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The Drift
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| As spring approaches, I hope all of you fly tyers and fly buyers have filled your fly boxes with your confidence patterns and maybe some unfamiliar ones as well that perhaps popped up during a cold winter night when you decided to check out YouTube’s numerous fly-tying channels. As of this writing, the Kinni at River Falls is running at 114 ft3/s with minimal turbidity, and the Rush is running at near normal levels and is slightly off color. Brian at Lund’s Fly Shop reports that midge larva (emergers and dries), winter stone flies (nymphs and dries), small nymphs and scuds, and buggers and small leech patterns are good options to try. My main source tells me that the fish seem to be congregated in the deeper pools and the slower water just off the main flow. I want to thank everyone who continues to volunteer for the buckthorn and box elder removal downstream of the Steeple Drive bridge on the Kinni. Randy is hoping to clear this spot through the end of March. Our fundraising efforts for the auction were very successful. Thanks to all the auction donors for their art, vacation stays, guided trips, gift cards, gear, swag and other fun stuff. The net income for the online auction is $10,560, the 3×100 chance board is $4,820, our Hap Lutter Memorial Appeal as of February is $8,290, and a donation from Tattersall of $3,000 gives us a total is $26,670. WOW!!! I want to give a special thanks to the auction committee members: Greg Olson, Ken & Missie Hanson, Michele Bevis, Jeff Himes, Tom Schnadt, Ben Belt and Matt Janquart. The auction requires extensive planning and I am amazed how it all comes together and runs so smoothly. Kudos to you all! Winners of the 3×100 Chance Drawing: Sage rod (#19) Gary Horvath, Debra Kovats Cunningham painting (#68) Norling bamboo rod (#47) Ron Kuehn. Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who bought a ticket(s) for a chance on one of the items. Recently, I met with Kasey Yallaly (WDNR) and Amanda Little, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, to discuss the chapter’s sponsorship of a DNR internship program for students enrolled in Environmental Sciences at the University. A formal agreement between the DNR and Stout is currently being processed to create a DNR gift fund that will provide funding for a summer intern to help Kasey and her team with the many fisheries projects scheduled for this upcoming season. Kiap-Tu-Wish will be the donor source to the DNR fund. At the February board meeting, a motion was made and approved to fund up to $6,000 / year for a 3-year period. Any additional donations to the program from outside sources, grants etc., will be used to offset the direct cost to the chapter. Maintenance Committee Items: Rock for the South Fork of the Kinni project has been delivered at a cost $6,407, Needs for Plum Creek for grass seed/mulch: $6,000 A proposed mowing budget came in too high. The committee will review the proposal with the WDNR in order to revise the projected mowing costs. Kiap-TU-Wish board members who are up for re-election: Gary Horvath, Randy Arnold, Rainbow Barry, and Ben Belt. Please take some time and read their Bio’s below. Elections will take place at the chapter meeting on April 1st. Happy Spring, Suzanne |
Board Nominees
Randy Arnold Board Member / Volunteer Coordinator Randy was raised in Monticello, Minnesota, three blocks away from the Mississippi River. He usurped his father’s fly rod at 10 years old to pursue panfish in any of the lakes he could reach via bicycle.While working in technical theater in the Twin Cities, a coworker related stories of fly fishing in Montana; soon the two of them were exploring trout fishing options in the metro area. A visit to a local south Minneapolis fly shop steered them to western Wisconsin where Randy saw the chapter’s positive impact on the streams in and around River Falls. He joined the chapter and his now the passionate leader of the Kiap-TU-Wish volunteer workday crew. He enjoys fishing, but also enjoys the time spent working on stream restoration efforts. |
Ben Belt  Active TU member since 2016. Live on a small farmette in Arkansaw, WI with my wife Valerie and our three sons, Huxley (8), Sawyer (6), and Moby (5). I try not to give them all fly rods at the same time in the same boat. My passions include letting the boys be boys, guiding them in the right direction (fishing of course), and on occasion, finding time to soak a fly with a friend or two. Typically I focus on trout, musky, and bass. But very much opportunistic when a bite is on no matter the species. Time on the bench is limited but sometimes a necessity. I’m looking forward to meeting you all and encouraging our youth to participate and finding good mentors to keep the chapter and sport going strong. Thank you for your continued support within the chapter. |
