Latest / The Articulate Fly / BONUS: The Science of Streamers (Pt I): Kirk Klingensmith on Jigging and Wrecking Flies
Transcript
- 0:04Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Butcher Shop where the Meat Meets the Water.
- 0:09On this episode, I'm joined by Kirk Klingensmith.
- 0:12Kirk is a lifelong angler and retired engineer who brings a scientific perspective to the vice in the water.
- 0:18Kirk helps us understand why our favorite streamers do what they do and how we can use that knowledge at the vise and on the water.
- 0:26In part one of this interview, we tackle jig flies and wrecking or kicking flies and saved swim flies for next time.
- 0:32I think you're really going to enjoy this one, but before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items to make sure you don't miss a single episode of the Butcher Shop.
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- 0:59And finally, a shout out to our sponsor.
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- 1:36Well, Kirk, welcome to The Butcher Shop.
- 1:39It's good to be here.
- 1:40Thanks for having me.
- 1:41Absolutely.
- 1:42I'm looking forward to it.
- 1:43And we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly.
- 1:44We like to ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.
- 1:49You know, I can almost not remember what I didn't fish.
- 1:55I fished with my grandfather, I fished with my father.
- 2:00They all took times take me out fishing and honestly it's from as early as I could remember with you know, a worm in a pole and all that stuff.
- 2:16And, and my, my grandfather was my best friend and my dad was like right there as well and they always had time to go fishing with me.
- 2:29That's fantastic.
- 2:30So when did you come to the dark side of fly fishing?
- 2:33Well, that's an interesting story.
- 2:35So I was really into fishing And I was, I was very much into scouting.
- 2:42I was a Cub Scout and I got the Boys Life magazine.
- 2:47And in 1969, I was 10 years old, there was an article, it was a photo shoot about how to tie a fan wing royal Coachman.
- 2:59I still have the article.
- 3:01And so I didn't have all that fancy tools.
- 3:07And you know, it was 1969.
- 3:10There was not a whole lot of people that fly fished and not a lot of information.
- 3:16So I used my dad's machinist vise, I used my mom's sewing thread, and my dad had some pheasant feathers from hunting.
- 3:28And I tied my rendition of a fan wing royal Coachman, which I still have.
- 3:38And I, I show at all my fly tying classes because it doesn't look anything like that.
- 3:46But one of the advantages of not having anybody around to mentor me was nobody could tell me that fly wouldn't catch fish.
- 3:58So I went out and I caught loads of fish with that fly.
- 4:04And it was, it was quite some time that went by that I realized these flies were pretty ugly.
- 4:13But I was catching fish.
- 4:15And so I entered through fly tying, through scouts, and I was largely self taught then all through my teenage years.
- 4:30Yeah.
- 4:30And you know, there's been a fair amount of water under the bridge since then.
- 4:34And you live, I guess, you know, up in kind of upstate, kind of Finger Lakes region in New York.
- 4:38And so that probably influences what you like to chase now, right?
- 4:43Yeah.
- 4:43Yeah.
- 4:44So I, I grew up in western Pennsylvania and I grew up as a trout fly fisher and, and all the things that you do in western Pennsylvania.
- 4:56But these days I really like to fish for smallmouth.
- 5:03Takes the majority of my time.
- 5:07I have a drift boat.
- 5:08I fish the Chemung river, which is a, is a feeder stream to the Susquehanna.
- 5:14And I've, I've, I've traveled all around for smallmouth.
- 5:18But I, you know, of course I love trout fishing.
- 5:20I love the tributary fishing, saltwater fishing.
- 5:24I, I love all aspects of fly fishing.
- 5:28Yeah, very, very neat.
- 5:29And so, you know, you have a really interesting professional background.
- 5:33You're retired now, but, you know, we always, you know, bring our life off the water, onto the water.
- 5:39So I'm kind of curious, you know, you're an engineer by training.
- 5:42You know, how does that affect the way you approach your fishing and your tying?
- 5:46It's, it's just embedded in who I am, my background in engineering, I, I see the physics.
- 5:55I, I'm looking for connections between the science and, and how things work constantly.
- 6:05That's what motivates me.
- 6:07And my career at Corning was all about innovation.
- 6:10I was really blessed to be able to work in some tremendous innovations in glass melting, in glass forming, optical fiber making.
- 6:23It was really an amazing career as an engineer, it was a dream career.
- 6:31But I'm completely enthralled about innovation and I love to learn new things so that we can, and show how those new things can be helpful in our, in, in our world.
- 6:49And, and so I bring that kind of approach to problem solving to what I do in fly fishing.
- 6:56So I have a real ear on the rail to what's going on as far as innovations in our sport, especially with the young voices in our sport.
- 7:07They're really.
- 7:09There's a lot of exciting innovation.
- 7:12That's what connected me to Blaine Chocolate.
- 7:16And I think the last part I'd want to point out is that in Corning, the technical work that I was doing, often the world didn't know how to do.
- 7:29Sometimes we had to develop the physics to do what we wanted to do.
- 7:36And there, the largest team that I led had 55 people working on it.
- 7:44And so to solve these kind of problems, it was a collaborative problem solving process that worked well.
- 7:54And I was really blessed to be able to coordinate between research centers in Russia, in France, in Asia, and we really solved amazing problems.
- 8:07So I love that whole aspect of problem solving, to share perspectives, listen to others, with the belief that as a community, we can learn and get better together.
- 8:23Yeah, very neat.
- 8:24So were you always a tinkerer and that.
- 8:26So basically then, your.
- 8:27Your engineering life was just basically an extension of kind of who you were as a young man and a kid?
- 8:33Yeah, you're probably right about that.
- 8:37You know, my, My dad would any.
- 8:41Anything that wasn't working right, I was allowed free rein to take it apart, see if I could make it work.
