994 | English Trout Fishing with Howard Croston: Dry Flies, Grayling, and Hardy Reels

00:00:00 Dave: Some trout rivers force you to slow down whether you want to or not. Today, Howard Crosson takes us into England’s historic trout waters. The pressure of world-level competition, fishing, and the future of hardy rods and reels. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip, and what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. Howard Croston, the global product manager at Hardy’s, is going to be breaking down a bunch of great stuff. Today. We’re going to talk about the dry fly mistakes anglers repeat when conditions get tough. What competition fishing actually teaches you about reading water, the story behind Hardy’s legendary Perfect Reel, and what Hardy is building next for streamer anglers and technical dry fly fishermen. Plus, you’re going to get Howard’s thoughts on the Euro nymphing debates, giant grayling, and the one thing anglers can do quickly when fishing gets hard. If you want to connect with Hauer, you can find him at Hardyfishing.com, and you can follow him on Instagram at Howard Crosson fly Fisher. All right, here he is. Howard Crosson. How you doing, Howard? 00:01:12 Howard: How you doing, Dave? Thanks for having me. 00:01:14 Dave: Yeah, thanks for coming on. I, I stay back again because you were on the littoral zone recently and you were with Phil, and he’s doing a great job over there kind of in our network. And you guys talked about Stillwater fishing. So I think that that’s going to be something that we will probably not dig into deep. I think today we’re going to talk about what you do on top of Stillwater, which is working with Hardy, you know, and your home waters there. We’re going to touch base on some trout fishing. So yeah, first off, maybe just give me an update on, on what you’ve been doing. Um, you know, since I guess it’s been a little while since you chatted with Phil, but this is twenty six now. You got a big year ahead of you. 00:01:49 Howard: Yeah, we’ve got a, I’ve got a really big year from a on a couple of levels really. Um, we’ve been doing an awful lot, um, out in the US and in the American West. So already this year I’ve been over for two and a half weeks out to Montana, doing some stuff with dealers and obviously doing quite a bit of fishing as well, and promoting the brand later on in the year in in September, we’ve got the world’s coming up in Idaho, so I’ll be back over for that. And then in the middle of that, my wife and I are having our first child. So oh wow, it’s going to be quite a it’s going to be a different year. 00:02:27 Dave: Oh man. Yeah. You got a big year. That’s that doesn’t get any bigger than that. So yeah. And yeah, Idaho is great too. That’s awesome. We’ve been talking a little bit about that because of yeah, it’s in the world’s or in the US, you know, in eastern Idaho. We’ve been chatting with some of the team USA and you’re on maybe talk about that a little bit. What you guys are preparing for what your team. We haven’t talked too much about the kind of the English team. But describe that a little bit. 00:02:52 Howard: Yeah. So we’ve got we’ve got a really solid team that’s been getting better for the last two or three years now. We’ve got a, you know, a pretty good process now for qualifying for the team instead of the team just being picked, which it used to be in the past. And so we’ve had some new faces in there who’ve qualified for the for the team by. Right. But we’ve got a strong team this year. We’ve got five anglers plus reserve and a manager. Unfortunately, I’m the only one who’s fished any amount out in the American West, but they’re all good anglers. Um, and we’re coming over for a good sort of two weeks of solid practice prior to the competition as well. So looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be a really good trip. 00:03:31 Dave: Awesome. Yeah. And is there a big like if, you know, for folks on the team over there fishing maybe more of your area around England and that, you know, UK, is it quite a bit different fish in say England versus moving over to fish the Henry’s fork some of those areas. 00:03:47 Howard: Yeah, definitely. I mean you guys have got a lot more fish than we have. I mean our river systems are good. We have got good wild wild trout fishing. We don’t really have wild rainbows in the majority of the country. We have a few and a couple of isolated pockets in quite small rivers, and we don’t have cutthroats at all and we don’t have whitefish, although the whitefish do behave very, very similar to European grayling. So they’re similar. Obviously we’ve got the Browns. It’s just our waters are a little different. I think there’s in general the fish density is a little bit lower. And quite often our fish to my mind anyway, do seem to be a little bit more selective than, than some of the fish I’ve caught out west. 00:04:30 Dave: Right. Which is probably a good thing, right? If they’re selective, that means it’s harder to fish. You guys are probably you got to be a little bit better angler to fish kind of England. 00:04:38 Howard: I mean, maybe, but you know, maybe not. 00:04:42 Dave: It’s it’s different. 00:04:43 Howard: You know, it’s different. There’s you guys got a lot of bugs as well, a lot more variety and a lot more biomass than we have in some of our rivers. So, you know, those fish out west can still get pretty tricky when they get on sort of like compound hatches and stuff. It can become a little bit more of a challenge. 