Rainbow Barry  Board Member / Education Coordinator I initially learned to love water in the lake country of Oneida and Vilas County, Wisconsin. But after moving to River Falls in 2006, I became enamored with the Kinnickinnic and its tributaries. My husband persuaded me to stop looking under rocks and try fly fishing a few years back. Finding new pockets of trout in headwater streams is a wonderful addition to my natural wanderlust. Environmental education has driven my vocational pursuits. I have led ecological restoration parties at the UW-Madison Arboretum and studied aquatic ecology on the front range of the Colorado Rockies. More recently, I ran a small, organic CSA farm and I am now a Children’s House (Kindergarten) teacher at the River Falls Public Montessori Elementary. As an employee with the River Falls School District, I hope to expand on opportunities to educate and engage youth in our outstanding coldwater resource, especially children who would not otherwise have access to these experiences. I am also an enthusiastic participant in Kiap TU Wish’s on-stream work including restoration work days and water monitoring with the Wise H2O app. Looking forward to meeting and working alongside more of our dedicated and knowledgeable chapter members! |
Gary Horvath Treasurer Gary spent his most memorable times as a kid in the outdoors with his father wading wet as they fished the Jump, Yellow and Fischer Rivers near his grandmothers’ farm in Taylor County. He attended the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point where he received a B.S. in Water Resources/Chemistry. He was introduced to trout fishing in the streams of the central sands west of Point.He worked on his first stream improvement on the Little Plover River, which is currently ravaged by groundwater withdrawals. In 1985, he took a job as a chemist at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture analyzing groundwater for pesticide residues. Gary moved to River Falls and has been active with the chapter since 1989 serving in all officer positions including 5 years as President. |
Stream Highlight: Isabelle Creek
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| by Kasey Yallaly The Baldwin area DNR fisheries crew completed a watershed survey of the Isabelle Creek watershed in 2023. Watershed surveys are basically a comprehensive look at the fishery within the entire watershed and valuable information can be gained from these types of surveys including interactions between the mainstem of Isabelle Creek and its tributaries, areas of importance for natural reproduction, trout species composition throughout the watershed and size structure and densities of trout and non-game species. I have received many inquiries about Isabelle Creek after the large fish kill occurred in 2022 so hopefully this article will give folks a good update on how the stream is recovering. Isabelle Creek is little gem of a stream with its watershed sandwiched in between the Trimbelle and Rush River watersheds. The stream flows south from Ellsworth and enters Lake Pepin in the town of Bay City, WI. Most of the stream features high gradient limestone riffles and pools with the stream flowing through a picturesque valley like its neighboring streams in Pierce County. Access to the stream is mostly limited to bridge crossings, of which there are many, other than 2 DNR easements. The northernmost easement on Isabelle is located upstream of the Esdaile town park at the intersections of CTH EE and 620th Street. This easement is only on the east side of the stream from the town park up for a few hundred yards at which point it becomes easement on both banks. There is some nice water and trout within this reach of stream. The lowermost easement is located just outside of Bay City, and it can be accessed from STH 35. There is a distance between the highway and the easement that is not public access on the banks. Otherwise, there are many stream crossings off 620th Street and at CTH EE that provide great access. During the survey, brown trout were found at all stations that were sampled one year post fish kill. The 2 upstream-most stations were located within the area directly impacted by the fish kill and brown trout were found in low densities within this area, but evidence of limited natural reproduction was found. The uppermost station at CTH V revealed mostly yearling