yes you can. two of the best places to fish are at the farad and floriston exits. fish hard behind and around the big rocks for big fish. both are california. hard fishing though.

if in reno go at night and cast in the runs under the bridges in town. big browns are there.
ive caught many.

I took the Floriston exit and fished upstream and downstream of the easternmost bridge. I hooked and lost a couple of fish, one on a big, ugly, black stonefly nymph, and one on an orange stimulator. Both were small. I also missed another small strike on the stimulator.

then the rafters showed up

One of the rafting guides told me to go up to this dirt road in Hirschdale, but I didn't have time...maybe next trip. I did google "truckee river" and "hirschdale" and read some entertaining stories about huge stonefly hatches going on and not being able to catch anything - sounds right up my alley!

its good at hirshdale also. the whole river in cal. is good as not many californians live close by so the reno people dont fish it cause they have to buy a cal license.

its a river that takes time to learn. like i said big flies behind the big rocks is where the biggest fish are. but all the good looking water has promise.

been tying some more flies--just some light baitfish patterns for the river. most of these are on #1 or 1/0 hooks. i bought a white fox tail and that stuff is awesome. all the tails in the white flies below are tied w/ that fox hair. stuff is really nice and a lot of movement in the water. a lot of ppl are using finnish racoon lately too which i think is pretty similar. mono eyes on those flies as well. been catching some snook lately which is nice, and caught a nice keeper flounder on the fly last week.

Ran up to the Truckee River at Hirschdale...



Fished in the afternoon/evening, and didn't even see a fish jump, much less get a strike.

I tried a variety of nymphs with/without indicator, and some prospecting dries - nada.

Pretty funny, I figured there would be an October Caddis hatch like the Merced River, and sure enough...



...they kept landing on me, but there was no surface activity, like at all.

this time of year weighted nymphs on the bottom. or very early morning or at dusk big streamers or woolybugger type flies for the large browns in the deeper holes and outside bends that have more water..

this is one of the most beautiful spots to fish in a perfect river. but not always easy to catch something.

I was just about to say - if I'm gonna get skunked, I wanna get skunked in a place that looks like that. The High Sierras can be painfully beautiful.

Regards, Lee

that is just 20 minutes outside reno on hiway 80

As mentioned a while back, I've got an old Fenwick fs85:



I love this rod, but there is some pretty heavy grooving in the tip top and the last couple of guides.

- Replace guides? If so, use modern guides or metal?
- Hang it on the wall?
- Change line more often?

The wrapping is just beautiful, and I wouldn't want someone to screw it up, but I'd still like to use it if possible.

nice old spinning rod great for steelhead. change out the guides for whatever. the collector value is only about 75 bucks, so might as well use it hard if you like it.

if you take it somewhere that actually builds rods they will have no problem replacing the guides with something that looks similar and can def match whatever the thread color/pattern is. or you could hang it on the wall and buy yourself a new one that's prob what i would do.

as an aside, i built my first rod a couple months ago. it was pretty fun and i was surprised at how well it turned out. i bought a cork and then built it into a split grip (since that's what all the cool kids are doing these days) just cutting it and then sanding the edges down. really happy with it (altho the blank is crap) and have actually tugged on a few fish with it as well.







my gf catching a nice jack..you can tell the rod has a weeee bit of flex haha

victory!

Bumping for software upgrade

Argh, man, that Truckee River is tough. Hit Hirschdale on Sunday and the Glenshire area today...nada. The only fish I saw was when I was fishing a beadhead prince under an indicator and what looked like a pretty nice fish came up and batted the indicator before swimming off. Kind of a piscine FU...

yea truckee is tough. need to fish at dark or just at first light for the browns. or when there is a hatch. the fish hold in the tight holding water behind rocks and you have to work for them. but the good fish are big.

there are some excellent lakes for big fish if you learn to fish them right. fordyce res. up above truckee is fantastic as well as boca res. but you need something that floats you.
there are also a couple of small lakes that have big fish. big browns under the bridges in reno

tl;dr i know but...