00:05:01 Dave: There’s a lot going on there. Obviously. I think we’ll touch base on that as we go a little more. I wanted to hear kind of kicking this off a little bit on Hardy. You’re maybe you could talk about your role with Hardy, and because it’s a company that’s been out there a long time, I mean, you go back to the, some of the products, you know, the perfect and things like that, these reels that are just kind of stood the test of time and are, you know, iconic. Describe that. What do you do with Hardy and talk about what it feels like working with a company that’s been around for so many years? 00:05:28 Howard: Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s I’ve been with the company now for, I think this is my twenty fifth year, which makes me feel incredibly old. I mean, it was always as a brand and a company, one that I had a lot of respect for growing up. My first ever proper fly rod was a hardy fly rod. Um, a rod called a hardy favorite. Um, and then shortly after that, I got a hardy Hurley sovereign and I actually I managed to get them by winning fly casting competitions when I was like thirteen, fourteen years old. And, um, I always had a, you know, an attraction and an affinity for the brand because it was as I was growing up, it was always the brand that everybody, you know, sort of desired to own and, you know, and really reach for. And for me personally, I went to, I was actually at a game for once and I was, I was talking to one of the then rod designers and, you know, I said, you know, I’d love to work for the brand one day. And, you know, and he said, oh, you know, he didn’t say you can forget about it. But he more or less said, you know, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll end up working, working for the company, you know, because it’s a small company, relatively speaking, and you’ve got to have a, you know, specific skill set or whatever if you want to get into product development. And obviously, I was only a kid at the time, but, um, I did get in the industry. I got in through a working in a fly shop, and then ended up doing product development for another company, and then got an opportunity to go back into retail management for Hardee’s. That was my first job there twenty odd years ago. And then there was an opening in product development, and I went in as a product development assistant and basically worked my way through. And, you know, I’ve held a lot of different roles over the years with the brands from product development assistant through fly product manager, global product development manager, when we had multiple brands, was brand manager for a while. And now I’m back as being the global product manager. 00:07:26 Dave: Wow. Yeah. So you kind of you’ve done it all. 00:07:29 Howard: Yeah. I’ve, I’ve moved around a lot over the, through the, in the business anyway, but I always end up back on the product because that’s really what the, what my strong point is, to be honest. 00:07:38 Dave: Yeah. And I think we’ll cover a little bit about that, what that looks like. But what was the the fly casting champion when you were thirteen or fourteen? Where was that at and what was that? What was going on there? 00:07:48 Howard: I did a lot of I mean, before I ever competition fished, I did an awful lot of competition casting. And there used to be a circuit in the UK. They were they were basically country and sporting shows all around the country. You know, when I was, I think I was twelve and my dad pushed me into entering one and I unexpectedly came second, which was a bit of a shock. And then I basically spent the whole winter practicing. I went back the year after having done that practice and ended up in the first one I entered, winning every category, which again was a bit unexpected, and it sort of set me off with a bit of a. You could say I’ve got a bit of a, an addictive personality over certain things. 00:08:33 Dave: That’s right. 00:08:34 Howard: And I got completely wound up in it. And yeah, I threw loads of loads of effort at the casting and, and won something like eighty or ninety different tournaments over about a six year period, a seven year period. And yeah, I really got into it. I ended up I went to world championships and stuff, and I never did great at world championships, but I was, you know, competitive. But it was, you know, I was casting against Steve Rajeff. And, you know, at the time, I was, you know, late teens, early twenties, and Steve was, you know, had seven or eight inches on me. And, you know, and he’s a probably the best all around caster in the world. So that was probably not going to end well for me in that situation. I was lucky. I did manage to pip Steve to first a couple of times in casting events at things like FTD, uh, where we’re just using normal fishing gear. When it came down to the real, the tournament stuff that you use at worlds, I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t compete with him with that. But with normal fishing gear, I could sort of hold my own. So. 00:09:40 Dave: Right. Wow. So it sounds like. And your dad. It sounds like he was into the fly fishing. What was that like when you were, uh, what was your dad most interested in? 00:09:49 Howard: Yeah. So my dad was actually a fisherman. He didn’t fly fish. Um, but my uncle did, and we sort of we had a holiday place up in the English Lake District, um, near where I, I have actually have a house now on the same river and basically it was all fly fishing there. So my dad had to learn to fly fish if you wanted to fish in that area because there was, you weren’t allowed to use conventional equipment. Um, so my uncle gave my dad some pointers and then I started fishing with them both. And just that obsessive compulsive thing again, I got completely and utterly engrossed with fly fishing. And that’s, you know, that’s what got me off on it. And, you know, and then the casting came as part of that, right? 