July 1st, during sparse hatches the trout tend to move around a great deal when feeding, this feeding behavior will often frustrate the angler. With this constant moving of the trout there also arises another occurrence which many anglers misunderstand and that is the territorial fighting between the trout. Anyone who has fished on the spring creeks of Paradise Valley have seen this behavior and I have seen this behavior on many trout streams around the area and across the country.

Standing motionless on the bank of the pond, I watched as at least a half dozen fish rose towards the fly as if inspecting it's every piece of thread. Then suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the largest in the school closed the last few inches and sipped it in. For a second it simply hung suspended, as if contemplating spitting it out or not, when a lift of the rod set the hook kicked the palm-sized fish into high gear. With a whoop fit for setting the fly on a tarpon I played the little fish. It's slashing runs zigzagged back and forth through the pond as it fought much bigger than its size for more than a few minutes. Nevertheless, the little 3weight rod held to the task and I was soon admiring one of the brightest colored pan fish I had caught in years.

"History is one of the least accepted of Fly Fishing's side attractions, and that has often puzzled me because the history of Fly Fishing encompasses all the other elements of the sport."

"The study of its history illuminates more than the past; it reveals how we came to think as we do today." Paul Schullery, American Fly Fishing, A History, 1987

I happen to agree with Paul 's statement many times during my career when explaining a point or trying to make an angler understand a fly fishing technique I often revert to fly fishing history to explain a point or two ensure that the proper person is given credit for the method that was developed.

Recently I was checking out some potential travel destinations and suddenly realized that the price of going almost anywhere has gone up exponentially since the last time I took a vacation. Being retired, my travel consists mostly of day trips around home, and a two and a half day marathon each fall and spring when we go from Montana to Arizona and back again. The cost of taking just a short leisure trip got me thinking about the often underrated value of enjoying what's right outside our doorway.

Any tyer, over the years, develops tips and tricks when it comes to bench work. They are as numerous as your own imagination. As you develop them, keep a list --- when it's long enough share them with an audience. FAOL provides a great format for you to share the new tricks that you've developed both on and off the water. Here is my modest list of 'tips' which I've developed over the last few years. I hope you enjoy!

It was still too wet to drive into many of the ponds I would like to get to, and I was not sure I want to carry everything back out from some of them either. So I picked one that is about a quarter of a mile off the road. I took two rods, a 5 weight graphite and a 5 weight bamboo, four hook boxes of flies, the fish basket and the lanyard with the forceps and nail clippers on it.

The memories flow back to me like a flood tide. The day began just 90 minutes prior to a June flood tide off the Cape Fear River, NC. I hoped out of my 19' D-3 Skinny-Water Skiff (powered by a Go-Devil 35 hp Surface Drive engine) and we began wading into a very large Spartina grass flat with an approaching 5.4' High Tide during a low country full moon week in June. My watch said it was almost 11 a.m., and the sun was as awesome as it gets for sight fishing tailing reds in skinny water. There was just enough wind (<10 mph) to make ripples on the water as these flats were quickly flooding from various creeks and drainage cuts.

My first experience with Stone fly hatches as a fly tier came about in Western Washington along the upper East fork of the Satsop River on the Olympic Peninsula. Daryl, a good friend from Mountain Home Idaho and I were exploring a section of the Satsop that we could only seem to find on the map. It seemed that the river narrowed considerably and wound its way through some older clear cuts, to a point where the springs began to be the main substance of its flow. After being unsuccessful for a couple of hours trying to pick up the stream, we picked an old overgrown logging trail, and headed out on a compass heading that "should" eventually intersect us with the stream.

This fly developed after a tour last summer of Hareline Dubbing and a conversation with Marcos Vergara regarding the fish attracting properties of their UV materials. He referred me to a book titled, The New Scientific Angling - Trout and Ultraviolet Vision. The author does a decent job of presenting the limited scientific evidence regarding UV receptors in trout eyes and in the UV reflective body parts of hatching aquatic insects. There is scientific evidence that the UV spectrum penetrates the water to a greater degree than the rest of the light spectrum. I decided to do my own research and let the trout decide.