The 6wt E

At the intersection of passions there often lies magic. Overlapping devotions compound and exponentiate in weird and wonderful ways, lifting each to stimulating new heights. But, just as often, at those same crossroads lies madness and the sad truth is, when in the throws of passion, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.

My love affair with fly fishing is well documented. But those who know me best are also aware that I have been recently consumed by another old flame. The guitar. I’ve owned a trio of acoustics for decades, sentimental pieces more than musical, but the fire was reignited with the purchase, last November, of a Fender Telecaster and Blues Junior amp (electrified devices, for those of you uninitiated in modern six-stringed instrumentation). Our quiet hide-away in the woods has become a little less quiet and a little less fishing has been going on.

And while the Telecaster has gotten the most attention, the increase in musical interest has blown back on my acoustics. I pick them up much more often now, especially when the urge to make noise surfaces and there’s too little time to set up the electric, or when Mary has the girls over and I must be sonically restrained.

Such was the case yesterday as Mary and Susan and Sherry were downstairs, working on their basketry. I picked up the quietest thing I owned, my Yamaha G-231 classical, a box that I hadn’t played in a while, and gave it a good strum. But, with that single rake of the pick, the top nylon E-string pinged at the bridge and I was down to five, the final string left hanging loosely from the headstock like some poor tenkara offering.

At that point, I could have easily set the Yamaha aside and picked up another guitar, but it’s not in my nature to leave things in such awkward states. My OCD won’t allow it. And a quick rummage in the case failed to produce the new set of D’Addarios that I was certain had been there. I had replacements for the Fenders, my steel-stringed acoustics, and a variety, 09s-to-11s, to try out on the Telecaster, but none for the 231’s nylons.

If the strings were not in the case, then they had to be in my toy closet - that cluttered hole in the wall filled with guitar accoutrements, camera gear, and all things fly fishing - and it was there that the passions overlapped. Once the nylon set couldn’t be found, my eyes fell on the carefully stacked boxes of fly lines.

Do you think...

I grabbed an old RIO bass line, a 7wt that I’d had for a while and was likely not to use again, cut out a four-foot length of running line and strung it up. It easily tuned to an E and I got a soft, mellow note, but it couldn’t be held for long. After a bluesy Stormy Monday, it went flat as a Lefty Kreh loop. And I didn’t like the feel of the textured line or the “round-wound buzz” that I got as I slid between notes. That sound’s okay down low, but not acceptable in the upper registers. A four-foot length of the tapered head faired a bit better and had a bit more warmth of tone, but also quickly lost tune after just two bars of an acoustic Layla. That and it felt a bit bulky for the top end. All-in-all, the 7wt was unsatisfying, but the concept showed promise. A more scientific analysis was needed.

Tension was not an issue. Guitars are normally strung in the neighborhood of fifteen pounds tension and a fly line should handle that and more. I’ve broken off enough 20lb floro tippet on bonefish and reds to know that to be true. Size and texture were next to be considered and the possibilities that lay between 5wts and 8, especially when factoring in the tapers, would give me plenty of options. Perhaps a newer line would help address the tuning issue as well. But in the end it would all come down to tone. It’s all about tone.

So I started experimenting. I grabbed a fresh box, a RIO Outbound Short Freshwater 8wt intermediate sinking line, thinking the running weight would be about right. In addition, the untextured, slick finish should reduce the buzz and the sink line might add some weight for a fuller sound. I hacked a few pieces, strung them up, and saw improvement, but the tuning issue remained. One full play of Down By the River and it was flat again. Worse, the coldwater coating began feeling tacky as it warmed under my fingers. Great for avoiding coiling issues in cold weather. Bad for warm hands and hot licks.

A tropical line, then. Snipped up another Outbound Short, this time a 9wt intermediate, but with a saltwater coating. Better texture under my fingers and a decent tone, but the bothersome tuning issue remained. Didn’t hold up through Day Tripper. Barely got through the intro. It was beginning to look like a show-stopper.

