Louisiana redfish fly courtesy Captain John Iverson.

I couldn’t help but feel like a “dude” as I lined up my two rods by the boat, and slipped them into the fly rod holders in the Mitzi. All clean, and pressed in Simms this and Simms that, I tell myself it’s the right gear (like the Mitzi rod holder areas) for the job, no matter what the name is. Still I feel a bit too clean.

We push off, crank up and idle out through the narrow channel lined with piers and boats. It’s not early, but early enough in The Big Easy. I always wonder if the guide wishes we were earlier or later, but the cloud bank covering the sun tells me all I need to know. This is going to be tough without Mr. Sun to light up the redfish TV. Outside the no wake zone, we are on plain in a flash, and running at 30 through the maze of channels, open water and marsh. Obviously, the Captain knows his course, there are no navigational electronics on board, like the back of his hand.

Bundled against the morning wind, up and running.

We finally drop off plane and the Captain cuts the engine. Stealth is the rule, and he hops onto the poling platform and starts moving us down the edge of a grass line. The wind is enough to ripple the water, and as we continue to pole, ripple the Captain’s confidence as well. If I were doing this, I would definitely point out the disadvantages as well, a cloudy day, a windy day, all would be noted disclaimers.

On deck. Looking for signs of famous Louisiana redfish.

I’m up first, and that vision thing just isn’t working yet, as I see a few small fish dart under the boat, and larger mud clouds further away – the telltale signs of spooked reds. Then I see a huge fish pass under the boat like a subsurface smart bomb at least three feet long. Now I am the one who’s spooked. There’s still no “shot” to be had though, so we pole on, and on. The show is awesome from the vantage point of a casting platform two feet above the deck of a Mitzi Skiff in the Louisiana marshes. When the sun peaks, the water TV is on, and it’s the best episode I’ve ever seen. Right off I see a red the size of one of those Baghdad cruise missiles pass under, stabilizer fins out and moving subsonic without apparent propulsion, self correcting and gone. This, I say, is not for the weak hearted.

Captain John describes directing someone where to cast. “like playing a video game with a broken console.” However we eventually tune in.

I give my turn to JG after who knows how much time, and he steps up to the platform like a batter stepping into the box. Time to kick back and enjoy the ride. Shots aren’t coming quick, clean or often. Getting into a groove is impossible.

The sun works its way up, and I am back on the platform, when finally I get a shot, more like a point blank drop on about a 20-inch red. I drop, and it hauls under the boat in a cloud of mud. Another shot a little later, at ten feet, nets a weak set and slight tug followed by a loose fly and rocketing fish. Gone. Now I look inside, and wonder how all this will end. Overreacting to sight casting for redfish is pretty easy for me. Perhaps it’s just too much “See the fish. Be the fish,” for my mind to handle.

The hours drift by, through lunchtime shrimp poor boys, and back onto the platform. It’s amazing how weak my legs feel as I adjust to the rock-and-roll of the Mitzi. Time to get back on the bike, again with the new year resolutions.

We pick up several times and move through the marshes, sliding sideways through turns in the tight channels, out in the open and tight again. We find an unlimited supply of shores to pole and an unlimited supply of wind. The Captain is huffing and puffing a bit between cigarettes. Morale is like a top spinning down and beginning to show some wobble. My “report the story no matter what” is starting to look more like a curse than a blessing.

I take to heart “keep a line in the water” by casting blindly to shorelines and backhanding into channels. Now we are conscious of time, and moving more to find fish of any size, and get on the board. Pick up and move.

Whether because of the level of action, or self centeredness, I find myself on the platform again on the next stop – a fairly wide backwater we enter by poling through another of those narrow channels. We are about to make the turnabout and head out when I feel a stop on one of those blind backhand casts into the channel.

I finally make good. Twenty minutes worth and deep backing.

I set the hook for luck, and the fish heads about fifty feet into the wide backwater in a heartbeat. The bend in my ten weight Z Axis, and the sound of the drag on my Tibor tell us all that this is a fish. Then a change in direction, a 180, and it’s headed into the narrow channel – hoping to get all the way through and out into the open water.

The long run takes all my line, and now we’re into the backing, and into more backing. I have a good bend in the rod, and the boat is starting to move with the fish. Side pressure, side-to-side pressure, all give the same result – a standoff. She’s wanting to make the turn in the narrow channel when the Captain decides it’s time to follow for real. There’s no headshake, no turns, just a tugboat beginning to move us.