brown trout that were likely the result of the restoration stocking that occurred in the fall of 2022 after the kill. The fish kill did not impact the area downstream of the 4th bridge crossing (as you are moving downstream or south) off 620th Street and this was apparent in our surveys based on the status of the trout population. Brown trout densities within this reach of stream were high and fish were found up to 18 inches and natural reproduction was strong. Our trend site, which is located along CTH EE downstream of Esdaile, has documented a steady increase in brown trout densities for almost a decade. Stocking was also previously needed to supplement the fishery in the Class II section, but stocking ceased in 2018 in order to evaluate the fishery. Because of this increase in densities and natural reproduction within the mid and lower reaches of the stream, the current Class II portion of stream will be reclassified to Class I and the Current Class III section will become Class II during the next reclassification cycle. We will continue to monitor the recovery of the fishery within the impacted area in 2025 but barring no future fish kills, the fishery should continue to recover nicely. See you on the stream! |
Another Leader
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| By Mike Alwin There are billions and billions of trout fly patterns out there. You can walk into any fly shop on this continent and buy an Adams. And if you look long enough, you’ll probably find a pattern you’ve never heard of and never seen before. Buy one, it might work. If it doesn’t, there’s always that Adams to fall back on. If an Adams will work, why is there such a dizzying array of patterns? Now the cynic will tell you that if you publish a magazine article about the next big deal fly, you’ll make a few bucks on the article and gain yourself a slice of fame, but there’s more to it than that. There are two other factors involved. One is the inherent creativity of our species, and the other is our perceived need for an improvement. Bob Mitchell once said, “The reason you tie your own flies is because that way you get exactly what you want.” Tying your own flies is one of the adjustments you make to further your success on the trout stream. If you’re fishing a dry fly, there are two adjustments you can make: change flies and change the tippet. If you’re fishing nymphs there are three adjustments you can make: change flies, add or subtract weight, raise or lower the strike indicator. When I started trout fishing in the early 70’s, short of money, I bought one leader and a spool of tippet material. How do you think that worked out? Like everyone else I gradually added longer leaders and more spools of tippet material, trying to adjust. I also spent a lot of time at the kitchen table practicing knot tying. That skill came in handy when I bought a copy of JOE HUMPHREY’S TROUT TACTICS and became semi-obsessed with his leader formulas. He had leaders for dry flies, nymphs, streamers and wet flies, all of which were designed for various conditions. So, I bought a leader wallet and filled it with leaders for the specific situations I envisioned for myself. They all worked, but I got tired of retying the dry fly leaders. Now most people don’t carry around a dozen leaders like that. Most people buy a leader and shorten or lengthen it to fit the situation. One of my friends, nameless, said I was crazy; I prefer to think of myself as thoughtfully engaged. Tying your own leaders is one more adjustment you can make to further your success, but you don’t have to carry a leader wallet to make these adjustments. Several years ago, Gary Borger published an article about his latest leader design he called the Uni-Body Leader. I honestly don’t know why it took me a decade to screw around with it but two years ago I succumbed. Warning: it is unorthodox. Here is the formula. 48” — .020” 12” — .013” 48” — .010” I made only two modifications to this formula. I substituted 20 lb Amnesia for the butt section and I attached a tippet ring at the end of the .010” material. You can tie the entire Uni-Body with whatever nylon you like; I used the amnesia because I like its visibility. The tippet ring allows you to modify the tippet without chopping up the Uni-Body. To fish a nymph or streamer you can add just a foot or so of tippet material of the appropriate diameter. To fish a dry fly or swing a wet fly you can add a couple feet of your favorite tippet material. You might be bewildered like I was at the radical nature of this design, but it turns over well and serves almost any function you can imagine. |
Tying and Fishing the Goddard Caddis
