Archive for September, 2007

Other than a brief outing the other day to try out the Meiser Fly rod, I’ve been in bed, sleeping, napping, and feeling miserable getting over a nasty virus.

Woke up today and felt much better, and after feeling up to unpacking my suitcases from the trip to Grande Prairie, I thought I’d go back to the pond off Highway #9 near Orangeville, Ontario and try the Meiser rod out again. Hopefully this time with some fish on the end of the line.

All I can say right now is “Sweeeeet!” After making some adjustments for the handle length of the rod, laying out line was quite nice. Tried a few different fly patterns in the first half hour and caught nothing. Then tied on a white leech sort of thing tied up by Ernie Kalwa and after a few casts off the dock, felt a vicious take.

A couple of minutes later, netted this very nice 16 inch rainbow trout:

Continued to try the leech pattern but no luck on it. Tried a few other beefier type flies and still nothing. After a while, I noticed some fish rising to some hatching chironomids and thought I’d tie on a sort of “Brassie” pattern (not sure of the name of it – but basically a copper body with a beadhead and head of peacock herl).

The rod cast the fly exactly where I wanted, and during the extremely slow stripping of the line, this 17 incher was fooled and brought to the net:

Due to the angle of the camera, it looks smaller than the first one – but it was an inch longer.

Anyhow, really impressed with this Meiser System 2 rod!!

(Disclaimer – Bob Meiser is a client of mine).

I had hoped the Meiser System II 10 1/2′ rod would have arrived before I left for Grande Prairie, but sadly it did not.  Instead it arrived at my home while I was in Grande Prairie and it was impossible to have it shipped next day delivery to the hotel I was at.

This evening was the first opportunity I had to cast it.  I headed over to Humber Springs with my “wee man” to meet Ernie and Arron and thought that I’d try the rod.  I only had time to cast it for about 30 minutes but is it ever sweet! Light as a feather and as Arron Varga said when he tried it, “it casts like a cannon.” It’s a “switch rod” so there were a couple of things I had to get used to but once I did, the rod was just a dream.

After I’ve had more opportunity to fish it and hook and land fish, I’ll write up a more full review.

A quick update – my internet access in Grande Prairie during the Canadian Fly Fishing Championships was horrible so I didn’t have much chance to update the blog with the daily events and my observations.

I’ll have more shortly on the event – but in the meantime, I found the conditions to be very tough! The first morning on Moonshine Lake, there was snow on the ground.  Throughout the sessions, high winds and often wind direction changes were hard to deal with.  During one of the sessions, we were dealing with winds of 50 KM/hour and whitecaps on the lake while struggling to row the 14′ boats against those winds in order to begin a new drift.

I also had a hard time keeping fish on the end of my line.  I’m not sure why that happened. There were two sessions which I should not have blanked but did.

Yes, lots of whiskey and other warming beverages were consumed during the event and lots of great camaraderie with other other fly anglers I have not seen in over a year!

Ah, fine whiskey, fly fishing, and women! . Even with the tough conditions, it was a very enjoyable event for me and a great learning experience.

My hat is off to the organizers including Jim Epp of the Peace Country Fly Fishers Association for pulling off such a great event with very few noticeable hitches to the anglers that had flown to Grande Prairie to compete.  They did a fantastic job!

I’ll have more as soon as I have managed to settle in back home, get all my laundry done including that of the new clothing I had to pick up in order to better deal with the weather conditions.