Latest / The Long Haul with The Articulate Fly / S6, Ep 38: Shoal Bass Shenanigans and Fly Tying Philosophies with Georgia's Fletcher Sams - The Articulate Fly

Transcript

S6, Ep 38: Shoal Bass Shenanigans and Fly Tying Philosophies with Georgia's Fletcher Sams - The Articulate Fly · The Long Haul with The Articulate Fly

• 0:03
  Intro: Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly.
• 0:08
  Intro: On this episode, I'm joined by fly tire and river keeper, Fletcher Sams.
• 0:13
  Intro: We take a deep dive into shoal bass, Fletcher's fly designs,
• 0:16
  Intro: and his work protecting central Georgia waters.
• 0:19
  Intro: I think you're really going to enjoy this one. But before we get to the interview,
• 0:23
  Intro: just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast,
• 0:27
  Intro: please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating and review in
• 0:31
  Intro: the podcatcher of your choice. It really helps us out.
• 0:34
  Intro: And we're excited to partner with our friends at Jesse Brown's Outdoors to bring
• 0:38
  Intro: the Chocolate Factory to Charlotte on May 4th.
• 0:40
  Intro: Blaine will be teaching private tying classes, discussing predator and prey,
• 0:44
  Intro: and sharing his favorite rod, reel, and line combos.
• 0:48
  Intro: Check out the link in the show notes for more details.
• 0:51
  Intro: Now, on to our interview.
• 0:53
  Marvin: You well fletcher welcome to the articulate fly.
• 0:56
  Fletcher: Thanks for having me very excited yeah.
• 1:00
  Marvin: I'm looking forward to it and it was kind of it's kind of ironic that two southerners
• 1:03
  Marvin: have to go all the way to ypsilanti michigan to meet each other in person.
• 1:06
  Fletcher: Yeah that was uh that was quite the show yeah and.
• 1:12
  Marvin: It's kind of funny too i was explaining to people i was like there was this
• 1:15
  Marvin: whole like southern predator angler scoff posse up there.
• 1:18
  Fletcher: Yeah yeah it's uh we
• 1:21
  Fletcher: we carpooled up uh believe it or not at least half
• 1:24
  Fletcher: of us so um you know it's it's been uh
• 1:28
  Fletcher: a really cool show lots of relationships you know that you can meet on social
• 1:33
  Fletcher: media but then you know now you have like real in contact stuff with them and
• 1:39
  Fletcher: so um yeah that's that's been super cool uh especially Officially meeting folks
• 1:44
  Fletcher: like Chase Smith in person.
• 1:46
  Marvin: Yeah, absolutely. You know, so Fletcher, we have a tradition.
• 1:49
  Marvin: I know you're a listener, so you know the tradition is we like to have all of
• 1:52
  Marvin: our guests share their earliest fishing memory.
• 1:55
  Fletcher: So, my earliest fishing memory that's really super burned into my brain is at a young age,
• 2:06
  Fletcher: my family was super close, and I grew up a mile down the road from my cousin, Jimbo.
• 2:13
  Fletcher: And Jimbo and I fished his dad's
• 2:17
  Fletcher: bass pond, and maybe the biggest fish in there was half pound, pound.
• 2:25
  Fletcher: Um, and we would go out there with jitterbugs and beetle spins and just have a blast.
• 2:29
  Fletcher: And, uh, you know, that's kind of what I thought fishing was and it was a great
• 2:33
  Fletcher: time. But then my dad took me to this farm pond down the road.
• 2:37
  Fletcher: Um, and, uh, you kind of have this fish that haunt you. And this was the first
• 2:43
  Fletcher: fish that really haunted me.
• 2:44
  Fletcher: And I, you know, just kind of went down there and no one knowing what I knew
• 2:48
  Fletcher: and tied on a jitterbug, threw it out and started reeling it back in.
• 2:54
  Fletcher: And, uh, it got kind of underneath the branch and I thought that I was going to get snagged.
• 2:59
  Fletcher: So I went a little bit faster and it just looked like a toilet flushed right there in the stick.
• 3:06
  Fletcher: And, uh, this, she was probably five or six pounds, but, you know, as a kid, I was,
• 3:11
  Fletcher: you know, 20 pounds and, and it jumped out of the air straight in the hook and
• 3:16
  Fletcher: blew off and, you know, just totally distraught.
• 3:21
  Fletcher: And my dad had to, you know, calm me down and everything like that.
• 3:24
  Fletcher: But that, that's my earliest burned in fishing memory.
• 3:29
  Marvin: Yeah, that's pretty neat. So when did you come to the dark side of fly fishing?
• 3:33
  Fletcher: So, um, on a, a trip, my, my grandparents took, uh, Jimbo and I,
• 3:41
  Fletcher: um, out on this, I mean, trip of a lifetime when I think that I was.
• 3:49
  Fletcher: Say 10 and Jimbo is probably 12 or 13.
• 3:53
  Fletcher: And, um, they took us out to the middle fork of the salmon, um, out now, Idaho.
• 3:59
  Fletcher: Um, and we did a float for, I think it was seven days.
• 4:05
  Fletcher: And, uh, you know, Jimbo was getting ready to go and, you know,
• 4:10
  Fletcher: getting all the stuff that he wanted to take.
• 4:12
  Fletcher: And he was gonna try fly fishing. And, of course, you know, I have to do what my big cousin is doing.
• 4:20
  Fletcher: And so I begged for a fly rod to take from my mom and dad, and they got me one.
• 4:25
  Fletcher: Went out there, and, you know, it was just dry flies for a really big cutthroat.
• 4:32
  Fletcher: And this was back in the early 90s.
• 4:36
  Fletcher: And it was just awesome. It was the coolest thing. And, you know,
• 4:41
  Fletcher: I was terrible angler, but, uh, was able to catch fish.
• 4:45
  Fletcher: And, uh, that was the first foray into fly fishing.
• 4:50
  Fletcher: And, uh, when I got back home was kind of, you know, in this trout snob mode.
• 4:58
  Fletcher: And then I kind of started trying to trout fish up in the North Georgia mountains
• 5:03
  Fletcher: and it was crowded creeks, nymph fishing. And I just, it, it, it wasn't for me.
• 5:11
  Fletcher: Um, and so I kind of dropped it for a long time.
• 5:15
  Fletcher: It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I picked it back up.
• 5:21
  Marvin: Yeah. Very, very neat. And the rest of course is history. You got a little bit
• 5:25
  Marvin: of water under the bridge since then.
• 5:26
  Marvin: And, you know, who are some of the folks that have mentored you on your fly
• 5:29
  Marvin: fishing journey? And what have they taught you?
• 5:33
  Fletcher: Um, you know, I, I, I lived in.
• 5:38
  Fletcher: In, you know, middle Georgia, there's no fly shops around or anything like that.
• 5:43
  Fletcher: The closest one we have is an excellent fly shop called the Fish Hawk.
• 5:48
  Fletcher: And, you know, the one mentor, I guess, that's been kind of constant in my life
• 5:57
  Fletcher: is this guy named Rob Smith.
• 5:59
  Fletcher: Everyone knows him down here as Mustache.
• 6:02
  Fletcher: And if you don't know Mustache, you need to know Mustache.
• 6:08
  Fletcher: And he has no social media presence whatsoever, but everyone knows him.
• 6:18
  Fletcher: And I remember when I went in and decided that I was going to,
• 6:26
  Fletcher: I was doing a lot of duck hunting at the time.
• 6:29
  Fletcher: And wanted to bring a fly rod with me for, you know, after the morning was kind of done.
• 6:34
  Fletcher: And we were out in the boat and redfish were around and wanted to kind of get
• 6:40
  Fletcher: into it and went in with the intention of buying a redfish rod. Um...
• 6:46
  Fletcher: Rob kind of, you know, gave me a little refresher and got me all set up.
• 6:52
  Fletcher: And as that kind of progressed into bass fishing, Rob was always there to kind
• 6:59
  Fletcher: of steer me in the right direction.
• 7:02
  Fletcher: Not necessarily like spending time with me on the water as a mentor or anything like that.
• 7:08
  Fletcher: But he is always somebody that I really look to to help me problem solve problems
• 7:16
  Fletcher: with my casting, my, you know, understanding how to fight fish, that kind of thing.