00:10:33 Dave: The casting. And then eventually and now you’ve got the yeah, the world championship right around the corner this year. Um, that’s amazing. And I’m trying to, you know, the difference between, you know, fishing up there. You hear a lot about, you know, lots of private water, you know, kind of in there. And how did that factor in when you were a, you know, a teenager fishing? And then as you get into now, I’m guessing you’re probably, you probably fished some of those a lot more of those waters. But how does that look in England? Is it challenging to get out and fish some of the good the good trout waters for folks? 00:11:05 Howard: Uh, yeah. I mean, it’s different. Obviously, we don’t have the large scale public access that is still still exists in part of the US. We have more private access, but it’s not necessarily that difficult. You can still access good trout fishing, particularly in the north of England in the south of England, which is what everybody thinks of when they think about English trout fishing. They all think about the test and the itching and places like that. That is harder access. It costs more. It’s more expensive. You can buy a day’s fishing, but it’s typically not going to be low cost. Further north you go, the prices actually drop and it gets it can get really, really cheap in the further north you go up into Scotland. And as we have local angling associations, which you can either be a member of, or you can sometimes go as a visitor, as a guest. And you know, there’s plenty of fishing available if you, you know, if you look for it. 00:12:03 Dave: Yeah. If somebody was coming there, you know, let’s just say they’re coming in from the US to do a kind of a trip, you know, kind of maybe it’s a family thing, but also want to do some fishing. Where would they start? What would it be a good place to figure out where to go? It sounds like the North would be the place you want to research. Unless you unless you’ve got a lot, a lot of money to put into it. But where would you start to understand more about all that? 00:12:25 Howard: Yeah, I mean, it’s an old bit of advice, but if you’ve got a there’s a local fishing tackle shop in the area, you’re going to, that’s probably the best first port of call. Um, they can usually guide you in the right direction. That one of the big differences between fishing in the UK and in the US, for example, is we don’t have a big culture and big tradition of of using guides in the same way that they used in the US, you know, and some of the salmon beats and some of the chalk stream beats, they have ghillies, which is, is a similar kind of thing, but in the sort of north of England where I am um fishing guides and not a, you know, most fly shops will not be affiliated or have access to a number of guides, you know, there might be one guide or two guides working in an area who can, you know, give you some pointers. So I mean, the first stop is a local fly shop. Second stop is always the internet. And you can just Google things obviously, and you’ll find, you know, pointers and where to go, how to get access, where to buy access. 00:13:31 Dave: Gotcha. Is there a big difference between the fishing tackle shops up there in the UK versus, say, the fly shops in the US. 00:13:38 Howard: Yeah. I mean, I would say the the main difference is if you go in a you’re gonna fly shop in the US, obviously there’s a most of them have got a, you know, an incredible array of actual fishing flies for sale for a start, and often a little bit less in the way of hardware. And a lot of our fly shops have got more hardware than they have actually got flies. They do sell flies, obviously, and some of them have got quite a big range of them. But our shops are generally, generally not always, but smaller and they may be quite often have a little bit more sort of cross tackle other country pursuits present in the shop, you know. 00:14:18 Dave: Like hunting and other things like that. 00:14:21 Howard: Yeah. They’ll have, you know, they’ll sell Wellington boots and tweed trousers and check shirts for, you know, for shooting. And some of them will sell ammunition and guns. They tend to be a little bit more, in some cases a little bit more general, um, outdoor pursuits rather than a specific, you know, hardcore fly shop. We do have them and we have some good ones, but they tend not to all be in the same scale as the US. 00:14:47 Dave: And where are you in you’re located? Where is your kind of home home area? 00:14:50 Howard: Right. No, I live in the north east of England, right near the the hurdy factory. I sort of live equidistant between the factory and the office, um which are like two separate locations, the factory being in Alnwick and the office just being a little bit south of that. I sort of live here now, although I do have a property on the river where I actually learn to fish nice, which I spend quite a good bit of time at, you know, in season. 00:15:15 Dave: Yeah. How far is that river? You’re kind of the fishing kind of that home versus where you’re at in Hardy. 00:15:21 Howard: Yeah. So it’s over there is like an hour and fifteen minutes. 00:15:25 Dave: Oh, that’s that’s close. Yeah. That’s nice. 00:15:27 Howard: So it’s pretty close. I mean, there is a river runs through the middle of the town where I live. And it does have trout in it, and it does have a small run of Atlantic salmon. 