Riffles, Runs & Lies

Kelly Creek Flycasters January 2006

Greetings club members, I hope the holidays found everyone well and with family and friends. I also hope everyone found something under the tree that might come in useful on the stream this season. I hear that Sage fly rods make for a nice gift and I’ve always thought that Ross reels are ideal stocking stuffers.

My 2006 fishing calendar looks like it’s going to be fun. By the time we meet in January, I’ll be back from a weeks fly fishing on the Yucatan Peninsula, I’ve got a couple days guided on the Green River with Saker in March, a 2 day float on the Missouri in July and 5 days scheduled on the North Umpqua in August. All that on top of my regular Owyhee, Bitterroot and Rock Creek and North Fork Coeur D’ Alene visits and our regular club activities on our local waters. What do people who don’t fly fish?

Here is an important reminder for all our club members, we are moving our January meeting date to the 17th in order to accommodate Bob Sheedy, a past speaker that we think very highly of. He’ll have a great program for us and our meeting location and all other details will remain the same. The club voted almost unanimously to change our date so we could book Bob’s show, so be sure to come to the meeting and see it. In February we’ll go back to our usual meeting time of the 2^nd Thursday of each month.

Now that 2006 is upon us, don’t forget to get your dues paid. We had numerous members last year that were pretty lax about getting their dues paid and the club really needs that money to afford our speakers. And don’t forget about our incentive, at the March meeting will hold a drawing for a $100 dollar gift certificate for all members who’s membership is current. That would just about fund a trip over to the Bitterroot so make sure you take advantage of that. Also, remember to pick up a raffle ticket or two for the bamboo rod donated by Bob Clark, we need to sell 150 of those tickets and when we do, some lucky ticket holder will have new cane to fish.

It’s time for all of our members to start thinking about our Spring Banquet. It’s getting harder and harder to find auction items so the board has a request to make of all our membership. If you know of a local business that would support us by donating an auction or raffle item, please e-mail myself or any board member the name of the business/company and we will follow-up. We are going to need everyone’s input to make this years fund-raiser a success, so please give this some thought and respond, the more ideas we get, the better the banquet will be for all of us.

To close this newsletter out I’d like to pay a complement to our club. This last year as seen a large increase in the diversity of our membership. We’ve got many more women attending our meetings and it’s nice to see families and kids in there with us and taking an interest in fly fishing. I think our outreach classes are really starting to pay off. Our meetings have been great and there’s no reason to think that this years club activities wont’ be better than ever. I’d like to thank everyone for their interest and participation and I look forward to seeing you at the January meeting.

Zach Funkhouser, President

Sitting here trying to figure out a subject for this letter has been a lot more difficult than I had expected it would be. I have been blessed with the opportunities to spend a lot of time fishing in a lot of different places over the course of my life, but “show-and-tell” about some marvelous adventure I have had somewhere in the past just didn’t seem like something that I thought you would all like to hear about. Then, it dawned on me while celebrating the arrival of 2006 that I am rapidly attaining the lofty status of “old-timer”. Simple math in the back of my mind (2006 – 1946) quickly ascertained this for me! Now, reminiscing about the past may be a refreshing review of the past 50 years or so of fly-fishing (for you other “old-duffers” out there), but it likely will give some of you younger folks a view of the past that might just make you feel fortunate that you are where you are right now!

To start with, I am going to take you back to the early 1950’s, which is when I started to make my first feeble attempts at any kind of fishing. My parents had a summer cabin on Henderson Lake. Henderson Lake is a beautiful lake that is located in north central lower Michigan. Henderson Lake was, and still is, very good fishing for bass, pike, and all of the other pan fishes and I spent a lot of time fishing there each summer with my dad. Occasionally, we would catch a large northern pike (10 to 15 pounds), which always caused quite a stir amongst the locals in the area. Fishing back in those days was pretty rudimentary at best. Cane poles (a 12’ to 15’ cane “pole” with a piece of line tied to the end) and old bait casting reels mounted on steel rods were used a lot. The bait casting reels were not like any of the modern bait casting reels, and they seemed to over spool on every cast causing a huge “birds nest” back lash that took forever to untangle. Because of this, they were pretty much relegated to use for trolling or just to lower the baited hook straight down over the side of the boat. In short order, the cane poles and bait casting outfits were replaced with Zebco spin casting reels and solid fiberglass rods. It seems like Sears and Roebuck must have had a monopoly on these solid fiberglass rods since I can’t seem to remember seeing them anywhere else. Some of these early fiberglass rods were square and seemed to be about as stiff as a piece of solid steel. I remember vividly saving my allowance for several months to buy my first Zebco reel. It cost about $10.00, which took a quite a few months to save at $0.50 allowance per month.