went to Grand Key, Bahamas two weeks ago with my dad mostly on an offshore/bottom fishing trip but we brought a stand-up paddleboard along and at the end of the day my buddy and i paddled over to some flats and it was just really amazing. first time i had fished for bones there and it was just really impressive. fish were wayyyyyyy bigger than normal bahamas bones. smallest fish i saw the whole time was prob 5 pounds and saw the 2 biggest bones i've ever seen. one of them looked like it was 3 ft long underwater it was crazy...my buddy took a shot at that one and spooked it.

i had really good luck though, esp with the conditions. we basically fished from 6-8pm with crappy light and a lot of wind (15kts+ every night) but i managed to catch a bonefish 3/4 nights. two of them were personal bests too.

the first one i would estimate at around 7lbs (and more or less confirmed with the length/weight conversion table). saw this fish as we were getting ready to quit for the night as light had all but disappeared. my buddy spotted a shape in the sand about 30ft away and (because i just got a new rod--sage txc 7wt ) was just making a few false casts to see how it felt so i was prepared. first cast didn't do anything, fish kept swimming to my left and farther away. luckily this was kind of crosswind and i am left-handed so it was still right in my range. picked up, made a 2nd cast, but it wasn't great and fish turned again so kind of out of range. immediately picked up and made a great cast about 50ft crosswind, leading the fish by a few feet and it was right on the edge of my vision too so at this point i couldn't tell anything whether the fish was following it or not. strip, strip, strip, pause, strip, pause, strip, i kind of relax like "not happening", strip, BAM! line sings off, fish heads into the channel, get the fly line back and a 5-6 ft bull shark comes out of nowhere flying after the bonefish onto the flat. i go slack on the line to let the fish swim, and it basically swims right at me, i frantically try and recover the line to get back tight and do with the hook still in. the bone then stayed in the skinny water and we rounded it up about 2 or 3 minutes later. this was the first night after running across from FL and was a great way to start the trip as well as being a personal best bonefish!




the 2nd night was the only night we struck out. we had two good opportunities but my buddy just couldn't capitalize and we were really short on time, prob only had 40 min of sorta light.

the 3rd night we came over after a loooooooong day of trolling in 5-7 ft seas, getting our ass kicked and not catching **** (missed 2 really good blue marlin bites like a n00b), as well as basically breaking the paddleboard i had borrowed coming off on of the waves. we patch the board up and head over to the flat for some incredibly therapeutic bonefishing. this was def the night we saw the most fish. i am not sure how many "shots" we had but we easily saw over 30 bones all of which were 5lbs+. really early into the wade i made one of the best casts of my life, about 45ft directly into a 20kt wind and had a bonefish eat and just didn't get a hook set and it came off within 40 ft of its initial run. after that, i was mostly hanging back and letting my buddy take the shots since he had never caught one before. we get to sort of the end point of the flat and i was hanging back about 50 ft from my friend who was casting at a group of 3-4 fish that were tailing hard right on the edge where the sand meets the grass.

i turn around and see a big bone working hard literally maybe 15 ft right behind me. i am like fk how do i not scare this thing. so i make a crappy little roll cast at it and it sort of half-spooks. it makes one kick with the tail, does like a semi-circle away and then slows down. i wait a couple seconds and it starts feeding back upcurrent and is now about 40 ft away from me. i wait until i have a good down-crosswing angle and make a nice cast just a couple feet in front of him. make like 1 or two strips and the fish totally reorients, starts tracking the fly hard, nose down, and like one strip later fish was onnnnnnn. it was such a sick bite to watch, truly incredible. this fish then proceeded to haul assssss went immediately across the flat and into the deep water. and just did. not. stop. i have 225 yards of backing on that fly reel and he was easily more than halfway into it. i really did not think i had a chance at landing it, especially after having seen the bull shark 2 nights before. there was also a huge rock in the far side of the channel that he was headed straight for and i really thought i was going to lose it with only 12lb tippet. somehow, i manage to keep gaining line and get the fish back onto the flat and after about 15 minutes i had the fly line on the reel again. after another 6 or 7 minutes my buddy scooped him up and i had a new personal best. i think this one was about 8.5-9lbs based on feel/relative to the other one and length/weight conversion tables.