00:15:35 Dave: Oh, cool. 00:15:36 Howard: But it suffers from low water. And the trout fishing can be really patchy. But if we get rain, we’re only ten miles from the coast and it actually gets. Sea lice, Atlantic salmon coming into it. So. 00:15:48 Dave: Oh man. That’s great. Yeah. That’s the great thing is that you guys have the Atlantic salmon. I know the numbers have kind of been up and down. Like they are probably similar to steelhead. Right. You’ve got challenges there, but it sounds like you can still that might be worthwhile if you were heading over that way to try to put together a salmon trip as well. 00:16:06 Howard: Oh yeah. We have got accessible salmon, you know, accessible salmon fishing. You can actually there’s a website and it’s called Fish Pal that you can go on and buy days salmon fishing by the day on some really good beats. You know, the salmon fishing is, is like it is pretty much everywhere in the world. It’s, you know, it’s not super predictable. And a lot of it is driven by the weather. So, you know, you’ve got gotta, you know, if you hit it right and the weather’s good and there’s fish there, you’re going to catch them. You get it wrong. It might be just good casting practice, right? 00:16:40 Dave: Right. That is the cool thing. It sounds like Atlantic salmon are definitely aggressive. So if they’re there, it sounds like you got a good chance to hook into one. 00:16:47 Howard: Oh yeah. I mean, if you’ve got a fish that’s um, a relatively fresh fish that’s moving through, especially after if there’s some fresh water in the river and good conditions and you, you get a fly swung through him, you’ve always got a decent chance of it, you know of it having a go. 00:17:05 Dave: Stonefly nets, handcrafts, wooden landing nets, fly boxes and reel seats in little Rock, Arkansas, using premium hardwoods and burls sourced from landowners across the United States. Every piece is built by hand, combining traditional craftsmanship with the durability anglers need on the water. What makes Stonefly different is the attention to detail. You can customize your net with your choice of wood and even add personal engraving to create something that’s truly unique. And these aren’t just pieces of gear. They’re the kind of tools that become part of your fishing story and stay with you for a lifetime. You can check in with Stonefly Nets right now. Just head over to Stonefly nets dot com. Check them out right now and get started today. When it comes to high quality flies that truly elevate your fly fishing game, Drift hook dot com is the trusted source you need. I’ve been using drift hooks expertly selected flies for a while now and they never disappoint. Plus, they stand behind their products with a money back guarantee. Are you ready to upgrade your fly box? Head over to Drift Hook dot com today and use the code swing at checkout to get fifteen percent off your first order. That’s drift Hook d r I f t h o o k dot com. Don’t miss out. One of the things I wanted to touch base on is we mentioned at the start of the Hardy perfect. I mean, there’s you’re a product guy, so, you know, it sounds like you are well aware of making good products that reel maybe describe what it is about that reel that was such a game changer in eighteen ninety one, I think is when it was was released. And it’s still to this day, I think people see the heart. I mean, we have a lot of people that are swinging flies and stuff like that, but what is it about that reel and describe how you maybe utilize that as you think about other products in Hardy’s lineup? 00:18:48 Howard: Yeah, I mean, it’s an iconic fly reel. I mean, it was basically the the big breakthrough with it was that it ran on ball bearings versus, you know, not. So you had a reel that suddenly became, you know, very smooth and, and much more, much more usable, really just a better quality, you know, a better execution of a fly reel in its most basic terms. And it became iconic because of a number of things. I mean, obviously it featured the ball race, but then the reason it’s become such a collector’s piece, really, even today, even the, the ones that we make now in our factory in Alnwick, which utilize, you know, cutting edge CNC machine processes, you know, and, and the considerably different in the way that the made from the original reels. Basically people collect them because if you look back over the whole history of it, it’s almost impossible to know exactly how many variants are out there, because what used to happen in the old days was they would produce them and they would make so many, and then there would be some kind of small change that was made to address something, either a not necessarily always an issue, but they would change the way they did something in the factory. 00:20:06 Dave: To make it better. 00:20:06 Howard: Make it better, or the way it was, the way it was put together maybe changed a little bit, or they changed the design for some reason. And it just became a, you know, it’s just become a thing that is, uh, is very, very collectible. You know, if you look at an old perfect and you look at a new one, you can still tell it’s a perfect. It’s still very, very similar in a lot of ways, but equally there’s points of difference. And it’s just a fascinating, you know, it boggles my mind to the depths that some of the collectors go in and the amount of knowledge they have about, you know, about the perfect in particular. But a lot of the reels from from Hardy’s history, from Hardy. 