but there’s a lot going on everywhere, and I also wanted to factor in things like cost of education.
My list included places like San Diego for offshore shark and bluewater fishing, Tulane in New Orleans for redfish, Miami for the Keys, as well as popular northwestern fishing locations like Oregon and the two Montana schools (which we listed at 1 and 1a, incidentally).
As much as we all like casting dry flies at big trout–and Montana has as good a claim as anywhere to the best fishing of that kind–in the last ten years fly fishing really has put down hard roots in other fisheries. We have a shop here in Georgia (Cohutta Fishing Company) which uses the slogan “For the diversified angler” and which mostly caters to striper fishermen, of which there are now enough to keep them in business.
Bottom line is I didn’t want to do just a list of the best places to trout fish in the classic sense; I wanted the parents and kids reading this article for actual advice to be thinking on a bigger scale than that, and also to be happier with the school they might wind up in. There’s lots of great fly fishing everywhere these days. One of my friends even objected that Kansas State wasn’t included! Hahahah.
Zach
I’m sorry you didn’t like it Karlin. I enjoyed writing this article and magazines don’t have comment sections. I wanted to share it with my friends here. I’ve written a lot of articles and I rarely post them here, but I thought this one would generate discussion.
PS You guys see the black tape on my pinkie finger? I asked Jay to toss me a beer and somehow I managed to cut the hell out of my hand on the top rim when I caught it. Duck tape was all we had for a bandaid. I was actually bleeding pretty good while I was fighting that fish.
Tim –
Dude, totally. I was shooting the 12-24, on my D600 body, and I think that shot was actually right at 18mm, which is as wide as I can go with that DX lens on my FX body (and I am just happy to be able to get that).
So there’s obviously a significant foreshortening effect going on and the fish is well out of the center of the image circle (the pic above is cropped). That said, it was a pretty short fish for its weight. I boga-gripped it and I am 100% confident in its 17 pounds, but that shot looks like a mere 5 lber.
Mark – this is a river run fish and we were fishing in the evening. I would love–love!–to try lighted night fishing on this water but it is technically illegal to fish out there after dark as it is a National River running through a major city and they try to keep the bums out. Functionally the real problem would be that they lock the gates on us, and the best hole to try lighted night fishing is at the base of a very steep hill that I wouldn’t want to have to climb with my canoe, even with my wheels. But dude, that would definitely be effective.
In point of fact this fish came off of the front of a rock shelf in a spot where basically no one but me fishes. I’ve told people about it before but it looks so unpromising that no one ever really gives it more than a quick toss. And yet I’ve caught over a dozen stripers off this one lie. Last year I shot an article for American Angler magazine on Spey fishing for striped bass (super fun by the way when the fish are here in numbers). I caught six fish in six trips off the same spot I caught this one. Jay’s seen it now so I guess I’ll have company going forward, but it was good while it lasted. 🙂 It’s very hard to get your own private Idaho on any river with as much traffic as this one.
Zach
Hey Gerard –
Thanks for posting this; I was going to link to Midcurrent yesterday but ran out of time.
The ‘inside story’ on this sale is that Pure Fishing wasn’t even really targeting Hardy per se, but actually wanted to buy Chub, which is Hardy’s much more profitable coarse-fishing lineup in Europe. Hardy came along in the deal sort of like Ross Reels did when Orvis bought Scientific Anglers.
So on the whole this is probably a bad thing for Hardy, sadly. Over the years there have been many ‘legendary’ brands absorbed by other companies or morphed totally out of recognition. The #1 fly tackle company in the 1920s in the United States was… Abercrombie & Fitch. Yep, that Abercrombie & Fitch. You can still find Hardy reels badged with their (importer’s) logo from that period (which incidentally I would pay good money for if anyone finds one).
Fenwick, Lamiglas, Payne and Leonard are all companies which once occupied the niche of a Sage or Scott or R.L. Winston today. Sage rose like a phoenix from the ashes of Lamiglas after a sale similar to what has happened to Hardy. Of course those were better times and Sage was manufacturing everything in the U.S. in their own facilities, whereas Hardy has become a de facto offshore rebadger in recent years.
The problem Hardy has today is the same one the all-American manufacturers like Scott face, only worse. English labor costs are even higher than American-domestic costs. Consequently to keep making things in England, Hardy would have to raise its prices into the stratosphere. You can see that reality reflected in their occasional ‘English made’ releases of special edition Perfects and the like – those reels generally cost over $1000US. Hardy gave up making rods in the UK years ago (all recent Hardy rods are Korean, just like TFO, except they use JS Corp like we’ve discussed here before as a source, whereas TFO has a standalone factory). If you’re going to buy a Korean-made rod, TFO is the clear winner from a cost/benefit analysis standpoint. Their rods perform just as well on the actual water as any rod anywhere and their build quality is comparable to all other Korean-made rods. So why pay for a European label?
That unfortunately is the conclusion that it looks like too many anglers reached. If you take a birds’-eye view here, Hardy was the victim of long-term increases in European production costs. Going overseas first with rods then with reels was a stopgap measure to eke out a few more years as a semi-independent company, but ultimately the market figured out that the overseas-made equipment wasn’t significantly different from that which can be had for much less cost from the same original equipment manufacturer (JS Corp). Hardy thus was left with its (seriously excellent) “classic” designs, the most significant of which are over a hundred years old and widely available on the aftermarket, with more appeal to serious collectors because of manufacturing practices which are now illegal (such as making the exteriors out of lead paint).
Meanwhile, their sales of ‘new’ product designs I don’t think were ever especially good, and in very recent years their lineup had split into two philosophies which never really sat on good terms with each other. On the one hand they had the popular old designs from the early 20th century like the Perfect, Bougle, Cascapedia and Lightweight reels (all of which I personally adore, even in their Korean embodiments), and then they had the much more fashion-forward, Ari Hart-esque modern lineup of the “performance reels,” most of which you’ve never heard of because they came and went so fast (Fortuna, Angel, Zane, etc.) Their rods almost uniformly fell into the latter category–and that European, modern-art look has never been all that popular in the U.S., which fly fishes with great nostalgia, thus cutting Hardy out of the richest market going.
Best case scenario Hardy benefits from the deeper pockets of their new owners and they’re able to somehow recapture the essence of English Hardy. It could be that a great designer could give them that edge. Or it may be that the new owner is willing to front the cost of getting the English manufacturing back online at an initial loss so as to rebuild the brand and ultimately make up the losses on higher volume sales.
More likely is Hardy becomes more like Fenwick, Lamiglas or the others named above as a brand you’ve heard of, but which had its heyday long ago. I don’t think Hardy will ever devolve into anything less than a ‘quality’ brand name, but it will remain a brand only, applied to Far East-built equipment.
That’s my read on it.
ZachFinishing these off with a couple pics of my compatriots, Andrew and Thomas.
Andrew on the stick.
Thomas with a nice solo carp. Thomas had a banging day from what I heard.Zach