• 7:22
  Fletcher: Um but you know by
• 7:25
  Fletcher: and large um the the fun
• 7:28
  Fletcher: thing to me about fly fishing um as far
• 7:32
  Fletcher: as how i got into it and how i learned was really
• 7:36
  Fletcher: trying to figure it out for myself and you
• 7:39
  Fletcher: know kind of surrounding myself with fishing buddies
• 7:43
  Fletcher: that liked figuring things out themselves and
• 7:47
  Fletcher: you met some of of those guys that came up to michigan
• 7:50
  Fletcher: uh adam smith and his brother travis smith
• 7:54
  Fletcher: and uh seth clark and we all
• 7:57
  Fletcher: just kind of nerd out about fly fishing and you
• 8:00
  Fletcher: know trying to solve different problems and really just kind of feeding off
• 8:05
  Fletcher: of uh the problem solving aspect of fly fishing and figuring it out for yourself
• 8:12
  Fletcher: makes it a lot more rewarding experience in in my opinion Yeah.
• 8:18
  Marvin: Which is interesting because I know we were talking up in Michigan,
• 8:20
  Marvin: too. That's probably how you've kind of, you know, not to you,
• 8:24
  Marvin: but to a lot of people have started chasing kind of edge species on the fly.
• 8:27
  Marvin: And, you know, everybody that I talk to that fly fishes in Georgia,
• 8:31
  Marvin: they're absolutely nuts about shoal bass.
• 8:33
  Marvin: And, you know, for folks that aren't familiar, you want to kind of give folks
• 8:38
  Marvin: kind of an overview of like, you know, what a shoal bass is?
• 8:40
  Fletcher: Is sure you know i
• 8:43
  Fletcher: i think most of your listeners uh women outside
• 8:46
  Fletcher: of uh the southeast you know kind
• 8:49
  Fletcher: of tend to think of bass as largemouth smallmouth
• 8:53
  Fletcher: maybe spotted bass and there's 19 species um that that have been delineated
• 9:00
  Fletcher: of black bass that you can go catch today um and georgia has 12 of those And out of the 12,
• 9:10
  Fletcher: the shoal bass is very unique in a lot of different ways.
• 9:17
  Fletcher: It's a habitat specialist first of
• 9:20
  Fletcher: all and foremost um there's a reason it's called a shoal bass and that's because
• 9:25
  Fletcher: they live in this what we call uh fall on habitat uh heavy current rock um rapids
• 9:34
  Fletcher: for lack of a better description and um.
• 9:40
  Fletcher: These fish require that for spawning habitat. And if you impound the stream
• 9:47
  Fletcher: that they're in, they're not going to survive.
• 9:50
  Fletcher: They do not do well with impoundments at all versus, you know,
• 9:56
  Fletcher: say a smallmouth or a spotted bass, which is kind of more of a habitat generalist.
• 10:02
  Fletcher: They'll kind of be all over the place.
• 10:05
  Fletcher: They'll make huge movements up and down, 100 mile plus movements,
• 10:12
  Fletcher: migrating every year between where they spend most of the year and then when
• 10:19
  Fletcher: they come up to spawn. on.
• 10:21
  Fletcher: To look at one, it's apparent that they're very different if you had both of
• 10:28
  Fletcher: them in your hand, but I'd say that the coloration most resembles a smallmouth bass.
• 10:35
  Fletcher: They have vertical barring going down the body,
• 10:39
  Fletcher: kind of an olive back and a yellowish light
• 10:45
  Fletcher: olive side flank and a pretty white belly and they have this big black spot
• 10:52
  Fletcher: typically on their tail and their fins are almost like a mauve color.
• 11:01
  Fletcher: And the other distinguishing thing from small mouth would be that their mouth
• 11:10
  Fletcher: is almost as big as a large mouth.
• 11:13
  Fletcher: Very, very large mouth. um and proportionately their tail is not as big as a smallmouth bass um,
• 11:23
  Fletcher: And where they live for a good part of the year is in tiny little current breaks
• 11:31
  Fletcher: inside the heaviest current that they can find.
• 11:34
  Fletcher: And that's how they largely ambush food, is in and out of tiny current breaks when stuff washes down.
• 11:44
  Fletcher: They can get fairly large. The Georgia record, I believe, is eight pounds,
• 11:52
  Fletcher: four ounces, and it was tied two years ago.
• 12:00
  Fletcher: And they only live, only native to one specific drainage, the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint drainage.
• 12:11
  Fletcher: That the Chattahoochee forms part of the border from Alabama and Georgia and
• 12:19
  Fletcher: kind of flows out the Appalachian Column to the Gulf of Mexico.
• 12:22
  Fletcher: And then the Flint forms around the Atlanta airport and comes down through Albany
• 12:27
  Fletcher: and meets the Chattahoochee and Lake Seminole.
• 12:30
  Fletcher: And that is their native range. In the 70s, they were stocked in the river that
• 12:40
  Fletcher: I work in, the Otmogi River in the Altamaha system.
• 12:46
  Fletcher: And the native bass at that time in the 70s.
• 12:53
  Fletcher: Old mogi were um a strain of red eye called the altamaha bass and largemouth
• 12:58
  Fletcher: and these days in the shoal habitat um they're the largemouth are incredibly
• 13:06
  Fletcher: rare and there are no pure.
• 13:12
  Fletcher: Altamaha red eye these fish immediately took
• 13:15
  Fletcher: over everything um so that's kind of what they look like and kind of where they
• 13:21
  Fletcher: live um but they are habitat specialists and they have to have that shoal habitat
• 13:31
  Fletcher: in order to survive gotcha.
• 13:33
  Marvin: So it sounds like you know maybe unlike smallmouth bass you kind of have to
• 13:37
  Marvin: target them like your fish in pocket water right.
• 13:40
  Fletcher: Yeah yes and no i mean I mean, they will be kind of in more open water.
• 13:50
  Fletcher: They will hang out in pools.
• 13:54
  Fletcher: And, you know, I'm sure a lot of your listeners are listening to this and say,
• 13:58
  Fletcher: oh, you know, smallmouth bass hang out in that kind of habitat in my neck of the woods.
• 14:03
  Fletcher: And sure, they can be in that kind of gentle area.
• 14:08
  Fletcher: Area but um i think the
• 14:11
  Fletcher: the thing that's really bizarre
• 14:14
  Fletcher: when when people experience anglers uh
• 14:17
  Fletcher: come down and try for the shoal bass is how
• 14:21
  Fletcher: much current they will be in um you
• 14:24
  Fletcher: know people try to make them analogous to
• 14:27
  Fletcher: trout and all this other stuff and it's it's it's
• 14:30
  Fletcher: really just its own thing and because a lot of this habitat is pocket water
• 14:36
  Fletcher: troughs ledges high current wood rock all this stuff it's challenging to get
• 14:46
  Fletcher: your bait where you need it to go.
• 14:49
  Marvin: Yeah. And so I guess, does that mean that you generally are fishing,
• 14:53
  Marvin: you know, opting for like a
• 14:54
  Marvin: streamer presentation over like poppers and sliders and things like that?
• 14:59
  Fletcher: There, there are, um, you know, in the summer, um, poppers can be,
• 15:06
  Fletcher: um, uh, a really good, fun way to do it.
• 15:11
  Fletcher: Um, you can fish, you know, big nips for them that, that can be fairly effective
• 15:17
  Fletcher: if you can get heavy enough.
• 15:18
  Fletcher: But for me, the streamer fishing thing is the river that I'm in, unfortunately,
• 15:28
  Fletcher: from a fishing standpoint, runs exceptionally clear almost all year.
• 15:37
  Fletcher: And we just have super high visibility. ability.
• 15:42
  Fletcher: And from a fishing standpoint, I don't really have a lot of patience for nymphing
• 15:50
  Fletcher: or dry flies or even poppers.
• 15:53
  Fletcher: I love animating a fly and I love seeing them eat.
• 15:57
  Fletcher: And this fish is almost 100% pesimorous after they're 12 inches long.
• 16:06
  Fletcher: So all they eat is fish pretty much and so my favorite way to target them is
• 16:12
  Fletcher: totally with a streamer and if you see me out on the water with a bobber on
• 16:19
  Fletcher: i am having a really awful bad day.
