Fly Fish Chick

My friend LG has filmed a marketing video for our friends at The Trout Shop in Craig MT and they were kind enough to ask me to record the voiceover for the video. I was happy to help, although with everyone’s fishing schedules, we have had trouble the past few days trying to find a time to get it done.

Two days ago I rowed my mom and Little Chick on a 7-mile float in a heavy headwind. After being in the narrow, long Safari race boat the Clacka felt like a battleship! I couldn’t get over how wide it seemed. Rowing in the wind with very few fish wasn’t exactly the ideal way to recover post safari. I was still a little beat.

Meanwhile LG was wrapping up a 32-day stretch with some good clients. So we couldn’t seem to schedule the voiceover.

Finally we confirmed a time: 1pm yesterday at the Trout Shop. Perfect. Only problem? We couldn’t find a quiet place to record. The shop was bustling and there is a bell in the back office that goes off every time a customer comes through the front door.

Hmmm, what to do? What to do?

You got it. The quietest spot in the whole town of Craig was the Trout Shop bathroom. They were able to cut the music on the bathroom speakers so LG set me up with the fancy mic and camera equipment and I recorded the voiceover for the video in a quick fifteen minutes.

It’s a glamorous life I lead to be sure…I image James Earle Jones negotiates a better deal for his voiceover work.

But I did score a bottle of leftover Pinot Grigio that LG’s clients had left him.

We were done in plenty of time for me to meet up with my friend Brandon of PRO Outfitters – we were doing a late afternoon/evening float. We ended up getting on the water around 3pm and had a feeling things were going to light up. The wind finally calmed down, and a bit of cloud cover helped the cause.

Finally! After a long summer of high cfs and water safari delays and an extended nymphing season….dry fly action. Big time. It was the essence of the Missouri…rising fish, picky fish, small CDC dry flies that were hard to see and even harder to keep afloat, small trailer flies that were impossible to see. Long drifts (some more drag-free than others!), great takes, big eats.

After fighting 20,000 cfs these Missouri trout are strong! Even the fourteen inch football rainbows put up a dramatic fight. It was beyond fun. They were also skiddish. We saw a ton of fish eating on top but one or two casts would put them down, which added to the fun. Although we did find two or three resilient pods that allowed me to trick more than one fish.

I missed eats, I broke a few big ones off. I boated a few good ones.

It was a picture perfect evening float. I love this river.

73.5 hours-incredible! So Proud of team Paddlefish!!

After another grueling day, team paddlefish made it to the last check point at 800 pm. Spirts and humor are intact, but fatigue is setting in. They shoved off at 815 to battle San Antonio Bay against howling SE winds for their final push to the finish line!

Please cross your fingers!

Here us FFC just before departure.

100 miles to Seadrift after team paddlefish checked in at 1035 pm tonight at the Cuero 236 checkpoint.
Brutal 96 degree heat coupled with some night time hallucinations has made it a long day for team paddlefish.
They are holding up well and are on the way to Victoria!
Here is a picture from the Hochheim checkpoint.

FFC is on her way to the coast. As of 10pm at the Palmetto checkpoint, team paddlefish was doing great and banking hours!! Here is a photo from the Staples portage.

Team Paddlefish in full force at race registration. Spirits are high — and according to race officials so is the water on the lower Guadalupe near the coast. The race will start but they will monitor flooding in South Texas. In the meantime it was a great day with family, friends and fellow racers.

having breakfast tacos with the chick while learning how to blog – the professor

Still gun-shy from last month’s race delay, I don’t want to jinx anything but it seems the Texas Water Safari is actually going to start tomorrow, July 10th at 9am.

Ah! Can you believe it is finally time??

I am signing off from the blog until the race is done and I am back in Austin convalescing with queso and red wine for breakfast in bed next Thursday. But don’t feel abandoned…there will be a whole Team Paddlefish crew of people and some fancy gadgets to keep you informed as this wild and wacky adventure unfolds. Here are some ways to follow us down the river from your computer…

While we can’t have any 2-way communication, we can have a SPOT Tracker which uploads satellite data every few minutes to detail our whereabouts. This is the Team Paddlefish SPOT Tracker page where you will be able to pinpoint our location along the race route. Obviously this will only be interesting starting Saturday morning at 9am. Until then it’s just us running errands.

After a quick ‘Digital Social Media 101’ course that I will be teaching over breakfast tacos this morning, my dad and the Professor will be armed with passwords and ready to keep yall in the know…

My dad will be doing periodic updates on the Team Paddlefish facebook page as well as the Fly Fish Chick facebook page. Not that I am a control freak or over-managing my team (ahem), but I have requested – for yall’s benefit – that he post different pictures on the two facebook pages so not to be duplicative. You don’t have to join facebook to view the updates on those pages, just click the links and see if he has any progress or pictures to report. Simple as pie.

Meanwhile the Professor will be doing posts to the blog here at FFC as well as periodic updates on The Fly Fish Chick TWITTER. Again, you don’t have to join twitter to see the updates on that link.

