CHANGES AT TEXAS FLY CASTER
As fishers we know one thing is a constant – change. It can be small changes, as small as a fly, or big changes as personal as job loss, or a new career start. People, friendships, fishing, business, just about everything has changed over the last few years.

Here at TFC you have seen changes that could look radical if you don’t visit often, and would be hardly noticeable if you visit daily (which thankfully many do). Changes that have already come this year are the move from having discussion boards hosted here at TFC to elimination of those, and a move to the highly, no joke, highly successful Texas Fly Reports site. Texas Fly Reports has an RSS topic feed at the bottom of this site so that you can see what the latest discussions are with out leaving TFC. If you want to go directly to either TFRs or Oklahoma Fly Report, those links are always in the left column. And this won’t be a year to rest on my laurels either.

The adventure in socialism, “Guides” page, has been modified to feature paying guide’s shingles, and so far I am the only one who’s paid up for this benefit. Be sure to have a look at the unique approach I have to guiding – combining fishing and photography lessons. There’s not enough hours in the day to try and explain how something like being on a high traffic site would be beneficial to a guide, or through the new branch of my photography business – DentonDigital.com – a website design and hosting business that concentrates on building sites like this one for organizations looking to have complete control of their websites. Of course I will concentrate on one of the most lacking segments of website design and functionality – fishing guides. It’s amazing how bad so many sites are! They’re leaving a lot of business on the table – untapped.

As far as a redesign of the TFC site, I’ve been threatening for a long time, and have yet to find a new look worthy of the look and functionality of the current site. It could still happen …

We are still trying to figure out what to do with www.dfwflyfishing.com, a site I created for Joel Hays. He’s hanging it up as far as paid guiding trips, in favor of unpaid child rearing. Heck of a great trade in my estimation. If anyone has suggestions on that transition, and how to drive his significant traffic to my guiding services page, I am all eyes and ears.

The brand new site www.buyafishinglicense.com is up and running. I was motivated to create that site on a bumpy ride to the launch in Louisiana last month. Give it a try on your smart phone and see how cleanly it takes you to the fishing license site for your state. Advertising on that national site is available now.

WEATHER
They are calling for snow followed by rain here in North Texas tonight. Hard to believe, but true. Lakes are coming up nicely in this part of Texas, and I have to admit I didn’t think the epic drought would be showing signs of ending this soon. Make no mistake, we here in North Texas are in much better shape than the rest of the State of Texas. Predicting fishing is absolutely more difficult than predicting the weather, but if things continue along this line, it won’t take much rain this spring to trigger hybrid running action in the creeks and rivers. Spur of the moment guided trips for hybrids will happen if conditions line up for that phenomenon. And the rising water, over arid greenery, means lake flats will be crawling with bass and carp as the water warms up.

Summer came a month early to Texas. Imagine that.

That doesn’t mean fall will be here a month early though. No, what it means is we are being set up for the mother of all hurricane seasons. Water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are downright amazing. Hurricane seasons are pretty long for scientific reasons, but prime-time hurricane threat expands inside the season calendar when it’s this hot this early.

Growing up on the Texas Gulf Coast at the southern tip of Texas meant keeping ample supplies of duct tape to tape windows and for the serious stuff, plywood was at the ready from the local lumber yard. Storm prediction for landfall location ran twenty-four to forty-eight hours in advance. Black-and-white flickering radar images on a black-and-white TV were what we had, and we all walked uphill to school – and home! Seriously, there was an element of suspense attached to a hurricane. Where would it really hit, and how bad would it really be? Most of the time we left the tape on the windows for months on end. The variables, compared to today, were many and large.

The facts are:
- There are twenty-one names for hurricanes of 2011, and they are:
Arlene
Bret
Cindy
Don
Emily
Franklin
Gert
Harvey
Irene
Jose
Katia
Lee
Maria
Nate
Ophelia
Philippe
Rina
Sean
Tammy
Vince
Whitney

- Today, off the coast of Texas, northeast of Freeport the water temperature is 87-degrees fahrenheit. If you are interested in the latest information from NOAA, you can find the Atlantic Hurricane information here.

With the latest Don, dissipating upon landfall at my old home shore, it makes me wonder what it’s going to take to relieve the state of what my newfound local friends call “the worst drought they’ve ever seen.” These guys are pushing seventy, and the weathermen have moved this summer into second place all-time, and a serious contender to the summer of 1980 – number one all-time for consecutive days over 100-degrees, and number of days over 100-degrees.

