At the bench

This post is brought to you by my idiot friend, Sir Brimley, who decided to jump into a lit barbecue. Methinks the hilarity of the situations outweighs any loss of fly tying materials-- especially since there never was much fly tying potential with the hair on his face:

I didn't get a very good picture but he seriously lost a lot of hair-- the big tufts sticking out his ears and the whiskers above his eyes are completely gone and though you can't see it in this picture he lost about an 1/8" all around... not the brightest cat I've known.

Other than laughing at my not-so-bright feline friend I've been spending a lot of time at my tying desk in the basement for hours on end drinking beer and muttering a lot of innapropriate things when I break my thread or I can't find something important (the real question is-- is any of it truly important?). The reason for this is that I will be going to North Carolina for 7 days here at the end of this month and I will be staying about 5 minutes away from the French Broad. Smallmouth fishing here I come.

In order to get ready for the trip (that's the excuse anyways) I've been tying all sorts of streamers. Clousers, Rubber-legged woolly buggers, home invaders, crawdads, estaz jigs and bellyache minnows are just some of them -- fortunately most of these should be effective on the truckee too. Here's a few that I thought turned out pretty well -- I can't wait to fish these:

Home Invader Streamers

I saw Doug McKnight tie these on the weekly fly --you can see the progression of the first home invader I tied (on the left) to the decent looking one on the right that finally has about the right silhouette. However arctic fox is great stuff and can be bought at around $7 a tail if you look around a bit on the interwebs. I'm hoping to get some browns to look at these size 2's on the truckee too.

The other thing I've heard is a must have for smallies is crawdads-- which conveniently catch a lot of nice fish on the truckee too. I tied up some realistic ones and some quick impressionistic patterns both designed to ride with the business end up:

Raccoon tail hair for arms:

Something a bit closer to the real thing:

Now I've never actually caught smallmouth on the fly so I'm looking forward to this opportunity greatly. I have to throw in that it's mostly a family trip but I'm hoping to get in a couple of hours here on my 8wt. If nothing else I think I'll will hopefully be able to catch a few bluegills or sunfish. :-)

Know of any fishing spots I simply shouldn't miss near Asheville NC? Let me know!

Cheers.