Out of office

Due to notoriously non-liquid fishing waters and the holidays we're out of office until next year, which will start no sooner and no later than 1-1-2010 on this blog.

Boy George, pike fly fishing & christmas

"You must be permanently on grass man, if you really think that thing at the end of your line looks like a fish", the man behind me said. "And to wave it back and forth like that all the time, what's that good for? Why don't you just throw that thing straight into the water and keep it there, you know, I mean: where the fish are?"

Just a typical question from a passer-by that will sound familair to a lot of us pike fly fishermen. Shouldn't be too difficult to answer, one would think, but I dare you to give that a serious try specifically for pike fly fishing. Because indeed, why don't we just throw something that really looks like a fish straight into the water? Why do we insist on fishing with things that look like we tied a hook into Boy George's hair? And why all the hassle with that line in the air anyway?

Good questions. So let's make a comparison with some fellow pike guys, the lure fisherman. Let's start with what's in favour of lure fishermen when it comes to catching pike:

• they can cast further;
• they can cast easier, especially with a lot af wind;
• they can cast in places where fly fishermen can't;
• they will hook less passers-by behind them;
• they can fish a water faster and more efficiently;
• they can fish with exact copies of prey fish;
• they can fish with giant projectiles;
• they can fish with lures that make a lot more disturbance in the water to attract pike;
• they can fish deeper and have better control over the fishing depth;
• they can fish easier and with more people in a boat.

Now let's have a look at the supposed advantages of pike fly fishing:

• it's a very active way of fishing for pike (so is lure fishing);
• you can cast "flies/lures" that don't sink and allow for a shallow, very slow retrieve (what about balsa poppers and the modern streamers for light spin fishing tackle?);
• the fun of tying your own "flies" (many people build their own plugs or jerk-baits: compare that to tying a bunch of feathers on a hook);
• playing a fish on a fly rod is a lot of fun (modern spinning rods with braided lines are the ultimate in lightweight piking).

O.k., so it must be something else then. But right now it's christmas, so we've got other things on our minds (like we should). Let's give this weird "pike on the fly" thing some more thought later, o.k.?.

I'm (not) dreaming of a.......

B&W

Now, let's have a look at some pike pictures from to those old days:

Check out the parasites on this one.

As you can see, this one was taken when the world was already slowly starting to turn color.

Guilty

You all know that fly casting is an art. The art of loop control. The real artist knows exactly what to do and when to do it. Timing is the essence. The skilled caster keeps the lower and upper leg of the loop both travel in a straight line path. Because what he wants is a narrow loop that will pierce through the omnipresent wind like a hot knife through butter. Now take a look at the picture and weep. What the !%$*^& am I doing here? Sometimes it takes a picture or a video to see the error of one's ways. Or maybe I can blame it on the photographer.....

Erik



Dear Erik,

Nope, sorry Erik, a photographer just record what he sees. He can control shutterspeed (1/125; should have been faster in this picture), aperture (f/6.3; about ok for a d.o.f. that needs to cover the whole line), sharpness (diffucult to say what causes the unsharpness of the streamer, motion blur or out of focus) and ISO (500; could have been higher to facilitate a higher shutterspeed). He has influence on the place he takes the picture from and so determine the composition of the picture, but only photoshop and other computerwizard tricks can make a bad cast look good.

But, casting a large streamer, you managed to get it across without hitting the floor or a tree. You placed it within 1 foot of the bank on the other side of the river, so who cares about art.

Harmen-Jan

N.B.

Apart from making a bad cast look good (which would've been a hell of a challenge in this case by the way) you can also use Photoshop to serve as a less radical, but still very useful tool for tweaking your pics. In this case, it took a B&W layer on which you brush back the original colors of the line and after that a further blending change of the layer to make the line and streamer stand out more from the rest, while still keeping some nice green colors in the background.

Hajé

Hide & seek & funny jaws

Winter is moving in here in The Netherlands. To us pike addicts this is an important milestone. Fish can be found almost everywhere during the rest of the season, but when it gets colder they tend to flock together and the pike will follow their prey. So if you can find them, you may well catch several pike within a short timespan. We were hoping for such a feast a couple of days ago, but to no avail. All Harmen-Jan and I caught were a few solitary pike. Rather small ones really, surely nothing to brag about. But two things are worth mentioning: firstly, all pike had an upper jaw that was shorter than the lower jaw. Just look at the pictures to see what I mean (lousy pictures that were shot with a mobile phone because Einstein forgot to put a decent battery in his hotshot professional three month's wages supercamera).

