Roughfisher's Ruffians

Triple the hackle for triple the pleasure: grizzly marabou tail, hen pheasant and ruffed grouse double thorax.



Carp, beware of brass knuckles hiding beneath their trenchcoat and fists underneath their beard. These are the toughest flies I know.

More Fan Mail

Dear Roughfisher,

Here's a picture of an admirer of your carp crack! I hooked the fish for her and then let her fight it! She could barely hold the thing!!!!

Image courtesy of Bennett Muraski

The fish was caught on a size 8 orange carp crack, the fish was 32"L and 19"G. no scale though...

-- Bennett Muraski

Thanks for the note and photo Bennett. Well done! I love seeing photos from my readers with fish they've caught on my patterns. Even better when a kid is involved! If you've got any fish porn to share that was caught on one of the roughfisher's patterns, send them my way. Use the contact me form and send me a note.

Flats of the Third Coast

Flats of the Third Coast from FP Media on Vimeo.

Check out the new Beaver Island video from Caleb of fishpornfix.com. You might even catch my ugly mug if you look close. Makes me want to go back and cruise the flats again.

Changeup

Continuing on with the odd weather as of late. One day, seventy degree plus temps, the next, barely breaking fifty. The ice is gone, the snow has been long gone for over a month. Water temperatures in the main river systems are still fairly cold, with barely a sign of walleye spawning activity. Soon after the walleyes spawn, do the suckers. Places where you'd think you'd see fish are devoid of any life. Went up to the carp flats at mid day and nothing. Then the sun came out and fish were jumping, spawning, everywhere. Weird.


I decided that it was time to give a few Critter Gitters their first taste of action. I wasn't gonna throw them into the shit right away, but give them a few exercises in less of a hot zone. First few casts into some rocky pocket water and picked off a few smallies. Not that I doubted their potential, smallmouth are simple greedy pigs, quite stupid really, fun to torment with rubber, fur, feather and steel. Time to move on to some real targets.



First drift through a promising run and I hook up. All I saw was a dorsal fin break the surface and I couldn't tell if it was a carp or a buffalo. After a couple large pulls upstream and then down, I scrambled to get my freshly stripped line back onto the spool. As I pulled the fish against the current I manage to bring it to the surface, a decent sized bigmouth buffalo. Had a brand new net with me and even remembered to use my digital scale. I put the netted fish on the hook, something I have rarely done in the past, scaling out at 10.5#.



Hopefully next time I'll get the carp to play. I only had an hour window between when the sun came out and when I had to leave. Foul hooked a few tailers in the mud, visibility worse than that of chocolate milk. Saw a couple of nice spawners, but mostly small little punks. Hopefully the weather will become more consistent. Until then I'll keep dreaming of chasing tails...

Live Más

More fly porn: the Critter Gitter in my Super Squirrel brown spectral dubbing blend.



Between, my hot orange, olive, peacock, and squirrel brown variations, the carp should be on a feeding frenzy this season.


Let's roll!