• 16:23
  Marvin: And and we'll and we'll talk about this when we get to to fly design because
• 16:28
  Marvin: i know from talking to you in michigan um at bob in the hood that you've got
• 16:32
  Marvin: some really kind of unique you know approaches to the way you like to design
• 16:37
  Marvin: and fish streamers that are kind of unconventional for kind of what I think
• 16:40
  Marvin: of as kind of traditional predator streamer folks.
• 16:43
  Marvin: But, you know, on the tackle side, are you fishing those with like,
• 16:46
  Marvin: you know, six and seven weights on like floating and intermediate lines?
• 16:50
  Marvin: I mean, kind of what's your tackle setup? Yeah.
• 16:53
  Fletcher: So, um, you know, shameless plug for Schultz.
• 16:56
  Fletcher: Um, that, that swim fly rod that he developed, I've got four or five of them
• 17:03
  Fletcher: and, um, all eight weights and the, the eight weight thing really kind of evolved,
• 17:11
  Fletcher: not, not necessarily because of the fish, but because of the flies,
• 17:14
  Fletcher: um, because they have such a big mouth, we're throwing fairly large flies,
• 17:20
  Fletcher: um, you know, up to 12 inches long.
• 17:23
  Fletcher: And so having the ability to quickly switch to a fly that's that size,
• 17:29
  Fletcher: it helps to have the extra beep.
• 17:32
  Fletcher: The other thing is, you know, these fish can live in really small,
• 17:37
  Fletcher: really, you know, crowded canopy creeks and being able to roll cast a decent
• 17:46
  Fletcher: size streamer, it helps to have the weight. weight.
• 17:51
  Fletcher: And, and most people, at least most people that I fish with fish with eight weights.
• 17:57
  Marvin: Got it. And so that for folks that don't know, that's a Loomis stick.
• 18:00
  Marvin: Um, and I'll try to drop a link to it in the show notes. And are you then fishing
• 18:04
  Marvin: a floating line or intermediate? I mean, what do you like to do?
• 18:07
  Fletcher: So, you know, um, when I first started to really get, um.
• 18:14
  Fletcher: Serious about, you know, tying and doing all this stuff for Shoal Bass,
• 18:19
  Fletcher: I was essentially trying to copy Mike Schultz's program of kind of breaking
• 18:29
  Fletcher: down the water column and having it situational to water temps and,
• 18:35
  Fletcher: you know, kind of through the whole thing.
• 18:38
  Fletcher: I've got, you know, full sink, sink tips, all this stuff.
• 18:43
  Fletcher: And when we're fishing out of a boat, we'll, we'll have seven rods in the raft.
• 18:49
  Fletcher: And, you know, we're, it's almost like we're the glitter boat guys,
• 18:52
  Fletcher: you know, just picking up a different setup and, and growing it.
• 18:56
  Fletcher: Um, but you know, it's kind of evolved over time.
• 19:02
  Fletcher: At least my program, what I run is really kind of simplified and specialized
• 19:08
  Fletcher: into a floating line program primarily.
• 19:14
  Fletcher: And a large reason that I'm doing a floating line kind of base program these
• 19:21
  Fletcher: days is I really like targeting these fish on foot.
• 19:28
  Fletcher: Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm weight fishing most of the time and really the only time
• 19:35
  Fletcher: that I'm bringing any kind of sinking line is when I'm in a boat.
• 19:41
  Fletcher: And, you know, we, we fish a lot with conventional guys, uh,
• 19:47
  Fletcher: trying to learn what they're doing and, you know, how the fish are reacting to the different baits.
• 19:52
  Fletcher: And, you know, one thing that I feel like you can replicate a lot of the stuff
• 19:58
  Fletcher: that, that's been fishing guys and conventional tackle guys are doing.
• 20:02
  Fletcher: And, but the one thing that you're really able to do that they're not able to
• 20:07
  Fletcher: do so well is like the floating line presentation.
• 20:12
  Fletcher: Um, it's just really hard for conventional guy to do like a grease line swing, for instance.
• 20:19
  Fletcher: And so, you know, I feel like because of the clear water, I've kind of developed
• 20:28
  Fletcher: my flies to all be fished on a floating line.
• 20:33
  Marvin: Got it. And I would imagine you probably given if they're fishing in structure,
• 20:37
  Marvin: you're probably almost all fluorocarbon, right?
• 20:40
  Fletcher: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It takes a lot for me to go under like 20 pounds.
• 20:46
  Marvin: Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I know from looking at your Instagram feed that
• 20:50
  Marvin: there's some other species you like to chase on the fly, too.
• 20:52
  Marvin: You want to share those with our listener?
• 20:55
  Fletcher: Yeah. So, you know, in Georgia, we do have 12 different species of black bass.
• 21:02
  Fletcher: And my other favorites to fish are what we call the red-eye clade.
• 21:11
  Fletcher: That's seven different species. species.
• 21:13
  Fletcher: Some are only found in Alabama, some are only found in Georgia and South Carolina.
• 21:18
  Fletcher: And because we're so geologically old down here in the Southeast,
• 21:24
  Fletcher: we have all these isolated drainages.
• 21:27
  Fletcher: And so you have all the speciation down here.
• 21:30
  Fletcher: And if you're not familiar with the red-eye species, they don't get very big.
• 21:36
  Fletcher: Like let's say a 12-inch fish is like equivalent to to a 19,
• 21:42
  Fletcher: 20-inch smallmouth, right, as far as trophy size.
• 21:46
  Fletcher: But they are incredibly colorful.
• 21:51
  Fletcher: Some of the species have really bright red fins or orange fins or yellow fins and have.
• 22:02
  Fletcher: They look like smurfs part of the year just totally
• 22:05
  Fletcher: blue um bright blue coloration on
• 22:09
  Fletcher: the face and the bellies and um they live
• 22:12
  Fletcher: in a lot of places that you would think are
• 22:15
  Fletcher: like brook trout streams um and those
• 22:20
  Fletcher: are fun for me to kind of target and and
• 22:23
  Fletcher: you know really i like doing that because it's kind
• 22:26
  Fletcher: of a solo thing or maybe you and one other person and
• 22:29
  Fletcher: you will definitely not see anyone else out
• 22:33
  Fletcher: in most of the places that you're going to go target those
• 22:36
  Fletcher: fish so really rugged really remote and you
• 22:39
  Fletcher: know if it was a trout stream it would be packed but you
• 22:42
  Fletcher: got the whole thing to yourself and so um those
• 22:46
  Fletcher: species in general have a special place in
• 22:49
  Fletcher: my heart because you know the the the
• 22:53
  Fletcher: fly that you know the first fly
• 22:56
  Fletcher: that i named uh was really
• 22:59
  Fletcher: originally to target that specific
• 23:02
  Fletcher: uh clade of species um
• 23:06
  Fletcher: and and it was really kind of
• 23:08
  Fletcher: a technique specific thing that that kind
• 23:11
  Fletcher: of led me to them and um outside of.
• 23:14
  Fletcher: The red eye bass um um i am
• 23:18
  Fletcher: really really into uh fishing
• 23:22
  Fletcher: for bowfin and striped bass and those fish are also kind of special to me because
• 23:30
  Fletcher: the bowfin have really shown me a lot about fly durability material selection
• 23:35
  Fletcher: um those kind of things and and you know same thing with a striper i mean um a lot of the.
• 23:43
  Fletcher: Striper fishing we do is kind of targeting them when they're
• 23:47
  Fletcher: acting like shoal bass um or or sometimes
• 23:50
  Fletcher: while we're fishing for shoal bass they'll be by catch
• 23:53
  Fletcher: but um they're they're not
• 23:56
  Fletcher: small fish and uh the lessons
• 23:59
  Fletcher: learned on fly durability from them um you
• 24:02
  Fletcher: know kind of changed the way that i've kind
• 24:05
  Fletcher: of gone about building flies too so um we we kind of tend to do a little little
• 24:12
  Fletcher: bit of everything except for trout fishing um so it's it's kind of come full
• 24:18
  Fletcher: circle back to you know what interested me as a little kid which is fast stuff yeah.
