Fishing Report 6/19/2014

Sometimes when you go fishing, you don't have to set up your rig. Some bugs working the morning away on this Summer Thistle. I was out at Manassas this morning getting new tires mounted on the camper trailer wheels. The shop said it'd be a few hours, so I spent the time checking out the battlegrounds. First stop was the site of the Second Battle of Manassas. The fields and rolling hills looked like places regiments would have marched on - but today, you could see the bales of hay being rolled for colder times ahead. I walked down the path and came up on this pond - the first thought I had was "I need to go back to the truck and get my flyrod" - but I decided to just stop and watch what was going on in the water. I saw tons of tadpoles - going up to the surface to take a gulp of air and disappearing back under the weeds. There were a couple of turtles - one more interested in the other. And I saw several of these crayfish just hanging out in their 3"x3" space - as long as no one moved from their spot, there was peace in the crayfish neighborhood. I did not see one sunfish or bass - and even if there were any in this pond, they'd probably be so stuffed full of food that they'd ignore my flies and the mediocre presentation. Sometimes it is better to just watch.

Recycling Old Clothes to Make Rod Socks

La helped me make a rod sock for one of the flyrods that didn't have one. Old clothes (or old outdated uniforms) make awesome material stocks for small projects like this. Threading the surger was intimidating and kicked our butts. And this is absolute proof that making something camouflage makes it even better than it would have been if it were just plain - at least three times better, maybe even four X... I sewed the button on and made the final stitches up the center to separate the rod pieces. I had a couple of PVC pipe rod tubes for the tenkara rods I have, but haven't been using (I am pretty anal with my stuff so I haven't been placing the tenkara rods in the tubes - just haven't needed to put them in there when I've been as careful as I am) - the PVC is just a few inches too short. I'll fix that with a trip to Home Depot and a hack saw. Pretty nifty if you ask me (and a big MA-HA-LO to La for the surger and high end sewing machine tutorial) ;)

True Amphibians

We didn't see any fish to speak of during the hike, but we did see a few toads hopping around the trail. And where there are toads, there are tadpoles. We did see tadpoles in copious amounts and Noe proceeded to figure out a way to study them up close - empty Tic-Tac case! That coupled with our hardcore efforts to ensure we didn't pick up any ticks along the way, you could say we had a case of Tick-Tads! I know that was corny - sorry...