dkile

Quill Gordon Crippled Real Wing
by Sandfly

Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s while fishing in the Pocono’s I fished the early season hatches there every year. The first big hatch was the Quill Gordon hatch. While the wet fly and nymph were productive the dry fly was not so productive for me. Even though I used the standard pattern I could not get consistent takes.

For years this went on and I became frustrated with the hatch. After moving to Ansonia in 2006 I found there is a heavy hatch of Quill Gordon's here at times on Pine Creek.

Again I was frustrated by the lack of surface takes on my flies I used. I experimented with different dries for the Quill Gordon with the same results. I think it was because the flies pop so fast the trout didn’t want them so much.

While sitting on the bank one day watching the hatch I saw a brown feeding on the surface. As I watched I noticed he was taking flies that were not riding high but the ones riding low in the surface. I went home and tied a few down wing flies and went back the next day.

They worked I started getting more fish on the down wing. I thought I could come up with a better fly yet and sat down and tied the Quill Gordon Crippled using raffia for the wing instead of the old standby of wood duck. Along with this I changed the body from a quill body to a dubbed dirty olive/yellow dubbing with a peacock quill rib. This did it and my catch rates went up.

Now when the Quill Gordon’s are hatching I make sure I have these in my box along with the old patterns too.

The Fly Fishing Show in Somerset, NJ was well attended by many from all over the region. Plenty of vendors filled the exhibit hall and seminars were busy as well by Saturday. Some snow on Friday morning seemed to slow up a few on the first day. I arrived to the usual filled parking lots on Friday afternoon.

I enjoyed seeing a lot of friends and members from Paflyfish. I do think many held off from going to Somerset and are waiting for the Philadelphia show in March.

There was a lot of conversation about the Philly show. It is rather close to Somerset and only six weeks away. Seemed like many vendors were planning on attending, but not all.

The results from Friday seemed encouraging for many vendors. One of the destination guides felt he would have sold all his summer trips by noon on Saturday. One of the fly shops shared that they had been doing pretty well selling boots and waders first day. I helped out first thing Saturday morning with my own boot purchase.

I enjoyed meeting Steve at Rise Fishing Company. Steve and his wife Amanda have recently started a rod company focused on designing rods that are user friendly for anglers to match their skills and fishing situations. Rise also has pledged to donate 20% of their profits to conservation efforts. It was good to see Ernie Pribanic from Laurel Highlands Guide Services in the both helping the team from Rise as well.

Meeting up with friends and getting introduced to new folks is always the best part of the show, but I especially enjoyed getting to the seminars this year. Gary Borger was my favorite with his Fishing the Film discussion. Going to try and hopefully catch George Daniels if he is presenting in Philadelphia in March.

If you are considering going...

When ice makes it's impenetrable mark on the streams, anglers focus more of their time fly tying, bantering about spot burning and taking advantage of the upcoming outdoor shows. Like in years past these shows provide a good opportunity to see much of the new waders, boots, rods, reels and fly tying gear. As for me it is a good chance to escape from a little cabin fever.

Mike Heck, Orvis Trout Guide, fly fishing instructor and author of "Spring Creek Strategies" will be participating in several of these shows. Mike will be providing fly tying demonstrations and signing books at Somerset and Philadelphia Fly Fishing Shows. "I love meeting up with people at these shows. Especially all the people I normally am only able to converse with online," says Mike. He will also be helping out at the National Capital TU Chapter Angling show in March as well.

The Fly Fishing Show in Somerset, New Jersey has been a big success for many years and will showcase other notables as Bob Clouser, Lefty Kreh, Dave Whitlock and Eric Stroup. Like Mike, I look forward to getting to the show this week to meet up with folks from across the region. The Somerset Fly Fishing Show is this weekend, January 21-23, 2011.

New this year is the The Fly Fishing Show in Philadelphia. The show will be held in the Valley Forge Convention Center on Saturday, March 5 and Sunday, March 6. Similar in arrangements as the Somerset show; loaded with gear, guides and all the best fly fishing offerings in the region.

The Eastern Sport & Outdoor Show is one of the biggest outdoor shows on the East Coast if not North America and attracts tens of thousands of visitors...