Another look into the closet and the light bulb went off. The lines' core was the key. If I could find a more stable core, perhaps it would hold. RIO’s low stretch ConnectCore might be the answer and I quickly took the scissors to a new 5wt Xtreme Indicator line. The running line proved a bit light, but a length of the head – the cool orange front taper – seemed closer. A rousing ten minutes of twelve-bar-blues jamming, bends not normally heard from an classical guitar, didn’t budge the tension an iota so the tuning issue was licked, but I’d lost the tone with the lighter line.

A 6wt InTouch Grand, then. The trimmed out green front taper wasn’t quite as cool, visually, but the tone was better. Not just better. Fantastic. Buddy Guy’s upper licks never sounded so good. Downright buttery.

I’d hit the sweet spot. Beautiful sound. Tuning stability. Silky feel. I’d solved my E string problem...

(with $400 worth of fly line)

…and wondered how fantastic it’d sound if I replaced the G and B strings as well.

Down the Rabbit Hole

“Be sure to bring your headlamp.”

It was an odd instruction given that I was to meet him at noon. Everything else he’d suggested – sturdy boots, rugged clothes, large dark streamers – made sense.

“And a 7 or 8wt. But it needs to be short.”

I’ve visited a lot of odd places with Troy. He has a knack for finding local out-of-the-way fish and figuring out how to catch them. Landlocked stripers in Jordan, gars with rope flies on the Neuse, bowfin cruising those out-of-the-way Durham floodplain impoundments, contraband carp from golf courses unnamed. Not your classic fly fishing fare, but never boring and always for targets with some kick. So when he suggests that we try something new, I don’t ask anymore. I just go.

I’d been bitching all week about how cold our streams still ran, delaying the late March white bass run and keeping the largemouths’ lips locked up tight. I’d had enough winter trout (enough goddam nymphing) and was itching to get the warmwater season going. Troy’s call was a ray of hope.

“There’s something we’ve got to go do.”

We met, the next day, just a stone’s throw from downtown Raleigh, behind a long, single-story brick building occupied by two hair salons, a nail parlor, and a dingy old laundromat. Beyond the back lot, where the stylists parked, the ground fell away to a trickle, barely wet, one of the many small creeks that interlace the capitol and ultimately coalesce to find their way to the Neuse.

We rigged and I noticed that Troy didn’t have his usual gear. His favorite Orvis was replaced by a stubby off-brand stick, thick in the butt and no more than six feet in length. My 7’10” bass rod seemed huge.

We dropped to the water below our parked trucks and, to my surprise, turned upstream, not down, towards the Volkswagon dealership and the heart of the city, shortly arriving at a small muddy pool below a culvert that burrowed under Wake Forest Road. Sunfish, I thought, or maybe a few small Roanokes. Pretty dull stuff and a waste of an 8wt. I’d hoped for more.

But Troy didn’t stop at the pool. Instead, he climbed along its littered edge and hoisted himself into the opening.

“What are you waiting for?”

I followed, though not easily as the rough-edged culvert extended a couple of feet above and out over the stream, and shuffled along behind him, beneath the roadway, head bowed and back bent in the four-foot space, all the while wondering why we hadn’t just climbed to the surface to cross. An easier portage, it seemed, than going underneath.

But Troy stopped mid-tunnel, switched on his headlamp, and turned left into an opening that I had not yet seen; a passage that ran parallel, and under, the roadway median, accessed through an old steel grate door that Troy opened with no small effort. I followed him through the gate, down a handful of steep cement steps that ended at the lip of a hole into which a ladder descended; iron wrungs imbedded into the concrete sides of a ten foot drop. At the bottom, another pipe.

It’s not easy, traveling down a four-foot conduit with nothing but a headlamp. Even without claustrophobic tendencies, it’s unnerving; never mind managing a fly rod in such tight quarters. But Troy pushed on, unfazed, as the pitch of our tunnel turned downward, to the right, and the sound of mid-day surface traffic gave way to the quiet white noise of the shallow water flowing between our feet.

After a couple of turns and what seemed an eternity, Troy stopped, leaned forward to put down his rod, worked his way around to face me, and reached into his pocket to pull out a small puck-shaped container.

“You’ll want this. Under your nose.”