- 8:49And most of the time I didn't.
- 8:51Most of the time I was.
- 8:52I was kind of understanding how it worked, but, you know, it was broke in some way.
- 9:01So, yeah, I was always a tinkerer.
- 9:04Yeah, I'm guilty.
- 9:07Yeah, it's funny you say that.
- 9:08So I can remember one time, gosh, I was probably in elementary school, maybe early middle school, and I got a Radio Shack computer kit for a birthday present and I put together it, put it together that evening and
- 9:20my parents were so disappointed.
- 9:22They thought they had gotten a project to keep me busy for weeks.
- 9:28But, you know, it's interesting you'd mentioned Blane and, you know, people, you know, obviously a lot of our listeners know about the book, the Game changer.
- 9:35But what they probably don't know is that you wrote a chapter for it.
- 9:38And I was really kind of curious, you know, how you met Blane and kind of how it came to be that you wrote a chapter on, like, fly physics for his book.
- 9:46So I'm a fly fishing show junkie.
- 9:49I've been going to fly fishing shows for 25, 30 years.
- 9:54And I first met Blaine back when he was doing the Gummy Minnow.
- 10:00And.
- 10:02And we connected then and started talking.
- 10:06I got all the stuff to make the Gummy Minnow.
- 10:10He sent me all the patterns.
- 10:12I still have those, what he sent me.
- 10:15And for years we would meet at the Fly Tying show in Somerset.
- 10:23We would get together and I was so excited to see him, he was excited to see me, and he would just abandon his booth and we'd head out.
- 10:34There's a pond in front of the hotel there, and we would be casting his latest prototypes.
- 10:41And he's talking about what he's thinking, and I would talk about the physics and how what he was doing would.
- 10:49Would.
- 10:51Was working and then how to make it work better.
- 10:55And it was just fun.
- 10:57We were just two guys talking about phishing problems.
- 11:03And it turns out my daughter went to Roanoke College for her undergrad.
- 11:08She's now a dentist.
- 11:09And while she was there, had occasion to fish with Blane.
- 11:16And then there was.
- 11:18There was a day when we couldn't fish, the weather was bad, and we were in a.
- 11:24A Mexican restaurant sitting there having lunch and drinking a few beers.
- 11:29And finally Blane says to me, he says, he says, can I trust you?
- 11:37And.
- 11:38And I said, sure.
- 11:40He pulls out the Game Changer.
- 11:42And this is like five years before the book.
- 11:46And we.
- 11:48We kept the conversation going about how.
- 11:52How the flight worked and.
- 11:54And there was several other prototypes that he was showing me that he was experimenting.
- 11:59And you know, Blane is.
- 12:02Is a genius innovator, and it was so fun to kind of help him with the background behind it.
- 12:13So it was another time at the Somerset show, at the Fly tying show, that Blane and I are talking.
- 12:20We're the physics thing.
- 12:21And he was in the midst of writing the Game Changer book, and Jay Nichols was there, and Jay's like, listening to our conversation, and Jay said, hey, would you write a chapter for the book?
- 12:37So I said, I would.
- 12:39I was just in the process of.
- 12:40Of.
- 12:41Of.
- 12:42Of retiring.
- 12:43So I said, get a little free time.
- 12:45I'll do it.
- 12:46And Bob Popovics was right there and it was really funny.
- 12:52So as soon as I said yes, he grabs me by the ear.
- 12:57And we go over to his boots and he starts showing me videos of.
- 13:03Of.
- 13:03Of these flies that he had prototyped.
- 13:06And he's asking me, why does this move different than this?
- 13:10And we must have spent an hour or two together and there was a line of people who wanted to talk to him and he completely, like, ignored them.
- 13:21He wanted to.
- 13:23To kind of tell me everything he knew and get me on the right start for, for this, this chapter.
- 13:32Well, the, the chapter ended up to be about 15 pages long.
- 13:38And, and honestly, I think calling it the physics of fly motion was probably the, the death wish there.
- 13:45And I don't remember if I put any equations in there, but if I did, that was probably the nail in the coffin.
- 13:53So, of course, when the book came out, there's.
- 13:56There's a couple page summary that's edited out to seem like a conversation between Blaine and me on some of the basics of the fly motion.
- 14:09And so that part made it in the book, but I guess this talk is going to kind of let me fill in the rest of it.
- 14:19Yeah.
- 14:20And so, you know, I thought it would be interesting, folks, that, you know, we've got Kirk, a tremendous resource.
- 14:24And so I just wanted to, you know, tonight what we wanted to do is to kind of take, you know, a handful of basic streamer styles and kind of talk about the science behind why they do what they
- 14:35do and how we can play with that so that we can make better decisions, you know, at the vice and on the water.
- 14:41And so I thought, you know, we're going to walk through jig flies flies that kick swim flies.
- 14:46But I thought we'd start tonight with like a jig fly and you know, talk about like, say something like the clouds or minnow.
- 14:52You know, what's the bite trigger that people have, you know, kind of they like to use a jig fly for?
- 14:59I mean, what is it that it does that it makes fish want to eat it?
- 15:03So I think that's a great place to start.
- 15:06And, and, and, and jig fly, it drops when it's paused so that it dives downward at the pause.
- 15:18And often that can be a lethal visual trigger for fish.
- 15:24And so I think it's important to think about the action of a streamer in, in two ways.
- 15:34One is, is how does it move when it's retrieved and then how does it move when it.
- 15:39When it's paused?
- 15:42And, and another aspect of this is what does the, the fly?
- 15:49What.
- 15:49What does it look like when it's both retrieved and paused and, and so jigging in general means it drops when I pause it.
- 16:01Okay, but what I mean by the, the attitude of the fly or the, the, the, the motion of the fly.
- 16:10If we think about a crayfish fly, for example, when that fly drops, it drops with the tail first and the claws up.