I can still vividly remember the first trout I ever saw. When we where staying at the summer cabin, my mother would drive to the local general store, which was located about 10 miles away on a county road. The general store was situated on the south side of the county road right next to the Rifle River. Now, keep in mind that back in those days, the only magazines that had anything to do with fishing were Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and a youngster of about 8 or 9 years old would not have access to these unless your father, or uncle, or somebody you knew happened to buy them at the store. Back in those days, there weren’t any subscription services, so the only place you could get them was at the local drug store. In other words, you would have to go somewhat out of your way to buy one. In fact, thinking back a bit more, at that time it had only been a year or so that we even had indoor plumbing and running water in the house! At any rate, on one such trip to the general store, while my mother was in the store, I wandered down to the river and met a fisherman cleaning 2 beautiful rainbow trout on the bank of the river. Both of the trout were about 12 or 13 inches long. Now, I had heard stories of trout before this, but had never even seen one, either in person or in a picture, before this time. Needless to say, I was enthralled not only by the 2 trout in the fisherman’s basket, but also by his stories of fishing for them and catching them on the wonderful flies he showed to me. He also explained to me how to tie a hook on the line, secure a small split shot some distance above the hook, thread a worm on the hook and then cast it under the alder bushes against the far bank and let it drift with the current. I returned to the cabin with my mom with a new mission in life, and of course the “rest of the story” is history. It took several trips after that before I caught my first trout, and I’m sure my mom got tired of my daily persistent begging to take me “down to the river for a couple of hours this afternoon”. I’m sure the bass and pan fish in the lake appreciated my absence on the lake a lot of the time thereafter, but the poor trout in the river were another story.

Seeing those two rainbow trout that day on the Rifle River started me on a journey that has taken up most of the rest of my life. My first attempts at trying to fly fish began in the summer of 1958 (WOW, it’s hard to believe that was 47 years ago). Now, the first problem one would have encountered trying to learn anything about fly fishing back in those days was that there were not any books, videos, DVD’s, or much of any other information available for that matter! My father and his beloved cane poles, bait casting and Zebco spin casting outfits weren’t much help either. To top that off, the equipment available at that time was pretty pathetic compared to today’s standards. The top reel available at that time was the Pflueger….Garcia and Shakespear had a couple of models on the market, but the Pflueger reels where far superior to these, if you can believe that. Pflueger reels are still around today, but now days they are pretty much the bottom of the line. How many Pflueger reels do you actually see out on the stream these days? Scientific Anglers didn’t show up on the scene until the mid 60’s. Before that, fly lines like everything else, were pretty much a complete mystery. Trying to match a fly line to a fly rod was about as much a science as reading tea leaves. Of course, no one seemed to know what a “matched” outfit was supposed to feel like anyways, so we all got along just fine. Watching a bunch of people fly casting on the river looked like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie; pretty funny at best! Believe it or not, another major obstacle in the pursuit of equipment was just trying to find any equipment to even look at. There weren’t any “full service” fly shops anywhere, except maybe in upstate New York or Livingston, Montana, both of which might as well have been on the moon as far a 12 year old kid in northern Michigan was concerned. Fishing equipment was a sideline for places like drug stores, hardware stores and souvenir gift shops located in the areas frequented by tourists. Fly rods were another story in them selves. The best deals seemed to be the Japanese made bamboo fly rods that cost about $4.00. Not only was the $4.00 hard to come by, the glue used on those rods seemed to leave more than a little to be desired. Most of them just sort of started to come apart at the seams if they got wet. Now, who ever heard of a fly rod that wasn’t made to get wet? The early fiberglass rods that were available felt more like a real “pole” than a “rod”. Graphite wasn’t even being dreamed about at that time. It didn’t start to come on the market till the mid to late 70’s.

Well, in spite of all of these hardships, some of us continued to pursue trout fishing with the fly, and eventually we learned how to do it to one degree or another. Some of us “old timers” still don’t cast so well, but we manage to get the job done. I guess by the time all of the mechanics of fly casting had been figured out in the late 60’s and 70’s, I had already learned all of the bad habits I am still plagued with to this day. So, it was too late for me to learn how to cast correctly. So, if you ever watch my casting stroke, don’t bother to try to tell me that my casting is terrible. I already know that it is, but I don’t care anymore because the fish don’t seem to be bothered by it! Back in the early days, whenever we caught a fish, any fish, we all got excited as hang. Even if it was only a 6-inch brook trout, it was cause for celebration. A 14-inch brown was a monster and seemed to us like it should be news worthy of the front page of the local newspaper. Far off exotic places where larger trout were common were unknown to us, even in our dreams. It wasn’t till the mid 60’s that we became aware of rivers where much larger trout could be caught through magazine articles. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that this new found knowledge changed the way we thought about trout fishing forever, and perhaps not for the better either.

