photos, fly fishing, food, maps & cycling
After a nasty incident involving salt water and rust, I started using what I call a ‘working box’ of flies when I’m fishing. So, when I change flies, they don’t go back into the main box wet (or salty!).
Over a session, I might use the same fly several times as conditions change, so I find it a handy way of of organising things. At the end of the day, it’s nice to review what you did, and the decisions you made along the way.
If you fish in small streams (or even larger ones!), you’ll have hung a fly up on a backcast, or a missed strike. Sometimes, it’s just inconvenient, and the fly is within reach, but more often than not, all you can do is hopefully tug… shaking the branch with your 6x tippet, until something gives way; usually the tippet!
This little tool – simple and cheap to make, and super lightweight – can sit quietly in your bag/vest until needed (quite often, if you cast like I do!)
So, what is it? Basically a really light grappling hook. You put it on the tip of your rod, place the hook over a strategic branch, remove your rod (nice and safe!), and haul on the string until the fly is within reach. I rescue at least one or two flies per session on small streams – saves me so much frustration.
You’ll need: a 20cm length of standard garden poly pipe irrigation hose; a length of strong cord (I used brickie’s string); a large fish hook (point and barb removed); a small chunk of compressible foam (not pictured, but I used a bit of super cheap EVA mat).
Cut the ends of the hose on an angle, and cut two slots near the end on one side to thread the cord/hook through.
Cut the point of the hook right off with a pair of wire cutters, and file it flat so there’s no sharp edges.
Tie the string to the hook securely.
Thread the hook through the slots, so it sits out from the hose like a tiny gaff. This is a bit tricky, but you’ll get there!
Finally, stuff a little chunk of foam in the end near the hook – this is to stop your rod tip going all the way through.
And there you have it… a tool I’ve been using for at least five seasons now, and it’s saved me so many flies. I hope it finds a place in your vest!
This tool, photographs and overall concept are copyright © Andrew Harris. Personal use is free, and encouraged, but commercial use must be by express permission.
Used to love a nice bit of Tasmanian salmon. There was a time when it seemed a pretty solid, and sustainable choice. I also knew how to cook it, and it was bloody delicious.
And then, the problems started to surface. Pollutants in Macquarie Harbour, reports of fish in poor condition, question marks over the feed used. I stopped buying it around the same time as the ABC Four Corners episode Big Fish – not because of it, but it just confirmed my feelings.
Do I miss it? Absolutely! Every now and then I see someone eating it and remember just how great it was to cook with. Unfortunately, the controversy still rages, there have been fish kills, and a lack of agreement about the way back. Even goodfish.org says no.
Could its demise have been avoided? Maybe – we’ll never really know, but you could tell when its price was so low compared to other fish, that corners were being cut. And the popularity meant that supplying such a market would become unsustainable.
Flyfishers eagerly anticipate the warmer weather, when the fish are ‘looking up’, in search of insects on the water surface. We carefully apply floatant to our flies, and do our best to dry them in between ‘drownings’ in the mouth of a fish, or the swirl of a turbulent stream. Eventually, despite our best efforts, dry flies transition to anything but dry, and have to be retired.
Not sure why, but a little while back, I had a bit of an idea about this. In the bottom of our laundry cupboard are a few different treatments we apply to gloves, jackets etc. to keep them dry. They’re pretty good stuff. What would happen, I mused, if I treated my flies with this stuff before I even hit the water?
Here, for your amusement, is what I did, and how I tested it.
I mixed up a fairly strong solution of the waterproofing liquid (about a teaspoon to a cup of water), and soaked the flies for 10 minutes.
I dried them on paper towel in the sun, but these solutions recommend using a tumble dryer to ‘heat cure’ the treatment, so I put them in a 50° oven for 10 minutes. I just felt like that was a fair equivalent.
After drying, it was time to do a test. I’d kept an untreated one out as a control, and I put the two flies in a dish of water, and waited!
Actually, I waited quite a while. They were both bobbing around like corks for at least an hour! Eventually, though, it was clear the untreated one was slowly losing the battle. It wasn’t obvious from above the water, but from the side I could see that its whole body was under, with only the tip of the wing keeping it afloat.
The treated fly, on the other hand, still had most of its hackle above the surface, with the body only just sitting through the surface.
Even more telling was a close look at the flies themselves. After a shake – like you’d do to try giving a fly a quick dry out – the floss body of the treated fly was several shades lighter than the other, and looked dry, while the untreated fly looked waterlogged.
