Throwback Gallery: My First Fly-Fishing Trip - Bennett Spring, May 2013

For the past few weeks, I've been working on moving my old Macbook's hard-drive data and backups onto a formatted external terabyte hard-drive that Emily's PC can read (oh God, such a boring sentence to start of a blog post with). Long story short, after a frustrating week of messing with formatting languages and partitions, I stumbled upon some old photos I'd forgotten about from a few years ago. The photos below are from my and Emily's camping trip to Bennett Spring back in May 2013. This was my first time fishing with a fly-rod and unsurprisingly, I had no idea what I was doing. Today, I still kind of don't know what I'm doing, but unlike back then, today I feel the need to write about it on the internet.

You'll notice in the pictures below, that there are no triumphant shots of me holding a trout. I got skunked the entire weekend. There are also no shots of me wearing waders because I didn't realize I needed waders to fish at Bennett. Lesson learned and I asked for waders that Christmas. Despite my naiveté, I still have fond memories of that trip. My favorite being Emily getting scared I was leaving the campsite so early in the morning to go fish, so she tagged along with me and slept for a few hours in the front seat of the Prius while I stood on the banks like a goon. Fun times. Please enjoy the gallery below.

Tying the John Deere Marabou Jig

Whenever I fish Bennett Spring or Montauk State Park, I always seem to have the best luck whenever I use the the John Deere Marabou Jig pattern. I first learned about this fly last May, when I was fishing with the Eckelkamp family at Bennett Spring. I had a lot of luck with it on that and several subsequent trips. I'd been meaning to learn how to tie my own and this week I finally buckled down, bought the materials, and taught myself how to tie this incredibly versatile fly. This is one of the most popular fly patterns in Missouri, and you can find it in pretty much any fly shop in St. Louis or near the Missouri trout parks. Both T. Hargrove's and the Ozark Fly Fishers have instructions on how to tie this particular fly but I thought I'd give a crack at explaining my experience with it.