The Caddis Fly: Oregon Fly Fishing Blog

This is the third installment of The Fly Fishers Glossary: Snippets From the Underbelly of Fly Fishing, Fly Tying, Fish Biology, Dusty old Facts, Hallucinations, and the Plain Truth as I know it.

Baby seal
Obsolete fly tying material. Grim to admit it, but we salivated over this stuff back in the old days. It was highly sought after to tie nymphs. Tyers hoarded this stuff. Some idiots still sneak it in from Canada just to say they use it. Modern materials are superior replacements for this material. See also Temple dog Fur and don’t use this stuff either.

Backing
The financial support begged from friends/parents/girlfriends/wife so one can retire and buy a Fly Shop. As in, “I know that I can make a go of this Fly Shop if you’ll just give me your financial backing.” Provision of said backing is a generous but futile act –- an unadvised leap of faith. Every dolt remotely familiar with the Fly Fishing Industry knows that this is a doomed proposition.

Alternate
A string of white lies and evasions woven by your fishing buddy who was with you when you had a two-hundred-and-thirty-seven fish day on the Siuslaw River in 2002.

Fly fishers who have shared outlandishly successful fishing events 1) are sworn to secrecy; 2) have learned to rehearse their stories so as to provide semi-credible backing when separated, drunk, and interrogated by sober friends who attempt to pry the truth out of them; and 3) head straight to their cell-phones to call fifty-three of their closest friends.

These phone calls begin with, “ Dude, you’ve gotta promise not to tell this to ANYONE”.

Alternate
A form of small-diameter fishing line, usually braided Dacron or Super Braid, attached directly to a fly reel spool before the fly line. Actually seeing one’s backing because a large salmon/steelhead/Great White Shark has pulled out a all the fly line is the goal of every fly fisher. Ninety-nine percent of fly anglers NEVER see their backing in the water unless a Poagie attaches a small Alder tree to their line, sending it off downstream to simulate a monster steelhead. Backing is engineered to mold and disintegrate after 2.5 days cooking in any truck parked in front of a Wal-Mart. Damaged backing should therefore be replaced often, just in case a big fish accidentally provides an opportunity to shout,”Dude, like he’s got me into my backing”. Backing costs about twenty-bucks per yard.

Bang
Noun. Bang is a term that refers to fish-camp beverage – composed by adding Bourbon to Tang, or Tang to Bourbon. Regardless of the order of adding, it is essential for the bourbon volume to exceed the Tang volume. The best operational method to achieve this balance is simply to add the Tang powder to straight Bourbon. Bang is a simple, pleasing, and effective libation at breakfast, lunch, or supper.

Barbless
The state encountered by Barb’s husband when he returned from a spur of the moment fly fishing trip to the Skeena in 2007; as in: “Like Dude, I’m Barbless and I have no idea why!”

Alternately – a hook that had had the barb squeezed so hard in the jaws of needle nose pliers as to smash the barb flat and make the hook look like it is without a barb (i.e., barbless). Said barb smashing has been known to weaken the tempered steel at the juncture of the barb and the hook shaft, occasionally resulting in the hook shaft breaking when fighting a really big salmon or steelhead. These hook shafts never ever break when fighting logs, rocks, Pogies, trout or small salmon or steelhead. Only when fighting the big boys.

Bear grease
See fly poo.

Big Gun
A very long fly rod. Formerly, ten-foot rods were referred to as big guns. Since the arrival of Spey rods as a common fishing tool, a fly rod probably should be twenty-feet or longer to be referred to as a big gun.

Alternate
A big gun is a famous fly fishing personality with a huge ego, as in, “Dude, all the big guns were there at The Fly Show – it was effing-awesome.”

Big Tides
The greatest tide exchanges of each month are referred to as Big Tides. For example, a seven-foot high tide followed by a minus one-foot low tide yields an 8’ exchange; this would be considered a Big Tide. Big Tides coincide with the full and the dark of the moon and therefore occur about twice monthly.

Salmon tend to migrate into estuaries and from estuaries into rivers during Big Tides. Popular lore suggests that salmon tend to bite better during big tides.

The hormonal cycles (mood swings) of many women are similarly affected by the moon. Thus, Big Tides are associated with the best fishing and the WORST times to leave the girlfriend/family at home.

-JN

This is the second installment of The Fly Fishers Glossary: Snippets From the Underbelly of Fly Fishing, Fly Tying, Fish Biology, Dusty old Facts, Hallucinations, and the Plain Truth as I know it.

Jay W. Nicholas

Amnesia
A state of mind that overcomes fly anglers who are contemplating the merits of going off on a fishing trip versus staying home, going to work, or the like, and fulfilling whatever virtual or contractual commitments they may have made. Said anglers are likely to suffer from amnesia in the form of “I promised to do what”?

Any recent or longstanding obligations to family, employers, neighbors, medical professionals, and the like are likely to be obscured by amnesia at these times. Amnesia is most likely to occur during salmon and steelhead season. Trout-season amnesia is not particularly common, and is far less severe. This medical condition is not treatable with FDA approved medications; however, Twelve-step Programs have occasionally offered temporary relief.

