Fly Fishing Expo 2013

As many of you know this weekend the Tom Helgeson's Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo is taking place.  And holding true to tradition, the past couple of days has been full of fly fishing vendors, presentations, reunions with old friends, and meeting potential new friends.  

This year a met a couple of budding fly tier's, I should say they are already great even if their feet don't quit make it the floor as they are tying in their chairs.  Also there are three representatives (one from Grand Marie, MN, one from Columbus, OH, an one from Colorado) here talking about the latest buzz in the industry, Tenkara fly fishing.  

I didn't see a casting pond this year, but there were two different areas where you could shake a stick to convince you to just buy it, or you can work on casting with the FFF peeps to get rid of some of those bad habits.

So far I scored on a cool rod rack, a funky fish art coffee mug, and a nice brown furnace dry fly cape.  I also donated a little bit to the Project Healing Waters supporting wounded veterans who fly fish and bought a raffle ticket from Twin Cities Trout Unlimited chapter for a bamboo rod made by the hands of the illustrious Dave Norling.

I'm finishing up breakfast right now and am on my over for the final day of fun and tying flies for people on Fly Tier's Row.  

www.critters-corner.com

Tenkara Presentation Delayed

Tenkarausa©

Tonight Sensei Eric and myself (Tenkara kid) were scheduled to give a presentation to our fly fishing club on Tenkara style fishing.  We had gadgets, rods, flies, and a power point presentation all set up to go.  But we got bumped out of our meeting room at Schroeder's by some other riffraff group that went by the St. Paul Winter Carnival planners or something.  So our presentation has been rescheduled for next month.

Regardless, it was good to see the guys and finally meet Eric's very nice wife.  In fly tier's fashion, we made due and quickly conducted a business meeting in the bar in preparation of the upcoming Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo in two weeks. Minutes were taken down on a napkin and then we were back to swapping stories and generally enjoying not being trapped our houses.

I'm looking forward to another great fishing season and with Wisconsin C&R open, I wish you all the best for in your fishing adventures and hope to see you at the Expo!

www.critters-corner.com

"Natural" bases for your fly vise

Hey y'all,

I saw a friend's post on facebook tonight and had to share it with you. 

 

A company over in Michigan called The Granite Fly makes fly tying bases out of various shapes and sizes of granite.  I think this would be a pretty neat accessory for either tying at home or out in front of audiences. 

 

Check out the website and definitely check out the Galleries  http://thegranitefly.com

 

(I am not endorsing, soliciting, or getting anything by pimping this company, I just thought it was a novel concept) 

 

 

 

www.critters-corner.com

The last four days was kind of like Christmas for me.

The last four days of the Great Waters Expo was kind of like Christmas for me.
To keep things from getting long winded on this post, I will just note my highlights from the week, so as to not bore ya too much.  So hang on and here we go!

A year ago, at the expo I was not really enjoying it as much as I could have.  With the weight of having been informed that my department was being off-shored and I was to be out of a job soon, having my DVD player stolen at the expo, and wrapping up all the mess that was involved in replacing the engine in my truck, I was having a serious bad streak that was beating me down.

With that in mind, we flash forward a year for the 2010 expo, I am in a different place.  A happier and more appreciative place.
 
Thursday:

• Thursday night at the club, we had a great presentation by Jeff "Bear" Andrews from Michigan on fly fishing for Labrador Brookies.  The photos and the stories had me dreaming of going on such an adventure.  In support of Bear (and my want for a fresh lesson) I purchased one of his fly tying DVD's on tying trout flies.
• Thanks to Andy Fiskness's hard work, we also got our hats and clothing back that night with the new club logo embroidered on them so that we would have them for the expo.

Friday:

• Greg Meyer gave me a nice display piece of driftwood that I can use to display my flies on when I do tying demonstrations.  It's very cool!
• Mark Tibbetts brought his 105mm lens for me to use to see if I like the results in regards to my macro fly photography.  I can't wait to set up Critters Fly Studio and start snapping a few pictures to see what happens!
• The Fly Tiers gang had supper at a nice Italian restaurant, called Biaggi's, that was way too good and way too filling and way nice atmosphere.  I HIGHLY recommend it as a must try for anyone needing a night out.

Saturday:

• I scored three dry fly capes for the price of two.  I only intend on keeping one for myself, and donating the other two as raffle items for our club presentations.
• Then, from the chicken pimp, I scored four nice sections of cock feathers, each different colors, for use as hackle that will be suitable for 18 - 24 flies, along with two hen necks.
• My buddy Jeff Kennedy and artist, came up to me on Saturday morning as I was set up doing some fly tying demonstrations and asked for one of my flies, so I gave him one of my Spruce streamer flies and he headed back to his booth to paint it.  He painted up a very nice water color portrait of it then returned the fly to me along with the water color painting.  I was very shocked and VERY grateful for the gift.  I have purchased some prints of his work in the past along with his recent book, Drawing Flies 365, and to have an original painted by Jeff of a fly tied by me...well that's something I just can't describe in words.  Wow.
• I found a nicely made 4wt Pennington bamboo fly rod that felt very good and is going to work very nicely on about half a dozen streams I know.  Not to mention that both Steve Pennington and his wife were extremely nice and wonderful to talk to and talked a little about his home waters in Northeastern Iowa.  The feel was right, the price was right, and now, I am in need to find the right reel for it since I bought it home.
• Another bonus was that I had several opportunities to socialize a bit more with another tier, Bill Heckel, whose flies and personality I really admire.  A Really nice guy, with some illustrative and funny stories involving his friends Lefty Kreh and Dave Whitlock.  He also was nice enough to tutor me on a technique to improve a problem I was having with the wings of a fly I was struggling with, which worked instantly to improve the quality of the flies I that I was tying at the show. 

