Green Machine Gains Strong Experience ~ Big Fish Day On The Pueblo Tailwater (PT) Section of the Ark 11May26

I headed to the Arkansas tailwater seeing mostly stable flows ~125cfs for 5 days below the Pueblo rez. Plus, Kala was on-pointe for the remodel this day. This is not high enough for this time of year but visibility was good, and bigs were sighted. The big cutbows were deeper, or in the tail of runs and holes most often ~ though I need heavy flows to float my bug choices through and caught my best in faster water around rocks. There was a strong mayfly hatch at 8:30-9:00am (yeah - I was there early for me) and great bug-sign early/similar for many species; I tried to match the PT-like stuff but caught some on cobalt bead Destiny's Child too while mayflies flew. The best producer on the day yet, flung from Green Machine, was the #22 Awesome Midge. I caught 2.5 fish/hr at the Nature Center 1st (AM) then similarly during the PM session at Valco Ponds and upstream. The bigger fish were a 21" cutbow from the Valco section and an 18.5" cutbow from Nature Center. I spotted a weird tangle of prior drowned bikes at NC too.

Replicating The RF SageBuster 2020 As The Rodfather Green Machine aka SB26 ~ Stolen But Very Fine CTS-Based 9' 4pc 4wt Is Born Again 14Mar26-07May26

Context... Some know I've sold all my manufactured rods from Winston, Sage, Scott, GLoomis, and Orvis at this point. No problem as I've built solid, most better IMO, Rodfather replacements. Unfortunately one keen SageBuster 2020 (CTS 9' 4pc 4wt), the Rodfather Cutthroat, my 3rd build ever in maroon & gold, was stolen along with the mated orange Redington reel ~ this build is about fashioning a replacement... the Rodfather Green Machine 9' 4wt 4pc with the venerable Ross Evo LT reel.

Unlike the very close cloning of the Rodfather True 3 that was also stolen, here I built a similarly specified rod, but altered the color scheme from the RFCT. The new rod, the Rodfather Green Machine, RFGM, came out great in an all green motif: a custom colored dark urban green CTS blank, green variegated wrap accents and a green on green custom handle. The new CTS Affinity X blanks have gone to a more robust and accurate ground ferrule system that I prefer on high performance rods ~ another upgrade from the original Cutthroat/SB2020. It did add to the speed and strength and true casting weight of the rod however, so not as close to a true 4wt this time. Such is often the case with modern graphite blanks. The specs and look are great though: ERN: 5.1, AA: 72° Wt: 4.1 oz (plus a .4 oz removable fighting butt), and a nice 7.4oz swing weight for a 9 footer. I am reticent to repurchase all the reels lost in the ripoff but that's OK here as the the RFGM balances and matches spectacularly with the dark green Ross Evo LT 1.5 now loaded with SA MPX WF4F line. The reel is very experienced from it's frequent use on the So Platte in 11 Mile Canyon adorning a great manufactured rod, the Winston GPX, acquired 20yrs ago during amplified fishing on So Platte 'streams.' I sold it for 70% of buy price so yeah. The new system is beautiful and casts decently with the half weight heavy line; it will likely serve as my goto 4wt this season ~ and my most used rod in CO, where the 8.5' Diamond Blaze has served well recently and is now resting.

Handle... I bought green horizontal variegated, green died, and green rubber butt rings to fashion an all new 6.5" double wells handle for the Green Machine, complimented by a 1.25" removable fighting butt with an inverse color scheme in order to use up otherwise wasted parts. Too, I went from 1/6th checkerboard in the forehand to 1/4th checkerboard in the palm ~ it's disturbing but cool IMO.

Hardware... I got my favored REC reel seat in nickel silver with a maple insert, including the removable fighting butt hardware (for a custom butt). These just feel and work nicer than others to me ~ worth it for mating to a more costly CTS blank. I also got the super-slick Snake brand double footed guides for this rod, and a Fuji stripping guide... all in bright silver; again these are worth it for this blank.

Wraps... I used variegated green, black, & brown for the guide wraps. ~ this stuff wraps out with cool moire patterns, but I needed to use colorfast fixative before epoxy. As usual on my rods I added fish length length markings from 16" to 24" ~ these are useful, not just hopeful. CTS oddly (IMO) ask for guides to be adjacent to ferrules so some need to be incorporated together as shown.

