Ride Lugged

Grant Petersen’s Rivendell, originally uploaded by the_swami.

Click here for the full interview.

I’m not in the Rivendell Cult but I know that there are a few worshipers who read this blog.

I like the idea of the fly fishing question but I wasn’t impressed with Grant’s response. He should have said, I’d take you on the snake river in Idaho, we’d grab a drift boat with a bike rack on the front, float a few miles drinking some brews then we’d drop some woolly buggers over the side of the boat, drink some more brews. If we didn’t catch anything then we could start dropping M80’s over the side until the fish start floating to the surface.

You and I both like to flyfish, and we both ride bikes. If you could take me on a bicycle-flyfishing trip, or a flyfishing-bicycle trip, where would go, and what flies would we bring?

If it’s any trout stream in America with a good food supply and therefore a healthy population of trout between 12″ and up to maybe 24″, and the water is running clear and not too high, and it’s fairly wadeable (so, not too deep), we’d need four flies only. Three would be nymphy. A size 16 with a thin hare’s ear body ribbed with gold, a peacock herl thorax, and a brown partridge hackle, on the long side. Then the same kind of fly with a muskrat body, black herl thorax, and a starling hackle. Then a pheasant tail nymph, tied with copper wire twisted together with 2-3 fibers from a pheasant’s tail, but with a herl thorax, and no hackle. Then a size 18 elk hair caddis. Four flies makes you fish them right and not blame the fly, and maximizes the time you spend fishing, not tying on flies.