• 24:24
  Marvin: And then you know i'll drop this in the show notes but uh you know folks should
• 24:28
  Marvin: check out your instagram feed because there's some absolute hogs for stripers
• 24:32
  Marvin: uh in your instagram feeds just it's kind of crazy really.
• 24:36
  Fletcher: Yeah and you know going back to uh mustache at
• 24:41
  Fletcher: the fishhawk i i've kind of gotten to the point now where um i don't i don't
• 24:46
  Fletcher: post fish pictures anymore because it's just it's hard not to burn spots and
• 24:52
  Fletcher: stuff with with those pictures so um kind of cool cooling it on uh posting any
• 24:58
  Fletcher: more of those for at least a little bit yeah.
• 25:00
  Marvin: Well there you go and so you know we've kind of danced around the fact that
• 25:03
  Marvin: you, uh, that you tie flies, you know, how did you get interested in tying flies?
• 25:09
  Fletcher: Um, you know, probably 10 or 12 years ago, um,
• 25:15
  Fletcher: my parents, um, took a fly tying class and they really got into it and,
• 25:21
  Fletcher: you know, for a little bit and they thought that it would be something that
• 25:26
  Fletcher: I was interested in cause I was kind of starting to fly fish and everything
• 25:30
  Fletcher: like that and of course i was like that that like arts and crafts i don't need
• 25:33
  Fletcher: to do that i i just want to buy the flies and go out there and fish and and so you know after um,
• 25:41
  Fletcher: a couple years of it you know the the vice
• 25:44
  Fletcher: and the little you know combo pack of materials sitting in the closet i had
• 25:50
  Fletcher: a pretty frustrating day shoal bass fishing where i could not get a fly deep
• 25:56
  Fletcher: enough to hit where i wanted to hit in the hole and so i i dragged that thing out of the closet And,
• 26:04
  Fletcher: you know, pulled up somebody's YouTube tutorial on how to tie a clouser and
• 26:11
  Fletcher: bought the heaviest tungsten eyes that I could and, you know,
• 26:15
  Fletcher: a bucktail and started spinning them up.
• 26:17
  Fletcher: And it's kind of been an obsession ever since.
• 26:22
  Marvin: Yeah. So, you know, what do you tie on today? day?
• 26:26
  Fletcher: Um, you know, I, I, I think I, I, I started with a peak, um,
• 26:31
  Fletcher: and, you know, kind of wore it, wore it completely out.
• 26:36
  Fletcher: And, uh, these days I primarily tie on a Renzetti.
• 26:39
  Marvin: Gotcha. And, uh, what's your favorite flavor there?
• 26:44
  Fletcher: Um, it's, uh, just a saltwater traveler.
• 26:47
  Fletcher: Um, I've, um, you know, worn out a couple of jaws and, And, you know,
• 26:53
  Fletcher: the thing about the Saltwater Traveler is I really don't need,
• 26:58
  Fletcher: for the flies that I tied,
• 27:01
  Fletcher: like, you know, true rotary function or anything fancy like that.
• 27:05
  Fletcher: I just, the arm design on the Renzetti allows me to get a little bit more purchase on shanks.
• 27:19
  Fletcher: And so that's primarily the reason that I really like that vice.
• 27:25
  Marvin: Got it. Yeah, I've got two of them. I've got I'm left handed.
• 27:28
  Marvin: So I had one for the back in the old days where we didn't work from home.
• 27:32
  Marvin: I had one for the office and one for the house. And now they're both in the office at home.
• 27:37
  Fletcher: Yeah. And now my, my daughter, um, is showing interest.
• 27:43
  Fletcher: So she's, she's using an old peak, um, time with me. So.
• 27:48
  Marvin: Yeah, that's pretty cool. And so, you know, who are some of the,
• 27:51
  Marvin: um, the tires that have kind of influenced your development over the years?
• 27:57
  Fletcher: That's that's a really long that's really
• 28:01
  Fletcher: long list um you know i i
• 28:03
  Fletcher: think if you if you look at my pages it's it's
• 28:07
  Fletcher: very obvious that the blank chocolate's a huge influence but um you know i didn't
• 28:13
  Fletcher: start tying um changer style flies
• 28:17
  Fletcher: for a few years um and you know kind of started out out with classics,
• 28:26
  Fletcher: you know, Bob Clouser, you know, some Popovic's flies, like hollow flies.
• 28:33
  Fletcher: And then, you know, lefty deceiver, double deceivers, that kind of thing.
• 28:39
  Fletcher: And really, it was kind of around the double deceiver that I started looking at,
• 28:46
  Fletcher: you know, the stuff that Madden was doing with a peanut or,
• 28:50
  Fletcher: you know, articulated flies and really started looking at what Gallup was doing
• 28:57
  Fletcher: with the extended body articulated fly and all the variation that, that he was doing with,
• 29:04
  Fletcher: you know, that kind of body design to, to get the length with these natural
• 29:09
  Fletcher: materials that he wanted to get.
• 29:12
  Fletcher: And, you know, same, same thing with the extended body concept
• 29:15
  Fletcher: on the B-Squad with Papa Vic and the way that I really started looking at these
• 29:24
  Fletcher: articulated extended body kind of flaws was in my brain, it's...
• 29:35
  Fletcher: All different styles to kind of accomplish the same basic idea
• 29:39
  Fletcher: which is you know a single hook streamer i
• 29:43
  Fletcher: was only able to get so long and um
• 29:46
  Fletcher: by adding the extended
• 29:50
  Fletcher: body tail articulation whatever you want
• 29:52
  Fletcher: to call it you're able to get a much bigger
• 29:55
  Fletcher: bait but on top of that you're able to get the movement
• 29:59
  Fletcher: in it and so you know i would
• 30:01
  Fletcher: say that um pop of x
• 30:04
  Fletcher: madden um blaine um
• 30:08
  Fletcher: are all huge influences but then there's also like conceptual stuff that i like
• 30:16
  Fletcher: to take you know in other words i don't tie their patterns but i really like
• 30:21
  Fletcher: the ideas behind their patterns and And like Mark Sedati with the weight balance principle,
• 30:27
  Fletcher: I really try to build my flies in a way that they are weight balanced.
• 30:37
  Fletcher: That's not always possible, but I like to have weight balance flies in my box
• 30:43
  Fletcher: so that I can hunt all day on a new river.
• 30:46
  Fletcher: And so, you know, I'm not, I'm not all out there tying Sadati Slammers,
• 30:51
  Fletcher: but you know, that, that concept that he brought, um, I really,
• 30:56
  Fletcher: really adhere to that. at Andy Sabota with the Swimmy Jimmy.
• 31:02
  Fletcher: It's one of my favorite flies of all time. But again, you know,
• 31:06
  Fletcher: it's going back to the extended body thing.
• 31:11
  Fletcher: My favorite way of tying any kind of extended body fly is doing it with a Game Changer platform.
• 31:18
  Fletcher: And I think that it allows me to use materials in a way that the fly looks more
• 31:31
  Fletcher: realistic, in my opinion,
• 31:33
  Fletcher: and less suggestive.
• 31:37
  Fletcher: And because I fish a lot of really clear flows, trying to take flies from a
• 31:45
  Fletcher: suggestive standpoint to a more realistic standpoint, but not really...
• 31:52
  Fletcher: Losing action, gaining action, that kind of thing.
• 31:55
  Fletcher: I think that the shank-based bugs are really kind of where I'm totally adherent
• 32:04
  Fletcher: to the Game Changer platform, pretty much.
• 32:08
  Fletcher: I do tie some single articulation flies, but even those, it's not using a wire and a bead.
• 32:15
  Fletcher: It's connecting them with shanks
• 32:17
  Fletcher: and really kind of going back to some durability stuff from the bow fin,
• 32:25
  Fletcher: the pickerel, and the big striper is, you know, a lot of the wire connection, a lot of this stuff,
• 32:33
  Fletcher: you know, it'll put your tackle to the test.
• 32:37
  Fletcher: And so, you know, even on the single articulation flies, I'm articulating it
• 32:42
  Fletcher: with shanks just from a durability standpoint.
• 32:46
  Marvin: Uh, God, and it sounds too, like, you know, given the species that you like
• 32:50
  Marvin: to chase on the fly that you didn't really kind of, you know,
• 32:53
  Marvin: you didn't start tying pheasant tails and then get to predator flies.