That brings me to another “half-truth”. “The fishing in the good ole days was always much better than it is today”. Well, this probably is the truth for some areas, but based on my years of fishing, I believe that the fishing is a lot better in most areas today than it was back in the “good old” days. All of the management practices, such as “catch and release”, “bag limits”, “slot limits” and such have improved the quality of the fishing over the years to something that sometimes almost “boggles” my mind. The idea of “limiting your kill” and not “killing your limit” is practiced by the majority of the fisherman I run into on the streams now days. Back in the “good old days”, such thinking was almost non-existent. Almost all of the fish caught were killed! This resulted in fewer and smaller fish wherever there was any kind of fishing pressure at all, which was just about everywhere. All of the new management tools and regulations have resulted in more and larger trout in most areas that have suitable habitat and water quality. Based on this, the norm these days seems to be more and larger fish, and anything less doesn’t seem to be worth mentioning. A good many fisherman now days seem to be interested only in fishing in areas where they are likely to catch larger trout. It seems like it is not even worth their time to fish in waters that hold only small trout. I doubt that such fisherman would have lasted very long in the “good old days”.

I guess the bottom line to all of this is that the “good old” days aren’t always what they were cracked up to be. For those of us that are old enough to remember them, most of us would probably just as soon forget about some of the miseries that we endured during those times. For those of you that are younger (less than 40 something), enjoy the plethora of information and the miracles of modern technology and management that makes everything so much easier and more enjoyable for you. I know it sure does for me.

Oh, by the way, there is one thing that was a big plus back in the “good old” days that I don’t want to forget about either. Back in the “good old” days, there were certainly far fewer people on the river to contend with. In fact, seeing anyone else on the river was almost unheard of. I guess that all of the information and the new equipment does have its drawbacks. There are more and more other people taking advantage of the opportunities available and enjoying the sport every year. I’m not sure which is better? The modern era with all of the modern equipment and great fishing, including the crowds of people, or the “good old days” with the primitive equipment, solitude and mediocre fishing? Some day, this will be the “good old” days for you younger folks. I guess that all of us “old timers” will have to judge that question for ourselves, and the rest of you will get your chance to do the same somewhere down the road. In the meantime, I hope none of you will allow any of this to affect your fishing. I know I am sure not going to. Hope to see all of you on the stream somewhere during the upcoming year.

Stillwater fly-fishers know that lake fishing is one of the toughest games around. It can be an amazing trout fest one day then complete and absolute failure the very next day. Have you ever wondered where the fish were, what they were doing and why they were not taking your flies? Have you ever thought about donning scuba gear to pursue a birds-eye view of trout feeding behavior to improve your catch rates?

Then this is a show you do not want to miss. Stillwater expert Bob Sheedy has already captured the foraging behaviors of giant trout, or “Shamu” as he likes to call them, and is willing to share his underwater video footage and interpretations with us. Bob has addressed the club before and his presentation was very well received. He spoke on stillwater strategies and how to read lakes. This is a follow-up show to his last presentation and promises not just to be very informative but it sounds like Bob has some very interesting footage to show us as well.

Total Funds: $ 5,439.82

Please post this schedule and mark your personal calendar to remind you of club activities. When and if changes occur you will be notified in the newsletter. If you have an addition or change you would like to make, please notify a director or the club president and the board will certainly consider it.

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Riffles, Runs & Lies is edited by Zach Funkhouser on behalf of the Kelly Creek Flycasters. All club members are welcome to submit articles for inclusion into the club newsletter by contacting Zach at Zach84@cableone.net or by phone at (208) 743-0435.

“If a new man is particularly attentive he can learn to fly fish in half an hour. But then he will go on learning as long as he fishes for trout.”

Member & Term	E-Mail Address	Phone Number
Zach Funkhouser, Pres. 2007	Zach84@cableone.net	(208) 743-0435
Terry Nab , Vice Pres 2007	oregrange@aol.com	(208) 746-4810
Fred Smith, Treasurer 2006		(208) 743-2390
Bruce Young, Secretary 2005	grizzlyhackle@hotmail.com	(208) 746-7079
Bill Lillibridge, Board M. 2007	blillibridge@cableone.net	(208) 743-8970
Ginny Foote, Board M. 2008	ginny@vfooteconsult.com	(509) 751-1750
Jeanie Centenari, Board M. 2008	jcentenari@fbnw.com	(509) 791-5474
Fred Trevey, Board M. 2007	trigby@cableone.net	(208) 743-5465
John Claasen, Board Mem. 2008	steelheadjohn@tds.net	(509) 243-8958