All the while, I am getting peppered from the peanut gallery; “It’s probably a big ray. Maybe it’s a black drum. Watch out for those oysters! They’ll cut you off!” All I know is there is one big head shake, and I finally get back all my backing. Finally, a tail swirls below the surface, and leaves a boil the circumference of a five gallon bucket.

After twenty minutes we get the fish down to five feet of line and a fully down leader. I finally muster the courage to put enough on the rod to make her surface, and we all see that it’s what we are after – a 30-inch plus red. She’s beat now, and the Captain reaches out the back of the port side and tails her. “She’ll go forty inches. Looks like twenty-five pounds,” the Captain said.

You try holding 25 pounds of slimy, pissed off redfish – it’s a blast!

The photos are as goofy as anything I have ever been in because this is the biggest fish I’ve ever caught. She’s heavy enough, and my arm is weak enough from the fight, that I can’t even hold her out toward the camera for the distorted porn shot being demanded of me. Of all the luck to have Jerry along to witness and document with great photography skills, what he keeps calling, “The fish of a lifetime.” I don’t disagree as she is released almost exactly where she was caught.

Winded, and overwhelmed, I crash on the ice chest, we pull up and motor out to another spot. The wind is dropping now, but the sun is dropping a bit too. We start to watch the clock more intensely. Jerry is on the platform when the Captain guides his cast right to a waiting eight pound redfish. He’s on the board, and the fight is a good match to his Xi2 nine weight. We land him, and he’s a bright red specimen with beautiful mature coloration. Some more photographs follow, and I hope I can return the favor of good photographs to Jerry and his Louisiana redfish.

A beautiful specimen caught in the Louisiana way – sunlight, sighted, cast, tempted, hooked, set, fought and landed.

Finally, we both are on the board, the winter sun is dropping, and we’ve had enough. It wasn’t a typical quantity day by Louisiana standards, but the quality was outstanding. It’s time. We pull up, grab our seats, and settle in for the hour ride back to the launch. Even the ride back seems fast. Maybe it’s the anticipation of seeing the photographs, or telling the story.

NOTE – I am going to run a post of more photographs from this trip in the next few days. I hope you enjoyed the day in the Louisiana marshes.

Ross Evolution LT reel going mean green. Photo – Texas Fly Caster

As part of a new push to go green in our last year of existence, I thought I would go green with some reels that fell into the box of gear that will be tried and tested this spring.

We all know what a fly reel does in fly fishing. It holds line and brings drag to bear on fighting fish. Drag. If you’ve fished with me, you’ve probably heard me preaching at you, “GO TO THE REEL!” Why not use your reel for its intended purpose, and practice going to the reel for the time you have that big one on. It makes me cringe to watch these guys on TV, stripping in big fish, only to get them close to landing and have them run through their floating line, while the personality keeps finger pressure on the line between his finger and the cork. (Insert primal scream here.)

As I have started looking toward catching larger fish, I also find the large arbor reels very efficient at picking up slack line – the easier they spin, the less effort devoted to that as well. What really did generate some small upgrades for me was drag, or the loss of functioning drag in my Orvis BBS reels. I don’t make a habit of cranking down drag, or leaving it cranked down when I put my reels away. I back off all my reel’s drags – no matter what kind they are. That habit was ineffective on the two Orvis reels I have in key sizes that I use very often. So often in fact, that I knew I would need something to replace them should I ship them off for repairs. And the silver finish on the BBS reels has to be a carp deterrent – it’s so bright and reflective. Before these reels came along, I was even considering getting into the anodizing business – just so I could get the shiny off stock store bought reels!

Ross Evolution LT4 Reel – Photo Texas Fly Caster.

THE ROSS EVOLUTION LT
First up is the Ross Evolution 4 reel. We have all read those first gear(head) reports with the second-by-second, “I waited for UPS, I opened the package, it was gleaming like a tarpon’s a&&, etc …” So, I will spare you the titillating description, and more importantly get back to you with performance updates as time moves on. The Ross is green. The finish is good, but a little more opaque than I like. It must have pretty darn good bearings because it free spins quite well. This reel is less of a wide/large arbor, and more of a straight up large arbor reel. For future reference, the drag is extremely smooth (with extra fine incremental clicks) and kicks in promptly and progresses smoothly as the drag is tightened down. Release of the spool is push button, with a smooth movement and solid clicking sound. Clean, tight inside and out.