- 16:19Right.
- 16:21And, and so that is a very important trigger for smallmouth, of course.
- 16:27But if we were thinking about a Clouser minnow, if the, if the fly would just do a nose dive every time you stopped it, that wouldn't be natural.
- 16:39It wouldn't even be a trigger that fish would look for.
- 16:45So in getting into the discussion about jigging streamers, which is a pretty big topic, there's a lot of different things we can do to engineer how the streamer acts when it's retrieved, how it acts when it's paused, and
- 17:07then how it appears to the fish.
- 17:11And so if we kind of start at a very basic level, let's just take a clause of minnow, because I think everyone kind of has that in their mind's eye, you know, what is it that we're actually doing
- 17:20at the vise to achieve that jigging action?
- 17:25So the Clouser Minnow, first of all, where the weight is like super important to how it, it's going to dip in on the pods.
- 17:40So Bob likes to have his lead eye about a third of the way down the hook shank, it's not right at the eye, it's a third of the way down.
- 17:51And so that weight placement can be really, really important to how the fly is going to move and how it's going to move when it stops.
- 18:02Okay.
- 18:04The other thing that's really, really helpful to understand with the Clouser minnow is it's made with bucktail.
- 18:11It's got some flash in the middle, but the bucktail is a stiffer material.
- 18:18And so when that fly stops, it's not going to nose dive on us.
- 18:25The whole stiff material is going to tend to, to have it levitate a little less.
- 18:32Okay, so you're going to dip, not dive.
- 18:36Contrast that with, let's say a Kreelex.
- 18:39Okay, so we've got a Kreelex.
- 18:41It's really flimsy flash material.
- 18:45And when you stop that Kreelex, it's going to go straight down, or more or less straight down with the flash, kind of like a parachute, a flimsy parachute, if you will, as it dives.
- 19:03So this, these are kind of different ways we can engineer these jigging flies.
- 19:10Now, of course, if, if, if the desire is to get it sunk quickly, the Kreelex with the limp material is going to go.
- 19:22It sink a lot faster than the, the, the deep minnow with the bucktail.
- 19:31Yeah.
- 19:31And so if you.
- 19:32Because it's almost like, you know, conventional anglers with skirts Right.
- 19:34On jig flies.
- 19:35Right.
- 19:35So they get kind of a nice drop.
- 19:37Right?
- 19:37Yeah.
- 19:38Kind of float gently, kind of like a feather, but also too, I guess, you know, so we've got, you know, kind of, I guess, drag in the material, so you know that all of that Kreinik flash collapses.
- 19:49Right.
- 19:49So it's much less drag, much smoother than bucktail.
- 19:52But I would also imagine too, that one of the reasons Bob likes the weight on the Clouser where it is, is because the more you move it away from the hook eye, the flatter the drop is.
- 20:05Right.
- 20:05Compared to it, basically nose dipping.
- 20:07So if you wanted a fly to jig and nose dip, you would want to put that weight closer to the hook eye.
- 20:12Right?
- 20:12Right, right, right, right.
- 20:15And, and nowadays we have a lot of innovative jig flies that are coming out and they use different kinds of jig hooks.
- 20:25Some use a 90 degree jig hook, some use a 60 degree, some use a 15.
- 20:31And, and so all those affect the balance point of the weight at.
- 20:38Which affects how the fly transitions, if you will, between the retrieve motion and the, the motion without retrieve, the pause.
- 20:52And so if I think about that, if you had a 90 degree jig hook, I would imagine it would drop more severely than say a 60 degree jig hook.
- 21:00Right, right.
- 21:01You're pulling it more in a straight line, if you will.
- 21:04Yes.
- 21:05So you're gonna get a more of an abrupt change in motion between the two.
- 21:12Yes, absolutely.
- 21:13Because it's really almost like on the 60 degree, it's almost like the weight is like almost tipping something over and then it starts to fall.
- 21:19Right?
- 21:20Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 21:21And what's you.
- 21:24You started talking about it.
- 21:25It's really important to understand that the, the drag of the fly itself.
- 21:33So if we have a thin, narrow fly like the Clouser Deep Minnow, or let's say we have an Estaz body that's big and bushy, that is going to tend to mitigate this, this, this jigging action.
- 21:55So that fly is going to present with less motion.
- 22:01Yes.
- 22:04But that, that could be really helpful in certain fishing situations.
- 22:12Yes.
- 22:12Yeah.
- 22:13Interesting.
- 22:13And so, you know, I think maybe for jigging flies it's not as important.
- 22:17Kind of.
- 22:18Not that terminal tackle is not important, but I think maybe there's.
- 22:21There are Less levers to pull kind of with the line leader in the rigging.
- 22:25But you know, tell me if you agree or disagree with that.
- 22:27You know, I think you would probably time on with a loop knot.
- 22:30You know, it's not a swim fly necessarily because so you don't, you're not looking to create slack on the, on the, on the pause or anything like that.
- 22:36But you know, what can we kind of play with on the rigging side on a jig fly to kind of alter the action?
- 22:42Well, there, there's an awful lot of innovation that's going on in jigging flies at the moment.
- 22:49So let's just start with something I learned in Alaska.
- 22:55And in that case, the silver salmon, chum salmon react to the straight drop pink fly, right, the jig fly, but they like to see it drop.
- 23:11So I was in Alaska the last several years and in that case they advised us to use a leader that was made of tippet the whole length.
- 23:27Okay.
- 23:28So in our case we're using a floating line, a nine foot leader, but it's all tippet.
- 23:36So you have less impedance to that fly and what you get is a stronger pull.
- 23:44So when the fly drops, you get a stronger pull and so it tends to make more of a scissor action to that fly.
- 23:53So that's an example how we can engineer the leader system to affect the jigging action of the fly.