Ice, ice baby.

So there you have it. Our pike heaven froze over. Apparently, nature thought it was time to protect the heavily targeted fish with a temporarily defensive shield. Good for them, and in the long run probably good for us too, since the last month we already noticed fishing pressure has had u huge effect on pike behaviour.

Harmen-Jan's EZ-ties: Magic Twisty

Back to seasons's start

When I first read about the tournament last august it triggered me to start thinking about pike fishing again. In the Netherlands pike season closes in march, and before it is legal to start pike fishing again the true fly fishing addcit already is busy with other parts of his precious sport.

Myself, I am a true addict. If I wouldn’t fish for a week, I don’t think I could be held responsible for my behavior anymore. To my girlfriend that can be annoying. I will never be able to walk past a pond, stream or any other type of water without checking it out for the rest of my life. Spotting fish, looking for obstacles, checking out if something is hatching, or even better… is there activity of a rise for example? There is not a single day I don’t think about a fly rod, a tying pattern or fish.

And when I am too busy, I will always manage myself into a position where I will be able to fish for just a little while. One free hour of spare time, just making a few casts during lunch break. It all adds up to the need for fishing that my soul is craving for.

So back to the start of the adventure. The tournament and just thinking about participation made the itches come. Although it was the beginning of october and I was still in a trout and grayling modus, thinking about small nymphs and dry’s, the attention got drawn to the bigger flies. Much bigger I should say, being streamers of at least 10 inches.

The last trip to Denmark should have been a nice and promising autumn one, but weather was going to be worse up there. And last minute, Hajé and I decided it would not be worth the drive all the way up north, just for some murky water nymphing with a strike indicator, where the aim would have been sight nymphing for the biggies. So instead we both decided to earn a little credits with our girlfriend (or family in Hajé’s case). And we did decide to go out one of those days for that very first session of guinea pig launching for pike.

Polder pike from the East

Harmen-Jan & Erik, who are both a member of the “Vliegvisgroep Almelo” (Fly Fishing Group Almelo), which is a subsidiary of “Vislust Almelo” (Fishing Lust Almelo), had their annual piking day in november with their club in a polder in the eastern part from Holland (which is no more than 2 hours from the very western part of Holland).

For those of you that are new to these things: a Dutch "polder" is land made out of water. Don't ask us about the chemistry involved to pull this off, but it obviously seems to be working quite well since we build entire cities on (or rather: in) it. Anyway, the classic Dutch polders basically consist of totally flat grasslands with cows or sheep on it, and with smaller and bigger canals in between to drain the water (and drown the animals, as it turns out). This not only means lots of water, but also - and more important to us pike-flyfishermen - lots of shallow and accessable water.

A real pain in the.........

.......lateral epicondyle.

Testing fly rods is hard work. Especially when they're 9 weights and up. In an attempt to fully load a possible sponsor rod (a 10-weight; I wanna cast at least the whole fly line with this thing) Harmen-Jan regrettably also fully loaded something else: his elbow.

Oh well, just a little overstraining of the muscles. The best thing to do is probably just some more fishing with the lads. And indeed, all went well during the fishing, but in the evening and the day after Harmen-Jan couldn't pick up a coffee cup. And when he found he even had severe difficulties holding on to his beer, he knew something had to be done right away.

The internet. Epicondylitis lateralis humeri, a.k.a. tennis elbow. A tennis elbow is an inflammation of the tendons that join the forearm muscles on the outside of the elbow. The forearm muscles and tendons become damaged from overuse — repeating the same motions again and again. This leads to pain and tenderness on the outside of the elbow.

Family doctor: "This may take a while, up to a year of rest maybe."
"Well I don't think so doctor, any other options?"

"A fysiotherapist. And if that don't work, we'll inject the damn arm to total silence....."

O.k., let's start with the fysio. Twice a week ultrasound treatment until it hurts to hell, massage it, and train, train train. Concentric weight lifting, or rather, slowly lowering a weight of 2 kg in your hand, so the muscle and especially the tendon gets loaded evenly and gently in order to make it less vulnerable. And indeed, after two weeks it's already getting better. So say goodbye to a full year of treatment. Ha! This will be done within a couple of weeks at the most!

