Page 2 - Blog

Darren Wood tests LOC waders on Norway's Orkla River and decides whether the product is worth a $1,600 price tag or not.

Truth is, steelhead do take during the middle of the day, in bright sun, but you probably won’t raise one to the surface at that time. Instead, these fish find deep runs, slots, chutes, and plunge pools and hold close to bottom. You can also find summer steelhead holding in the shadows that ledge-rock provides . . . and you’ll find plenty of that shadowy ledge-rock on Idaho’s Clearwater River, Oregon’s Deschutes and North Umpqua rivers, and Washington’s Klickitat, among others.

Doomscrolling on social media can diminish our own experiences, but only if we allow it to. Take time, at least every once in a while, to consider how fortunate each of us has been in our angling careers.

When the weather heats up and it gets too hot for trout, anglers begin searching for warm water species such as the common carp. This is how you catch carp on a fly rod.

In fact, chances are they’ll ask if you are in possession of any bananas before you board their vessel. If you are, they will end up in the water or on the dock. The bananas will not come on board. They all have stories to back up why bananas on fishing boats or fishing trips are taboo. I’ve got lots of them myself.

Whatever you call them, blue-winged olives are an important part of a fly fisher’s yearly playbook.

I believe that if you really care about your favorite water way that keeping it a secret is not going to protect it for very long. In fact, I believe that when many anglers try to keep a river a secret it actually becomes more desirable to try to get to.

If you haven’t read the book Trout Flies by Gary LaFontaine, “You betta ask somebody.” I recently purchased a new copy of this book off eBay (new to me) actually signed by LaFontaine. It’s signed, “For effective flies -Gary LaFontaine.”

In high school I was a pretty poor fisherman, I certainly didn’t realize it at the time, but I was bad. There was a whole crew of us, and we were all bad at it. Relatively bad, as in we were probably better than most our peers, but we just didn’t know what "better than what we were" should look like.