Well, 2007 was a busy year if nothing else- I had over 40 fishing trips with some really great people and finished the season skunkless! Looks like I’m on track for an 80+ trip year as I already have a bunch of trips scheduled and it’s only January. The water conditions were really tough due to lack of rain but this year is looking up already as we’ve had more snow today alone than I think we had all winter last year and it looks like we’ll get more this Saturday.

My boat couldn’t have performed any better than it did; no problems what-so-ever and it was subjected to some serious abuse. I still have some modifications that I need to make to it as I never got time during the season. I made a prototype canvas cover for it that made it extremely fly-fisherman friendly and got great reviews- now I just have to get the heavy canvas that the final product will be made out of and finish it up.

Flies, flies, flies:
I’ve started tying my own flies after buying a kit featuring a Lefty Kreh video. I’ll get to meet Lefty this year and I can’t wait! Look up the kits on bassproshops.com and you’ll find it. Great set of equipment and a video that is worth the price of admission alone. I got the Bass version of it.

Lefty & Mike Huffman cover a wide variety of flies and also tools and techniques. You’ll notice that there is no whip finisher included in the kit- don’t buy one like I did; once you learn to whip finish by hand, you’ll realize that whip finishers are to make a simple task difficult. I can’t do it as casually as Lefty and Mike yet, but I can tie a whip finish much better with two fingers than I can the whip finisher already…plus, I already knew how to use a whip finisher!

So far, I’ve tied a ’seaducer’, a wooly bugger, a floating deer hair popper with weed guard and a little Quido hair streamer just for fun. The popper was the only tough one of the bunch, but it turned out a lot better than I expected. I haven’t tied ‘Lefty’s Deceiver’ yet- I wanted to get some practice in and get the skills down so that I do a good job with it. The video (DVD) is great to learn from. I’m planning on buying all of the DVD’s in the series and at $40 a kit it would be worth it to have the extra tools so I may just buy kit after kit. I’ve also got some ideas for flies I want to make that I’ll talk more about once I get around to them- I’m hoping they’ll work well.

Here’s a pic of my popper:

I resolved myself to the fact that it was going to turn out bad since it was my first attempt at one, but was pretty surprised at how well I did. I need to make the next one(s) much more densely packed and I need to use lighter test mono on the weed guard (if I use any at all) but I think it turned out ok. I am going to make a shadow box of flies and this is one for the display.