He twisted open the puck and I flashed back fifty years. Nightmarish memories of childhood colds, remedied by undershirts plastered to my chest with this putrid petroleum product. Vicks Vapor Rub. No thanks. I’d rather be forced to fish bluegill the rest of my days.

“Suit yourself.”

He stuck his finger in the glop, smeared a wad into his sparse mustache, and inched back around. We continued on, shortly to turn at another crossing pipe and it quickly became clear why he'd suggested the rub. The smell was awful. Sewer meets garbage meets dead rotting flesh, emanating from a cavernous junction in the city’s old drainage system. But it was better than the Vicks.

“We’re here.”

We're where?

“This street kid told me about it. We help at the soup kitchen. When he heard that I fished…”

I squeezed up beside him at the end of the pipe and looked out into the space. The far side was not discernable in the weak light of our headlamps, but Troy thought it was no more than sixty feet, and perforated, like swiss cheese, with other pipes and culverts, both inlets and out. Below us, perhaps four feet, was a concrete floor that sloped into black water, the surface of which held all manner of unidentifiable flotsam. The place had an uncomfortable clamminess accentuated by the smell. I couldn’t fathom what we were doing there...until fifteen feet out something swirled.

Something big.

“Don’t know what it is. The kid doesn’t either. But to live down here... Gotta be badass.”

What flashed in my head was the scene from Star Wars - down the Death Star prison garbage chute. Luke and Han and Chewy and The Princess, bobbing about in the junk while something horrific swam below them, tickling their feet.

Troy chuckled at the reference and dropped down from the pipe.

I waited above for there wasn’t much room on “the shore.” And even in old clothes I was reluctant to get too close to the mess. I’d stink for days. But Troy never flinched.

“Third time’s a charm, big boy. I’ve brought the meat today.”

He’d already been down here twice?

And when he said “meat” he meant it. A huge deerhair sculpin, the size of a sewer rat, black, with a 2/0 stinger in the head and a second in the tail, both weedless to get through the trash. Mousing simply wasn't enough.

If I had to bet my life on a man catching a fish, I’d bet on Troy. Some folks just have the knack. They may not be pretty or sophisticated or have all the flash gear, but they know how to outsmart a fish. All you have to do is watch for a moment and you’ll see it.

He squatted at the edge of the effluence and watched for another swirl. He was poised as for bonefish, sculpin in his left hand, the fly line’s head out of the rod tip, ready for a quick hauling roll and shoot. That’s all the room he had, anyway. Troy looked like a heron, stoically waiting.

And waiting. I began to wonder if the swirl I’d seen was an illusion. If it was the exotic effect of toxic fumes finding their way through my un-vapor-rubbed nose and penetrating deep into my brain. But just as I’d decided that this was all insanity, there was a ripple at the edge of our visibility and Troy took his shot.

The huge streamer landed, with a splat, just out of lamp range and a foot to the left of the disturbance. Troy gave it an immediate pop strip and then paused. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing, until some nearby trash bobbed, ever so subtly. Troy twitched his rod tip with an equivalent genteelness.

All hell broke loose.

Trash and dark water exploded. Troy gave a mighty strip-set and his reel started screaming; reverberating eerily in the small concrete space. Fly line flew out like it was tied to a Ferrari. Forty, fifty, sixty feet. Beyond the bounds of our small dark enclosure. The beast, in his madness, had gone down an outflow and kept right on going.

In an instant he was into the backing and, without hesitation, Troy did what any good fisherman would do. He followed. He pointing his rod after the fleeing prey, ducked his head, and ran splashing through trash down the rabbit hole. In a wink he was gone.

It took my heart a moment to stop pounding and my brain a bit longer to sort out what had happened. But when it all went quiet I found myself alone in the dark, listening as Troy’s awkward footfalls echoed softly into the indeterminate distance. And when I finally started breathing again there was only the sound of lapping water and floating garbage rubbing against the sides of the cistern.

I called, but heard no response beyond my own echoes. I waited.

Time looses its hold when it’s deep under ground. In the dark, the seconds and minutes get lost, turn back on themselves, and wander helplessly about. I waited ten minutes, or three hours, it might have been either.