- 24:03Perhaps the more obvious way this occurs is we have loads of people who are doing euro nymphing with jig streamers.
- 24:13Right.
- 24:15And, and this has become a pretty big innovation in our sport.
- 24:20People are using even ned rig jig streamers that really go down.
- 24:28Okay, so what are they doing?
- 24:30They're using a long tippet right on Europe.
- 24:35So they're playing the same game.
- 24:38What does that do?
- 24:40That allows the fly to sink very rapidly, so you get the maximum benefit to the weight.
- 24:49But it also gives me a more profound jigging motion.
- 24:54Yes.
- 24:57And so we can, and in fact, we're approaching what the gear guys are doing with their net flies and jig flies that way.
- 25:10Now, I do understand that the whole Euro thing is maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but I'm just coming at it from a physics point of view.
- 25:24And if we're trying to get the maximum drop, the maximum movement on the pause, then these are some tools that fly fishers can use.
- 25:39So that makes sense.
- 25:41Yeah, it does.
- 25:41And I mean, and the other thing too is, and this is the same sort of thing you see with the euro nymphing Guys.
- 25:45Is by being able to be very efficient with the impact of the weight that you use, you can actually fish lighter, more lifelike flies.
- 25:53So you get all these ancillary benefits.
- 25:55So, you know, you might get current movement off material and things like that, and you're able to get down and actually have a fly that looks like something a fish wants to eat.
- 26:03Right.
- 26:04That's a really important point.
- 26:05Yes.
- 26:06Is like a lot of things in fly fishing, we're kind of optimizing it for the lightest weight possible.
- 26:17And these techniques that the euro folks have taught us, by using the thinnest tippet possible, that can help us on normal jig flies.
- 26:29Okay.
- 26:31No matter what kind of rod you have is throttle down the tippet, and you're going to amplify the jigging motion.
- 26:39You'll be able to get deeper, let's say, with a floating line with a long leader.
- 26:47And now you can reach some depths where maybe you couldn't reach before.
- 26:53But.
- 26:53But taking your.
- 26:55Your realizing that.
- 26:58That your tippet, your leader, is a tool in your box to help you is what I'm hoping people can take away from that.
- 27:08Yeah, absolutely.
- 27:09And then, you know, there's kind of a corollary that builds off of that.
- 27:14And, you know, we've talked in many of our previous conversations about how on the engineering side, there's been an absolute explosion in fly lines.
- 27:21Right.
- 27:22And one of the things that I've seen, and particularly talking to people that have streamer patterns that had been around for a while, you start to see almost a blurring between jig flies and swim flies, because you now
- 27:34have the ability to take so much weight out of the fly that, you know.
- 27:39So, for example, you know, I think of, like a circus peanut, originally tied was a pretty heavy fly that had a pretty pronounced jigging action.
- 27:45Right, right.
- 27:46But, you know, talking to Russ now with the various lines that he can fish from sa, he can literally start to back the weight and literally run a progression to where he's fishing.
- 27:56Bead chain and plastic eyes on a circus peanut.
- 27:59So it's.
- 28:00It's a much less of a jig jig fly fly, and it's able to be targeted kind of at particular depths and behaviors.
- 28:07And I thought that was kind of an interesting thing.
- 28:08And so I know you and I have talked about it because you've got a protege who does that.
- 28:11Not at SA, but at Rio.
- 28:13You know, how.
- 28:14How should we think about that as an angler to basically start to look at the.
- 28:19The fly line system and being able to adjust kind of the fly parameters.
- 28:24I'm really glad for this question, and I think I'll just start here.
- 28:30As fly fishers, we tend to see our methods as the sporting way to catch fish.
- 28:37And sometimes we project that we would be catching more fish if we just used gear.
- 28:43We just let ourselves do that, and we can kind of get into this bucket that would say, well, this is more challenging, so we're giving up fish.
- 28:54Fish.
- 28:54And.
- 28:55And by fishing with the flies and we.
- 28:58We sometimes imply that our sport is really complicating.
- 29:02And.
- 29:02And I really think this impression is not very helpful to others and.
- 29:09And often to ourselves because we.
- 29:11We often miss that.
- 29:13Fly fishing has tremendous advantages.
- 29:17And just take for an example, you're in a midge hatch on the west branch, and there's fish rising everywhere, and you've got a fly rod versus you got a Rapala.
- 29:31It sucks to be the guy that has the rapala.
- 29:35So where am I leading with all this?
- 29:38Is in fly fishing, we have tremendous advantage with fly lines.
- 29:46The gear guys are limited by the weight of the lure and its action.
- 29:53But we.
- 29:53With.
- 29:54With the fly, we can now bring the fly lines into the equation.
- 30:00And so now we have choices.
- 30:03So we.
- 30:04Yes, everybody uses a floating line, but we've got intermediate lines and we've got sinking lines.
- 30:11If you were to come on my drift boat, we're going to have six rods and.
- 30:16And two of those rods are going to be sinking lines.
- 30:22So that gives us options to present the fly.
- 30:28So if we want to retrieve the fly and keep it close to the surface, now we got a floating line.
- 30:36If we want to be mid column and we want to come in, let's say it's a jigging fly, we want to present that fly on a retrieve and then drop.
- 30:47We can present it really well mid current, and the.
- 30:54The gear guys can't touch that.
- 30:56Right.
- 30:57And so it's a really tremendous advantage that we have with fly fishing to be able to manipulate the fly line to favor the action of the fly on the retrieve on the pause.
- 31:13So, you know, Russ's example.
- 31:16Perfect right now.
- 31:18That doesn't really give you the news you can use about.
- 31:22Okay, smart boy, tell me when I need a sinking line.
- 31:29That.
- 31:29That's a little more complicated, but not so much is.