00:20:46 Dave: Yeah, yeah. And I’m, I’m no collector. My dad was definitely a collector of old reels and everything. But yeah, I feel like I still have this thing for it. You know, you just I don’t know what it is about it, I guess. What was that original reel, I guess? Was it made for focused? Was trout the number one? Was that the first made for that area? 00:21:06 Howard: Um, I can’t recall whether it was specifically a trout or salmon reel. I probably tend towards it being more of a salmon reel. Um, although relatively quickly we went on to doing it for, you know, from trout sizes right up to salmon sizes. So and we still do. We still do that today. You know, we have we have a full range of sizes of it. And it’s, it’s really become the, you know, the quintessential classic look of a fly reel for use on a, on a cane rod, right? In the smaller sizes. And even now you get people using the most cutting edge, syntrix based material, carbon fiber, two handed fly rod for Atlantic salmon. But the real they put on it is quite often a perfect or a cascapedia or another classic reel, because it’s just got such a a historic significance in fishing. Any of those hardy reels that, you know, even guys who are using relatively all the most modern fly rods prefer to use a classic or a traditional reel in many cases. 00:22:08 Dave: Yeah. They just look, it feels like, you know, part of that’s the tradition. But the reel to is now are the Hardy’s that are they have they were they clicking Paul at the beginning? Have they always been that or describe that a little bit. And what’s your take on that? 00:22:22 Howard: I mean, initially there’s, you know, they’ve all been some form of click and pulse system. And, you know, obviously now we do a lot of disk drag reels as well, including sealed disc drags and, you know, more traditional open disc drags. But there’s something about a click and Paul reel for a lot of anglers. And you know, one of them, which is often talked about is the sound, you know, a click and reel makes a sound. It makes it a very pleasant sound, particularly makes a pleasant sound if you’re salmon fishing with it. 00:22:53 Dave: Right. 00:22:53 Howard: Fish pull in, line off it. 00:22:55 Dave: And. 00:22:55 Howard: The people around you salmon fishing. 00:22:57 Dave: Right. 00:22:58 Howard: The reels aren’t making any noise because they’re not catching anything. So there’s this thing of, um, some salmon fishermen, I think quite like the, the announcement that they have a salmon on the end. 00:23:12 Dave: Right. 00:23:13 Howard: That comes from fishing with a classic click and Paul load reel. And at the end of the day, who doesn’t like that sound when a fish takes off and starts ripping line, right? 00:23:24 Dave: Do you have you done a little bit of salmon fishing? Have you done an equal amount as the other types of fish? I mean you’re probably doing more competition now, but has that been a big part of your history? 00:23:34 Howard: I do like salmon fishing. I quite like steelhead fishing as well. I’ve done a little bit of both. I’ll not say that I get I do loads and loads of it. I probably manage um some years I’ve done more than others, but in a normal year I’ll probably manage to salmon fish, you know, maybe half a dozen times in the year. Just time really for me. I love my trout fishing. I also like my saltwater fishing. Um, I’ve been fortunate. I’ve done a lot of Turpin fishing and bonefish permit all over the world. And I have done a little bit steelhead fishing in the US and, you know, a reasonable amount of salmon and steelhead and sea trout fishing in England. And I do enjoy it. I do enjoy the tradition of it. And obviously it’s great when you catch one. But I tend to spend most of my time chasing, you know, large wild brown trout. And if I can, preferably on the dry fly. 00:24:28 Dave: On the dry fly. Yeah. That’s awesome. And that’s part of the game, right? With fishing, that’s something that, you know, we’ve talked a lot of the competition anglers and everybody thinks of Euro nymphing, which is a big part of it. But dry fly fishing is, is, is as big or it can be right on any given comp. Is that true? 00:24:44 Howard: Oh, yeah, one hundred percent. I mean, it’s I had this a little bit with, um, with Kelly actually. Kelly gallop on one of his things back and forwards a lot about, you know, I got baited into it with him. I mean, me and Kelly got on great. But um, you’ve got to be able to do everything, you know, as a comp angler. You know, if you look at anybody who’s worth the salt in competition fishing, they can literally do everything from, you know, wet fly fish, streamer, fish, urine nymph, dry dropper, dry fly, you name it. They are highly proficient at it because you have to be. You cannot get away with just being a urine nympho. 00:25:22 Dave: That’s right. You got to be able to do it all. So that’s we’ve definitely covered that is when you look at, you know, back to again, fishing, kind of focusing specifically England. It could be, you know, maybe that where your, your house is there, but what is the, you know, dry flies up there? What are the hatches that people are really getting excited about? When do you think would be a good time to is there a specific time of the year range of months that are good to head out there? 00:25:46 Howard: Yeah. I mean, right now it’s it’s starting to fire. Typically, it’s our good dry fly fishing in my area runs through sort of from April. It starts to get going. We start fishing on the fifteenth of March and given good weather conditions, you can get dry fly sport from from the get go. But this spring didn’t really work like that. It didn’t really get going straight away. Um, but April, May, June, you know, eight months, July in the evenings can still be good. Uh, after that, it starts to slow a little bit. And then it picks up a little bit in September and then a trout season. Anyway, generally for most of the country closes around the last day of September. 