Troy didn’t return.

I needed to move, to find my friend, to get the hell out of there. I needed to locate somebody who could help. I tried to retrace our steps but in the vast drainage maze my sense of direction came undone. Always go up, I eventually decided, and followed anything with a positive pitch until I began to hear the sound of tires on pavement and saw pencils of light that, as I got closer, illuminated another wrought iron ladder. It led up, thank you God, to a manhole; a manhole that emerged on the sidewalk of Salisbury Street, downtown Raleigh, two miles from the hair salons.

I pushed open the cover and crawled out to the pavement as onlookers stared. Ignoring them, I pulled out and unwrapped from its plastic baggie my cell phone, intending to call 911. As it searched for a network I wondered what to say. They’d think I was crazy and, given what we’d been doing, they were probably right. The connection happened quickly, there in the heart of the city, but before I called Emergency and made a fool of myself, I threw a Hail Mary. I called Troy. No answer. More desperate, I texted.

Where are you?

To my surprise and great relief, the “typing” icon immediately popped up. He was safe! He was responsive! A rush of questions flooded my brain. Did he land the beast? What was the damn thing? Did he get a picture? Was he back at the trucks and could he come here to get me?

But the joy was sort-lived. The typing stopped and the message was delivered.

him gone u come bak bring mor meeet

Photo Credits: I wish I could claim these images. Instead, I enlisted my good friend, the uber-talented Thomas Harvey, to help me create something unusual. What he came up with simply blows me away. Thanks, bud. This stuff is badass.

Oh. And happy April 1st.

Dew Buggers

If you've been around here for a while, you've come to know three things about me.

First, while I love to chase trout, I hate fishing nymphs. I’m an unapologetic, can’t stand still, gun and run streamer fisherman, period, and at times it’s put a serious crimp in my catch rate. That is, it used to. This recent swing in fishing fortune leads me to the second thing…

... I’m a Mt. Dew addict. While you probably wake up each morning and head for the coffee pot, I get out of bed and stumble downstairs to the basement fridge for some green lightning. It’s often what gets me from under the covers, thinking about how good that first slug will taste. It’s a sad thing to admit, but I’m hooked just as firmly as if by nicotine or hard drugs.

So how does my trout catch rate lead to Mt. Dew in a single step?

Late in the Fall of 2012 I visited my nemesis, The Smith, in southern Virginia. The river has kicked my ass again and again over the past decade, keeping a stingy hold on its numerous, but finicky, brown trout. Regardless, I keep going back. Stubborn, I guess, both the river and I.

That particular day, like most every other, I parked at the old mirror plant, dropped the tailgate, and rigged my gear. Ready to slip into my waders, I turned and hopped to a seat, clumsily knocking over the ubiquitous open soda bottle, dumping pop all over my boots and small, open Cliff Days Worth box of woolly buggers, soaking everything completely and cruelly wasting half-a-bottle of my green liquid crutch.

The boots would be fine but the flies were a mess. A quick shake was the best I could do, for that moment, so I closed the box, stuck it in a vest pocket, intending to rinse the whole shooting match once I got to the water. I forgot the cleanup, of course, once I stepped into the flow, intent only on catching that first trout. It didn’t happen right away, goddam Smith.

After an hour of frustration and a few changes of flies, I remembered the buggers. They were a sticky mess, as you can imagine, but I pried a mid-sized olive from the tacky blue foam and tied it on. First swing, the skunk was off as a nice twelve-incher came to hand. Second swing, another brown. And so on throughout the day.

The light bulb came on. A Eureka moment ensued.

To make a long story short (you’re welcome), after a lot of trial and error, Mt. Dew-soaked olive woollies have become my go-to trout candy; #8s with a lead wire underwrap and a bright red gill finish at the hook’s eye. “Untreated” olives don’t cut it. Similarly treated blacks or browns or whites don’t work. Saturated olives get attention.