So, there you have it. Not very scientific, but I felt it was conclusive enough that I went on to treat everything in my box that I wanted to float. I’m hoping this summer I’ll spend more time fishing dry flies than I will applying treatments and trying to get them to stay afloat!
For a change of scenery, today I had a run at Woodlands Historic Park. While exploring an alternate path, I stepped over a fence, and somehow my QuadLock belt clip let go, and I dropped my phone. Didn’t realise until I’d driven back home to Brunswick. So began a stressful day. 10:50am.
At home, I used Find my iPhone to locate it, and this is when I realised what had happened. It was exactly where I’d stepped through the fence. I took another phone with me so I could call and hear the ringtone, and my mountain bike, because my legs were trashed from the run! Walked back and forth over the area, calling repeatedly over a period of about 10 minutes. I then realised I could send an alert sound to it via Find my iPhone. No sound. It clearly was no longer where I’d dropped it. Sent another alert, but this one didn’t get through. Tried calling again – straight to message bank – the phone had stopped responding. 11:50am.
Really disappointed, now, I headed home again. Looked up Find my iPhone again, and was surprised to find it had moved 7.2km to Australia GSM World, Dargie Court, Dallas. That looked mighty suspicious! I mean, they even list iPhone unlocking as one of their services! Not the same ‘unlocking’ as taking control of a phone, but if someone didn’t know, they might have tried the shop. I decided to ring them. The person who answered the phone seemed evasive, but ultimately claimed to have no knowledge of the phone. At this stage, I didn’t realise that the phone icon had changed – a black screen indicates that the phone is off or not connected. Still, what could I do? 12:44pm.
Giving up hope now, decided to report it to the Police, after all, the phone shop had to be involved in some way, even if it was only to tell someone “no, we can’t unlock that phone”. So, I’m on the phone to the very lovely person on the Police Help Line, when Find my iPhone reported a new position! This was very strange – the phone was now back at Woodlands, but at the homestead carpark. I thought this was promising – maybe someone was handing it in. I thanked the person on the Police Help Line, and tried, several times, to call the Woodlands Homestead number – nothing. I would have been surprised if it had been open, but it was worth a try. 1:07pm.
Resigned to losing my phone, had a shower, and some lunch. Returned to my computer and Find my iPhone, to once again be astonished by another reported location. Dimboola Road, Broadmeadows – right outside the Town Hall, and more importantly, opposite the Broadmeadows Police Station! I gave it a minute or two to be sure, before ringing the station. Sadly, no – “no-one has handed in an iPhone, but I’ll take some details” – then, while I was still on the call – “oh wait, someone’s just handing one in now!”. A Council worker handed in the phone. 1:31pm.
Yet another drive out into the northern wilderness, but this time with a happier destination. The lovely policewoman I’d spoken to earlier reunited me with my phone. One last surprise, though… the SIM had been removed!
So, those are the facts, but they raise so many questions! What happened at Australia GSM World? Who took the phone back to Woodlands, and why? When was the SIM removed? Did the phone keep reporting position without it?
The answer to the last question is quite astonishing. Apparently, it can! Once a device has been marked as lost, it will snitch to any other Apple device it can find, and continue to report its location. I am so impressed, and grateful!
Love this extremely low effort phishing attempt, I don’t even think they deserve marks for trying – because they didn’t!
Checking in is now mandatory at all shops and venues in Victoria. A lot of people still don’t check in, though. Why?
It’s framed as a compliance problem, but I’m absolutely convinced it’s also a user experience problem, and that a simpler, more robust process, would lead to higher checkin rates. I’ve watched people attempting to scan, and failing at rates of greater than 50% – they are trying to comply, but it’s just too hard.
It’s common now to find yourself standing in a queue to check in – many businesses only have one poster up to scan, so for a variety of reasons, only one person at a time can check in. It should not take so long, and there are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, the Services Victoria app is just slow. I don’t have an brand new phone, but it’s not that old either – still, this app is by far the slowest to load to ready (25 seconds!) of any app I have. This is less of a problem now that the app can be correctly triggered from the camera, but even that didn’t work properly until more recent versions of the app, causing a lot of people to just stop using it.
Second, the codes are very complex. QR codes work best when the string of text is short. These ones, however, encode a monstrous 215 character URL! Here’s one I used today…
Why is this a problem? More characters means more dots in the QR code. More dots means smaller dots, that are harder for cameras to interpret reliably. Add to this, that most are situated in less than perfect lighting, and laminated, so that reflections cause problems as well. You have to be right in front of the poster, cut down reflections, wait for the camera to focus… it’s a perfect storm, really – especially for the sort of cheaper, low powered phones that many older people choose.