Fifteen years ago on December 2, 1995 I turned an old Macintosh computer in my office into a web server. I stumbled my way through a bunch of HTML code and watched as about 200 page-views were served up that first month. My guess is that was about two people that kept coming back to look at the same ten lame pages about ten times that month. Fifteen years is not a very long time, but in Internet years it is like a look back to a Jurassic fossil. Now I realize we haven't solved world peace here so rolling out the self-admiration club band is only reserved for special days. I think every fifteen years or so you can fire up the way-back machine and dig up a stone or two.

Much of the inspiration for the site came from the authors Landis, Meck and Sanja. My friends Ron, Greg and I would travel around the state fly-fishing with their books by our sides as we explored new waters. At the time I was working for Apple Computer with their latest HTTP web servers. Being a tech geek it became pretty evident to me the future was going to have a new road with the world wide web. Being a Geography Major during college I immediately applied my cartography skills and made up 67 county maps of the state. I published each county with all the major fly fishing and trout streams. So then I had like 77 web pages.

Ryguyfi will post the detailed update this week. I wanted to share a brief trip report to get the week started. Fishidiot and I made our way up to the Steelhead Jam on Friday morning. Nothing like some Sheetz coffee and a Tastycake cupcake to help start a fishing trip. I am used to taking most of my trips alone so having some company for the six hour ride was most welcomed.

We made a brief stop at an unnamed wild brook trout stream in Centre County. I didn't even have my gear on and Fishidiot already had a trout.

We arrived in Erie late Friday afternoon. Again I will let ryguyfi provide the details, but in general the weather was nice, the water was low, and the fishing was slow.

As always it was a great opportunity to meet up with over 25 Paflyfish members during the weekend. We had frequent chances to get together at Folly's Campground or at dinner during the weekend.

Fishidiot and I had enough of the Erie skunk on Sunday and headed towards Spring Creek. Very nice afternoon with some time at Fisherman's Paradise. Still many fish on the redds spawning along the banks.

Fun weekend to get caught up with everyone. Thanks to ryguyfi for putting this together. The guys at Leland provided some of their Red Truck fly rods to try out. It was nice to have Fishidiot as my navigator.

There has been a lot of interest in a variety of Paflyfish swag since we ran out of hats a few months ago. Maurice took care of our last order and a big thanks to him for championing that cause over the last year.

I have found a online store that provides us a lot of different logo products including mugs, steins, hats and more. I have started with a few of the more requested products and will add based on requests. Let me know your feedback.

A special thanks to David Weaver (Fishidiot) for donating one of his fantastic pieces of art work for the coffee mugs. It features the new Paflyfish logo on one side and his beautiful trout on the other side.

The Paflyfish Zazzle store can be found here.

I will have to admit the prices are a little high, but I don't want anyone to have sticker shock. They charge a little more than some places, but mostly because they make these item one at a time. Discounts for bulk orders which I highly encourage. 10% of every order goes to help support the site.

For those not aware of this legislation, the PA House of Representatives has passed a severance tax on the Marcellus Shale Gas Extraction. The importance of this tax is to build a fund to help protect the environment form past, current and future impacts of this activity. Currently the PA Senate has just two days to pass this legislation or it will die and the areas of the state impacted by Marcellus Shale will be unprotected.

It is easy to help pass the tax, just click the link below and fill in the form, the text of your email is provided and you can edit it to your specifics if you wish. It only takes a few minutes.

The Penn Future direct link to email your Pennsylvania State Senators.

Although the Marcellus Shale gas extraction may not directly affect your home watershed, it does affect many of our treasured trout streams and forested areas upstate and to the west. This is an important piece of legislation to protect our states natural resources. Every other state that has MSGE has levied an extraction tax except Pennsylvania and the senate is stalled wishing not to pass it. They need to hear from every constituent.

Pennsylvania Trout Unlimited is encouraging the passage of this legislation with an appropriation of 2%-4% going to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission Among other conservation agencies. It may be helpful to include this in your text.

Thank you for helping to keep Pennsylvania's natural resources protected.