I have a handful of theories as to why this works, but can prove none of them. Perhaps the brominated vegetable oil (BVO) that keeps that soda’s coloration so perfectly suspended (and causes most of the civilized world to ban this ingredient from human consumption) affects the viscosity or hydrological properties of the water around the fly in a manner that’s somehow appealing to fish. Maybe, because it only works with olive buggers, the eerie green solution generates a prismatic effect of some sort. Or it could be that, like me, the caffeine gets the trout’s motor running. I don’t know how, but it works. Consistently.

So now, before I head for the stream, I soak a handful of buggers in Mt. Dew (not diet or caffeine free – only the real stuff), then let them dry before putting them in my “sticky” Cliff box. I’ve even taken to carrying a small atomizing bottle of the soft drink to “re-energize” a fading streamer (or to take a quick, reviving sip myself). I’ve done it quietly, though. My fishing buddies don’t know what my edge has been.

Now I don’t want to get into a protracted ethical discussion about doctoring flies. The way I see it, if I’m willing to drink the stuff then it’s fair game to apply it to a streamer. It’s not like it's a scent or anything. Whatever the reason, it’s helped me tame that bloody Smith River and, as an amusing side effect, has my puzzled compatriots murmuring to themselves with great regularity.

Got a river kicking your ass? Give it a try.

But don't get hooked.


Note: Of course, the third thing that you have come to know about me by now is that I am not to be trusted on the 1st of April.

The Cure

Two days of Sudafed didn’t cure my vertigo.

My regular doctor had no opening for me this morning and I hate emergency rooms so I agreed to go to Mary’s doctor, who (how can I say this nicely?) I consider a bit of a flake. You know. “Holistic medicine.” At Duke University, no less. But I had to stop the world from wobbling and if it took crystals and magnets to get it done, so be it. I'd try anything.

I can hear the medical insurance claims processor laughing now.

The examination started out normally enough (as long as you discount the spinning of the room) with the asking of a few questions regarding the dizzying symptoms, the taking of blood pressures, and the shining of little lights into my nose, mouth, and ears. But as she pulled the otoscope from my right ear canal, she began to poke and pull on the lobe and outer ear.

“How’d you get that?” she asked, referring to the fresh puncture wound on the upper part of my ear.

-- o --

I guess I need to break away from the story, here, to make an embarrassing confession. With an upcoming fishing trip to Mexico, a friend suggested it would be a good idea to get some practice casting with big wind. We’ll be fishing the east coast of the Baja peninsula, into Bay of California surf, and when the fishing is good the wind comes out of the south/southeast, pushing a right-hander’s cast into his body. I needed to be ready for that.

So, last week, on a cool, blustery day, I carried the 9wt, an intermediate sink line, and a big chartreuse and pink clouser down to the pond, put my right shoulder into the wind, and practiced. I threw for about fifteen minutes before a perfectly timed gust imploded a lengthy backcast and stuck the heavy tuti-fruti streamer squarely into my right ear.

Thank God for barbless.

Stop laughing.

-- o --

“Interesting,” said the doctor, who then turned and pulled from a drawer a small case that, when opened, revealed a set of varying sized needles; wire thin to the size of a fat toothpick.

“How big was the hook?” she asked.

“Ummm… A 1/0, so, pretty big,” I responded uncertainly.

She nodded and pulled from the case the biggest, nastiest looking needle. She examined it closely. “About this diameter?”

“I guess so.”

She looked at me earnestly. “You see, the ears are chi crossroads and are the polar focal points on one of the body's prime energy meridians. They’re a pivotal tipping place and I believe that when you stuck that fly in your ear you blocked and interrupted the even flow of chi across that meridian, which, of course, includes your inner ear and brain. What you did with that errant fly was to apply some inadvertent acupuncture. To fix things we simply need to restore balance.”

And before I could fully grasp what that meant she grabbed my head and jammed that big honkin’ needle into my left ear at the same precise point at which the fly had skewered my right.

“What the HELL!” I screamed...

...and the room stopped spinning.

Stream Weaver: Living Art with Rod and Reed

I'm an author.

Do you have any idea how odd, and exhilarating, that statement feels? After eighteen months of ripping and tearing with editors, publishers, and my own personal demons, it’s finally a reality and I can spill the beans. I’m an author.

