Orvis Disappointment

I don't even know if anyone still reads this blog, it has been dormant for some time. But I had to vent this.

A while back on this very blog I wrote of the failure of a pair of Orvis waders HERE and then again HERE. Well since I tried to patch them and it didn't work, I decided to send them back to Orvis. I was excited when I got them back because they had patched like a dozen pinholes I didn't see when I tried the whole flashlight-in-a-dark-room trick.

So when we headed up to New York again for a special trip in pursuit of large brown trout, it was November, not January. I left the neoprenes at home and decided to give these Orvis waders one more chance. Temps in the upper thirties is still not warm, so you can imagine how I felt our first day of fishing when as soon as my boots hit the river, I knew my waders were filling up with water. But I had to fish in them, so my feet froze as I fumed.

That night the local fly shop sold me a pair of very nice, comfortable Redington waders. They are extremely comfortable and, lo and behold, actually WATERPROOF! I love these waders. And as an added bonus, I now have a convenient box I can use to send the Orvis waders back. But not to repair, I'm done with that and with them. I just want them to know that those waders have ruined a day of fishing for me for the last time, and maybe they'll notice the box they arrive in. Brand loyalty for fly fishermen is a long term prospect, and I have wanted to like Orvis. But these waders pissed me off for the last time.

Trout Prints Available

I just completed a limited edition of 22 linocut prints depicting a brown trout from the Rose River. These hand-pulled prints are available, signed and numbered, from my web site!

Chesapeake Striper

My friend Douglas is having fun fly fishing for Stripers on the bay this week. Looks like the weather's good and the fishing's better! Nice fish, Douglas!

Thanks AHPS and NOAA!

I'm kind of confused about the relationship between agencies, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service and the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service maintains this amazing web site where you can get real-time water conditions anywhere in the country. I have been using it locally because I wade fish, but I'm finding myself even more interested recently because I started kayaking last year.

So I kept trying to find a way to display my nearby river gauge info on this blog, kind of like the weather widgets you see on sites all the time, displaying the weather at a vacation destination or golf course or something. Thanks to blogspot's ease of use I came close, but the RSS feed from the NOAA site was only displaying the location of the gauge, not the river level itself. So I felt like the RSS feed was the key, but couldn't figure it out until the webmaster of that site responded to my email with the suggestion to try another service to create the RSS feed widget.

The result is the widget you see at the top right of this page. Hardly worth a post explaining the process, I suppose, as the information is more for me than anyone else. But I wanted to acknowledge that a big organization like NOAA took the time to answer my question and help me work through it so I could get this little bit of code to work on my blog. Pretty cool.

First Backyard Fish!

The wading was awkward through deep, soft mud. But I finally managed to get down to the river and throw a fly line in. Once I found a spot that didn't make me feel like I was standing in quicksand, it didn't take long for this smallmouth to take the fly and make a little history for me: The first fish caught from our very own back yard. While not a large fish by any measure, it was big to me.

I think I'll let things continue to dry out a little before I wade again, perhaps the kayak is the best tool for fishing this particular stretch of bank. In any event, it feels good to be fishing again.