New Idylwilde Flies Site will sear your retinas with sweet karate.

Posted in arriving in style, Friends of Buster, Flies: Badass on February 8th, 2010 by bacon_to_fry

Pardon the blatant industry shill here, but a few of the signature tiers are friends with a few of us and we’d be better off in the grand scheme of wallet health if they were getting paid more so they could buy their own breakfast burritos. Plus, in all honesty, we know the dudes who did it and frequently use Idywilde’s owner Zach for free gas to the river. Zach always rolls with a Jetboil and makes you coffee and noodle soup and stuff while fishing. Class act, that one, and one hell of a stick on any steelhead river.

Anyway, the new site’s pretty sweet, which you’ll immediately realize when you check it out, has cool bios of the tiers, a killer blog that’s bound to get even better as Zach finds his “voice” and you can sign up to get photo collage emails that feature Brian O’Keefe’s latest photos and exploits. We consider that in itself pretty worthy because Brian ends up in places we’ll pretty much never, ever see, yet we do not hate him for this. Point your pupils there, if you’ve got some time.

And dig this toad as proof he can fish: Zach “The German” Mertens with his gameface/I-must-break-you look and one hell of a fucking January steelhead. And no, this is not a BC fish:

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Lust

Posted in not even remotely related to fly fishing, clearing out the memory card, Accoutrements Collectibles And Antiquities, BWTF Luxury Tours on February 8th, 2010 by Salty

It comes in many forms 

ImageShack

via Choppertown Nation 

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Heh, Austrians

Posted in Lazy Ass YouTube Posting on February 4th, 2010 by Salty

via The Chum and oh yeah, the good part starts at 1:35, so just fast forward.

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Wanna See Some Pictures?

Posted in dogs, clearing out the memory card on February 2nd, 2010 by Gaper

 Yeah, I know, it’s cliche and it’s been done but I like my dog and I like my fishing buddies dogs and I like my driftboat. So, much like that guy in the office who insists you look at photos of his kids because they’re obviously more interesting and attractive than all those other boring photos of other people’s kids, I am forcing you to look at photos of the dogs I love most in my favorite craft. Please jump in and contribute your own photos of dogs in driftboats, but do remember that they won’t be as cute as mine.

Lehua sitting in the best possible place to interfere with rowing.

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Lehua and Cassie in their favorite slumbering spot.

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Cassie proving that she’ll sleep anywhere

cassy.JPG

Bear all tuckered out from a day of drinking and fishing.

bear.JPG


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Xtramarital Relations

Posted in i am not fucking kidding, yet another excuse fer drinkin', beatdown on January 29th, 2010 by banknote

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“Laser Beams”

Posted in bacon!, clearing out the memory card, Spey, Laser Awesomnality, Blogroll on January 28th, 2010 by banknote

Talk of lasers over at Apocalypse Steelhead reminded me of a shot from a warm, first-week-of-June afternoon. Check out bacon, keeping the duckies honest and on the far bank.
012810_baconlaser_640.jpg

I’m glad there’s still plenty of winter left before spring.

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“Whoa Suh, Whoa Suh…”

Posted in corporate rock still sucks, The Politics of Campfire Music Selection, Night Ops, uppity mountain hippy extravaganza, Lazy Ass YouTube Posting on January 24th, 2010 by WT

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Boat: A hole in the water you throw money and time into

Posted in Your Custom Drifter, Flotsam, BWTF Seal Of Approval, Blogroll on January 21st, 2010 by Salty

Just kidding with the title, but one of the Stansberry brothers One Mule Team is still cranking away and restoring his bartender. Too cool of a project.

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Super Skunktastic

Posted in Why do we make this so complicated?, beatdown, don't you ever wash that thing?, Good Fishing Is Where You're At, Utterly Ridiculous, Gone fishin', Fishin Dogs, The Globetrotting Angler on January 20th, 2010 by Gaper

I haven’t landed a fish since November.