But that statement does not come without a price. To make the admission, I must now make another. I’m also a basket weaver.

While that might raise a few eyebrows, you should not be surprised. Fly fishing and basket weaving fit like reel in reel seat. Bamboo rod and natural weaving materials come from the same soil – the same earthy center – and their employment elicits the same emotional satisfactions.


They are a perfect compliment to a simple and creative existence – both the active and passive expressions of our connection to our natural surroundings and loftier ideals. Each is rhythmic. Each is subtle. Each is all-encompassing if we allow ourselves to be enveloped within the rudimentary, repetitive motions. The practices are elementary, but each carries within it profound implications that can reach deep into our souls and our lives, if we let them.

That's what Stream Weaver: Living Art with Rod and Reed is all about. The book is a series of essays and images that celebrate the intersection of stream and studio and natural living, some of which you might recognize from previous posts here on Mike’s Gone Fishin’, most of which are new views of life lived deep in the Carolina woods.

To my great surprise, the concept has resonated with everyone who has touched the project, from my new good friend Bob Clauser (who has a secret connection to the woven art, one that I won’t reveal here but that you will learn in his surprising Introduction), to Jeffery Long-Berger (who, honestly, could give a shit about fly fishing but is a weaving god and writes a darn good Forward), to the publisher, Natural Presses, who will print the book on 100% natural kudzu and wisteria fibers and who’s owner, Kevin Smallie, is a member of the 20/20 club – coaxing a 22 inch brown on a #20 BWO from the South Holston last November.

So here’s the pitch. We’re going straight to paperback (fly fisherman and basket weavers are both notoriously frugal, except when it comes to their “gear”), but Kevin thinks we can pre-produce a number of first edition hardbacks for special distribution - coffee table books, if you will - and is ramping up a short-run production process for them. These will be available, before the general publication of the paperback, to family and friends. You, dear readers, having put up with me here for more than three years now, are considered friends.

To sweeten the deal, the first ten pre-orders will also receive a very special gift. I started basket weaving shortly after I started fly fishing because I wanted a creel. I couldn’t bring myself to pay the crazy prices I encountered for them and, with a forest full of natural fibers sitting just outside my door, decided to weave one myself – and was hooked on the craft.

So the first ten friends will get one of my handmade creels. Be forewarned, however, that, as a strict catch and release fisherman, I will lash its top permanently closed so that it cannot be used to actually store fish. But it will definitely look “classic” on your hip. Or on your coffee table. Next to the book.

But here’s where reading Mike’s Gone Fishin’ finally pays off. If, when ordering, you type in the secret regular-reader’s code, you‘ll also receive your choice of a wide-brimmed faux Tilley hat, completing your classic look, or a genuine T.F.M. Comrade baseball cap, for those a bit more hip.

To pre-order your hardback edition of Stream Weaver: Living Art with Rod and Reed, a one-of-a-kind handmade creel by the author (I still get goose bumps when I type that word), and the hat of your choosing (all for a mere $29.99 - credit cards and PayPal happily accepted), go to The Outdoorsman's Bookshelf and type “April Fools” into the special offers box.

I’ll be glad that you did.

The End of the Road

It's a sad day here at Mike’s Gone Fishin’ for today I must say goodbye to you all.  With a heavy heart, and with great reluctance, I plan to pull the plug on the blog, effective immediately.  This will be my final post. I’m sorry.

When I retired, I thought that keeping a blog would be a fun thing to do, giving me a creative outlet while keeping me in touch with the I/T industry from which I’d departed.  I reasoned that a blog would also allow me to incorporate my rediscovered love of the long rod and share my adventures in the outdoors with whoever might be interested.

Catch and Release

I'm not quite sure what possessed me, but I decided to fish the Haw yesterday. Now, that may not seem all that surprising to many of you as it's something I do all the time, but usually not a couple of days after it's tickled flood stage. But spring fever has taken a hold on my soul and the forecast of a perfect North Carolina day in the mid-seventies dictated a walk to the river. And no walk to the river is complete without the 6wt. I told Mary I probably wouldn't fish because of the dicey conditions, but we both knew better.