Tag: texas fly fishing
First Day of Spring 2017 Are You Ready For It?
Monday Morning Fly Fishing The Week Ahead
That big wheel in the sky keeps on turning … today is the first day of Spring 2017! What lies ahead, and what we left behind are cause for excitement and concern respectively. The warmest winter in record, what more can we say? It leads to a spring full of even higher potential for the fly fishing scene than last season’s blessings. Soggy Bottom Boys? Your time is now. Continue Reading
Monday Morning Sidewalk – Post Christmas Roll
Winter Wonders and Wanders on The Fly
Good morning. I can imagine you are probably enjoying the perfection of this dying year’s calendar, still off from work for another week if you’re lucky, and looking for a fish to catch – trying to get lucky. Well, the temperature here in Houston went over 80-degrees yesterday, and when I was checking with a couple of fly fishing friends in DFW, the temperature hit the high 70’s there as well. Amazing.
Whatever fly fishing you do, be sure to let me/us know about it, and have a great week!
Monday Morning Sidewalk – Ice Ice Baby
Good morning and welcome once again to the original Monday Morning Sidewalk edition of Texas Fly Caster. If you are into fly fishing in Texas, you’re in the right place!
Heck of a deal! Thirteen degrees here overnight, so I guess the mosquitoes are all finally dead and frozen. The local bird population is piling on the bird feeders, and large white wing doves are spinning it around like a carousel. I went out about every four hours on Sunday and poured boiling water on the frozen birdbath so the birds would have water. They loved it.
There’s little to do here in North Texas but either bite-the-bullet, and go north, or load up the plantation and go south. Well, I’m going south later this week … and trying to decide how long I’ll be gone. The siren’s salty song calls me still.
READ MORE WATCH LESS! – Continue Reading
Backcasting 2016 – A Look Back at The Year of “Recovery”
For those who are a captive audience wherever you are this Thanksgiving weekend, please enjoy a look back at what turned out to be an epic year of chasing carp on Lake Ray Roberts, Texas. A look back at a year of recovery for me. A look back at how rough things were, and appreciation of all things, a Thanksgiving for how good my health now is. To say I don’t recognize myself from this March to this November is a bit of an understatement. But then, I certainly don’t recognize myself from, say summer 2015 to now either!
Enough about “myself” though! This long video (which you can FF at any time) is a way for me to close it out, create a document, and keep on moving; new chapters are already in the works. You may experience problems with video length / quality / streaming speeds — and there will be a lot of bandwidth chewed along with that dressing over the holidays!
If you do watch – THANKS! And if you don’t? Thanks anyway! I would rather not see myself on screen anymore, so you can keep me off screen by sending me “newstips,” and story ideas, and inviting me along on your trips — to DOCUMENT YOUR FLY FISHING (and other) STORIES for consumption by hungry fly fishers here at Texas Fly Caster. Operators are standing by!
Have a fantastic Thanksgiving tomorrow, and we’ll see you out there somewhere on Black Friday!
Monday Morning Sidewalk – The Dogs Are Still Hunting in North Texas
carp on fly texas fly fishing ray roberts smallmouth
Good morning! If only for a moment, welcome to our escape from the US political reality show unfolding in front of us whether we like it or not. In North Texas, it has been a tall dose of reality, as we also saw our Texas Ranger baseball team bowed down to the Toronto Bluejays in resounding fashion as well. As for the first, it was Yogi Berra who said, “It ain’t over until it’s over,” and as to the Rangers, I heard the saying, “Pitching beats hitting” somewhere, and obviously pitching loses to hitting – if it’s inferior. Now that we have survived the long Ranger baseball season, and are surviving the political season … let’s get into the fly fishing season changes.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE?
Would you believe our carp season keeps on giving? I think there are plenty of folks who hang up ALL seasons on fly prematurely – no matter where they are, or what the fish is. Here, a burst of excitement comes with the heating of our little piece of planet that starts in April and goes into the summer. The excitement is all about carp, essentially a husky saltwater-like fish that comes along for all to see as the water warms for summer. It also helps that so many followers of the carp are working their way through a school year as teachers, administrators and parents. And they see the coming of the carp as the coming of summer, and a break from all the work, and a break from all the anemic synthetic stocker rainbow trout of the (nowadays) anemic North Texas winters. (anemic is apparently my word of the day)
If you simply read the discussion boards (anemic nowadays as well) at places like Texas Fishing Forum, you would believe that when it’s time to go back to school, the carp season is to be put away, over and done just like the summer. Well, I am here to tell you that is simply not true. Sure, there is an arc to the season, just like any freshwater season of fly fishing, and we are definitely on the downside of the carp arc by the time October rolls around North Texas. If you think it’s over, well you could dismiss what I say as “carp-chamber-of-commerce-speak,” but it ain’t over!
As I was searching a particular area of Lake Ray Roberts for smallmouth bass Saturday, I couldn’t help but take the trolling motor ride over to a “carpy” looking area just to see if there was anybody home. I was quickly distracted from the memory of catching a yearling smallmouth on Ray Roberts a few days earlier, as the carp showed themselves to be up, tail down and feeding.
Now, I quickly realized that, just like Donald Trump now realizes, a video with audio is actually proof of character. And without video, you might have reason to question the character of reporting on carp in October as “chamber of commerce speak.” As luck would have it, I was able to get a couple of phone photos, and later I wired myself up and had a GoPro running during another carp catch. Three carp landed in the space of less than an hour. Does that tell you something? Nothing but the truth.
Sure, we are all readying for big redfish on salt in Louisiana, or Texas, and sure we are all readying for those sweet rainbows in Oklahoma, but in my neck-of-the-woods we’re also still hunting carp until the last dog dies. And I think we have about two dogs left. The end may be in sight, my latest carp so far was caught years ago on a mild November 1 day, but then maybe that last dog has a huge heart. That’s what we’re here to see this year, so stay tuned!
Please have a fantastic week as you go about your business. Perhaps you can sense a new energy level flying from these fingers these days? I guess for us “survivors*,” we never know for sure just when, if, or how we will recover. I am at the year road signs now, and finally feeling like my new reality is a whole lot better than I was beginning to think it would be; strength is catching up with energy, overeating is the norm and outlasting anyone I fish with is again my standard. Certainly, my work needs to be a more pressing obstacle to fly fishing than it currently is, but even that has been on the upswing lately. (See Texas Parks & Wildlife Cover Photograph)
*I hate the term “survivor(s)” when it comes to cancer. As for myself, I am a “cancer beater” just to be perfectly clear.
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