Alternate: Amnesia is an obsolete fishing line. This line was manufactured by Sunset Line Company and when stretched, was promoted as suitable for use as a shooting line when fishing shooting heads. Stretching the monofilament line by hand, laying in loose coils on the floor of a boat or in a shooting basket was a pre-casting ritual practiced by salmon and steelhead anglers. Amnesia was offered in black, red, and chartreuse colors. Salmon anglers, especially, had preferences for one color or the other, believing that color choice increased their catch rates.

Although not manufactured these days, it is common to find old-time salmon anglers who have hoarded somewhere around a thousand spools of the junk. Amnesia is both loved and hated. Typically fished in #30 and #40 pound test, with a double surgeons loop joining it to the shooting head, Amnesia typically has a breaking strength of somewhere between three ounces and four hundred pounds, depending on whether it is wrapped around a harbor seal (#400 Lbs) or if the angler has hooked a big King salmon (3 oz.).

Anti-Trust law Violation
Investigative reporting has revealed that an international conspiracy exists among fly shop owners, a conspiracy intended to bring the fly fishing industry back from the brink of economic disaster during the current global meltdown. This conspiracy involves introduction of the “Dental Floss Fly” as a replacement of the Tube fly, which replaced the Waddington Shank, which replaced the Tungsten Bead fly, which replaced the Skunk.

Market research predicts that the average fly fisher’s arsenal of fly boxes will reach full capacity of these current and historically popular fly-types during spring of 2010; full capacity as in “stuffed to the gills”. Therefore, the fly fishing industry is busily writing articles, garnering pro-angler testimonials, laying-out ads for magazines and fly fishing catalogs, and stocking up on these Dental Floss Flies in preparation of the strategic unveiling. The bodies of three investigative reporters were discovered last week, victims of drowning in the North Umpqua, wearing fly vests weighted-down with jigs.

Information gleaned to date hints that the Dental Floss Fly will incorporate space-age polymers derived from melted balls of Spey tips pilfered from jockey boxes of trucks parked along the North Umpqua. Dental Floss Flies will be retailed as a discrete unit including Spey leader and fly. Pure marketing genius. As planned, the Dental Floss Fly will retail for $27.95 but will only cost about a twenty-three cents to manufacture. Hypnotic subliminal advertising is already convincing fly fishers that the Dental Floss Fly has superior fish catching abilities. I believe it, and soon you will too. Really.

Aquaculture, salmon farming
This is a heinous practice of raining salmon or steelhead in net-pens in oceanic or estuarine environments, for the intended purpose of making boat-loads of money for the owners of these companies. Let’s get to the point. These are nothing short of nasty, are not ecologically sustainable, pose huge threats to wild salmon, and should be outlawed.

These indisputable assertions are usually ignored by the prospect of providing jobs in small communities, providing cheap protein in the marketplace, and an aversion to interfere with capitalism, and the untoward influence of highly paid lobbyists.

Experience has demonstrated that these salmon farming operations do in fact provide local employment opportunities in economically depressed rural communities, for a while, that is. Then the dang salmon farms become horrific hotbeds of sea lice infested, antibiotic-resistant, PCB-laced, dye-loaded, flaccid chunks of meat that isn’t fit for cat food. So there. I read it in Scientific American, I think.

Eventually, these ecologically sick operations see the chickens come home to roost. But by then the damage has been done to wild fish and the local community suffers the most in this game, while the big corporations move on to pull the wool over the eyes of some new gullible nation.

The only thing to do is pester your legislators to prohibit these monsters ever having an opportunity to be approved anywhere within three light-years of your home waters and to positively and always refuse to eat farmed salmon or steelhead.

Automatic fly reel
Obsolete fly fishing product. What were they thinking? Someone got all enthused with technology and decided to add a big spring to the side of a perfectly good single-action fly reel and market the doo-dad as an Automatic. Ridiculous. The things weighed four times more than a single action reel. Anyway, these were spring-loaded wind-up toys that many innocent fly anglers fell prey to back in the old days. These reels had a lever that, when depressed, caused the spring brake to release and wind the line in. When executed without a trout attached, the line would come shooting into the guides at mach-three, often pulling in all the line and stripping off all the guides from the rod before the hook embedded itself in the angler’s hand.

Another common but unfortunate performance issue involved in releasing the spring brake with a smallish trout attached to the fly. This usually caused said trout to be flung over the angler’s shoulder and into the trees behind, where it would wrap several times around a branch, the leader would break, and the crows would begin to dine on lunch.

I had an automatic fly reel back in the sixties. It was black and was really fancy because it had one lever to release the spring break and a separate lever to apply friction to the spool, theoretically slowing the rate of line retrieval. I don’t remember who the manufacturer was. I do remember having trouble remembering which lever did what, and alternately having the line shooting in or not shooting in, trout launchings aborted mid-arc. Flies hooked in my nose, and crows complaining by my failure to provide their lunch. I also remember that it was necessary to pre-wind the spring before stripping line from the reel. Too little pre-wind would result in being unable to retrieve a trout within twenty feet of the shore. Too much pre-wind would result in speeds exceeding mach 4 and trout achieving escape velocity, thus denying crows any food whatsoever.

These are now collector’s items, Duh.

-JN