Infuriating, because there’s an easy fix – shorten the URL! The two QR codes below do exactly the same thing, but the one on the right has been shortened using bitly (not advocating bitly, just an example!). The result is a far easier code for a phone to read. Use matt lamination sleeves and you’ve solved most of the technical problems.
Blows my mind, really, because on the posters below the QR code, they have an alternate 6 character location code. If they can do it in 6 characters, why do they use 165?
Why use an app at all? If a six character code can be used, why not just use SMS? Phones are pretty good at that stuff! I suppose there’s the problem where a percentage of people have caller ID turned off, but I’d suspect that’s a smaller proportion of people than we have just giving up now.
Of course, the biggest question is, why did Victoria have to develop their own app? Check-in should have been a feature of the Covid Safe app from day 1, feeding into a single, centralised system. The bonus would be people opening the app on a regular basis, instead of it sitting idle, forgotten, and useless on their phones. Just another failure of the federal government to seize leadership when it needed to.
I can’t see the QR code thing going away in a hurry. I really hope they fix it.
Does anyone else do this? Probably not. The material is very hard to source, the commercial product is not expensive, and most good quality flylines have welded loops already. So why do I do it? I have no idea, but here’s how…
You’re going to need some braided material. I have some Gudebrod. I don’t think they make it any more. It’s too heavy for all my flylines, but it works ok for #8+
It came with a super tricky little hook tool, but I prefer a stout darning needle.
I cut about 24cm. That gives me 8cm of double, and 8cm to attach the flyline.
Fold the line to create an 8cm double.
Insert the needle near the loop and exit about half way/4cm. along the short end.
Thread the tip of the long end through your needle and draw it through with the needle. So now your short end is about 4cm and the long one about 12 cm.
Now, repeat with the short end, drawing it though the long one, and exiting after about 4cm.
If you get the lengths right, the short end will draw up inside the long one, with no cutting required. The long end is now 8cm or so, and ready for you to feed in your flyline.
I like to add a little whip finish with some rod building silk (mine’s also Gudebrod!), and varnish with some UV resin. I also soak a little bit of super glue into the area where the flyline meets the enclosed braid end.
Neat as a pin, eh?
Lockdown V2 allows fishing, as long as you stay within the locked down area, and stick to your nearest practical water.
I blended the locked down Local Government Areas, with a list of waters that have been stocked by Fisheries to create a quick reference map. It’s pretty up to date, too!
Between my father and I, there’s a lot of memories sitting in shoeboxes around the house. They’re not all great photos, but there are some great memories. Scanning them is slow, and when my scanner died recently, I almost gave up. Almost! 😉
This is a clip on macro lens from Struman Optics. It fits on any phone/tablet and produces a reasonable quality image. Most importantly, the macro is only 2.8x magnification. This means the captured area is around the size of a 35mm negative.
I cut a foam block to hold my phone just the right distance (25mm) from the negative.
I used a lightbox I’d already fashioned out of a plastic bucket, and some USB powered LED strip lights… (yes, we’re seriously low budget here!).
The negative carrier is from my old, dead epson scanner, but I don’t think it’d be too hard to fashion one out of card.
Now, here’s one of the fun bits.
On an iPhone, in Settings > Accessibility > Accessiblity Shortcuts … you can set a shortcut to invert colours on the screen. I use a triple click of the home button.
So, when I feed a negative strip through, I can get a reasonable preview of what the image is before capture.
This is important, because… well, TBH, there’s a lot of boring photos!
With iCloud photos, in a very short time, the images are available in the Photos app on my computer. I rotate and flip them before handing them off to Photoshop for the next step.
Invert the image, then head to Curves, and the advanced Options. Using Enhance Per Channel Contrast will get you 95% there most of the time. Save it as the default, and you’re ready to churn through them.
Save and close, and they’re back in Photos and ready for any tagging and fine tuning.
Samples – links open in a new tab:
So, with the COVID-19 virus keeping us all tucked up at home, everyone is moving their activities online. Videoconferencing for the masses – pilates, music, comedy, and … fly-tying!
Yes, I know it’s niche, but it’s a way of keeping social networks going, and keeping fisherpeople sane through these long, dreary days! Running a fly-tying demonstration online, though, comes with some special problems.
Here are my solutions to the problems.