• 32:55
  Marvin: It seems like you were kind of predator flies out of the gate, right?
• 32:59
  Fletcher: Yeah, pretty much that, that was, you know, it was like, Hey Rob,
• 33:04
  Fletcher: what, what, uh, what a bassy, you know, and, and, you know, showed him a little
• 33:08
  Fletcher: box, uh, you know, some nibs and stuff like that, that I was trying to fish with.
• 33:13
  Fletcher: With and my station was like bigger, bigger, bigger, you know,
• 33:17
  Fletcher: and, and, you know, once, once I saw a fish eat a streamer for the first time
• 33:23
  Fletcher: and how aggressive it was, I, I was hooked. I didn't want to do anything else ever.
• 33:28
  Marvin: Yeah. And, you know, so for folks that aren't, you know, familiar with your
• 33:32
  Marvin: patterns, kind of let us, you know, know some of your, you know,
• 33:34
  Marvin: more notable patterns and kind of, you know, kind of how they fish and kind
• 33:38
  Marvin: of what they're geared towards.
• 33:41
  Fletcher: Um you know the the like i
• 33:44
  Fletcher: was saying the the first pattern um that that
• 33:48
  Fletcher: i really named and i guess what most
• 33:52
  Fletcher: people know me for is is um what i
• 33:55
  Fletcher: call a tweaker and um the the
• 33:58
  Fletcher: idea for the tweaker kind of evolved out
• 34:02
  Fletcher: of uh red-eyed bass fishing and um another one of my favorite flies is a blind
• 34:11
  Fletcher: chocolate pattern the bugger changer and when I don't know the story but you
• 34:19
  Fletcher: know originally when when he.
• 34:23
  Fletcher: I designed that fly. It was a tailhook fly. And then, um, you know,
• 34:28
  Fletcher: there's some issues and there's a change to one shank back, um, on that fly, um.
• 34:35
  Fletcher: With the head just kind of float, not floating, but lead eye head with a little
• 34:40
  Fletcher: bit of brush and that thing will, you know, jig all the way down to the bottom.
• 34:44
  Fletcher: Them and it's a gray fly it's one of my favorite flies of all
• 34:46
  Fletcher: time um but when i'm
• 34:50
  Fletcher: red-eyed bass fishing it's hard to roll cast that
• 34:53
  Fletcher: thing um effectively and so i
• 34:56
  Fletcher: really wanted to figure out a way to you
• 35:00
  Fletcher: know just tie essentially the same bug but
• 35:03
  Fletcher: have a bug with less heavy lead eyes And the way I was trying to do that was
• 35:12
  Fletcher: just tying them with a deer hair head and having the deer hair kind of provide
• 35:18
  Fletcher: buoyancy that would keel it in addition to a little bit of weight.
• 35:22
  Fletcher: And so instead of tying them with, like, say, medium eyes, I'm tying them with
• 35:27
  Fletcher: extra small eyes and deer hair.
• 35:30
  Fletcher: And they were great red-eyed bass flies.
• 35:33
  Fletcher: Um and um also changed
• 35:37
  Fletcher: a really light wire hook and
• 35:40
  Fletcher: being able to roll cast that thing in those
• 35:43
  Fletcher: red eye creeks was great um and you know caught a ton of fish on it but the
• 35:51
  Fletcher: thing that i really kind of noticed in in fishing that version of the fly a lot was um Um,
• 36:00
  Fletcher: and I guess talk about this in a little bit, but, um.
• 36:06
  Fletcher: I was not really great with deer here when I started tying that bug and had
• 36:12
  Fletcher: a lot of variations to, you know, how I was carving the head.
• 36:16
  Fletcher: Um, and noticed on the heads that I was tying more like a Gallup Nancy P like
• 36:24
  Fletcher: really tall instead of really wide heads,
• 36:27
  Fletcher: that the fly was super weedless,
• 36:33
  Fletcher: like throw it in a weed bed, drag it out, throw it in a brush pile,
• 36:38
  Fletcher: drag it out, and never really getting snagged.
• 36:42
  Fletcher: And what was happening was the hook point was kind of loading back behind the head. head.
• 36:53
  Fletcher: When a fish would bite it, of course, had plenty of hook back there,
• 36:57
  Fletcher: but because the deer hair head was more buoyant than the hook point,
• 37:02
  Fletcher: the hook point would float ever so slightly behind the head while it was traveling through the water.
• 37:10
  Fletcher: Decided that because it was so weightless man this thing is going to be a great shoal bass fly and,
• 37:17
  Fletcher: the shoal bass would eat the hell out
• 37:20
  Fletcher: of it but almost every
• 37:23
  Fletcher: fish would straighten these little light wire hooks out and
• 37:27
  Fletcher: so we started tinkering with it
• 37:29
  Fletcher: a little bit more um adding more
• 37:32
  Fletcher: weight to the head and trying
• 37:36
  Fletcher: to go to heavier gauge hooks but we would
• 37:39
  Fletcher: lose the weightlessness because the hook would just
• 37:42
  Fletcher: kind of flop to the side the head
• 37:45
  Fletcher: would keel but this heavy gauge wide gap hook would just kind of fall to the
• 37:50
  Fletcher: side and one of the mods that we made to it to really kind of keel it was was
• 38:00
  Fletcher: adding a little bit of weight to the hook to keel it.
• 38:05
  Fletcher: And the really crazy thing about
• 38:08
  Fletcher: the final design is, yeah, it's still weedless, got a beefy hook on it.
• 38:14
  Fletcher: It's going to hold any bass species that you're going to want to hook on it.
• 38:21
  Fletcher: And it's because of the weight in the back of the hook.
• 38:27
  Fletcher: If you're familiar with like a yard sale supply that Matt Grudjewski ties,
• 38:34
  Fletcher: he weights the back of the hook.
• 38:36
  Fletcher: And that's really what kind of provides the glide and the jerk showing profile on that fly.
• 38:46
  Fletcher: Fly and what happens when you, you know, just kind of pop this fly is the belly will roll almost.
• 38:59
  Fletcher: Above sideways and flash like crazy.
• 39:03
  Fletcher: And it will show like t-bone.
• 39:06
  Fletcher: Kind of profile every time you're stripping
• 39:09
  Fletcher: it and so having that action that
• 39:12
  Fletcher: um the way that we fish this fly especially
• 39:16
  Fletcher: for for shoal bass is a pretty
• 39:19
  Fletcher: unconventional uh way of
• 39:23
  Fletcher: fishing and it's it's a boat fly you know
• 39:26
  Fletcher: the majority of the way that we fish that fly it's we do
• 39:29
  Fletcher: sometimes use it waiting but it's primarily
• 39:33
  Fletcher: a boat fly and um there are
• 39:37
  Fletcher: lots of these pockets that are up on
• 39:39
  Fletcher: the bank and a lot of
• 39:42
  Fletcher: them have wood and all kinds of other stuff and a lot of
• 39:45
  Fletcher: high flow and we will
• 39:48
  Fletcher: put on a really heavy gauge uh
• 39:51
  Fletcher: really long like 10 11 foot floating
• 39:55
  Fletcher: line leader and we'll throw
• 39:58
  Fletcher: this up on the dry bank and drag
• 40:01
  Fletcher: it down into these bank side pockets on
• 40:05
  Fletcher: the really clear low flow days and um
• 40:08
  Fletcher: try to make reaction
• 40:13
  Fletcher: bites happen right because otherwise it's
• 40:17
  Fletcher: it's um you know kind of having a tough day and so it's manufacturing uh reaction
• 40:23
  Fletcher: bites but um we're we're casting up onto dry land and dragging this thing into
• 40:30
  Fletcher: not near structure into structure um.
• 40:34
  Fletcher: And um hauling fish out over over structure fish will climb up over dry branches
• 40:44
  Fletcher: chasing this thing down um just
• 40:47
  Fletcher: a really really cool fly and a really cool way of fishing um but it's um.
• 40:55
  Fletcher: You know kind of the first named fly i guess that i did um and we have a ton of fun with that bug,
• 41:03
  Fletcher: but it's a really specialized bug as far as you know like any weedless fly you're gonna decrease,
• 41:12
  Fletcher: your hookup percentage somewhat and so for fishing open water near structure
• 41:17
  Fletcher: we like to fish other other bugs.
