In this installment we will be covering Flounder, Stingray and Black Drum. These are not the glamorous species you normally hear about but they are fun to catch and they all are great table fare.

The water was calling me and I headed to a pond. There had been too much rain to drive in anywhere so went to a pond close to a road. I had two rods with me, both of them graphite; a 3 weight and a 5 weight. I hiked to the southeast corner of the pond at the east end of the dam. There is a large flat here, a good place in the spring for spawning.

Yes I love grass, but not the kind that you cut with a lawn mower or smoke so that one can take a trip without leaving the farm. The grass that I have had a love affair with for nearly 60 years is Pseudosasa amabilis, [formerly known as Arundinaria amabilis], Tonkin Cane, the bamboo that is used to construct the finest fly rods in the world.

Our old friend Ralph Long has written another book on his adventures chasing trout around the country. Regular readers of the articles in FAOL are familiar with Ralph's writing and his great stories about trout fishing, fly tying and making memories. Ralph sent me the rough manuscript and I had the pleasure of reading it before it was published. It includes several fly tying patterns, complete with instructions and colored images of the finished flies.

As an official senior citizen now, I've had to make several changes to my lifestyle recently, that kind of caught me ill equipped and unready. In my more robust younger years it meant nothing to me to hike 10 miles or so through the woods in search of deer or climbing 2000 feet in elevation in the Blue Mountains of Washington State in the quest of elk.

The morning couldn't have been better. I had six inches of silent powder that had fallen overnight to stalk through, and the morning was offering up a hint of what warmth "could" feel like as the sun glowed through the overcast sky that was still offering up a light flurry.

In 1450 a manuscript entitled The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, attributed to one Dame Juliana Berners, a nun and noblewoman. The first printed copy was included in the second Book of St. Albans, printed in 1496. In addition to explaining how to make your own rods, hooks and lines the book contained a list or jury of twelve artificial flies. Dame Juliana was far from a purist fly fisher, and much of her Treatise is devoted to fishing with a variety of live baits. With due respect to Dame Juliana I offer the following modernized version of her Treatise.