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| by Jonathan Jacobs Until recently I had not much employed the dry/dropper technique. Rigging these setups is challenging and fishing them effectively is a skill I’ve been slow to develop. There are so many intriguing caddis emerger patterns out there, however, that it seemed prudent to figure out some way to use them. Trailing an emerger from twelve to eighteen inches behind a high-floating dry seemed worth a shot. The choice of an emergent pupa was easy; I wanted to try Charlie Craven’s Caddistrophic Caddis Pupa. Choosing the dry proved tougher. I settled on the Goddard caddis. It’s both buoyant and visible. I like to fish with flies I’ve tied, so I set about learning to tie it. The process proved daunting. I watched two YouTube videos, one by Tim Flagler and one by Charlie Craven., which proved invaluable and I strongly encourage you to watch both. Mr. Flagler produces fine instructional videos, but overall, I found Mr. Craven’s more helpful. Here are the tying instructions that I worked up for my own reference after gleaning all I could from the videos and tying several flies, followed by some additional musing: · Hook: 3769 Tiemco, size 14 (Heavy wire nymph hook used to withstand thread pressure) · Thread: Semperfli Nano Silk, 50D black body, 8/0 Uni olive for dubbing and to finish the fly · Body: Select cow elk from Blue Ribbon Flies · Hackle: Brown, preferably slightly undersized · Dubbing: Ice Dub olive brown Start the Nano Silk two eye lengths back of the hook eye. Wrap to above the hook barb, forward to the starting point and back to the hook barb. Apply a very small amount of cyanoacrylate glue where the thread is hanging. Bind down a cleaned, stacked and trimmed (hair tips removed bundle of cow elk with the tip ends forward. Hold the hair until glue sets. Carefully wind the thread forward through individual hairs. This will cause the hair to stand up. Center the working thread over the uncovered portion of the base thread. Use a half hitch tool to push the leading edge of the hair vertically and take a few wraps of thread at that point. Clean, stack and trim another bundle of elk hair. Center the thread on the bundle and use a spinning technique. Once the hair is secure, take a few half hitches while using a half hitch tool to keep hair out of the way. Cut the tying thread. Remove the hook from the vise and while holding the fly by the hook eye with pliers, briefly run it through the steam jet from a tea kettle. This will cause the hair to “spring,” making it easier to trim. Go through the arduous process of trimming the elk hair with a fresh double edged razor blade. Grasp the fly between thumb and finger to trim the tail to length, using the arc of the thumb as a guide. Place the hook back in the vise and start the Uni thread. Tie in a hackle with the quill stripped back about a quarter inch. Dub the head, finishing with the thread at the hook eye. The hackle should be dull side forward. Take a turn or two of hackle through the tip of the body and then make tight turns through the dubbing, capture the hackle and tie off. The heavy-gauge hook, the Nano Silk and the cow elk are keys to tying this fly successfully. Standard dry fly hooks bend under the pressure required to properly seat the hair. The Nano Silk thread is very fine which, as Mr. Craven points out (He uses 30 denier thread while I chose 50 denier), is easier to guide through the hair. I tried using Primo Deer as Mr. Flagler suggested. It’s great for flies like the X-Caddis, but the strip I have had hair that seemed too fine for this application. You’ll find that determining how much hair to use is literally a matter of cut and try. If you use too little, the fly will be sparse and not sufficiently buoyant. If you use too much, you will encounter difficulty in locking down the spun portion of the body and are likely to cut through thread when trimming the fly. A brand-new double-edged razor blade will get you through a few flies, but be prepared to replace it. Lastly, do not add antennae, as is often suggested. It’s painful to do correctly and the stiff fibers inhibit hooking fish. I fish this dry/dropper upstream in riffles to beneficial effect and have so far found the two flies equally effective. To date I have tied the tippet material for the pupa to the hook bend. That has worked well, but I am going to try tying the Goddard caddis to the main tippet while leaving a very long tag end on the knot, to which I will tie the pupa. That may produce a more natural looking drift for the dry fly. Editors Note: If you want to learn more about caddis, Jonathan has an excellent video on his YouTube channel where he explains the life-cycle of the caddis and shows caddis fly patterns that imitate each stage of their cycle. I encourage you to check it out at the link below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in3Lm6wSZPY |