• 41:20
  Fletcher: But if we're tweaker fishing, there's no better way to do it than with a tweaker.
• 41:26
  Fletcher: We don't do it with other flies.
• 41:28
  Fletcher: It's kind of its own little sunny, bright, summer day fishing program.
• 41:37
  Marvin: Very, very neat. And also too, talk to our listeners a little bit.
• 41:41
  Marvin: You were showing me some game changers that you tied that kind of had a spoon
• 41:45
  Marvin: face on them that It actually were fish kind of parallel to the water surface
• 41:50
  Marvin: instead of perpendicular. And you were telling me that was also for a shoal bass presentation.
• 41:56
  Fletcher: Yeah, that is, you know, I kind of tend to break my flies into different categories.
• 42:04
  Fletcher: And that's probably the most versatile fly in my box.
• 42:10
  Fletcher: I can, if I'm fishing an area that I'm not too familiar with,
• 42:14
  Fletcher: I can make long reaching casts.
• 42:16
  Fletcher: And, you know, swim it back like any streamer over a long distance trying to
• 42:22
  Fletcher: elicit a strike over terrain that I'm not sure about.
• 42:27
  Fletcher: Or you can just kind of toss it in a hole in one specific zone and twitch around and work.
• 42:35
  Fletcher: But it's kind of a...
• 42:41
  Fletcher: More, more wide, more flat kind of profile is what we're kind of ended up with
• 42:48
  Fletcher: of a Andy Sabota, swimmy Jimmy,
• 42:52
  Fletcher: and we're tying it on a game changer body.
• 42:57
  Fletcher: And we're, we're trimming the body, um, where it has, instead of a vertical
• 43:04
  Fletcher: profile, it's got a horizontally wide profile.
• 43:08
  Fletcher: Um, and it, looks like a dying bait fish up on the surface and um kind of swims
• 43:17
  Fletcher: sideways depending on the the presentation it's um if you.
• 43:27
  Fletcher: You can you know if you're a lot of people fish andy's fly on sinking lines
• 43:34
  Fletcher: but for me I like fishing on a full float and a long lure,
• 43:39
  Fletcher: and I will typically
• 43:43
  Fletcher: use it to fish one zone
• 43:46
  Fletcher: and dive down into that zone or into that pocket or into that shelf and then
• 43:55
  Fletcher: up over the next little shallow portion and back down into another bucket or
• 44:02
  Fletcher: hole in these giant shoal cones. complexes.
• 44:06
  Fletcher: And it allows me to cover a lot more water than say, like a deceiver or something
• 44:13
  Fletcher: like that. That's a regular hook down fly.
• 44:16
  Fletcher: That's once I get it in the water, it's just going to kind of maintain depth.
• 44:20
  Fletcher: This thing I can dive and then hover over obstructions
• 44:24
  Fletcher: and then dive down into into the next hole and that
• 44:28
  Fletcher: really you know we we we
• 44:32
  Fletcher: fish um a bunch of dams uh
• 44:35
  Fletcher: in the state and you know sometimes you'll have shad come through the turbines
• 44:41
  Fletcher: and if you've ever seen that you know those fish when they're kind of knocked
• 44:47
  Fletcher: out still alive they're kind of up on the surface they're They're sideways,
• 44:54
  Fletcher: they're flat, and when they are trying to resuscitate themselves,
• 44:59
  Fletcher: they'll kind of dig down and then kind of pause and just kind of shimmy,
• 45:06
  Fletcher: float up, back up to the surface and repeat that.
• 45:10
  Fletcher: And this fly really mimics that super-wounded baitfish kind of activity,
• 45:20
  Fletcher: but you don't have to swim it like that.
• 45:25
  Fletcher: If you fish it on a 45 downstream out of a boat, for instance, the fly will...
• 45:33
  Fletcher: Right itself, so to speak, where it looks like it's keeled vertically, um, and it kind of,
• 45:43
  Fletcher: will, will jerk up current and then show profile down, jerk up current,
• 45:48
  Fletcher: show profile down on the pause.
• 45:51
  Fletcher: Um, it is, it will do a whole lot of things, but I don't really take credit
• 45:57
  Fletcher: for that because I'm just, you know, trying to mash up a longer, extended,
• 46:04
  Fletcher: more realistic version of Andy's fly by putting Blaine's body on it.
• 46:09
  Fletcher: But yes, that is one of my go-to favorite flies for any species.
• 46:14
  Fletcher: If I am trout fishing, that's my number one bug.
• 46:20
  Marvin: Got it. And so, you know, any other, you know, flies, even if they're not,
• 46:25
  Marvin: uh, we'll say, uh, Fletcher originals, um, uh, or, or, uh, or techniques you
• 46:31
  Marvin: want to share with our listeners?
• 46:33
  Fletcher: Yeah. So, you know, um, there's another bug that, that we've been fishing for
• 46:39
  Fletcher: a couple of years now, um, that I'll call the quack head.
• 46:43
  Fletcher: And, you know, it's kind of trying to be a habitat specialist for these shoal
• 46:52
  Fletcher: bass is where it started.
• 46:54
  Fletcher: And when Blaine came out with his Jerk Changer, awesome swim and fly,
• 47:04
  Fletcher: and it's great. and we still use that for shoal bass.
• 47:11
  Fletcher: But there are a lot of places where I could not get that fly,
• 47:19
  Fletcher: more than a couple of inches under the
• 47:22
  Fletcher: water in some of these really fast pockets and
• 47:25
  Fletcher: i wanted to have something that was
• 47:28
  Fletcher: able to have
• 47:31
  Fletcher: a similar action yet get
• 47:35
  Fletcher: down deeper and the other
• 47:39
  Fletcher: thing that you know going back to the realistic uh version of the flies i really
• 47:45
  Fletcher: wanted to be able able to put eyes on it and have the ability to use natural
• 47:51
  Fletcher: materials and add colors and stuff like that that I wanted for the clear flows.
• 47:58
  Fletcher: And so I took some of the things that I learned about fly design for messing with a tweaker,
• 48:08
  Fletcher: like the belly flip um on the um on the strip and and uh a couple of things like that um and.
• 48:21
  Fletcher: This fly is a very thin profile um it's only got a couple of articulations out
• 48:31
  Fletcher: of the back and it's It's tied on either a really long,
• 48:35
  Fletcher: I think it's a TPE 615 AirX hook,
• 48:42
  Fletcher: which is a 3X long streamer hook,
• 48:46
  Fletcher: and half of the fly is hook, and that kind of gives it that jerky kind of movement.
• 48:55
  Fletcher: But the way that I weighed it and the way that the wing of the fly is kind of inverted where,
• 49:05
  Fletcher: the belly of the fly is the wing
• 49:08
  Fletcher: when you strip this thing it it'll show a whole lot of belly and kind of.
• 49:17
  Fletcher: Carve almost like a 360 while it's showing belly it's it's a pretty wild fly
• 49:23
  Fletcher: but you can also walk the dog and it'll punch down and get pretty deep pretty quick on the paws um so,
• 49:33
  Fletcher: trying to accomplish a lot of what uh grajewski was doing with the yard sale
• 49:40
  Fletcher: and and kind of the concepts of waiting with the wing and the belly flip with
• 49:49
  Fletcher: the tweaker and a lot of the action out of the jerk chambers,
• 49:52
  Fletcher: kind of where that fly idea came from.
• 49:56
  Fletcher: And it's a super cool fly.
• 50:00
  Fletcher: And now that Erex has come out with that new Beast long hook,
• 50:05
  Fletcher: hook, which is proportionately the same hook as that trout predator hook,
• 50:12
  Fletcher: it has become an awesome striper fly too.
• 50:17
  Fletcher: We could not hold the stripers with the TP hook, so had to work on that one
• 50:23
  Fletcher: a little bit. But that's another cool fly.
