Fishing & Photography

Fly fishers often spend so much time focusing on catching fish that they lose focus on what surrounds them. Fish live in beautiful places, if you haven't noticed. I love fly-fishing, but I also love making pictures.

On the water I carry an 8.1 mega pixel Sony Cyber-Shot "point and shoot." It's user-friendly, but has many functions for the more advanced picture taker. It's not waterproof but can handle a splatter of water once in a while. The picture of the High Sierra mountains (upper right) was taken with my Sony Cyber-Shot.

I also have a Nikon D-40 Digital SLR camera I use for more advanced shooting. Photographers call this camera an "amateur" camera, as opposed to a "professional" grade camera. While there may be some truth to that, my D-40 is much more advanced than anything Ansel Adams ever dreamed of. I don't carry my Nikon on the water. It's lightweight but too big.

The picture of the red thistle (above left) was taken with my Nikon D-40 after a day of fishing on Wolf Creek in northern California's Alpine County.

So, if you love fly-fishing consider adding photography to your hobby. You will be enriched greatly. Back away from the water for a little while and you will find stunning landscapes, beautiful flowers and wildlife.

Click here to see some of the pictures I've taken while on fly-fishing trips at the Virtual Fly Guides Facebook Page.

Additionally, whether you are a Nikon enthusiast or not, you will find Ken Rockwell's website very helpful. Check him out at http://www.kenrockwell.com.

Make sure you post your pics of fish and scenery, and your fishing reports, on the Virtual Fly Guides bulletin board http://tinyurl.com/yhsgtye.

Tight Lines and Good Pictures,

Sean Wallentine
Co-Founder, The Virtual Fly Guides

A nonrandom moment

Sit down, let it happen.


The concept of time is a matter of perspective.

August Caddis

An August evening. It means a possibility of caddis hatch where you live. They are rhyacophila, one of the two caddis species you know by name. They hatch after sunset. Last time you were here it didn’t happen.



There was some good fishing soon after 6 pm. when you arrived, but then it has been quiet. You take a break, eat your egg-bacon-sandwich.

Start again, fish a small streamer with soft hackle dropper. You start catching small trout. Replace the streamer with a size 16 caddis pupa. It’s getting dark, and the trout are everywhere. The best fly is a dry fly, green bodied Deer Hair Sedge.


When it is too dark to see your fly, you switch back to pupa pattern and feel the trout taking it. And when they stop, you stop.

You lived again.

Stand Still

Make your move. Make your stand. Let water pass by.

Take your time.

A lovely little thing!

But not mine.

He is going to fish with a bamboo rod of his own making this season

A friend of mine, the engineer, has been busy. Actually, he has not been all that busy as all this began over a year ago, but he has made a lot of work.



Sure he still has a lot of work to do, but I'd state it as a fact, that he is going to fish with his brand new 7'2" 4 weight Driggs River when the greatest evening hatch of the summer arrives.



And, I'm not going to fish with my own made cane rod. Not this summer. (My progress is detailed on the last picture.)

Fell in Love

It can happen.

Nature lesson

"Mr Trout, that's sunset."

Art of Getting Skunked

[Insert a lame statement here]

Spreading the word: Dahlberg Diver

Over a year ago, Jay Lee sent me two flies, a Humpy and a Dahlberg Diver. Last night I tried my best to instruct how to tie the Dahlberg Diver at the local fishing club.



It takes some time until we reach the level of perfection Jay has, but the word is out there. We are going to catch pike soon.



Thanks Jay!

Rod Building - Part 17: Inscription (hey, it's all done!)

My fly rod building project has come to its end. That's right, the rod is actually finished.



Looks like a fly rod, doesn't it?

Final part of the project was not made by me, but by mrs opax, who was very kind and wrote the inscription.



I thought a lot about the inscription. Candidates like "opax #1" were quickly abandoned. "Resembles-a-rod" would have been better, but I ended-up with "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".



In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is over seventeen minutes long song by Iron Butterfly. It was released 40 years ago. According to a legend, the title was supposed to be "In The Garden Of Eden", but someone had written "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," possibly while drunk or intoxicated, on a demo copy.



I have a new slogan for my blog:
If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
- opax fly-fishing

End of the road

Or perhaps... In middle of the road.

Rod Building - Part 16: "back back forth and forth"

My rod building project is going like a dance. I replaced the big ugly stripper guides with a pair of shiny, tiny chromed ones.



Removing guides is simple. What you need is a sharp knife, steady hand, and some acetone to clean the blank.



Does this make a better rod?



