A Simple Way To Identify and Catch The Big One In River! River dry fly fishing considered as the purest form of fly fishing inspired generations of writers, artists, poets and even philosophers to wax lyrical about its pleasures. The gist to river dry fly fishing lies in the rise. Here, the angler waits patiently for a rise to begin before he or she starts to fish. And the art comes in persuading a particular trout to take your artifical pattern among a host of natural flies. Rise forms vary widely from hour-to hour and river-to river. >From the way a trout breaks the surface (a rise), an experienced angler can tell how and what the trout feeds.

The Way Of A Bass Fisherman With a Fly Rod And The Way Of A Bass With A Fly Bass and Flies One reason I believe bass fly fishermen are not as generally successful as their trout fishing brethren is because the bass fisher, as a class, has not put as much study into his waters and his methods. This is not to be wondered at when you consider that fly fishing for bass is, compared with trouting, in its first tooth stage. In other words, if some anglers loudly proclaim that the east wind bloweth when they are bassing with flies it is due, not to the bass but to the angler. True one seldom gets the big, old, granddaddy bass of 'em all on a fly, neither do the bigger trout come to the net by the same route, but the average of the stream or lake can be caught on flies and are on certain waters. Is it entirely because of certain local peculiarities of fish, water or conditions that fly fishing for bass is practiced so successfully on such widely separated waters as, to mention a few: the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers in the Middle West; the Susquehanna, Potomac and Delaware in the East; the Current and St. Francis in the Ozarks; the Belgrade Lakes in Maine? I think not. Bass fly fishing has long been practiced and studied in these places, hence the success.

Do-It-Yourself Building your own Fly Rod First, like the man said, get some books. One of the best is L.A. Garcia's Handcrafting a Graphite Fly Rod from Frank Amato Publications. The photos are excellent. Skip Morris has maybe a more comprehensive book, The Custom Graphite Fly Rod, which as I recall from scanning it at the book store, covers repairs as well as the essentials. Dale Clemens's excellent volumes are encyclopedic-probably more than you want or need to know about all kinds of rods.

Watch That Wake
Sometimes we fail to pay attention to things going on around us when we fish. Wakes from a passing yacht can and will cause damage to you and your boat.....


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Eldon angler second in BFL tourney
Steve Evanoff of Collinsvlle, Ill., led the two-day, Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League Ozark Division Super Tournament wire to wire and claimed the boater title Sunday.
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