• 50:26
  Fletcher: And then the newest fly that we're messing around with,
• 50:31
  Fletcher: going back to my obsession with this sideways um
• 50:35
  Fletcher: bay fish fly is uh what
• 50:38
  Fletcher: we're calling a a swimboat fly you know
• 50:41
  Fletcher: kind of named it after my cousin jimbo
• 50:44
  Fletcher: because it's you know getting on that jitterbug thing
• 50:47
  Fletcher: as a kid i just uh cannot get over
• 50:50
  Fletcher: the top water bite and you know that's kind of the closest thing that i'll get
• 50:54
  Fletcher: to uh using a top water fly or those swimming jimmy flies but i wanted to be
• 51:00
  Fletcher: able to tie a bigger bug that I could get a hen saddle to get the body the way that I wanted it to look.
• 51:08
  Fletcher: And so, um, started messing around with, um, trying to make a synthetic version with bone. And, uh.
• 51:17
  Fletcher: Going back to sadati's weight balancing principle um you know that fly's got
• 51:22
  Fletcher: a whole lot of drag and because it's got a whole lot of foam on it and um we
• 51:30
  Fletcher: we're we're heavily weighting those flies,
• 51:33
  Fletcher: um and putting a lot of foam on them which seems kind of odd but the reason we're waiting on One,
• 51:42
  Fletcher: they're on a bent shank hook, like a TP650 for smaller fish.
• 51:50
  Fletcher: And then we're bending SA292s with a blowtorch to do striper versions,
• 51:57
  Fletcher: like really, really big versions.
• 52:00
  Fletcher: But the principle is more or less the same.
• 52:04
  Fletcher: You're getting a dive and fly got a big rattles in them that we're tying on
• 52:09
  Fletcher: with heat shrink wrap and a really realistic looking painted head on this foam and does,
• 52:19
  Fletcher: almost everything that this swimming jimmy fly does but harder it swims up harder,
• 52:28
  Fletcher: it dives harder, swims more just a really really cool bug.
• 52:33
  Fletcher: And because it's got rattles built into it, it is just something that fish can
• 52:42
  Fletcher: absolutely not ignore. It's.
• 52:47
  Fletcher: A bug that can suck a
• 52:50
  Fletcher: throw all day even though it is weight balanced it's
• 52:53
  Fletcher: you're you're hucking a whole lot um but once
• 52:57
  Fletcher: it's in the water uh it's really hard for a fish not to kill that thing um and
• 53:06
  Fletcher: those are the you know kind of the the bugs that are you know named bugs that that we tie,
• 53:13
  Fletcher: but we, we still finish a whole lot of brush head game changers,
• 53:18
  Fletcher: hybrid game changer, jerk changers.
• 53:21
  Fletcher: Um, we'll, uh, finish a lot of, uh, Chuck craft flies.
• 53:31
  Fletcher: Um, we will still fish a whole lot of clousers and, um,
• 53:37
  Fletcher: the other flies that
• 53:40
  Fletcher: we fish a bunch are um fisher rats
• 53:45
  Fletcher: flies um and you know
• 53:48
  Fletcher: yes we do fish some pole dancers but he's
• 53:52
  Fletcher: got a fly called a spot on bait fish and it a really flat single fly with and
• 54:03
  Fletcher: we tie him with a ton of weight and that is really you know when we're trying to hit bottom,
• 54:12
  Fletcher: that's that's what we're using but you know our fly boxes are kind of getting,
• 54:19
  Fletcher: smaller as far as the number of patterns as we you know kind of dial in this
• 54:26
  Fletcher: floating line program it's my box is really looking like you know bugger changer tweeter a,
• 54:37
  Fletcher: swimming jimmy a a.
• 54:44
  Fletcher: Spot on bay fish and maybe a couple other things if
• 54:47
  Fletcher: i'm really particular about whatever fishery
• 54:51
  Fletcher: that i'm in um and it's it's
• 54:55
  Fletcher: really kind of simplified uh the way that i fish because it's uh kind of limiting
• 55:02
  Fletcher: my options and so these days the patterns are kind of getting fewer and the
• 55:09
  Fletcher: colors are getting more.
• 55:12
  Fletcher: The other mentor that I have is a UGO fisheries biologist by the name of Jay Shelton.
• 55:26
  Fletcher: He's not really what I would call a fly-time mentor.
• 55:30
  Fletcher: He's really more of a mentor on and baitfish and other,
• 55:38
  Fletcher: you know, the target species quarry and how I can get flies that look like they
• 55:46
  Fletcher: look like and behave like they look.
• 55:50
  Fletcher: So these days I'm really just kind of fine-tuning color schemes to mimic different
• 56:00
  Fletcher: species and really kind of limiting the number of patterns that I'm playing with.
• 56:06
  Marvin: Got it. And so if folks wanted to get a closer look at your handful of patterns
• 56:11
  Marvin: and wanted to buy some, where should they go?
• 56:14
  Fletcher: Well, yeah.
• 56:17
  Fletcher: You might be able to go to um this year's input catalog and order tweakers um
• 56:23
  Fletcher: we i do not know if it's gonna make the deadline for production but i uh signed
• 56:32
  Fletcher: off on the samples a few weeks ago,
• 56:35
  Fletcher: and they're awesome um so you should be able to get um the tweakers in three
• 56:42
  Fletcher: different colors this year.
• 56:45
  Fletcher: I do occasionally tie batches for Mike Schultz, Schultz Outfitters for promotion stuff.
• 56:57
  Fletcher: There's another fisheries biologist down here that just left Auburn University.
• 57:06
  Fletcher: It's named Hank Hershey and he runs this little boutique shop called Hank's Bait Shop and.
• 57:16
  Fletcher: I'll do a batch every once in a while for him but other than that,
• 57:23
  Fletcher: don't really sell flies but I am happy to give you pointers,
• 57:29
  Fletcher: give you recipes do all the stuff and I'm working,
• 57:34
  Fletcher: with Hank to try to get a video up about how to tie a quack head on Southern
• 57:44
  Fletcher: culture on the fly here soon.
• 57:47
  Marvin: Yeah. Inside baseball says that they're actually circling up the,
• 57:51
  Marvin: uh, the posse to, uh, to work on the next issue here in the next week or so.
• 57:56
  Fletcher: Awesome. Yeah.
• 57:57
  Marvin: And so one thing I always like to ask really serious tires is to,
• 58:02
  Marvin: if they have like one kind of nutty, unusual tool that they can't live without.
• 58:08
  Fletcher: Absolutely. And that's the hairline has a material stager that Druch Kohn designed.
• 58:19
  Fletcher: And it's literally just a piece of foam with a bunch of slits in it that you
• 58:26
  Fletcher: can, you know, organize your material.
• 58:29
  Fletcher: And I'm pretty sure it was originally for production tires where they could,
• 58:33
  Fletcher: you know, lay out like 10 flies on one of these little foam blocks.
• 58:39
  Fletcher: But, you know, fly tying for me is kind of two different things.
• 58:45
  Fletcher: One, it's this creative, analytical, problem-solving design process.
• 58:55
  Fletcher: Process and it's also meditation and kind of therapeutic and the the way that i kind of,
• 59:06
  Fletcher: sides of my brain is you know i'll do all my design and all my material layout
• 59:12
  Fletcher: and all that stuff i need i need to use my uncreative side of my brain to to
• 59:18
  Fletcher: kind of organize all that and then.
• 59:22
  Fletcher: And once I kind of have everything laid out and organized and get up to the
• 59:26
  Fletcher: vise, um, you know, have everything laid out when I'm hunting material or anything,
• 59:33
  Fletcher: I'm just wrapping up on and wrapping thread on top of that.
• 59:37
  Fletcher: It lets me kind of zone out and, you know, getting to a meditative stand, just tie the bug.
• 59:45
  Fletcher: And so that, that tool allows me to do both instead of, you know,
• 59:52
  Fletcher: kind of going back and forth,
• 59:54
  Fletcher: kind of not getting that focus that I get when I'm actually at the bice, if that makes sense.
• 1:00:02
  Marvin: Yeah, no, no, no, it totally makes sense. And, uh, yeah, I mean,
• 1:00:05
  Marvin: it's, it's an amazing thing, even if you're not tying a lot of flies,
• 1:00:08
  Marvin: I mean, it's super productive to lay stuff out, uh, and measure it.
• 1:00:12
  Marvin: It, um, yeah, it makes things go a whole lot better. And, you know,
• 1:00:15
  Marvin: folks may not know Fletcher kind of your day jam is, uh, being the,
• 1:00:19
  Marvin: you're the executive director of, and I'm going to make sure I get this right.