He thought. But then the arm hit back hard. And yet, Harmen-Jan is still confident he'll be able to get rid of this nuisance within no more than two months. Word has it he's already consulting some sort of arm whisperer as we speak. And that's only his second option. God knows what happens if this guy gets desperate!

To be continued.......

Friday pike-day

So our theory about friday being the best piking day of the week didn't prove totally wrong so far. At the same spot where we only managed to catch one small pike with the four of us on a sunday, today we caught 3 and missed at least 10 with the two of us in not much more than two hours. That sounds o.k., but there are much more pike missed (moved but not hooked) than in october (which is the beginning of the pike season in our book).

C&R

Catch and Release will be a major principle of the tournament in Finland, and it was one of the most important reasons why decided to participate in the first place. In Scandinavia it might be something relatively new, but here in Holland almost all fishermen release their pike and have done so for ages.

Now don't get me wrong: I don't object to taking a pike home for dinner at all (they're delicious, by the way), but if most pike-fishermen would do that here in Holland we simply would not have any pike left in our waters within no time. We're a terribly crowded country, and, despite the fact that we do have a lot of water, the fishing pressure is huge.

So we put them back. But there's more to it. Especially with C&R we don't like the pike to get damaged during the process. The pike doesn't like that, nor does the fisherman who's next in line to catch the same fish. We want nice, undamaged fish, not only to admire the sheer beauty of mr. (or even better: mrs.) Esox, but also to hang on to the illusion that the fish we so skillfully outwitted hasn't been caught before.

So we try not to put them on the ground or on other rough surfaces (no pics of that kind on this blog). And of course we only fish with single, barbless hooks. There's really no reason not to when you intend to put the fish back. Sure, you might lose a jumper every now and then, but when that happens you already got the best of it anyway. And let's face it, the occasional loss of a fish caught with a barbless hook is nothing compared to the frequent hassle and damage (to the fish and sometimes even yourself) you'll experience when using barbed hooks or - even worse - doubles or trebles.

Allright, so much for the preaching, let's get to the fishing. Tomorrow we're up for another, albeit short, session. Since we consider friday to be the best piking day of the week (5 days have past since the previous weekend), I'm afraid there's once again no excuse for a skunk.

Troubled waters

This is what your favorite river may look like after some steady rain. A way too strong current. Your streamer disappears in a murky substance that bears only a vague resemblance to water. It's more like soup. A no-fish soup. Not much hope of catching a pike today. Not here. But there's always somewhere else. And somewhere else paid off this time. After a few casts a fairsized pike hit the streamer like a freight train. Released of course, so it may get to the next station on schedule.

Erik

Close, but no blank

When we announced our second fishing- and testing day on this blog, we advised you to sue us if we would come home with a skunk. Well, it was pretty darn close, but Erik and Sander saved the day by catching not much more than a meter of pike together. Here's Sander's half:

There were other catches though, but they don't quite impress on the CV of a pike fly fishing team that's about to compete on an international platform:

And here's one of the excuses:

The other excuse is that our two sponsor-visits put some mayor cuts into our fishing time. But they were quite interesting and productive, so more about that later.

The downsides of fishing solo

Fishing alone can be nice every once in a while. You can do what you want, go where you want, fish the way you want and quit when you want. Also, there's no buddy that annoyingly catches all the fish right in front of you, spooks all the fish or - even worse - frustrates, just by being there, the possibility to brag about your catches the way you normally would do.

But there are downsides too. There's no one to talk to, no one to share the excitement with, no one who will share his sandwiches with you and no walking fly shop to provide you with the stuff you once again forgot to bring yourself. And what about pictures? Who's there to prove it when you actually do catch something? Or even worse, a whopper? Who's there to convince the unbelievers that there's big pike even in ridiculously small waters?

In my case, the answer was: no one. Well there was someone around, but she obviously thought I wanted a picture of myself with the building and considered the pike to be nothing more than a pet and of no significance at all:

Actually, it was quite an interesting catch. The small canal this one came from is only 30-40 cm. deep, and the area to effectively swim and feed only a couple of hundred meters. The fish just cannot possibly go anywhere else and couldn't come from anywhere else. I knew it had to be there, but couldn't catch it before (or even find it, for that matter). But this time it was different.

In a shallow canal like this, when there's no wind, the big fish often will show themselves: you'll see a wave from shore to shore rolling through the canal, which really adds to the fishing excitement. When I first spotted the wave I thought it was just a big bream or carp. But those fish normally cruise in groups, and this really seemed to be just one fish. I still didn't think of a pike though, as they usually are quite static. But what the heck, I gave it a cast anyway.

