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Trout Tips: Let conditions choose your rod
An angler fishes a small mountain stream with a shorter, lighter fiberglass rod. For years, I've gravitated to lightweight and shorter fly rods, simply because I usually spend my summers chasing trout in tight quarters along snaking backcountry streams. The shorter rod length lends itself to fishing among overhanging willows, allows for tighter casts, shorter…
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Fly tying: The Chubby Chernobyl
Everybody loves the venerable Chernoble Ant—the high-floating foam creation that late-summer trout simply can't seem to resisit. Video of Chubby ChernobylAbove, Tim Flagler ties his Chubby Chernobyl, and even gawdier, nuclear-inspired critter that "floats like a cork and works like a charm." Indeed, it is "Hopper Season," after all—there's no better time to tie up…
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Trout Tips: Dust your fly
This time of year, when dry-fly fishing is about all I do here on the creeks and streams of the Yellowstone region, I have become a fan of the silica-based fly "dusts" that help soak up water from spent dry flies and give them a second life. Most of us, when fishing dries, apply that…
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Fly tying: The GFA Hopper
For me and other dry-fly enthusiasts (and that's putting it mildly, at least in my opinion), this month is the month. It's "hopper time." Here in Idaho, our backcountry streams are in great shape–runoff is well past done, night-time temperatures are a bit chilly, whcih serves to keep our high-country streams cold. The warm summer…
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Trout Tips: Fly selection for lakes
Choosing the right fly for lakes might seem confounding, but here are a couple of rules to stick to—consider these the "foundation" for choosing flies for stillwater reservoirs, lakes and ponds: 1) Most coldwater lakes that have trout also have small aquatic insects called chironomids. These bugs slowly work their way to the surface, and…
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Fly tying: The Bluegill Belly Bean
Here in the West, we're officially in the Dog Days — it's hot. As Niel Simon wrote in Biloxi Blues, "Man, it's hot. It's like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot." OK, maybe I'm being a little dramatic. But, when it gets this hot, it stresses our lower-elevation trout strea ms—water temperatures…
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New gear: TroutHunter EVO nylon tippet
TroutHunter, the iconic fly fishing outfitter and fly shop in Island Park, Idaho, on the banks of the storied Henry's Fork, is launching a new line of nylon tippet that the company claims has the strength of flourocarbon and floats better than other nylon tippets. Using EVO nylon technology, the company notes, the new tippet…
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