- 31:34Is that the sinking line really gives us an opportunity.
- 31:39When the fish are low, they're.
- 31:41They're pressured.
- 31:43It's.
- 31:43It's low and clear.
- 31:46We need to be where the fish are.
- 31:48They're.
- 31:48They're hunkered on the bottom.
- 31:50Okay.
- 31:52So the.
- 31:53The.
- 31:53The sinking lines now become our friend.
- 31:58Yes.
- 31:59Yeah.
- 31:59And the interesting thing, too, is, you know, now with the, like, triple density lines and things like that, we're able to, not.
- 32:06We're able to fish, if we want to, on plane, a little bit more because we have a much more general drop in some of the newer sinking lines as opposed to having that, you know, absolute hinge, which, if
- 32:15you wanted that kind of up, down action.
- 32:16Right.
- 32:17Great.
- 32:18But if you wanted to say, I need to be down at 6 or 8ft and I want to stay on plane as long as possible, we now have sinking lines that will let us do that.
- 32:26Yes.
- 32:28So last summer, I had a chance to fish with Chris Korketa.
- 32:33He's a guide.
- 32:34He's a striped bass guide on the Cape.
- 32:40Right.
- 32:41And so he's fishing these saltwater flats, and he's fishing with a weighted crab fly and a weighted fly line.
- 32:57It was tremendously innovative.
- 33:00And when you did the retrieve, he wanted the fly, the rod tip on the bottom.
- 33:07And his thought was that you keep the fly line out of the visual plane of the fish.
- 33:16And.
- 33:16And that his thought was that the lateral line is a lot less likely to pick that up.
- 33:22Okay.
- 33:24Now, I'm.
- 33:25I'm not saying.
- 33:29I'm just.
- 33:29I'm enthralled with the innovation.
- 33:32I caught a really nice striped bass with him, so I have data.
- 33:40But it's one more way we can use the tools in the box in this case in a very pressured fishery.
- 33:51Yes.
- 33:52And all our fisheries are getting more pressured, and these tools then become more and more helpful.
- 33:59Yeah, it's interesting.
- 33:59And I mean, you and I have talked about this before.
- 34:01You know, if you really open the aperture, you know, what we're really saying is if you kind of step back and say, you know, what do we want the food to do?
- 34:10We now have more levers to pull to do that.
- 34:13Right.
- 34:13Because we've got the fly lever, we've got the leader terminal tackle lever, and now we have this really powerful fly line lever.
- 34:22And so if you think about, like, well, what does the food look like?
- 34:25And then you can also solve some of these kind of ancillary issues.
- 34:27Like, you know, the striped bass, you know, don't know.
- 34:31You know, they don't see.
- 34:32They may feel the line, and all they feel is something is different and wrong, and that's why they don't eat, and that's why they go away.
- 34:37And so you have these ways to kind of mitigate some of those other Issues as well.
- 34:41Yes.
- 34:42Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 34:44All super cool stuff.
- 34:45If we kind of shift gears to, you know, kind of the wrecking, kicking style fly, and we'll kind of stay in the family of Blane Chocklett.
- 34:52So we'll talk about the T bone, right?
- 34:54Which I think is probably one of his early kind of wrecking style flies.
- 34:58It was really influential with the muskie guys.
- 35:01You know, if we kind of do the same process we did for the jig flies, you know, what is the bite trigger that's so attractive in that wrecking behavior?
- 35:10So this wrecking behavior is.
- 35:13You were describing a fly that kicks when it pauses or it turns sideways when it pauses.
- 35:21Often we put flash in a fly so that it.
- 35:25Not only is it a visual motion, but it often throws flash.
- 35:31True for jigging flies as well, by the way.
- 35:35So that bite trigger, that kicking sideways can be really an important trigger for predatory fish, especially muskies.
- 35:45But smallmouths react to it.
- 35:47Brown trout react to it.
- 35:50This kick on the paws, okay?
- 35:54So in this case, we're imparting action to the fly and then we're stopping it.
- 36:04And what's occurring is when.
- 36:08When the fly is going to kick, because the tail of the fly has more momentum than the front.
- 36:15So it runs into the head.
- 36:17It's.
- 36:18It's the jackknife trailer truck that, you know, the front stops and the back hits it.
- 36:26Okay, so let me just point out that this kick we think of as a visual trigger.
- 36:36Yes.
- 36:38And we describe it often as a visual trigger, but I'm not so convinced that all the time it's solely a visual trigger because the fly is also sending a pressure wave out that the fish can feel vibrations and
- 36:56noise that the fish can detect and all those.
- 37:02It's really hard to know.
- 37:05Nobody's interviewed a muskie, how, which are.
- 37:10Which are important.
- 37:11But in fact, it does all that.
- 37:14We get it all for free.
- 37:19So from a physics point of view, it really becomes helpful to think about what's going on here.
- 37:26So the momentum change, the moment is what is causing the wreck.
- 37:37So by momentum, when we pull the fly, the fly, that aspect of the fly, let's say it's the head, has a certain weight, right?
- 37:48And I think everybody knows that the momentum of the fly is 1/2 MV squared.
- 37:56So the faster it's going, that's the most important thing.
- 38:01But when we think about, we're driving down with our Mini Cooper and there's a trailer truck coming the other way, we know that the trailer truck has more mass, more Momentum.
- 38:11If there's a wreck, they win.
- 38:13Right.
- 38:14Now, it's important to understand in this analogy that the effective momentum has to subtract the effect of drag.
- 38:26So when we pull it, that the parachute, if you will, is taking away from the momentum in that mass.
- 38:37And we're manipulating both these things in our fly designs.
- 38:41Yes.
- 38:44So, example is we want the.
- 38:48The head to stall, and we want the tail to kick it.
- 38:52Right.