Valley Forge National Historical Park got pounded by the rains of last Thursday and Friday. 9.5 inches of rain in a 24 hour period wreaked havoc on the riparian buffer fences. Most of them are down. Some can be pulled up again but many will need new posts. The Park is calling for volunteers for this week. If you can volunteer time during the week, that would be great. If not we will hold a workday in conjunction with the Park this Saturday, October 9, 2010 – meeting at the Wilson Road iron bridge at 8:30 AM and working until 1:00PM (or whatever part of the day you can spare). Many of you have worked on the deer fences before either installing them or restoring them after past hurricanes. We have an ownership in these riparian areas and they need their protection. Please give us a hand on Saturday.

Thank you in advance,
Pete Goodman
President
Valley Forge Chapter of Trout Unlimited
http://www.valleyforgetu.org/

The Muddy Creek Chapter of Trout Unlimited like so many TU chapters in Pennsylvania does an amazing amount of work with conservation efforts for it's watershed. I am a big fan of these guys and the effort they make to keep up with projects in all aspects of the watershed.

The public is invited to attend an Open House on Saturday, September 25 from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. Come out to see the recent renovations to the Chapter’s Co-operative nursery grounds where they raise 8,000 trout that are stocked for the public in the Muddy Creek Watershed.

Activites will include:
Trout and Native Plant Nursery tours
Aquatic life exhibits
Trout egg incubator exhibit
Fly tying demonstrations
Fly casting demonstrations
Stream improvement project tours.

Food will be available for purchase including hamburgers, hot dogs, brauts and soft drinks. Chapter merchandise will also be available for purchase with a fly fishing rod raffle leading the fundraising effortin addition to bucket raffles for an Orvis Battinkill Bar Stock II 4/5/6 reel, Orvis Chest Pack, Framed shadowbox of flys and an assortment of 64 flys. We will also have fly tying materials for sale at bargain prices along with our fishing caps and collectible patches.

Directions to the nursery grounds are: Rt.74 to Brogue, turn at the Brogue Post Office onto Muddy Creek Forks Road, continue 2 miles to Left on Sechrist Rd, Follow Sechrist past Allegro winery to stop sign. Nursery grounds will be directly across.

Visit the MCTU website at www.muddycreektu.org

Last fall I decided to retire my old vest. Not that new things are always better, but my approach to fly fishing had change since I purchased my old vest 20 years ago.

More recently I find myself hiking into many spots and need to be a little more nimble. I am not fooling myself, I do realize nimble and me parted ways many years ago. Damn carbs! It seemed I was overstuffing my vest with loads of fly boxes and too much extra gear. Quite frankly casting was a bother as I had eight - ten different boxes crammed in all over my vest. One big final new requirement was being able to bring my camera and reach it with relative ease.

Of course I did a lot of research on the Internet and ultimately made my way to over to a fly shop and get the touchy feely thing going. Stopped into TCO Flyshop while on one of my daughters college road shows (please pick PSU, please pick PSU) and got some help from Chris. He was a big help and I settled in on the William Joseph Confluence chest pack. Now this pack has been out for a couple of years, but I still get asked a lot about vests and chest packs.

Once I made the switch I really enjoyed using the chest pack this season. First I had to repack all my fly boxes and gear, which in itself was a good thing. (See blog post here.)

The front of the pack has plenty of room for all my essential small gear. The zippers are awesome. Nothing worse than trying to keep things contained and getting held up on stuck zipper. In the front zippered section I can load up plenty of spools of tippet, split shot, a small knife and sunglasses.

The main front compartment is designed for fly storage. William Joseph provides a foam fly holder, which I keep loaded with several of my go to flies, nymphs and streamers. About the only thing I didn't like with the...

Are you concerned about about the environmental impacts Marcellus Shale drilling is having on Pennsylvania's aquatic resources?

Join Fish and Boat Commission Executive Director John Arway on Monday, August 23 where he will appear on the live radio call-in program Radio Smart Talk from 9 - 10 a.m.

The program will air on Harrisburg’s WITF 89.5 FM and may also be viewed and heard statewide at www.witf.org/news/smart-talk. Listeners may submit questions via e-mail at smarttalk@witf.org or telephone at 800-729-7532.

Warm Water Mini JAM August 7, 2010
Combined canoe/kayak float and wading trip on the Juniata River.
Thompsontown to Millerstown, PA.
Video provided by Skybay