00:26:31 Dave: Oh it does. Yeah. Because browns are spawning getting ready to spawn. 00:26:34 Howard: Yeah. And we can still fish for grayling. We can fish through the winter for grayling. But um most times the trout fishing all shut down in rivers anyway in rivers. 00:26:44 Dave: And grayling like you said, are similar, more similar to a, a mountain whitefish or that we would have here. Is that kind of similar? 00:26:51 Howard: Yeah. European grayling are pretty similar. They’re, they’re a, they’re a prettier fish. They’re a nicer looking fish, I think, than a, than a Rocky mountain whitefish. They’ve got a big, big, um beautiful dorsal. 00:27:04 Dave: Dorsal. Yeah. 00:27:05 Howard: You know, a lot of color in it. Um they’ve got quite a nice sort of pinkish hue to them on the, on the, on the gill plate. And they’re a really good sporting fish. You can get them on drys and nymphs and they do get quite big as well, particularly in the north of England. And we get them up over, up over four pounds is that, you know, is a more common occurrence than it used to be. 00:27:26 Dave: Oh wow. You get four pound a grayling. 00:27:29 Howard: Yeah. We can do. I mean I’ve the biggest one I’ve ever caught was was closer to five pounds than it was to four. But that is a once in a lifetime fish. 00:27:38 Dave: How many how many inches is that Grayling. How many inches of. 00:27:41 Howard: That fish was? I actually have a cast of it in the house. 00:27:46 Dave: Yeah. Oh you do? 00:27:47 Howard: Yeah. I had a model made of it and the fish was returned, obviously, but. 00:27:50 Dave: Oh, cool. 00:27:51 Howard: Um it was, that was a huge that was a huge fish. I’d have to tape it. Exactly. And I can’t remember because it was two. I caught that fish in two thousand and thirteen. 00:28:01 Dave: But five pounds. I mean you’re talking well over twenty inches probably. 00:28:04 Howard: Oh yeah. It was way over twenty. 00:28:06 Dave: Yeah, way over twenty. 00:28:07 Howard: I measured it in. I taped it in centimeters and took it to girth and everything just to work it out off the. 00:28:13 Dave: That’s not critical, I guess, on the thing, but again, I think a grayling. Of. I always go to, you know, Arctic grayling. And I think that they can get pretty decent size. But I feel like, you know, I think twenty inches would be. I’m not sure how many fish are in that range up there, but. So yeah, they’re a little bit bigger here down the European. 00:28:28 Howard: They can be. Yeah. I mean, they get, they get really fat. That fish was was really, really round. I mean it most likely been eating um salmon eggs. I caught it in the winter off the back of the salmon spawning season. It had probably been eating eggs at some point and which a lot of them do at times, but they get um, they do get big. They don’t get big everywhere. They’re actually not that long lived fish over here. So that fish was probably in the last year of its life. And they are a you know, that one was a unicorn. You know, I’ve, I’ve never seen another one that big. I know that people are catching them into like the mid four pounds now. Every so often. But they are still a rare fish. You know they are a rare fish. 00:29:15 Dave: What, what did you catch that one on. Were you dry or surf or below? 00:29:20 Howard: No. 00:29:21 Howard: Typically in the river. I caught it from those fish outside. I mean, I caught that in. I’ll try to remember what time of year it was. No, it was, uh, it was November or December. I think it might have been December. There’s very little bug activity on the surface. So it’s you know, I was, I was nymphing with a effectively Euro style nymphing with a with a nymph. Believe it or not, without a bead on it. It was just a leaded. 00:29:47 Dave: Oh, cool. 00:29:47 Howard: Traditional old fashioned. 00:29:49 Dave: No. 00:29:50 Howard: No bead. There was a bead on the cast. I had a bead on the point. Um but it actually came up and took the took the top dropper. 00:29:58 Dave: Took the top. What’s the on hatches. What are some of the big hatches there during the prime time that are people are getting excited for. 00:30:06 Howard: Yeah. 00:30:06 Howard: So prime time for us now. I mean, we have early season, large dark olives. Um, basically beat us. Then we get a reasonable hatch and march browns depending on where you are. It’s been a little bit hit and miss for us this year. The weather didn’t play very well and some days it was good and other days it was terrible. But March brown then off the back of that, usually we’ll see granum. We’ll get a big granum, big granum hatch that lasts for a couple of weeks, overlapping with generally got a lot of quite a decent amount of midge in the early season. Um, and then that’ll phase into, um, we’ll get some iron blue duns, get a little flush of iron blue duns, then we get into olive uprights, then we’ll get into blue winged olives and we’ll get some night time caddis as well. Yeah. And then we get quite a lot of terrestrials as well with right at this exact moment we’re coming off the back of the granum and we’re starting to get, uh, we’re getting some hawthorns, and some black gnats are starting to make an appearance, and a few olive uprights are around. 00:31:15 Dave: Yeah. So you pretty much get a lot of the hatches. You. It doesn’t sound like you get some of the big, the bigger like stoneflies at all. Do you have some black stones or any other types of stones there? 