Views From My Side of the Vise:
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| By Paul Johnson If you do an internet search for Parachute Blue-Wing Olive (BWO) dry flies you will find pages upon pages of results. It is the same on YouTube. I am not sure if there is a fly pattern out there with more variations. A couple of these variations have earned a permanent place in my Driftless fly boxes. My main go-to baetis dry flies are the BWO Special (from a previous column), the Purple Haze Special (for a future column) and the subject of this article, the Parachute BWO. I guess the best way to describe my Parachute BWO creation process might be to take a bunch of the many available BWO patterns, toss them into a blender and see what comes out. Some of the features of this fly are the same as most others, but not all of them. Here are the components that I put together to make this fly. 1. I like to use an emerger-style hook in size 16 to 20. The emerger hook gives the fly a nice profile, leaning towards a Klinkhammer look. 2. On this fly, I prefer to use Mayfly Brown Zelon for the tail, aka the shuck. This material is the perfect color with just enough sparkle or sheen. 3. For the abdomen I use a stretchy floss. For the most part, I have been using Bug Legs from Fly Tyers Dungeon. However, there are lots of similar products available such as Span Flex that work just as well. I like this stretchy floss because it gives the abdomen a subtle segmented look like you would get with biots or quills, but is much easier to work with. 4. Pretty much any hydrophobic material works great for the parachute post. I like to use white, but you can use whatever color works best for you, i.e., is easiest to see on the water. 5. The thorax uses just a touch of BWO Superfine Dubbing to clean up around the parachute post. 6. The hackle collar is medium dun rooster hackle. I will oversize the hackle (measures larger on my hackle gauge than the hook size) and make 5 or 6 wraps of it. The extra turns of hackle really help to float this fly.During our local spring and fall baetis hatches I will typically start with my BWO Special. However, in faster water or poor light conditions I will switch to the Parachute BWO to make it a little easier for me to see the fly on the water. Hook: Emerger hook, size 16 to 20 Thread: 14/0 Olive Shuck: Mayfly Brown Improved Zelon Abdomen: Olive Bug LegsParachute Post: Congo Hair Thorax: BWO Superfine Dubbing Collar: Medium Dun Rooster Hackle Give this pattern a try this spring and let me know what you think! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Paul Johnson Waconia, Minnesota Paulwaconia@gmail.com Watch Paul tie this pattern on his YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3nXGyLRrE0 |
A Band Aid Approach
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| By Jonathan Jacobs The paragraph below, with light editing, accompanied the photos in a post I made on social media. Judging by the reactions it generated there, folks found it interesting. The editor of RipRap thought its readers might enjoy it and asked me to send it along for publication. Writing it brought back fond memories for me but when I re-read it, I thought people might find it either interesting or incongruent that an Iowa farm kid somehow connected with fly tying and fly fishing or might wonder how Minnesota fit into the picture. The Iowa/Minnesota component is easy to explain: When I was young my family lived on a farm deep in the Corn Belt, miles from any kind of fishable water, but we rented a cabin for a week on a little lake in central Minnesota in late summer for several years before my parents sold the farm and bought a classic lakeside tavern/boat rental/cabin rental operation there. That’s where I did my fishing, but the roots of my interest in fly fishing are more complicated and are something I’ve had to think about. For one thing, in my time on the farm I had unfettered access to the outdoors before large scale, full-on industrial agriculture took over. There was a little creek on the property that ran through a sliver of abandoned pasture, low ground that hadn’t been fitted with drainage tile. There were only minnows in the creek, but interesting flora and fauna abounded and being “out there” inculcated in me an intense interest in the natural world. I think that being outdoors was the thing that my father liked