(huge props to the iphone camera)


i'll keep the TR shorter here on the last one. the last night was def the most relaxed night of bonefishing. we had had a killer day on the reef, caught a gazillion snapper and grouper, and managed to avoid the real sketchy weather. we cruised over on the paddle again and began looking. wasn't nearly as active as the day before and our lighting was even worse. we spooked more fish than we had shots at and the wind was really really howling (gusts to 25kts prob). my buddy brought a spinning rod and i mostly was just following along. this was the night we saw the monster fish that just spooked when he tossed the jig in. anyways, after seeing prob 6 or 8 bones and not catching one we decide to start walking back. after a minute or so we are walking, and hear a fish spook just a few feet in front of us. we are like "damn" but then i look around and see 3 fish, staggered slightly, feeding right into the current. they are about 50 ft down/crosswind and i quickly untangle my fly line, take one backcast, and shoot a cast right in front of them. fish tracks on it real hard, immediately, and i have another one on. was def the smallest of the trip but so fun to catch. i had such a ridiculous sense of fulfillment fighting it on the last few minutes on the last night of my trip. hard for me to think of any fish i'd rather catch on fly.

nice going, yes they are about the most fun fish on any light rod to catch.

Awesome. I'll likely never wander out on the flats, though I've read everywhere that that is one of the great fly fishing experiences.

it isnt easy fishing in most places. the fish are hard to see. he seems not to wear polarized glasses sometimes. i dont know how he can see the fish without them.

plus they are real spooky and not easy to get close to. at least where i have fished for them. but when you catch one, wow.

it is absolutely one of the most fun ways to fish. it can be difficult and frustrating at times but it's very rewarding when it works out. you don't need to be able to cast super long distances, but u need to be able to cast accurately 40-60ft with wind (not necc into it, bc u can usually position yourself) whether it's cross upwind or downwing etc. and u need to be able to double haul to really throw effectively in those conditions
yea i almost always wear glasses, that one pic with no glasses though it was a little past 8pm and i managed to just see the shadows and surface disturbance against a white sand bottom. ime, you can get much closer wading than you can in a boat. as far as seeing them, it all depends. if u are fishing in 3ft of water with turtle grass or marl bottom, they can be damn hard to see. otoh, if u are wading in 7inches with a sand bottom they are pretty hard to miss. and all in between of course.

Monday-Truckee, skunk-o-rama, though I saw more fish than last time. I also missed a solid strike on a beadhead copper john under an indicator in the evening.

Tuesday-West Carson, determined to figure out this whole nymphing thing, I found myself upstream of the 88 bridge and landed/released three small cutthroats (I guess Alpine county has been planting these along with the rainbows) on an unweighted pheasant tail. Easily missed a dozen other strikes, though...it's tricky, and I almost certainly needed to get in the water in this situation as a good number of missed strikes had to be due to having too much line out.

Monday I was also, not necessarily admonished, but "excuse me"'d because I had the gall not to notice that a small child had walked to the river bank downstream and behind where I was casting. The mother was pretty much telling me to watch where my backcast was going because I might hook the kid (not telling the kid not to get too close to me, or, I don't know, WALK RIGHT UP TO THE BANK OF A BIG RIVER?) People, man...

Any of you guys fish in the NE, specifically upstate NY? I am going to business school next month going to have to learn how to trout fish, don't know a damn thing about it.

grew up fishing there. good fishing for smaller fish. Adirondacks are acid rain ruined.

lower down great fishing in famous rivers like esopus, beaverkill, willowemac, neversink, lots of history. i fished as a kid with a few of the old time greats.

otherwise nowadays they have a fantastic salmon and stealhead type of fisheries in the great lakes. giant fish to be had fly fishing combat style in clear rivers.

alright, yea i remember driving over willewemoc i will have to look up the others. ya kind of hoping that there are some bigger fish of some variety in the finger lakes, or even if i drive up to the great lakes.

you will get giant fish that run up the rivers in the spring and winter out of the big lakes.