- 38:53So sometimes we want to put some weight in the fly, some lead eyes, for example, on a dungeon to get it down a little bit.
- 39:04It probably changes the action somewhat.
- 39:08And so it's.
- 39:11It's going to have a.
- 39:12The.
- 39:13The momentum of all that mass in there, but it's also going to have the drag of the head.
- 39:19So often with.
- 39:20With the wrecking fly, it's helpful to have something with a lot of.
- 39:25Of.
- 39:26Of a drag on the.
- 39:27On the front.
- 39:28Yes.
- 39:30And then the tail, we engineer that momentum.
- 39:36So we.
- 39:38We want typically a little more weight, gives us the speed, that momentum, and less drag.
- 39:48So often we'll put a mop in the back that'll really amplify the kick.
- 39:55Okay.
- 39:57But, you know, and when.
- 39:59When we do this, we need to be mindful.
- 40:01If you put a lead weight in the back, yeah.
- 40:03It's going to have a lot of momentum.
- 40:05But when that thing stops, you know, this tail is going to drop first, and that's not very fishy.
- 40:14So this whole position of the fly when it's paused and when it's swimming becomes something that we need to not lose track of.
- 40:25Yeah.
- 40:25It's almost like a saloon door opening.
- 40:27You want it to open kind of parallel.
- 40:29You don't want it to, like, have the tail drop and swing under the head on the stall.
- 40:34Right, right.
- 40:35Yeah.
- 40:36Yeah.
- 40:36And so if we kind of talk about this, like, if you take the T bone, for example, so what we talk about is we have like a big head, and you can do a lot of different ways.
- 40:44You can do it with material, you can do it with scoops.
- 40:46Right.
- 40:47I think one of the things we've talked about is, like, on a reverse tied fly, you get kind of this benefit because you get compression, and then you get almost like someone opening an umbrella, because when you pause
- 40:59the fly, it takes the.
- 41:00Takes the drag off of the bucktail, and the bucktail opens up and kind of accentuates the stall.
- 41:05Right?
- 41:06Exactly.
- 41:07Yeah.
- 41:08So it was really important that the reverse tied flies.
- 41:13A lot of times use that to the advantage that the front springs forward on the stall.
- 41:19It puts the Brakes on.
- 41:21Right.
- 41:22And then the back end hits it.
- 41:25Yeah.
- 41:26Often the back end is tapered.
- 41:28It's less drag.
- 41:30Boom.
- 41:31It gets it.
- 41:32So that's an advance.
- 41:33That's an example of how we can use like a bucktail, a springy material that when we retrieve it, it closes down.
- 41:45I like the analogy.
- 41:46Umbrella opens up.
- 41:47Boom.
- 41:49Okay.
- 41:50And it's a really clever way that we as fly fishers can make a lure that you can cast a hundred feet.
- 42:01Yes.
- 42:03But it's still really light.
- 42:06Uh, you had Mark Sedotti on a little while ago, and he talks about casting a, a fly that's over 2ft long with a 5 weight line is like, well, that's a pretty innovative design.
- 42:25And you know, our lure friends, our, our gear friends, you know, try delivering a lure that's two feet long.
- 42:34How are you going to do that?
- 42:36Yeah, they probably would have to use a potato cannon or something.
- 42:39Yeah, something like that.
- 42:42So if we kind of come back to the skeleton, and so we know that we want a big head that creates a lot of drag when you get the pause.
- 42:51And so how can you tweak the action of a wrecking fly?
- 42:56Either by adjusting the density, so restricting flow through the head.
- 43:00Or talk about like the, the smoothness, kind of almost like the difference between like the, the Clauser minnow example versus the Kreelex minnow.
- 43:09You know, how if you play around with like density and size of the head, how can you kind of tweak the wreck, for lack of a better word.
- 43:20So there was.
- 43:21There's a couple points you made.
- 43:22First of all, you talked about a skeleton, and I really liked that term, is we've witnessed the innovation of articulated flies to make bigger flies.
- 43:34We use multiple hooks, wire in between.
- 43:38And now we have the plane's tremendous innovation of using shanks.
- 43:46Okay.
- 43:48And Bob Popovic's used mono to make extended body.
- 43:52So there's different ways to make this skeleton that have emerged in the last few decades, which is really, kind of is really amazing.
- 44:04But so, so just to say the obvious, the hinging effects of the.
- 44:11These skeletons then become really helpful in amplifying the motion.
- 44:19So it's a good time to be a fly fisher.
- 44:24Now to answer your second question is that we have a lot of design choices in how we engineer those materials.
- 44:33And ahead, we see a lot of different styles of head.
- 44:37We have the deer hair packed deer hair, head of the dungeon.
- 44:44This is an example.
- 44:47And so you've wedged together a composite of material that's rather stiff.
- 44:55It doesn't Change its shape when it's retrieved.
- 45:02It's static, and water can't flow through it.
- 45:08So let's contrast that.
- 45:11We have wool heads.
- 45:13There's flies there.
- 45:14Wool heads.
- 45:15We have synthetic fibers.
- 45:16They're real popular these days.
- 45:19And so all those materials, the wool and the synthetics, they mat together, and they may compress a little bit, more or less.
- 45:29So why would we want to leverage one or the other?
- 45:34If we think about what does that fly do when it's at rest, when.
- 45:40How does it present itself?
- 45:43Is.
- 45:44Is if.
- 45:45If we want to fly that suspends.
- 45:47Yeah.
- 45:49Then we don't.
- 45:51We want to stay away from the wool.
- 45:52We want to stay away from.
- 45:55From materials that.
- 45:57That will sink.
- 45:58Yeah.
- 46:00And so the synthetics get it.
- 46:02Get a nod.
- 46:03Yes.
- 46:04And in.
- 46:05And the bucktail, of course.
- 46:07And now.
- 46:08And we have flies that feature foam faces.