Videoconferencing isn’t that hard, and there are a few companies who’ve had enormous growth with our enforced ‘social distancing’. Zoom is the obvious example. You can use it for free – you don’t even need an account to join a meeting. There are a couple of problems, though; Free users can only run time limited meetings, there are many options that new users will find confusing, and with all the extra publicity, there’s a few security issues being highlighted.
Zoom is still good, but from what I’ve seen so far, Jitsi is better. It’s so simple, it’s hard to see how anyone could have problems with it. It’s 100% free, Open Source – so there’s scrutiny of the code. It just works. So, sure, use zoom if you want – it’s fine, but maybe try Jitsi first.
Fly tying is fine, detailed work. If you can’t get a good image, nobody is going to know what’s going on. The problem is that automatic focussing cameras (eg: phones), focus on the most ‘interesting’ thing they can see. They look for edges, and try to resolve them to remove blur. If there’s anything in the frame other than the fly, the camera is going to focus on the largest thing it can see – you, for example! Not good.
This is how I set up for video of my vice. An LED task light directly above the vice, to avoid annoying shadows and reflections. My phone sitting on a mount (I used a lump of foam) about 15cm in front of my vice, and another 15cm behind, a backdrop of neutral grey paper or cardboard, large enough, that it fills the background of the camera view.
That’s it. Because your vice is the only ‘interesting’ thing the camera can see, it will focus on that. My iPhone would actually go quite a bit closer, but that would make it hard to tie. Still, adjust the distances to suit, the principles are the same.
The quality of the video is quite impressive.
Whichever platform you use, anything can, and will, go wrong in a live demo. If you want to really do this properly, pre-record your video. Even edit and trim out the clumsy bits if you can be bothered.
Now, run the video in a video player application, and use screen sharing to present it to your meeting. Zoom and Jitsi both allow you to share a specific application window, so you only share the video itself, not your whole distracting desktop. You can talk along with the video – replay bits that people want to see again. It all goes so much more smoothly.
Even better, it’s all run from one device, so you’re not running two meetings through your internet connection at once – less bandwidth, more speed.
Maybe I left it by a lake or a river somewhere – it’s been a year at least, and I’ve been looking everywhere for it, but can’t seem to get it back!
Last weekend was a classic example. I fished the Goulburn and a couple of smaller streams nearby. While everyone is talking about hopper feeders, and posting pics of speckled twigwater gold, I fished pretty solidly for three days – saw maybe two rises the whole time. Caught three fish – the largest was still in the small category.
I don’t think I’m a bad fisherman, I’ve had enough success over the years. I’m a pretty good spotter and most times if I see a fish, I’ll be able to get an eat. I’m just not seeing them. Where I am, they ain’t!
By the third morning, the rain, and plenty of self doubt had rolled in. I didn’t even plan to fish that morning, but you know how it is – just a quick look at this corner… well, it looked pretty good, so I fished!
Within a half hour I’d seen, and got an animated response from a decent brown. It failed to commit though, I suspect my nymph was a bit flashy in that clear water, but by the time I’d switched to a duller model, he’d moved on.
Another 20 minutes, and I was hooked up to another good brown. Not sure what happened there. He was off like a rocket, but maybe the hook didn’t set well, we were only connected for a few seconds. Still, things were looking up. A little while later, and I was tired. Nearly packed it in, but a bit of a breather and a drink, and I decided I’d give it another half hour.
Well, it was one of those moments. You realise that there’s a fish within a rod length, and you see it so clearly you can count the scales between its eyes. It was a long way between those eyes… this was a big rainbow, and it was looking right at me. Fortunately, I stayed still enough that it just turned around and continued on its beat. Now too deep to see, but I took a punt and flicked the nymph up about 5 metres to let it drift back. The indicator stopped.
A 4 weight glass rod doesn’t offer a lot of resistance, so this fish went straight down and buried itself under a log. I could still feel the powerful throbbing of the fish, but it wasn’t going anywhere. After about 15 seconds, it seemed to have had enough, because it tore through the surface, twisting and cartwheeling at what seemed like eye level – nearly reaching the overhanging trees – it spat the hook.
Was I upset? Not at all – I was a giggling wreck! I don’t know what the fish would have weighed, but the rod was never going to give me much control. I was just amazed and delighted to have made the acquaintance with this fish!
When I got my wits together and looked at the fly, it told the story. I was just totally undergunned.
Funny business, fishing. I’m not going to say I’ve got my mojo back, but maybe I know where I can find it!