Measure & Feel... Well the rod is color-matched and balanced very well with the classic Ross Evo reel. Later Ross designs have harder edges and are less enjoyable than this gen Evo. Loaded with MPX WF4F it casts great in the backyard but I might look for an even tighter/heavier live match to the 5.1 effective weight of the rod. The RFCT, which RFGM replaces, was butter, but this one is more like a tenderloin: beautiful, lean, and powerful. Let's go ~ 100 ft casts and 6 lb catches will be no problem.

Digital Audio Done Right ~ Added New JRMC Streamer, Mobile Stand, And Equalization To EleFrugalKit 28Apr26

Monitor & Stand... The lower level east wall EleFrugalKit got an update with the addition of a new TV stand & monitor, and the additional of a new Mele Quieter 3C streamer. I broke an old 65" monitor attempting to one-man load it on the new stand but bought an out-of-date, refurbed, smaller one on AMZ for cheap. The stand is mobile "just in case" and hosts my 'tiny' electronics stack of the Elekit SET amp, the DSPro 200 bluetooth receiver (most often receiving YouTube Music from guests), the new JRiver Media Center streamer (hosted on Ubuntu 22 on the Mele fanless PC), and the Schiit Modi MB 2 DAC.

MC Streamer... I built the streamer pretty quickly from a bootable thumb drive but getting JRMC32 (4 versions back) to run well on Jammy Jellyfish took some trials to find and install the correct archived versions and install them properly. Got it done and working on the best unadulterated audio path from USB-C on the PC to USB-C on the ModiMB2. Some say the JRMC software is acid, especially on Linux, and it does fail, and is bloated with so many features and so much flexibility, it is sometimes painful. Nonetheless, once dialed in, it works well for me... I've built 4 of these fanless Linux streamers now and once clean, they are strong. I don't really need a monitor (see my phone-based remote control of the streamer) but it's nice for updating software and viewing band images and lyrics. All my streamers pull mostly FLAC files from a multi-TB archLinux server.

Equalization... The new streamer also provided the chance to reload parametric equalization filters for the FrugalHorn Mk3s in this location, at least for JRMC content. Room curve flat baby.

Measurement... I remeasured the kit from listening position. I first compared the response of the JRMC streamer to the response of the DS200 Bluetooth receiver. It clearly shows the dominance of the speaker design and room itself as the curves are nearly the same. I next added PEQ filters and measured before/raw and after/EQed. There's strong improvement in sweep flatness when PEQ filters are applied. I also measured both the DS200 receiver equalized and the JRMC streamer equalized but won't show that as again the results are nearly equivalent. Distortion is mostly below the noise floor but I am losing something in the 4KHz-9KHz range that I wasn't before in a brighter room.

One can really warm up the most sterile digital files with some fine speakers, a multi-bit DAC, and tubes. The EleFrugalKit is very inexpensive, very cool, and very very...

MA April 2027 ~ Late Cuts & 1Q26 Album Drops 26Apr26

I delayed my MA blog entry in April to snag more nasty stuff. I surely wasn't watching F1... we saw to that by declaring war on Iran; now Hormuz is a real thing at risk to decades of maritime law overseen by our US Navy. Did we game this out right? Never-mind I'm on to my vibe-plane, Music Appreciation for April 2026. I'll start with that to which I listened with intent in ~

1Q26,  the album drops... 

• The New Pornographers - The Former Site Of 28Mar26 Frequently completely infectious AC Nelson songs & prep leads to great songs, recordings, and tour dates. I love this supergroup even though AC didn't have Neko sing many leads on this album. Always worth the time to listen.
  

• Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers - Hell To Breakfast 06Mar26 If you're from AZ, you know Roger Clyne; if you know me, you know Roger Clyne. The southwest's rockin' cowboy balladeer dropped another disc and it's very good (again).

  

• I’m With Her - Sing Me Alive 06Mar26 Sure I profiled this last month; I listened to the whole live album on bandcamp.com and boy howdy it was gonna be good. I received the digital version and integrated it into my audio infrastructure so listened on higher end gear ~ even better. Ltd release vinyl is next. 
  
• Sweet Pill - Still There’s A Glow 20Feb26 Philly rarely fails. The latest rip from the prog emo team is again very hot. 

• Cat Clyde - Mud Blood Bone 21Jan26 My latest crush from a deep dive on a prolific career from Canada. Spectacular writer, player (4 string is cool since when?), and vocalist. Wild backcountry stuff with killer voice breaks and country sentiments. I saw her and band @ eTown recently... polished delivery but fun.
  