All I can say is be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. All this talk of “we need a hurricane” to relieve this drought can be taken all wrong by the powers that be. I have been through a couple of them, and this really is one force of nature that we don’t want to conjure. Mother nature just doesn’t bring all the good and leave out the bad.

The Great Depression dust bowl – Cimarrona, Oklahoma. Photograph – Arthur Rothstein

Some Music to Feel Better by –

Greencastle Blues - Todd Snider Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

So June is the sixth month in a non Mayan twelve month year, and after all, we’re still here.

That’s not to say it hasn’t been a quite difficult and memorable first half of 2011. If things had gone as planned, we would have had rains that lead to releases of water from lakes that lead to hybrids and stripers aplenty. What’s the saying, “God laughs when man makes plans”? If I had a dollar for every time I was texted, e mailed, and called with “are the hybrids running?”, well, I would already be on the Texas coast fishing for tarpon. Sorry, once and for all guys, it (hybrids) just didn’t happen this year.

THE FORECAST

And unfortunately, the forecast for the foreseeable future does not leave any room for optimism in North most of Texas. We don’t rely on snow pack to make our waters run. We rely on rain, and the rain gods are not abiding our rain dances. Lakes, caught in a vicious cycle – no rain means water your yard, are dropping at incredible rates, and the wind … the wind … the wind.

If we could sum up this spring in one word, it would be WIND. The wind started blowing a couple of months ago and for the most part, say three days in two months, has been blowing ever since. Not only does it do an injustice to fishing, it also leads to increased evaporation. Unless you have lived through this spring, you really may not be able to get a grasp on the constant sound of wind, through the trees, behind the swells, in your ears and always against your transport.

For example; I traveled to San Marcos last Thursday and it took a tank of gas. I came back Sunday, and it took half a tank of gas. Now, anyone who knows me knows I am not the mathematical type much past tying my own leaders and a rod weight for any given fish, but at roughly $3.50 (usd) a gallon for mid-grade petrol I will be close to home for a couple of weeks or more.

The whole gas price scenario played out before, in 2008, but back then we didn’t have … the wind. As bitter a pill as 3.50 gas is to swallow, throw in a little wind cutting your mileage by half, and South Padre Island may as well be Denver (draw your own circle and see where it takes you).

There are, of course, other consequences from the wind and drought of 2010-2011. Possum Kingdom, out west, pretty much burned up. Texans know that roughly 160 lakefront homes burned to their foundations, but since it wasn’t Southern California, and since this is a Republican dominated state, it never really made the national political or news radar. Currently, Texas Department of Transportation is running “High Fire Danger,” and “Burn Ban in Effect” along the major highways in Texas, and fires are breaking out off-and-on along the edges of the Texas Hill Country and civilization proper.

DUST BOWL

So not only do we have some of the same economic adversity (granted on a lesser scale) as was visited on Texas during the Great Depression, we now have weather conditions that are accumulating into a comparable scenario as was seen in the Great Depression. Take heart, fly fishers. If you want a reality check, at the height of the Great Depression the unemployment rate was nearly 25-percent, and the great dust storm, Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, actually killed people.

FLIP IT LIKE A FRESH FISH

OK, so this fly fishing thing is supposed to be fun, right? Well, if the temperature and humidity are every bit the same in Dallas, Brownsville (almost the same), and Houston, why not go to salt? Salt, in and of itself is brutal. It’s brutal on gear, humans and human activity, but if given the choice of where to be during armageddon and the rampant running of the seven horsemen, you bet I’ll take the salt.

Heaven knows I gave the San Marcos River my best shot yesterday in the River Bassin’ Tournament held there, and my best shot wasn’t … any good at all. Team Diablo got nary a single inch from me, and we didn’t even show in the final standings once we all gathered back at TG Canoe & Kayak. I did let my teammate down, but we both learned enough to know how to do things at next year’s tournament … that is if there is any water left (in a different river). Sure, all the fishermen there said it “was a tough day,” but I guess I should lower my expectations of myself just about by, say, half.

On the flip side, I did see Alvin Dedeaux along the San Marcos guiding yesterday, and it was pleasant as always to come across such a nice guide, who was exceedingly tolerant of a flotilla of kayaks pounding the shoreline ahead of his clients for the sake of the tournament.

If anyone is interested, I can go into greater detail on the San Marcos River, and what little I learned about it while fishing there the past two days. If not, then we can get back to talking about the drought and the Great Depression. How does that sound?

There’s no rule that says flipping has to have just two sides to land on, so let’s try and land this one on its edge, and find a silver lining in the cards Texas has dealt us. It’s either that, or pack up the Land Cruiser and head north.