00:31:26 Howard: Yeah. 00:31:26 Howard: So we’ve, there’s a few stoneflies about at the minute. And depending where you are, it’s one of those hatches that’s not. You generally don’t see the bigger stoneflies getting targeted. And I think that’s probably just down to the fact that they’re not as consistent as they used to be, and probably as they should be. We do get some smaller stoneflies, particularly in the back end of the year, which can be like a needle fly, which can be, you know, a little bit more consistent, but there’s still never, you know, it’s not going to be like a salmon fly hatch in the US. 00:32:01 Dave: Right? 00:32:02 Howard: Yeah. It’s just not the same kind of bug. You know, we get we get, generally speaking, smaller storms and not as many of them. And then the one thing I didn’t mention, it’s more of a southern thing, but we do still get them up here is we get the we get the mayfly, which is our big. You guys refer to most upwards as mayfly. For us, a mayfly is a specific species effectively, which conversely now comes off in early June, generally speaking, rather than rather than May. But it was. That’s actually due to a historic God knows how long ago to change the calendar, and it slipped into June instead of being in May. So it was originally named a mayfly because it hatched in May and the calendar changed back in God knows when it changed it into June. So. 00:32:51 Dave: All right, so you had this flight. So the mayfly literally that name comes from England when they first started, where they were hatching in May. So that’s the mayfly essentially. And then. But because of a counter change in some, whatever, hundreds of years ago, it’s actually it’s actually June now, or it was in June, but the calendar changed it. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. 00:33:11 Howard: Yeah. But that’s a, that’s a big that’s a big upswing. 00:33:14 Dave: It is. 00:33:14 Howard: That’s like a, it’s like a Drake. 00:33:16 Dave: Yeah. Drake. 00:33:16 Howard: It’s like a big. Yeah. And they get called green. Drake’s as well over here sometimes. Yeah. 00:33:22 Dave: But they’re not. They’re different species. 00:33:24 Howard: Yeah. I mean I’m no entomologist but we have I think we’ve got ephemera. Vulgata and Ephemeroptera. Danica I think are the two that we get. 00:33:31 Dave: Okay. 00:33:31 Howard: And they’re yeah, one’s a big yellow one and one’s a big gray one. 00:33:36 Dave: I know, I love it. I, we, we’ve been doing some entomology. We’ve got the salmon fly project and some groups that are in the, you know, kind of out west. They’re trying to document the all the insects because they want to kind of see there’s lots of changes going on and they’re, you know, they’re focusing on some of those Montana streams and things. But it’s interesting because I feel like, you know, we don’t really know as we see changes. I’m sure you’re seeing some changes too in bug insect levels, right? It’s like that’s a starting point. Like how many do you have? Where are they at? Or are they going down? Are they going up? Do you think about that a little bit? Have you seen some changes out there over the last twenty years or so? 00:34:08 Howard: Oh God. Yeah. I mean, in my in my lifetime, and especially in the last twenty years, I’ve seen some big changes. And I mean, you can sort of see some of the reasons for it. I mean, one example I’ll give you is I can remember me and a good friend of mine, we used to fish, you know, an incredible blue winged olive hatches every June on this, on this stretch of river. And it was incredible. I mean, there were we would have a blue winged olive hatch to rival a, you know, fall hatch in the US. It was it was spectacular. And unfortunately, no, that’s that’s almost gone completely to the point where we get a smattering of, of those flies. And I think at least on the surface of it, the main reason appears to be that we had a series of what would have been, I guess, you know, one hundred year floods at one point we had a series of them, you know, over over a relatively short time span. And it significantly changed the, you know, the bottom of the river. It moved a lot of gravel. It took a lot of silt away. It changed it a lot. And the bluing olives seemed to have been a, you know, a victim of that, you know. 00:35:18 Dave: Yeah. That’s it. 00:35:19 Howard: But that’s, that’s not to say that there’s not more of other things. So it has definitely changed. In general, I don’t think it’s as good as it was when I was growing up and when I was younger. But I think it’s far from a disaster. 00:35:33 Dave: No, you could still catch some nice sounds like some nice fish. And we haven’t talked browns at all, but it sounds. Is that still a pretty, pretty healthy population of brown trout around your area? 00:35:43 Howard: Yeah. I mean it varies. Again, it’s it seems as though, you know, some areas that were always good sometimes now aren’t, but other places are coming back a little bit more. So it’s especially in the river. I fish, the main river, I fish, it’s, it can be quite, you know, some years it can some certain stretches, some years can be really, really good. And then all of a sudden that area is just not good for whatever reason. But there’s fish elsewhere. And it’s, I don’t know whether we, we have some, a lot of problems now with, uh, with bird predation. We’ve got European cormorants, which have, we’ve got in plague plague proportions now in the UK. And they are hammering, hammering some of our native fish to the point of it becoming a big problem. And in some areas, they don’t get that bird pressure for some reason. And in other areas they do. So yeah, it’s a complex situation. There’s a lot going on. Water changes, you know, predation. 