GR8 Float On The Arkansas With Matt & Rick 29Apr23

I got an invite from Rowmaster Matt to float the Arkansas River in his new drift raft and I jumped at the chance to join him and Rick. It was a gorgeous day driving through Big Horn Sheep Canyon with sun and 70s for the 9 mile trip from Rincon to Valle Bridge. We got a bit of a late start with CO 115 under construction and down to just 2 lanes and 45 mph for 20 miles south of Colo Spgs. I reached Rincon about 9:15am and caught a couple browns awaiting Matt so I could load my gear and be the shuttle car... as any unselfish dude might do. We started down river about 10:40am with ~300cfs flows here. The Ark here is a freestone, primarily brown trout fishery, and we are nearing the infamous "Mother's Day Caddis Hatch" (if we might not already be in it). We saw lots of caddis hatching in the AM and then returning to lay eggs late in the day, but there was not a lot of top water action this day. My favored caddis imitation, my Wired Up Ice, fooled quite a few fish today. It is also prime BWO mayfly hatch time here as well - and again we saw lots of 'em. Our mayfly imitations like purple RS2 and MHFBPT took their share and even the green electric Perdigon scored some. It is a bug bonanza on the Ark right now.

While I did "get to" row some simple sections, Matt & Rick are now strong rowsmen with several seasons, and did the bulk of the effort down especially tricky rapids, while I sat back and caught fish... nice for me. I did fine on the oars ~ no one died or swam. Matt was stoked to make a clean (no rocks or spins) pass on Tin Cup... here's the pic of the Class 4. I need to say also that Matt's new craft is being decked out sweetly... he is designing a never before conceived on water craft rod vault with his favored sheet metal guys in COS, Ultimate Rod. See the right side of boat pic ~ way to go Matt; it worked great and he could even dance on it.

We all caught decent trout. Seems like Rick nabbed the best brown... we think I hooked him first then fumbled the set I guess (and buggered my rig requiring retying). NP, Rick shot in the same little tongue and landed a nice German brown. As you can see, boatman Matt now has a mondo boat net we all appreciated. I caught a decent and rarer rainbow.

So, story goes, Dave lost his bobber as Rick & Matt rounded private water turns past an angel ~ I can't say for sure. The beauty of the Ark in BHSC includes not only world class fishing and friends but the majesty of the Sangre de Christo range. We had snow at many elevations 2 days ago and it lingered here and provided us a spectacular lunch view... sandwiches & brews of course.

There were plenty more fish, all browns, both German and Scottish, which looked like these of mine. I threw the Rodfather SB2020/Cutthroat today. The RFCT is a 4 weight we all tried with success and general praise.

Great time with the "cool kids" today... it was a long day as we "beached" at 8:15pm and had load-out duties and then the reshuttling to do. I promised the team a dinner & beer but the kitchens were closed in Canon City on arrival so that payout is due another time. Thanks guys for the fun day.

Incomparable Sunny War @ Lulu's Downstairs With Dave & Jim 27Apr23

Wow. Welcome to the new Colorado Springs.

Nina de Freitas was the opener for the show tonight at lulu's Downstairs in Manitou Spgs and she was excellent. Her voice was beautiful despite just recently recovering from throat issues. We were very lucky to have seen this relative local tonight. Here she is along with her song "Bound To You"... yeah, a bit about someone close dying. She's a Brazilian-born to musicians now residing in Denver. Sweet voice with heart rendering songwriting ~ excellent.

The incomparable Sunny War (Sydney Lyndella Ward) took the stage with accompaniment from Buffalo Nichols this night. If you've not listened to Sunny War, you should ~ she's generally lauded with a recently dropped new LP, Anarchist Gospel. She's a unique guitarist with a self-effacing and funny-as-heck stage presence, combined with strong songwriting with tough political messages along the way. She thumps out baselines with her right thumb while plucking leads and melodies with left fingerboard hand ~ amazing sound. She's Nashville now but has been homeless so knows a lot. The show was mesmerizing the whole way. Only 50 people were there and we were way luckier than the 500K folks from Colo Spgs who didn't attend tonight that's for sure. i was able to pretty easily grab the set list for the show in Ward's own hand.

This was my first time at Lulu's Downstairs, which has decent sound; I will come again. I surely would've gone to the 5/27 show with Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, but I have a conflict. COS is getting better for stuff like this. We enjoyed great food at Adam's Mtn Cafe prior to the show and spent a fine evening together hearing some breakthrough roots music. Thanks Dave.

Bumped Flows On The Ark Pre-Snowfall 24Apr23

Flows on the PT were bumped up to ~230cfs several days ago; they are pretty steady there now. Given the pending new snow storm tonight I took advantage of a nice weekday to head down to fish. It was overcast and chilly to begin but ultimately yielded a nice sunny ~60° day; I fished 10am-3pm. Flies of use today included midges in the morning, mayflies mid-day and a hodgepodge at mid-afternoon. Other than missing my first six fish straight in my first hour, fishing was decent but still devoid of >20"ers. I did catch plenty of 17"-19" fish like those shown, including a nice Scottish brown trout. I used the RF True 5 and it was fun.