I remember it well: a lanky, hatchery hen that unleashed the fury (Mitch!!!!) on my slowly probing winter-run swinger. It was hastily constructed in a moving vehicle saturated with liquor but the angry inland steelfaces didn’t seem to mind.

Inland steelface

Since then, there have been a few nips at the tail of slowly undulating streamers, a thrown hook or two, one monster head shake that I’m sure was the brown trout I missed all fall, a foot long chrome propeller twirling in the current as I hauled him upstream pinned to a five inch fly; he didn’t make it to hand. But really, there have been no fish caught since early November.

I went home for a couple tropical weeks to visit the family and the warmth of sun. It’s taken about three years of recon and connections to people much more knowledgable than myself, but I’ve finally figured out where to chase giant tailing bonefish on flats not five miles from the house where I grew up. So I spent quite a few sunrises here:Mike on K-bay flat

Trying to lead neurotic eight pounders far enough not to spook while they knife, spectre-like, through the pond-still surface. In retrospect, I probably should have worn different shorts. Murphy was hanging out watching the whole thing unfold and laughing his ass off. At one point, I had a fish in the ten pound class working his way right to left about 50 feet away, perfectly on line with my lightly dropped shrimp pattern. I led him by 20 feet and waited, he stayed the course. When he was at ten feet, my knees literally began to shake a little. An eagle ray appeared at my feet, gliding majestically accross the flat and I thought: “how picturesque and perfect”. He saw my pale, hairy legs and had a legitimate response: he immediately bailed in disgust. He made a beeline directly toward my unaware, tailing trophy and spooked the shit out of it. Stupid majestic sea creature, I hear ray skin makes great wallets. I spooked fish with my tippit knots, I spooked them with what I thought were perfectly legitimate light casts, I even damn near peed on one while depostiting rented coffee on a spindly mangrove. What I did not do, in two weeks of trying, was catch one. I lightly pricked two but never got the singing reel adrenaline shot.

I returned to Montana and found spring-like weather, so I figured: “What the hell, I can at least nymph the shit out of helpless pods of Madison trout piled into low-water buckets”. After I blanked on the third hole, my confidence began to waver. I went to one final go-to spot on the way home, certain that I would cleanse myself of the thick metaphorical funk that had followed me for so long. After many dozen casts, and several fly changes, I felt it, the throbbing buck of a frightened trout, he rolled on the surface and I saw a perfectly respectable 18 inch rainbow. I thought: “Even if I did have to resort to bobber fishing, it was worth it, my skunk is finally…oh son of a bitch!”. The line was limp, the fish hugging the bottom and telling his buddies: “don’t eat that shit man, it’s totally NOT worth it”. I turned around to make a sarcastic comment to the dog, just in time to discover her rolling her neck and shoulders against a particular spot at the edge of the shelf-ice.

“No, no , no, Lehua get out of there!”

She actually found a dead, half-rotten, half-frozen skunk protruding slightly from the muck on the bank of the river and covered herself in it.

skunk rot

She was pretty proud of the symbolic statement she managed to make

lehua-skunk.JPG

The ride home necessitated all windows down despite the falling temperatures and the residual wetness from my leaky waders. The air was permeated, not with metaphor but the actual essence of dead, rotting, skunk.

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Thinking with yr Noggin

Posted in uppity mountain hippy extravaganza, River's Blown, Buster Saving You Money Everyday, View from your bench, Sick Point Sick on the Sickter Scale, Git, Basss!, sticking it to the man, Utterly Ridiculous, Thee Thrifty Angler, BWTF Seal Of Approval, Corporate Fly Fishing Still Sucks, Fly Candy, Us vs. Them on January 19th, 2010 by creeklover

 Sucka MC’s,

Check out the $3.76 worth of saltwater/bass fly tying material I purchased from the Christmas clearance rack of my local home-improvement-do-it-yourself-and-get-busy mega store. Tis the season and git to tying.

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