CABIN FEVER!
Well, the Christmas and New Year’s festivities are all wrapped up. The days are still pretty short and the sun sets at about 4:20 in the afternoon. To top it all off, I have some sort of mild flu bug! Cabin fever is setting in at an alarming pace!
(Right – the walk from the porch over to the cascades – I can’t even get out to practice casting!)
Luckily, there is not a shortage of activities around the house to ward off the Shack Nasties! With a short 5 months until the Atlantic salmon season starts, there is a lot to do.
- I’ll need to order up a bit of new gear for the coming season. A bigger tent and cots (I’m getting too old to be crawling out of my expedition tent at 3 o’clock in the morning);
- Probably a new rod is in the works too, but I’ll look around a bit before settling on a two handed rod;
- I need to tie up a bunch of leaders. The wallet is simply empty. I must have given away a couple dozen leaders last season;
- All the rods need to be checked, cleaned and examined for nicks or cracks;
- Of course, pretty well at the top of the list is filling the fly bins.
We didn’t go through a whole lot of wet flies last year, so there are not that many flies to do on the heavy shank hooks. A few low waters and we’ll be all set. Unfortunately, that leaves the Bombers.
If you haven’t fished for Atlantics, monster Rainbows or big Browns, you may not be familiar with the Bomber series of dry flies. A cross between an overgrown Vole and a Wulff, it is a big bushy fly with a spun deer hair body and magnum hackles. We tie them on hooks ranging from #10 all the way down to #2.
The unfortunate part about tying up Bombers is the deer hair body. One has to pack and spin between 5 and 10 clumps of deer hair in order to build up a big enough body. Luckily for me, Liliane spins the deer hair and trims the bodies for me, so all I have to do is add the wings and hackle!
They may not be pretty flies, but they sure seem to do their job well! We go through all the trouble of tying up Bombers because they are just such wonderful flies to fish. Of course, the big bushy body and hackles call up the need for heavier rods. Still, a 6 wt is able to put must Bombers where they need to go. Into a mild breeze and the 8-9 wts come out!
Probably the reason we like these flies so much is the situation where we use them, at mid-day, with bright sunshine and dry flies. Life can’t get much better than that!
Michel Gauvin – A nice salmon which came up for an all White Bomber.
Bombers in natural shades also do a fine job of imitating mice and voles at dusk. A favourite on my home waters, the big sea run Brookies come out to hunt at night. Often they can be fooled by a big skittering bomber!
We have a ways to go! At the beginning of the season, three such boxes will be full.
On the right, the flies left over from 2009. On the left, the new stock getting spun up.
In a few weeks we’ll have enough dries. Then we get to go back to classic feather wings!!
Two articles in the archives which treat Bombers :