• 1:00:22
  Marvin: The Altamaha Riverkeeper. Did I do it? Did I get it?
• 1:00:26
  Fletcher: Yeah. Yeah. You got it. Uh, the locals call it Altamaha, but,
• 1:00:30
  Fletcher: um, yeah, everyone else, Altamaha.
• 1:00:32
  Marvin: All right.
• 1:00:33
  Fletcher: Um, and it's, uh, it's a cool day job.
• 1:00:39
  Fletcher: If you don't know what river keepers are started up in the Hudson River up in
• 1:00:47
  Fletcher: New York with a bunch of fishermen that,
• 1:00:51
  Fletcher: Couldn't catch fish because the Hudson was so polluted.
• 1:00:55
  Fletcher: And so they decided that they were going to go catch the polluters by letting permits.
• 1:01:03
  Fletcher: And at the time, the state of New York would kind of pay a bounty.
• 1:01:08
  Fletcher: And so they kind of became pollution bounty hunters.
• 1:01:13
  Fletcher: And as they saw success and as the Hudson began to be shad run and striped bass
• 1:01:20
  Fletcher: again, and you can start making their living.
• 1:01:24
  Fletcher: Other people want to replicate the program. And now there's a few hundred river
• 1:01:30
  Fletcher: keepers all around the world.
• 1:01:32
  Fletcher: We all are assigned a specific water body.
• 1:01:37
  Fletcher: And mine is the Altmaha base. And Altmaha system is the third largest contributor
• 1:01:46
  Fletcher: of freshwater to the Atlantic.
• 1:01:47
  Fletcher: Atlantic, very long river system, largely undammed from the fall line down, completely undammed.
• 1:01:58
  Fletcher: And it has an Atlantic drainage.
• 1:02:04
  Fletcher: It covers about a quarter of the state of Georgia. And what we primarily are
• 1:02:11
  Fletcher: designed to do is enforcement through utilizing the Clean Water Act.
• 1:02:18
  Fletcher: So we are designed to sue people that are polluting over their permit levels
• 1:02:26
  Fletcher: or implicitly polluting a permit.
• 1:02:29
  Fletcher: But we like to use all the other tools that are at our disposal to further our advocacy of a cleaner,
• 1:02:41
  Fletcher: more fishable river system.
• 1:02:45
  Fletcher: And so I've been on that job since 2019, and we haven't seen anybody since.
• 1:02:55
  Fletcher: So, that's kind of a last resort, but that's more or less what we're designed to do.
• 1:03:02
  Fletcher: So, we lobby, we advocate, we do cleanup work.
• 1:03:09
  Fletcher: Other agencies to promote swimmable drinkable fishable water in the watershed so um even when,
• 1:03:19
  Fletcher: i'm working i i've got a fishing rod either in the truck or in the boat with me,
• 1:03:26
  Fletcher: so um i get a lot of little bits of fishing time here and there um pretty pretty cool job yeah.
• 1:03:34
  Marvin: Very very neat and you know what are some of the challenges that are currently facing your watershed.
• 1:03:39
  Fletcher: Um we we've
• 1:03:42
  Fletcher: got a couple of fairly large projects
• 1:03:46
  Fletcher: um the um the largest
• 1:03:49
  Fletcher: coal burning facility in the western hemisphere is in our watershed and um when
• 1:03:56
  Fletcher: you burn coal you have a byproduct of waste called coal ash and it's really
• 1:04:02
  Fletcher: nasty stuff it's uh got uranium radium sodium,
• 1:04:06
  Fletcher: arsenic, lead, mercury,
• 1:04:09
  Fletcher: all kinds of awful stuff in it.
• 1:04:11
  Fletcher: And it's stored in ponds that are more or less pits that are submerged into the aquifer.
• 1:04:20
  Fletcher: And our EPA in
• 1:04:26
  Fletcher: 2015 created rules saying
• 1:04:29
  Fletcher: you got to dig that stuff up and stored in a
• 1:04:32
  Fletcher: line landfill or at least stored in a way that is not in contact with groundwater
• 1:04:37
  Fletcher: and this specific plan is surrounded by residents that are drinking groundwater
• 1:04:44
  Fletcher: and so it was a really bad situation we have a.
• 1:04:52
  Fletcher: Been able to successfully convince the county
• 1:04:55
  Fletcher: to put in water lines but we're still fighting the
• 1:04:58
  Fletcher: power company on proper waste disposal and that's the number one
• 1:05:00
  Fletcher: issue that we're dealing with and then uh on
• 1:05:04
  Fletcher: a more positive note um we
• 1:05:07
  Fletcher: are hoping and and i don't know what date this show may air we may have legislation
• 1:05:15
  Fletcher: by then um that we are in the final stages of of creating a national park in Georgia,
• 1:05:24
  Fletcher: Georgia's first national park on the Old Mulgee River.
• 1:05:29
  Fletcher: Right in the center of the two big shoal bass habitats.
• 1:05:33
  Fletcher: So that's been a really cool process.
• 1:05:37
  Fletcher: It's multi-agency, multi-municipality kind of group working together on this.
• 1:05:46
  Fletcher: And, you know, that includes the Air Force Base and also one of the removed
• 1:05:55
  Fletcher: tribes from Georgia during the Trail of Tears, the Muscogee Creek Nation,
• 1:06:00
  Fletcher: will be a equal partner at the table with U.S.
• 1:06:05
  Fletcher: Fish and Wildlife and the other partners with National Park Service.
• 1:06:09
  Fletcher: So that's a really cool, fun project that's kind of hopefully in the final stages.
• 1:06:19
  Fletcher: But we do all kinds of stuff. What I tell people is it's kind of like mowing grass with a push mower.
• 1:06:26
  Fletcher: As soon as you get done, you've got to do it all again.
• 1:06:30
  Fletcher: So some of it's Groundhog Day, but some of it's really fun, really moving the needle.
• 1:06:34
  Marvin: Yeah, that's needed if someone wanted to support your work, what can they do?
• 1:06:40
  Fletcher: Best thing is donate and become a member.
• 1:06:45
  Marvin: Got it. And I will drop a, uh, drop a link in the show notes.
• 1:06:48
  Marvin: It's kind of funny you say that because, uh, here in Charlotte,
• 1:06:52
  Marvin: it's like the spring fundraiser week for public radio. So perfect time to become a member.
• 1:06:57
  Fletcher: Oh yeah. Yep.
• 1:06:59
  Marvin: So before I let you go this evening, Fletcher, is there anything else you want
• 1:07:02
  Marvin: to share with our listeners?
• 1:07:04
  Fletcher: You know i i think um you know get outside your comfort zone try new stuff if
• 1:07:11
  Fletcher: you're not a fly tire start and um you know if some of these species are interesting
• 1:07:19
  Fletcher: to you or you know no matter where you live there's always something else to
• 1:07:22
  Fletcher: chase something else to learn and um,
• 1:07:25
  Fletcher: no matter what your skill level is as an angler um don't let the ego get in
• 1:07:31
  Fletcher: the way of learning of new stuff.
• 1:07:33
  Marvin: Very, very neat. And, you know, what's the best way, Fletcher,
• 1:07:36
  Marvin: for folks to kind of get in touch with you and follow your adventures at the bison on the water?
• 1:07:41
  Fletcher: Instagram.
• 1:07:43
  Marvin: And you want to share your handle?
• 1:07:46
  Fletcher: At Fletcher.Sams.
• 1:07:47
  Marvin: Well, there you go. That's pretty easy. And, you know, Fletcher,
• 1:07:50
  Marvin: I appreciate you spending some time with me this evening. It's been a lot of fun.
• 1:07:55
  Fletcher: Yeah, man. I had a blast. Thanks.
• 1:07:57
  Marvin: Absolutely. Take care.
• 1:07:59
  Fletcher: All right.
• 1:08:01
  Intro: Well folks i hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you
• 1:08:04
  Intro: and remember if you like the podcast please tell a friend and please subscribe
• 1:08:08
  Intro: and leave us a rating review in the podcast of your choice and don't forget
• 1:08:12
  Intro: to check out the show notes for more information about the chocolate factory
• 1:08:15
  Intro: in charlotte on may 4th tight lines everybody.