New Network Setup & New Server Gear 23Apr23

With MLC in town for an extended time he was able to build us a new "home server" for storage of whatever (especially music and image files) and hosting of a DVR (Plex), automated backups of client computers and devices, and other service software. My ancient Win 7 machine for this was no longer supported of course, but worse it was often requiring reboots... it served us very well for many many years but is now retired. Hecate is a hot Archlinux air-cooled AMD 32 core 4GHz machine with 32G DDR4 dimms and 32TB of RAID 10 commercial storage accessed via 2.5Gig Ethernet (or WiFi 6) on the Asus motherboard. It's a blazer and solid as a rock as well as impenetrable. My Linux admin skills are rusty but getting better. I have the critical stuff understood now; I don't use a UI on the server ~ just ssh into it remotely via terminal. $2,200, thanks Matt.

Here's Plex delivering 96KHz/32bit music, JRiver does it too from hecate. We can do this to any of our devices ~ even streaming to iPhones in the car, given networking mods mentioned below.

Matt even built himself a new workstaion, a new "water" cooled, overclocked AMD 16 core CPU on Asus with 2 new 32Gig DDM5 dimms and a killer AMD Radeon RX 79000 graphics card and a ton of SSDs. Performance is stellar. His prior AMD 96 core threadripper CPU on Asus will become a build server. I learned how to use Denver Microcenter (good store), apply thermal paste, install & test a cooling block and associated radiator, and strap up the motherboard connectors. As a thank you we gave him a new desktop headphone DAC/AMP called the Schitt Hel2, which is great with tough to drive headphones and it even integrates a mic connection (so you can audit what you are saying).

Our DSL bridge (& router) for Century Link was also very old and required too many reboots itself, as it ran out of memory handling the traffic for Blodgett, which has increased quite a bit with new 4K/HDR TV panels installed, and MLC being here. I had a new & modern one sent to me and we swapped the old one out. The network is much more stable now - plus we even went with open source ddwrt for routing and WiFi on our Nighthawk. The hecate server is hosting it's own VPN and we use WireGuard tunnels to gain secure & anonymous access to it's functions remotely. I'm using NoIP DDNS service to resolve my domain names to my dynamically assigned external IP address.

Above The Springs 23Apr23

Kala & I have been hiking Air Force Academy, Blodgett, and the Blodgett Open Space. Here are just some quick pans and pics from above Colorado Springs. We score some quick vert rambling around up there.

Building The Rodfather True 3 ~ Finally A Perfect 3 Weight Rod (drc#23 MHX 8' 4pc 3wt Fast) 16Apr23-22Apr23

It's been a long time and several attempts to find a gr8 3 wt fly rod for the quiver, but I kept trying. The recent Endless Wisdom (St Croix) is awesome, but a "weaker" 2.8 ERN; the Brookie (Rainshadow) is gorgeous and casts spectacularly but carries a somewhat high swing weight than desired for a 3 wt @ 9.52; the Lightening Rod (China) is excellent in many ways but I built a less than favored (by me anyway) western cigar handle for it (my mistaken attempt to lighten weight). Enter the Rodfather True 3, RFT3, an 8' 4pc with nice full wells custom handle, perfectly powered @ ERN 3.3 and it sports a Fast Action AA of 70°, a light weight of just 3.1 oz, and a feather-like swing weight of 7.5 oz. I'm pairing the rod with the lightweight Lamson Guru II #1 and I bought another spool on closeout to load a perfectly mated SA Amplitude Trout WF3F line for it (my other line was an Infinity taper with 100 grain more up front than desired ~ for perfection that is). The True 3 is based on a high modulus graphite MHX blank in raw grey coloring and is a dream to toss (at least on first casts in the yard). MHX blanks are well made in China and come warranted, so cost a smidge more... I've built several and they've been very good. The RFT3 is intended for smaller rivers and streams like Rainbow Falls, Gore, Ark Headwaters, and so on... it is a smidge shorter for tighter quarters and is the perfect rod for chubbies with droppers or smaller nymph rigs, and landing 2-4# fish. I'm excited to use it for post-runoff dries and rigs ~ it should be a great field shootout with the Endless Wisdom.

I started the build with a new handle design based on mixed wave cork rings combined with normal natural and burnt rings. I now favor a design featuring diamonds at least on top and bottom as an alignment aid... plus it looks cool IMO. Here's the new handle from sliced up to glued to turned complete.

I finished the T3 with CRB-based, less expensive hardware, including single foot guides and a small ultralight aluminum reel seat. It is wrapped out in cool blue & grey colorfast nylon using a variant wrap of blue for 50% then spiraling both colors for 50%, except for ferrule wraps which are all spirals.

The new 3 weight balances well with the Guru II with SA WF3F line and measured out so true to my desires, a real 3 weight, it was freaky. It is marked as usual with fish measurement marks. One other rod in the quiver is a "True" variant and that is my spectacular and go to 5 weight, the True 5 ~ when something is so dead nuts on like this, I repeated the naming idea.

Yeah; let's go fishing.

Rockin' The PT @ Low Flows 19Apr23

Colorado tailwaters completely rule pre-runoff. Today again I hit the Pueblo Tailwater ~ and again I felt low pressure on the river this day, at least early in the day. I arrived @ 9:30am with 58° air temps and flows falling to ~60cfs. Unfortunately, Denver Water again reduced flows from the rez so, again, not good. While it provides great visibility to the big fish, it also makes the whole show very technical: presentations and fly selection become delicate. So #24 midges were the ticket until a smallish mayfly hatch in the winds was observed... I converted the trailer to a #22 Destiny's Child and did very well in all the faster sections of the Nature Center from Bug Weir through Farm Across to Farm to Hook to, especially, the Carp Hole and its weir above. All cutbows, 50/50 male/female with all very strong girth. Happy April.