And finally, since we’re all river gauge junkies I thought some of you might be interested in the checking in on the CFS for various spots along the race route. If so here is the USGS table for TX. Scroll down to Guadalupe River Basin. Points of interest along the race are: San Marcos at Luling, Guadalupe at Gonzales, Guadalupe at Cuero, Guadalupe at Victoria (which as you can see is currently a high water point) Guadalupe at Tivoli upstream of Saltwater Barrier. The concern with all that high water near the coast is that we lose gradient, the water spreads out, and we lose our way as no linear paths become clear.

But we’ll deal with that in a few days.

In the meantime THANK YOU all so much for getting me to this point. I literally wouldn’t have been able to survive the past year without your enthusiasm and kind messages and unwavering friendship and constant cheerleading and boundless generosity. Truly, I feel very blessed to have shared this journey with each of you and am off to make you proud…

Cheers  & Love….catch you on the flipside. ~FFC

I have just returned from three days of fishing in Montana where the rivers are big sky high and the fish are eating way down low in funkytown. Despite these challenges we had a dynamite day fishing the Big Hole with guide and friend, Eric Thorson, who in our minds has officially earned the moniker ‘Hardest Working Man in Fly Fishing’.

With high flows, very few bugs flying, and fish who simply refused to eat, Eric worked like a maniac rowing through thousands of cubic feet of raging water while digging deep into his fly boxes and getting super creative on patterns.

You may recall we fished with Eric a few weeks ago during very chilly temps over Memorial Day. Eric and his business partner Ryan own Sunrise Fly Shop in Melrose and we are huge fans of these guys and their whole operation.

This time we didn’t have the frigid weather of a few weeks ago – it was about 90-degrees and sunny – but once again we fished like lunatics all day. Eric put us on a twenty mile float and it took all three of us to force feed the fish that we did manage to catch.

Try Me

We threw just about everything at these trout. I was determined to tempt something to the surface and spent most of the day with some duo combination of big-big dries, big-medium dries, and even big-humongo dries. I was somewhat coy drifting these superbad bugs in all the hotspots, teasing the fish with a “Try Me, Try Me, Eat Me, Eat Me, Drink Me, Drink Me” attitude.

I caught one small fish.

Please Please Please

The Professor was unafraid to go low early drifting small nymphs and worms and catching a handful of nice fish in the morning. When things went deadsville, Eric dreamed up a super funky combo of dead drifting a streamer with a nymph below. The Professor pulled out three or four fish on that rig while I was battling it out, coming up dry on dries.

It was time for me to show some humility and beg the fish. Please please please will you please eat something for me, Trouts? I haven’t had this much trouble trying to convince a creature to eat since Little Chick was a newborn and wouldn’t take a bottle.

Get Down On It

Okay, fine. Since all the fish were coming in the back of the boat I conceded and signed on for the down and dirty streamer-nymph program. Immediately I had two eats on the small wet fly, but I guess I didn’t have my heart and soul totally into it because I missed both fish! Argh.

I Feel Good

As the sun was dropping a little low in sky and the takeout was growing nigh, we all noticed more bugs fluttering about. Despite the lack of success on dries all day, Eric had a hunch.

We were all hot and tired and mildly deflated. We had fished ourselves into a certifiable frenzy but Eric got down on his metaphorical knees brought on a dramatic cape routine for a grand finale to beat the band.

In one fell swoop, we ditched all nymphs and rigged up big dry flies.

Ka-poow! Huge eat on top.

Cha-ching! Another one devoured it.

Ka-boom! Nice 17-incher pounced on it.

Thanks to Eric’s relentless efforts and keen instincts, we had some seriously hot fishing during the final hour of this mega float. In the words of The Godfather of Soul, “I Feel Good.”

Many Thanks to Eric and Ryan of Sunrise Fly Shop.

Be sure to check out their recently retooled website while you enjoy some tunes from Mr. Brown…

Mack Brown played football for Vanderbilt in 1970 when I arrived on the scene in Nashville, TN – as a newborn.

Much later as a college freshman in 1989, I arrived in Chapel Hill just one year after Mack Brown took over as head coach there for the Tarheels.

In 2000, I was two years behind Mack when I followed him to Austin.

And now, in 2010, I am a mere 22-pages behind him in the June issue of Tribeza Magazine.

Mack and his wife are on the cover of Tribeza’s June Outdoor & Sports issue, while yours truly has a little blurb in the EXPOSED section.

Many thanks to my dear friend and freelance writer Sarah Wittenbraker who wrote the piece with grace and humor. Much gratitude to editor Lauren Smith Ford for taking an interest in my quest for the Texas Water Safari, I’m honored she selected me for this month’s EXPOSED article. Special nod to Dylan who just happened to be the guy at Tribeza to answer my random phone calls, was incredibly helpful, and consequently is my new on-the-ground contact best friend over there. And finally, I can’t say enough about photographer Jay B Sauceda who made the photoshoot very laidback and easy breezy.

Check out Sauceda’s very cool site with images of small town painted signs (some of which are on the TWS race route to boot!) and some delicious photos of dive bars such as Ginny’s Little Longhorn. Be still my heart…

And to bring the whole thing full circle? This photog is no stranger to the flyrod. Here’s a great shot of him in West Yellowstone last year:

Many Thanks to the entire Tribeza team for putting together a red hot issue that features people getting active and getting out in it.

And PS…Hey Mack, what’s next for us compadre? Where do we go from here?

Go Heels. Hook ‘Em Horns. Go Team Paddlefish.