- 46:12Right.
- 46:13There's different.
- 46:13The swinging D, for example.
- 46:16But there's a number of flies that have popper heads that.
- 46:24And they all can.
- 46:26They have this wrecking behavior.
- 46:29Some of them have a little bit more swim behavior than others.
- 46:35But these are different ways.
- 46:36As fly tires, we can engineer the.
- 46:39The drag in the front.
- 46:42And one of the ways it does is we're changing the momentum of the front.
- 46:47Yes.
- 46:48But we're also changing how that fly looks when it's stalled.
- 46:53Okay.
- 46:55And that is really, really an important aspect of fishing the fly is how does it look when it's.
- 47:08When it stopped?
- 47:09Got it.
- 47:10And I guess one more question before we kind of move to the rigging stuff.
- 47:14You know, you know, I think of, like, a T bone.
- 47:17That's a style fly that has a relatively long front shank.
- 47:20Right.
- 47:21And so, you know, you and I have talked, you know, offline before about, like, small rail cars and big rail cars, but can we talk a little bit about how playing with the size of the front shank and
- 47:33the shank hook configuration, kind of how that affects the wrecking action of the fly.
- 47:39Yeah.
- 47:39Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that.
- 47:41And.
- 47:41And.
- 47:42And we.
- 47:43We will probably like the.
- 47:47The.
- 47:47The jerk changer is an example of.
- 47:52Of a fly that has a long front end designed that way to amplify the kicking motion.
- 48:00Why.
- 48:00Why does that work?
- 48:02Well, we need to think about the drag of that front end if we want to stall that quick.
- 48:09The two design levers that we have is the length and the diameter.
- 48:16Right.
- 48:17And in the drag equations, the length is an important term.
- 48:22So the longer it is, the more drag.
- 48:26Now that the bigger it is, the More drag.
- 48:29And in fact, in the equations, they don't scale linearly, but the diameter is more important.
- 48:39So in a fly design like this, one of the reasons to increase the length of that first section is to increase its drag so that it stops when we stop the retrieve.
- 48:57The second is that the back is what's going to kick around.
- 49:05So we want that to be able to move freely.
- 49:09So by keeping the front inch long and the back hinging easy, we can amplify the train wreck.
- 49:21Yeah.
- 49:21And then it's also interesting too, because, you know, you can, you can kind of walk a jerk changer.
- 49:25Right.
- 49:25Which you.
- 49:26Obviously the.
- 49:27The T bone's a different fly, but there's a kind of a variation of like, you know, do you want it to crumple once and sit and hover?
- 49:34Are you walking it back and forth?
- 49:36Right.
- 49:37Getting that kind of jerk bait action?
- 49:39Yes, yes, yes.
- 49:41Yeah.
- 49:42And so we have the emergence also of very innovative styles that, that walk the dog, that simulate some of the effects that our gear brothers have had.
- 49:59The way that these slides generally work is that they're naturally unbalanced.
- 50:07And so, for example, the spiral spook is naturally unbalanced.
- 50:12So every time we apply a retrieve in wants to, it's hard to know which way it's going to go because it's unstable.
- 50:22Okay.
- 50:23In fact, in reality, to an engineer, it's impossible to hand tie a fly with all the materials and have it perfectly symmetrical.
- 50:37There's no way you could convince an engineer that that's going to be perfect.
- 50:43Perfectly symmetrical.
- 50:45And all the spring forces on the front of the head are symmetrical.
- 50:49So as.
- 50:51As flying tires, we, we have this natural asymmetry that, that's playing on our fly designs that I believe is really important to how the jerk changer walks the dog.
- 51:05Yeah.
- 51:06And so on.
- 51:06On the wrecking style flies.
- 51:08You know, just like we talked about some things you can do with jigging flies.
- 51:11And we'll talk about swim flies here in a minute.
- 51:13You know, what are things that you can do kind of on the line leader, terminal tackle, front to, you know, magnify or adjust the way the fly swims and wrecks.
- 51:24So of course, the loop not really, really important.
- 51:30What we don't want to.
- 51:33We want that fly to be able to hinge and move.
- 51:36So there's loads of really, really good loop knots.
- 51:42And if, if you're a fly fisher and you, you're not using a loop knot, this is, this is a time to reconsider One of the things we haven't talked a lot about yet is how.
- 51:59How important the retrieve action is on the fly motion.
- 52:09I've had a chance to.
- 52:10To fish with with Blaine, and, And one of the fortunate parts of.
- 52:20Of fishing with Blane is, is we got in a situation where the fishing got really stingy, and he was really eager to get me hooked up on fish, and I wasn't doing it well.
- 52:36I.
- 52:37I can row a drift boat, and so I jumped on the oars.
- 52:40He gets up on the front, and for maybe 45 minutes, I watched him fish.
- 52:47And frankly, that was worth everything.
- 52:51It was worth writing this article because the way he cast and the way he retrieved and moved these flies, I still think is not well described in.
- 53:04In.
- 53:05In our literature.
- 53:07The retrieve and casting is so super important.
- 53:12I had an opportunity to fish with Bob Clouser.
- 53:18He came up, our club sponsored him for a day, like, 15 years ago, and I offered to take him out fishing.
- 53:27So I literally guided Bob Clouser for a day and a half.
- 53:32I was three feet away from Bob Clouser for a day and a half.
- 53:38And what I can tell you is the way he retrieves is like magic.
- 53:47Same with Blake.
- 53:48Magic.
- 53:48The retrieve is so super important to how these flies behave.
- 53:56And I think we.
- 53:58We as fly fishers, we get enamored with the fly.
- 54:02But in watching these fly fishermen, I think we.
- 54:08We should get enamored with the retrieve.
- 54:12So in.
- 54:14In the.
