Sometimes I get into a run of obsessing over Facebook Marketplace. Usually before I shut my eyes for the night I search to make sure nothing is passing under my radar. The other night I went on and this popped up. A river anchor for the Delaware, which is the exact type I need. You're not going to fish
that river with just any anchor. You'll either never grab bottom or eventually have to donate it to the river bottom because it's locked in and unable to be freed. Before work yesterday I met Bob and made the $45 exchange which came along with a quick lesson. Nice guy and nice anchor. Check.
And in getting ready for the season, and becoming a Gray's Fishtag Research tagger, I needed a new tape measure to take measurements of the fish. I found one on Amazon that came with a straight tape measure and a second that will come in handy meaasuring girth. It was waiting for me when I got home from work. In order to figure out a striped bass' weight you need the length and the girth of the fish. These measurements can be easily taken as the fish floats inside the veiwing tanks. Then you plug the numbers into the following formula you can get a approximate weight of the fish.
I am learning the advantage of staying put and tying a bunch of the same fly. First, the materials are already accessible and at the ready. There's also some technique muscle memory going on in your mind and fingertips so repetition helps you get better and quicker with each fly tied. I've been using these oddly shaped hooks that Joe gave me a few years back and I like them for these poppers. I think they are large enough and have a good gap space which will allow good hook sets. I'm using the large Flymen Surface Seducer heads and a mix of bucktail, Squimpish, and marabou. I have tied all kinds of
color combos in the flies this winter, except one. I haven't tied anything in chartreuse over something. It's a color combo most fly anglers swear by. Leif pretty much exclusively ties his Ugly Ass Fly in chartreuse over white, and those colors can be seen in Clouser's, Deciever's, and Bulkhead and Hollow
Fleyes. I need to find all of my green material, because, as they say, "If it ain't chartruese, it aint no use". But why is that? I found an article from FishTalk Magazine that explains color and how striped bass see the greens in the color spectrum. You can read that article HERE. Below is a chart from that article which discusses fishes in the Chesepeake Bay and how they see at different depths. Now we may not
be fishing at 174 feet, bottom graph, but it is telling how much green is seen from the top of the water column to way down in the deepest of waters. Maybe that is why the deep trollers using Mojo's and Tony Maja Bunker Spoons choose the big chartreuse colors. It's time for a color change at the vice.