BVK Machined aluminum reel by Temple Forks Outfitters. Photo – Texas Fly Caster

NEXT UP TFO BVK

The Temple Forks BVK reel fell into my hands as a trade in on an extremely disappointing machined Prism reel. What a disaster that reel was, after using it only a hand full of times. Being bulked up in the larger reels, I was hoping for something to fit my TFO 4wt Finesse, and the reel prescribed to me was the I, and of course in green. I appreciate, as always, the willingness of the guys at TFO to walk me through the aisles and show me the options. Fit and finish are bright green, and the machining is more square-edged than the Ross reel, which makes for obvious style differences. The BVK reel feels good in hand, the attention to details like the TFO logo on top of the frame and the “1″ and “BVK” on the stem, all add a touch of class to the reel. Inside, it looks something like the same setup on the Orvis BBS reels. The spool has a small spring loaded swing-arm-like release that is easy enough to find and engage. Removing and replacing the spools is smooth, and like the Ross, there’s no need to visually match anything up to get it to lock on. Then, there’s the drag … the first twenty-two clicks from zero drag do the same thing: nothing. Once the drag does kick in, there are plenty more clicks that actually mean something, and each one has value. It will be interesting to see how this reel handles the real world of fly fishing, but I am pretty optimistic that it will turn in good results. I kind of wish they would have covered that darn slotted screw in the drag knob with a little cap or something though. Read more details about the TFO BVK Fly Fishing reel.

BVK Machined aluminum reel by Temple Forks Outfitters has interesting details. Photo – Texas Fly Caster.

If finish matters to you right out of the box, the TFO reel’s overall anodizing is brighter more even and as JH would say, “sexier” than the Ross reel. If drag matters to you, then the Ross is smarter right out of the box. If price matters, then there’s only about 25-dollars separating these two reels in the smaller sizes. If reliability and durability matter to you, you’ll just have to wait and see how this story ends. Stay tuned …

Read more about the Ross Evolution LT.

Being a photographer by profession, necessarily makes me a gadget freak. There’s just no escaping it, and it’s often a bleeding edge on which I tread. And I have been on the Apple bandwagon since about 1995, when I had to go across the Square (I had a studio/living space on the Square in Downtown Denton, Texas) to borrow my friend Karl Schindler’s computer and printer to do something – on an almost nightly basis. Karl was in the music program at UNT and working on creating his compositions and printing the sheets for them. This was only two years after I created my first website, but way before the full blown revolution we photographers find ourselves in today.

After working for my wife’s business www.cimarrona.com at a recent hugely successful show in Deep Ellum, I was paid handsomely and it took a matter of hours until that money burned a ghastly hole in my pocket and fell right through into a cash register, “One iPad, 32-gig in white please.” Why white you would ask? To reflect the Texas heat wherever it goes this coming year – of course.

Now, just like all these pad things coming out, the iPad is merely the syringe that delivers the drug, and I am hooked. Within a couple of hours I had John Gierach’s latest book “No Shortage of Good Days,” and rolled the dice on Henry Winkler’s new tome “I’ve Never Met an Idiot on the River” as well. The Fonz’s book was priced at a low risk price (7.96 at Amazon), so why not? Was that the end of it? Heck no. To the magazine rack I go.

If you have been to my place, you know I occupy the back porch with two, and sometimes three dogs. That’s where the fly tying, cycling, fly rod storing man cave-ish existence is for me. It’s a good life, but a cluttered one, with magazines – lots and lots of magazines, filtering dog hair out of the air and in between slick pages. So as sentimental as I am about paper (photographic prints, books and magazines), I cut the cord to paper magazines by purchasing a new subscription to “Saltwater Fishing Magazine,” and am just waiting for others to expire.

There is this huge upside that is the crux of this observation – these darn books and magazines are many times easier to read. They also go with you wherever you go without taking up any space. Both of these plus column factory were unexpected, but now I am a complete addict. The books, like Gierach’s, are so much easier to read that I find myself blazing through them at many times the normal reading speed. The magazine contents include extremely sharp text and photographs that are stunningly reproduced. It’s a whole new world.

The next phase is to start lobbying the publications we like most, “Southwest Fly Fishing,” “Drake Magazine,” “Fly Rod and Reel,” “Texas Saltwater Fishing” and ________ (you fill in the blank) for their publications to go digital as well. Saltwater Fly Fishing is already digital, and you can bet once my subscription to that expires, I’ll never buy another paper copy – period, paragraph.

I am definitely not saying the iPad is the only reader out there, and the new Amazon “Fire” looks good up close as well, but the navigation is intuitive just like all Apple products (some would call it “elementary” or “childish”), and that’s how I have always liked my hardware – hit the button and go. There’s enough complications in the world that if I can simplify something like reading, I am on board for that. How about you?

NOTE – I’ll be removing ads for paper books at Amazon from the site. I will also let you know when any of the unique books in my store are converted to digital offerings. Expect a few book reviews sooner rather than later!