best about farming, too. My father had a brother, my Uncle Leonard, who with his wife, my treasured Aunt Luella, farmed just a few miles from my family and we spent a great deal of time with them. Like my father and me, Uncle Leonard loved to read. He subscribed to several magazines, including the old-fashioned “hook and bullet” magazines like Sports Afield, and some general interest magazines, too, and I had access to them.I read every word of those magazines, and I found articles about trout fishing in the outdoor magazines mesmerizing. Even the mass-market magazines occasionally had articles that would get me dreaming. One of them, either Life or Look – I don’t know which – did multi-page pieces complete with glorious color photographs on trout fishing in the Catskills and on fly fishing for Atlantic salmon. One of those articles included a photograph of a Silver Doctor, an old-fashioned showy wet fly, and I recall thinking that someday I would tie my own Silver Doctor and use it to catch a fish. That hasn’t happened yet, but I continue to hang on to the dream.  Another member of the group recently posted a picture of their first fly tying vise. Here’s mine. It was part of a portable kit my father made for me at least sixty-five years ago after I saw an article about it in Boys’ Life magazine. It required a hardwood dowel, which we didn’t have out on the farm in Iowa where we lived at the time, so Dad cut the handle off one of my mother’s wooden cooking spoons, which pleased her not at all. To assemble the kit, you placed the short dowel, which was center drilled, into the band-aid tin in the appropriate position and passed a nail (The nail is long gone, the screw is a modern replacement) through the hole. You then placed the longer section of dowel, the one with the slot cut in it, atop that. The longer dowel had a slot cut down it and a screw and wing nut through it. Tightening the wing nut closed the “jaws.” It actually held moderate-sized hooks pretty well. Hooks came from the hardware store and materials were things I mostly scavenged with some of them coming from my mother’s sewing supplies. Along with the vise components, the hooks and materials were stored in the Band Aid tin. I tied some flies that, while crude, caught sunfish in a little lake in Minnesota. That little kit set me on quite a path. |
Shakey Beeley
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| Shakey Beeley by Ken Hanson The Shakey Beeley was named after a Yellowstone National Park ranger that was known to fish the Madison in the park. A detailed story of this pattern can be found in “Fly Patterns of Yellowstone volume two” by Craig Matthews and John Juracek of Blue Ribbon Flies in West Yellowstone, MT. The pattern as we know it today was created by Blue Ribbon guide Nick Nicklas. Nick tied the fly on a #12 DaiRiki 280 a curved hopper hook. A TMC 2312 or equivalent will work fine. Like a lot of western flies I fish with, I’ve found the Shakey Beeley to work extremely well in our local waters. With the contrasting colors and flash, brook trout go nuts for it. I also tie it in purple. Hook DaiRiki 280 hopper or TMC 2312 #12 Thread: Brown Tail: Dyed Mallard and Yellow Krystal Flash Body: Yellow Haretron or Awesome Possum Rib: Brown Spandex Thorax: Orange Ostrich Herl Hackle: Hungarian Partridge and Yellow Krystal Flash A couple tricks: 1. When tying in the Krystal Flash for the tail, leave some facing forward to be used later to use as flash just behind the hackle. 2. Before tying in the partridge soft hackle, stroke the forward facing Krystal Flash back and wrap a few turns of thread surrounding the hook with flash. 3. Tie the partridge feather in at the stem and utilize some of the webby barbules to add a little bulk. This is not a sparse fly. You can see Nick Nicklas tie this fly HERE. Tim Flagler does another nice version HERE. |
Upcoming Events:
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| Upcoming Events: 1: Chapter Meeting, Tuesday, March 4th (weather permitting). Dinner at 6:00 pm, Dinner at 7:pm. Juniors Restaurant and Tap House, River Falls Wi. Presentation by Paul Jonas “What’s the deal with aquatic organism passage?” 2: Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo, March 21-23, Hamline University, Saint Paul Minnesota 3: Chapter Meeting, Tuesday, April 1. Dinner at 6:00 pm, Dinner at 7:pm. Juniors Restaurant and Tap House, River Falls Wi. Annual Business Meeting and selection of Board Members. 4: Chapter Meeting, Tuesday, May 6th. Dinner at 6:00 pm, Dinner at 7:pm. Juniors Restaurant and Tap House, River Falls Wi. Presentation by Kasey Yallaly and Nate Anderson of the Wisconsin DNR |