  
  

Recent cuts, just a few for you... some especially anticipating To-Hell-You-Ride BG Fest...

• Punch Brothers - New Bike (Live OV) 21Apr26
  
  
  
  
  

• The Vindys - Same Stars 12Apr26

  

• Larkin Poe - The Royal Express 14Apr26

  

• Tedeschi Trucks Band - Medley of Sly on Stern 27Mar26

  

Fishing The Ark Headwaters ~ Small German Browns & A Cascading Fail 24Apr26

Well, the best laid plans sometimes don't work out. Now in Summit, my trip to Jurassic Pk on the Blue was blasted when flows impulse-changed from 85cfs-415cfs yesterday. I fish the Blue at that level but the impulse change in flows will put fishing off a bit, so I shifted allegiance this day. I checked alternatives and headed to the Arkansas River headwaters south of Leadville this morning. I was a bit concerned hitting this spot at 10Kft elevation in Apr. It was 42° on arriving and my concern was warranted as fishing was slow and my overall outing even worse. I caught some 10" German browns on a brownish/olive #22 flashy midge, as yielded by this fishery often, from my stop at Kobe. I had a cascading set of haps that disabled images for this blog entry however. I forgot to bring the Hero cam as it was recharging, and as mentioned yesterday, the memory card now fails to be read properly by the camera, so I didn't bring it either. At the river I said 'I'll just bring the phone this once.' Prophetic, it was the once and last, as I lost my phone in the river, with the selfie, pan of San Isabels, pics of brown trout, and all my data/music/images/configs on my iPhone 12 Pro. I do not have good luck with phones on rivers and my 'backup' practice is not strong. Dang it ~ I ordered a new one and 'locked' the old one (just in case someone finds it and it still works). With rain & snow pending for Sun/Mon, and my Apple order awaiting me at Briargate, I'll head to El Paso Co tomorrow instead of out to the Colo River tribs I'd expected to attempt this weekend... and so much for Copper Mtn weekend events.

Fishing The Middle Fk Of SPLatte @ Tomahawk ~ Windy & Chilly But Effective 23Apr26

I hit the Middle Fk of the South Platte above Hartsel today as I passed by on my way to Summit. No one else was at the Tomahawk pull out, for good reason. Flows were low; temp was 41°; winds were high and gusty. Undeterred I suited up and grabbed my new v2 version of the 8' Rodfather True 3 and Lamson reel for its maiden field trial on this small river. My first hour at 10:15am was nothing caught or seen. In my 2nd hour though I began to see some small fish in shallow warming water and I was encouraged to keep going, but I did change rigs to include a #22 glass head tan midge. Then, I began to catch a number of 10"-14" rainbows and a couple of 10" browns ~ all on the tan midge. All the pics were taken via my still fish camera, which ultimately wasn't really storing them as the card wasn't recognized... I hadn't noticed; oh well. The selfie is the only thing captured as it was done with the Hero cam. Fishing wasn't off the hook but it was sufficient and I headed on to the Nest at 12:15pm as I was done with the chill and the wind. The new True 3 was fun for this size of fish, and was even pretty effective in the wind.

Fishing The Arkansas @ Breach Below Pueblo Rez ~ Town Runs Slow With Smalls & Nature Center Good With Bigs 22Apr26

Happy Earth Day ~ Nature Center ~ I finally caught a righteous 20+" fish this season! It used to be many outings in a row I could do this in CO; it happens less now and I don't believe it's me. Nonetheless, exciting and fun. I fished the Nature Center section this morning after the Town section seemed slow. I believed it'd be an epic mayfly day with warm 70° temps, low wind, and nice cloud cover. But nah ~ little known bug-sign this day. Nonetheless, this 20.5" cutbow was fooled by an oil can Perdigon and offered a good fight against the Rodfather True 5. Let's start @ the Nature Center from 11am - 1pm. I also caught a nice fat 18" cutbow just prior to the 20.5"er. I left the NC with a  sucker. 

Town ~ I hit the HS football stadium (now marked Scheel's) town section first. There were peeps but it wasn't heavily impacted except at my favorite spot there under the footbridge. The guy didn't move so I moved ahead of him to finish my pass with a few small cutbows. I hit a number of better fish on the nose with mayflies and midges but the bite was not 'on.' Flows seem low, slow, and water a bit warmer in town.