How cares, we are after the looks here. Almost done...

Splitting cane

I'll bet the Swedish knife manufacturer didn't see this one coming.



At first it was hard, then you figured it out and began to think it's easy. A bad mistake, as the split starts to wander with your mind.

Trick is to bend the wider side. The difficulty is that the narrower side bends a lot easier.

Social rod maker

What I didn’t know was that the hobby of making bamboo fly rods is such a social activity. Much of the work is done alone, but a lot more time is spent talking with fellow rod makers, 3-years-old daughter who wants a pink fly rod, 5-year-old son who wants a rod longer than his dad has, workmates, friends, and, well, just about everybody willing to listen. At some point a sister-in-law’s husband told me about a guy that only ever speaks about cars. I got the point.



I believe that most of bamboo rod makers are engineers. Books, articles and internet sites about bamboo fly rod making deal at least as much about construction of required tools and machinery, as they deal with the actual process of bamboo crafting. My task is to prove to the world that a humanist can craft a bamboo fly rod. The small print is that this particular humanist has partnered with an engineer to build bamboo fly rods.



Tools and machinery is one of the reasons this hobby is so social. If you don’t have all the tools, and believe me – you don’t, you can either construct (engineering degree doesn’t hurt), buy (costs about ten times as much as the materials for a bamboo fly rod), or you can borrow them. I prefer the last, so it takes a bit mingling with the right people to make the rod.

Splintering Cane: Feminine Reactions

I told my wife that the friend I'm going to build bamboo rods with had bought a bamboo fly rod.
- Why he wants to build a bamboo rod if he already bought one? She asked.
Why do the birds sing? Why the green is green? What keeps a rock from crumbling into dust?

The friend told he was casting his split-cane in the yard. A lady, a neighbor, walks past with a dog and smiles.
It is January, there is snow on the ground, pretty cold, about a hundred meters to the nearest lake shore, frozen lake shore, a guy is casting a fly rod as old as she. What's there to smile about?

Fly-fishing Tradition

Importance and role of the tradition in fly-fishing is substantial. There are flies and methods used by anglers hundreds of years ago, the reel is pretty much similar in design as it was when first invented, and the reason to fish is pretty much the same as is was before as long as we are talking about fly-fishing.



About a month ago I tied a few March Browns, winged wet flies dating back a long time. In the 80s I was with my parents fishing the Ruunaa Rapids in Eastern Finland. I had a fly rod and had bought, or at least whined to my parents long enough that they had bought me, a package of of three wets, pretied in a leader. I remember the horrible mess the rig was after a few minutes of serious rod waving. One of the flies was a March Brown Silver. I caught couple of fish. They were bleak, no trout for me back then, thank you.

I intented to visit the Ruunaa again last August but instead decided to go to the very heart of Finnish brown trout fly-fishing tradition, the Huopana. It is not a big river, or at least long, only about 1.2 km or .75 miles.



But its every pool and channel has been named and there are even rocks that have names. Those rocks are named after fishermen. That is what I call tradition.



The whole milieu of the river is unique. The houses, the old bridge, and even the old hydroelectricity plant just belongs there. As well as the fishermen (no more than 10 per day with the current regulations) and the brown trout.



The all time sport tackle record trout from Huopana was landed by Mr. Bruno Alanko on 22nd of August 1933 using "a yellow fly". That was 8.3 kilograms or 18.5 pounds of lake-run brown trout.

I visited the river exactly 74-years later. After a short but good night sleep in my car I saw two fly fishermen with a story to tell. "I just lost the trout of my life" was the first thing the younger man said to me when we met. With wide eyes and stunned expression on his face he told me about the trout he hooked and played for good thirty minutes. The hands of the older man were wide apart when he estimated the size of the fish with his hands. At least 5 kilograms he said. The fish broke of just when they thought that they could finally land him.

The tradition of fly-fishing is not static. It lives and evolves as we read, write, talk, and dream about it.

Prey's Beauty

Deep Sparkle Pupa Variation

My favourite caddis pupa pattern is Gary LaFontaine's Deep Sparkle Pupa. Green has been most effective color for me. I have replaced the hackle fibres of the original pattern with lively CDC fibres. This fly is fast to tie and ugly enough for trout to love it.

Black Zulu Special

Here is a variation of an old classic, the Black Zulu. This fly is tied on heavy wire grubber hook with a bead. Orange yarn is used instead of standard wool tag. It hardly makes a difference; actually this fly works well even without the tag.

I use this fly as a searching pattern. It works for trout, grayling, and white fish.