- 54:14In the same way that, that that we talked about for jigging flies, the fly lines give us levers so that if we want to fish a kicking fly low, we can have it presented horizontally with a sinking line,
- 54:35sink tip, for example.
- 54:39So these are not to be forgotten with kicking fly.
- 54:45Although I have to admit, is when you're fishing a kicking fly, it's a lot easier to get the action if you can see it.
- 54:53I have an advantage.
- 54:55Being in a drift boat is a lot of times when I'm retrieving, I can see the fly, and when it's super fun is I can see the fish.
- 55:08Yeah, I always say, you know, there's nothing more fun than smallmouth fishing and watching a white game changer disappear.
- 55:13And it just, you know, the water's dark and then the, you know, and you see the fly, and then the water's dark and there's no fly.
- 55:20But, you know, it's interesting, too, because I.
- 55:21I guess I have kind of two thoughts, you know, one, because I know, for example, like with chase, with the spiral spook.
- 55:27I know Tommy is this way, too.
- 55:28And back to what you talked about on jig flies is that having slack and so maybe making more of a trade off for a lighter tippet material or something that's more supple, you know, helps the action of these
- 55:42flies.
- 55:42Because I can remember, you know, when I interviewed Chase about the spiral spook, he was like, he was telling me that the, you know, originally the lot, the terminal tackle tippet material he was using was too stiff and
- 55:53it was literally pulling the action out of the fly.
- 55:56Yes.
- 55:57Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 55:58Thank.
- 55:59Thanks for the reminder.
- 56:00And so I think that at the secondary level, these things become really, really important.
- 56:09A lot of streamer specialists, they favor a fast action rod so they can their tip manipulations transfer more directly to the fly.
- 56:22Do I think that's important?
- 56:24Yeah, damn it.
- 56:25It really is important.
- 56:31It.
- 56:31And so, so you're, you're right.
- 56:34The, the, the leader is an important.
- 56:38That whole business of how the retrieve throw slack in the fly defines how that fly is going to kick.
- 56:47Absolutely.
- 56:51So those, those are, those are important.
- 56:54I think it's, if, if there's anything we're, we're trying to assure folks understand is the fly is part of a system.
- 57:05Yeah.
- 57:05And I think the other thing too, you know, because it's a little bit cryptic, like, it is amazing to watch Blaine fish.
- 57:10I've never fished with Bob, but I've, like, I've talked to Shumaker a lot and we'll talk, you know, what Bob does to manipulate the fly, that's just a little bit different.
- 57:18But I think the main thing, you know, if you, you know, people understand the focus for muskie fishing, but it's kind of true that way, you know, for a lot of streamer fishing.
- 57:29And I think that focusing on the retrieve and you sit back and say, well, what do we want the food to do?
- 57:34And you know, Blaine will always say, you have always have to believe that your fly is going to get eaten because you won't fish it well if you don't.
- 57:42Right.
- 57:42So it's just a mindset that's kind of like the final wrapper on the system.
- 57:46You got the fly, the line, the leader, terminal tackle, loop knot, fast action rod.
- 57:52But that mindset is critically important to being effective.
- 57:56Yeah, yeah.
- 57:57And so different of the people in your podcast have pointed out that it really is important to do irregular retrieve.
- 58:09Yes.
- 58:10And that was really, really clear from fishing with Bob.
- 58:14Is, is he.
- 58:15He cast a fly out there, he'd pop it, pop it, and then he would notice something and then he would, he would just Bump it, bump it, bump it.
- 58:28And then he's hooked up.
- 58:30And it.
- 58:31It was.
- 58:32He was definitely reacting to what he saw.
- 58:36And.
- 58:36And I think it.
- 58:37It's important.
- 58:38These are important lessons if, you know, fish learn, right?
- 58:43So they.
- 58:44They learn and they see this lure is, Is.
- 58:49Is presented this way.
- 58:52Okay, that's not food.
- 58:53I had a bad day when I.
- 58:55I hit that.
- 58:56But.
- 58:57But this one is really irregular.
- 59:02It's really wacky.
- 59:04And that behavior is what attracts fish to our fly.
- 59:14I do a talk on triggering, and one of the questions I asked at the beginning, why does the fish butterfly in their mouth?
- 59:26And all the kids answer to eat it, right?
- 59:31Well, in fact, there's loads of reasons that fish put our fly in their mouth.
- 59:40And one of the reasons is, you know, fish don't have hands, so if they want to see what the heck that is, they put it in their mouth.
- 59:51Fish have instincts, so if they see another fish struggling, there's actually an instinct to eliminate it.
- 1:00:03Or if it's in their territory struggling, they're gonna grab it and get it the heck away from them.
- 1:00:13These are really important instincts.
- 1:00:16And it doesn't have anything to do with eating it.
- 1:00:19It doesn't look like a food.
- 1:00:20It looks like it's in their face, right?
- 1:00:24So I think it's important to understand those all can be important triggers.
- 1:00:33It doesn't just have to look like a fish.
- 1:00:37And as a matter of fact, sometimes it's really helpful if it doesn't, we don't want it to look like a great swimming minnow.
- 1:00:48What we want, we have a guy in our club as Joe Cambridge.
- 1:00:53He.
- 1:00:54He preaches.
- 1:00:55He said, your fly is to win an Oscar on vulnerability, right?
- 1:01:05I'm helpless.
- 1:01:06I'm hurt.
- 1:01:07I'm stunned.
- 1:01:09I'm vulnerable.
- 1:01:11I can't get away.
- 1:01:13All those are signals that trigger these instincts to strike.
- 1:01:20Well, folks, we hope you enjoyed the interview as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you.
- 1:01:24Stay tuned for part two.
- 1:01:25And don't forget to check out the links to all this episode's sponsors in the show.
- 1:01:28Notes.
- 1:01:29Fish hard folks.