Sunday:

• We started the day with breakfast at the french restaurant across the street.  I normally get their awesome eggs Benedict, but this year I chose to deviate from the tradition and ordered their French Crepes made with salmon and dill.  It was very good, but something that would have made a better dinner then a breakfast as it gave me strong salmon breath.  I'd do it again as there was no need for lunch after that.
• I was able to take a breath from the show and go to two hour-long seminars.  One on fishing the Timber Coulee, a river I want to get to know more about since my last encounter where I had an epic battle of man vs. trout, and the trout won.  The other seminar was actually not a seminar but a open forum workshop for those looking for help with writing and publishing.  I found it very interesting and wished that we could have had an additional hour for the discussion to continue.

So that was my weekend in a nutshell.  I hope everyone that attended had a great time, it appeared that everyone from the club that was volunteering was having a good time.  I think this was the first year that I wished that the expo would have gone on for one more day.  Usually I am completly worn out, this time, I was energized by it all.   

So as promised, I won't get into all the other sub-stories to keep this post short. Time to kick off the socks and grab a beer.

Photos from last weekend at the Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo - Chicago

Hey everyone, I have spent most of my day doing some quick clean up, editing the photos I took last weekend at the expo.  Because there are so many of them, I posted them to one of my online web albums, which is at Picasa.  I hope you like them.  Happy viewing!

Ready...get set...

So I stopped by the fly shop last night for a couple of items.  The boys were a blur as they were packing up stuff for the Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo in Chicago.  We are all hoping for a fun and successful weekend.  Last year we got hit with a small snow storm over Friday night through Saturday morning.  Looks like the forcast for this weekend is just cold and cloudy, I can deal with that.

The crew members "representing" our club, will be Mother Feiker, Andy, Anderson, and myself.  We'll be taking off tomorrow after work and I'm really hoping for easy traffic.  At this point, it sounds like our main duties to help Tom Helgeson out at Chicago expo will be setting up and running the "Fly tying Theater" and all the Audio/Video stuff that goes along with it,  possible assisting with the local fly Tying group(s) with the "Teach a kid to tie a Fly" program (I'll be leaving that for the others who know how to talk short-people speak), and making sure that the Audio/Video stuff works for each of the featured presenters as they swap in their own equipment.  

I'd like to give a shout out to my pops, who just had knee surgery yesterday and sounds like things went ok.  I wish him a speedy recovery!

Minneapolis Great Waters Fly Expo

So last weekend was the Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo in Minneapolis. Other than myself being in out of sorts most of the weekend with so much on my mind as of late, the show was a fun one.


The club had great representation at the show. We had members volunteer their time in many areas. There were three banquet tables where people could come and sit down, and with hands on teaching, learn could learn to tie Woolly Buggers. This was the second year the club did this and it was a big success. A huge thanks goes out to those who took on the teacher role for that. We had a Membership table for those interested in learning more about the St. Paul Fly Tiers, and we were able to get our name out their to new people. We had a designated booth set up to allow selected members of the club to tie two at a time and demonstrated how to tie various flies; from trout flies to bass flies and things in between.


Then their was the Fly Tying Theater. This was a place for notable key fly tier's like Kevin Feenstra, Kelly Gallop, Denis Potter, and others to tie flies in front of a large audience, hooked up to a PA system and a video camera to show what they were doing on a big wide screen television. There were several sessions where all the seats were filled and had others standing to watch and learn.


Finally we generally kept tabs on Fly Tier's row where local tier's were able to set up a spot, tie flies, share their knowledge, talent, stories, and even a few laughs. I'd also like to give a quick shout out to my peeps of Laughing Trout!


I had a nice time talking to many familiar friends, and new ones. It was a more relaxed show, people held longer conversations then what I have had in the past, there was genuine interest rather than the quick hi-bye conversations, and the weather for the weekend was very "spring."


A couple of highlights were, 1) sharing drinks and cigars among old and new friends. I'd like to say thanks to the very friendly and funny TFO Representative (I think his name was John) who shared his Baccarat cigars (I kept the label as I really liked it) and smooth Kentucky Woodford Reserve bourbon. 2) The traditional Breakfast at the Hotel Sofitel where we spoil ourselves with things like eggs Benedict or crab cakes Benedict and as always, Ursula was there to add her unique flavor of friendly customer service as usual, and 3) I enjoyed a nice social dinner at Kincaid's in Edina. Any place that has that many choices in high end liqueur, mounted trophy Elk and Deer Racks with trophy fish, and Professional Wait Staff, is 5 stars in my book. Oh yea, the fantastic appetizer spread along with the Salmon entree was excellent as well. They were presented in a way that the Iron Chefs on the Food Network would have approved. I especially appreciated that my friend Peter was able to join us along with Bob White. Many stories were shared and laughs had.


I did tie some flies myself at the show. I decided to tie up some tube flies for some yet to be found hungry bass. I was asked by many what the the advantage of tube flies were. Well, I have found there to be three reasons, 1) you can use shorter shanked hooks to decrease the leverage a hooked fish would have in the fight, 2) the fly itself pops out of the way when a fish is hooked, thus allowing for less wear on the fly to lengthen it's usefulness, and 3) they have origins rooted back to the Scandinavian countries of my family heritage (kind of a connect to your roots thing for me). And there you have it...tube flies.

So now that the expo season has wrapped up, and the Sportsman's Warehouse tying event has been cancelled, it is time to shift to the preparation of fly fishing now that the Wisconsin catch & release season is underway.

Wishing Tight Lines to everyone in 2009!