The fish didn't hesitate for a single second, swallowed the 15 inch streamer and put the small canal on fire. A funny thing about these waters is that the fish doesn't have much options when it wants to take off. So the fish swam back and forth and the only thing I had to do was follow. And hey, it's still a pike and not a carp. But nevertheless, it did put up quite a fight before it surrendered.

And then, luckily, this nice woman walked by to make a photograph of the fact that I actually have been in front of that awe-inspiring building. And when it comes to the fish, well, you know the drill: "yeah sure, prove to me there was another half........."

Next on the agenda

On tuesday 24 november we're going to visit two possible sponsors and do some pike fishing along the way. The weather will be no excuse for a blank:

 

Excellent! Low pressure and a warm front passing (now that's perfect piking weather without irony). Top that with a nice breeze to put the sponsor rod to a true challenge and things can't possibly go wrong. So sue us if we come home with a skunk.....

The first training session, part 2: Urban Angling

At the end of the first TDF fishing-day, city folks Sander and Henk-Jan took the guys from the countryside Harmen-Jan and Erik to some totally different fishing grounds: urban angling in the city. Granted, the scenery doesn't quite match the picturesk Dutch polders (let alone the beautiful Baltic), but strolling around and casting streamers in an urban setting sure has it's own charms and challenges. For instance, the typical, somewhat nostalgic smell of cow-poo in the polders is more than made up for by the huge amounts of dog-shit you'll undoubtedly encounter on the banks of urban fishing waters (hence the expression "Frolic Walking" by the Dutch flyfisherman Erik de Noorman, which is now widely used as a synonym for fishing in cities and towns).

Also, the catches will be far more diverse than in the countryside. Not only is there a good chance at a decent pike, but shopping carts, bicycles, condoms, plastic bags, pedestrians, cyclists and even cars are also a frequent and inevitable target species.

Erik (left) at a hot spot near a bridge, only seconds before........

The first training session, part 1: polders

Lured by bold stories from Sander and Henk-Jan about the great fall pike fishing in the 'polders' around Utrecht, Harmen-Jan and Erik felt they needed some decent proof of that. Also, the first sponsor rod arrived and required some serious testing. So a couple of days later, the first Dutch Four Training Session took place in Utrecht.

After Harmen-Jan and Erik traveled half the country to reach these promised rich fishing grounds, the first words of welcome from Sander and Henk-Jan contained a sneaky disclaimer. Sunday is the worst day of the week for pike fishing, they said. The waters are crowded with other fishermen, and so they were on saturday. At the end of the weekend, it would take a very stupid (meaning: small) pike to charge yet another fluffy, feathery thingy passing by.

And so it turned out te be. Perfect, because it gave us an excellent excuse for our obvious lack of fishing skills. We did catch some pike though and had lots of fun along the way.

Test-casting a sponsor rod over and over again eventually annoyed the hell out of...........

And then there were four......

In august 2009, when everyone in Holland was minding their own summer business, a small post appeared on a popular Dutch fly fishing internet forum called Prikbord (pronounced Prick Board, which it usually isn't). It was a letter from Simon Graham about the pike fly fishing tournament he is organizing in may 2010 in Finland. Harmen-Jan (now our Team Captain) and not much later Sander ("Arubaman") jumped on it like hungry pike and began mailing each other about forming a Dutch team. They both selected another candidate, and so Erik and Henk-Jan came aboard.

A quick meeting was arranged at a Van der Valk road restaurant ("valk" is Dutch for falcon, which explains the toucan in the logo of the restaurant), where Harmen-Jan unfolded a slick plan to find sponsors for this project. And now, a few gigabites of e-mails, hours of phonecalls and already some testfishing later, we feel it's time to put ourselves and the project online. We could of course have waited until all would have been set and there were no more loose ends, but we think it fits much better in the concept of a blog to keep things dynamic and make this a true report of our project, from the beginning until the end.

In Holland we can fish for pike almost all winter long, so stay tuned for plenty of pike-porn, fishing reports, video's, tech-talk, colums, weird stories and other stuff that has (or sometimes has not) anything to do with pike fly fishing. By the way, we congratulate (and thank!) Vosseler to be the first sponsor link we put on this blog. Much more about that (and rods!) later....