Fly tying

Over the past year I've started to tie my own flies. With help from a neighbor's deceased grandfather's tool box and some one fly kits from Tenkara Bum I'm full throttle. I started off with some simple reverse hackle Tenkara flies and moved onto nymphs, streamers, dries and hoppers. Hoppers being my favorite - I think mainly because they've been so productive as of late. In particular the mini hopper over at AZ wanderings. For me it's a perfect combination of size, weight and wind resistance for cast ability on a Tenkara rod.

Grand dad's Bass Poppers

My mother's father died when I was two years old. Apparently we were really close. Though I think that may have been more of a one way street considering for most of that time I was contemplating things like my feet and not meaningful relationships. For most of my adult life I'd forgotten about him. My twenties were fueled by burritos, beer, and bike racing. My thirties - mostly just the beer and burritos. Somewhere in there I got married, bought a house in California, and moved my mom into the extra bedroom to die a comfortable death rather than one in Iowa. When COPD and emphysema finally took her in 2008 the market dropped out of our business (and a ton of others too) and we used the short sale process to untether ourselves from the sinking ship.

Fast forward to now... while sifting through what was left of my mother's belongings I stumbled across several of my grandfather's personal affects. Awards for years of service at Maytag mostly. Twenty five years got you a Cross pen set in those days apparently. What I didn't expect were three bass poppers with their foam heads kind of beat to hell. I doubt he made them himself, but if stories from people he knew are true he used to catch the hell out of bass with them. And considering this was a man who fed his family through the lean times on squirrel and the sales of mink pelt I'm pretty sure catch and release was not in his vocabulary. I don't know what happened to the fiberglass rod and Pfleuger Automatic (the shame of it) he used but I suspect a visit to Iowa might come up with something.

But I plan on catching some bass with these poppers. I also plan on collecting photos of flies and stories attached to them sometime in the near future.