00:36:48 Dave: That’s always a challenge. I feel like there’s always no matter where you are, there’s multiple things going on, right? You got the the human impacts and you got the, you know, invasive species and you got climate change, right? You got all these factors that are, you know, it’s hard to figure out like, gosh, what’s going on here? What do we do? I mean, yeah, I guess we should be happy that we still have this opportunity to get out there. And maybe it’s a call to action to everybody to be like, hey, we should be doing more to try to protect things. 00:37:14 Howard: Yeah, definitely. I mean, one weird thing that has happened is that in one river, in one river, I fish in particular, and I won’t name it, but the fish are just getting bigger every year. It’s shifted from having a population of large numbers of, you know, small to medium sized fish to having, you know, a much, much bigger population of medium to very large fish. Yeah. It’s not as consistent as it used to be, but the average size is just seems to be getting bigger every year. You know. 00:37:48 Dave: Experience the waters of Bristol Bay at Togiak River Lodge, where fly fishing meets Alaska’s rugged beauty. This is the place to complete the Alaska Grand Slam with all five salmon species rainbow trout, Arctic char and more. Where each day offers a new Alaskan adventure, you can visit Togiak lodge dot com right now to start planning your Bristol Bay experience with Togiak River Lodge. Back to the product stuff. Talk about that a little bit, what you’re working on right now with your product, kind of the things you’re interested in and, and maybe what we can expect from Hardy coming out here. And, you know, we talked about some old school reels, right? The perfect. But I know you guys have some newer stuff coming out. Describe that a little bit. 00:38:28 Howard: Yeah. So we’ve, I mean, I work quite a long way out in advance. So some of the stuff I’m working on now, it won’t start to appear for at least, you know, twelve months plus depending on, on what stage it’s at. But some of the stuff that’s coming out, which will be available within the next certainly towards the end of this season, we’ve got some interesting stuff coming through in Hardy. We’ve got a. Not specifically for the West, but targeted at West. We’ve got a range of three one piece fly rods in the. In the marksman range it’s got to come out, which have been really well received by the guys that have cast them, fished them, had them on the boats out west so far. So that’ll be interesting. Got a new fast Action Ranger rods coming again, not specifically targeted at the West, but it’s probably the the area that it all it’ll do best in. And then we’ve also got it’s been long awaited. It’s been in development for quite a long while. A range of new nymphing rods which are coming out, um, some Euro specific rods and also some, some longer dry fly rods because that’s becoming more the trend now. I mean, sort of technical dry fly fishing for Europe. Ten foot. Yeah, it’s either nine foot nine inch length is still about the optimum. So those are coming. Uh that’s the tactics range. and those should be towards the end of the year. And then on rails. Um, yeah, we’ve, we’ve got some interesting stuff coming. We’ve got a limited edition cascapedia in the works. Um, and we’ve just launched a reel that we’ve done in conjunction with Kelly Gallup, the new River on stream. And that’s been, that’s been going really, really well. 00:40:08 Dave: Oh, cool. What’s that one called? Is that one out there now? 00:40:11 Howard: Yeah, that one’s just launched. It’s called the Avalon Streamer. We developed it in conjunction with Kelly. Basically, we took all of his wants or requests for a specific streamer reel and platformed it off our existing Avalon reel. Um, but we, we increased the IRB and took the backing capacity down. We made it free spool so you can feel the spool rim and it spins the line up off the deck really quick, which is something he wanted. 00:40:37 Dave: Oh, wow. 00:40:38 Howard: We made it silent on the income. We put a click on the outgoing that’s a guide thing so that when you somebody using it who’s being guided, The guide can tell whether the angle is panicking and winding backwards, or actually the fish is swimming away and taking line off. So, you know, all those kind of things come from these years of doing that, and that reels really hit the mark for us. And it’s, it’s actually selling really, really well. 00:41:04 Dave: Oh that’s cool, that’s cool. Yeah, I’m looking at it now. It’s uh, yeah, it looks like a pretty light reel. Is that part of it? 00:41:09 Howard: The other ones in general are very light. That one we actually, we added weight to it on purpose. So we moved more mass to the rim of the reel so that when you spin it, when you fan it with your hand, you get that additional weight to help you know, the centrifuge effect for it to spin faster. And it also makes the real look a little bit chunkier. Um, which was something Kelly requested. And yeah, it’s, uh, it’s been very, very popular. 00:41:38 Dave: That’s cool. Yeah. I feel like those are, those partnerships are always, they seem to be a good thing, right? You’re kind of cross Branding things, you know, and hitting you know, Kelly’s got obviously a big following and out there. How did that did that come to be pretty organically? Have you known Kelly for a while or has that been been going for a while? 00:41:56 Howard: Yeah. So I mean, I’ve been I’ve been going into Kelly’s shops for a long, long time. I’ve, I’ve been a regular visitor to the, to the West for, for over twenty years. And I used to go in Kelly’s shop quite a lot and rather unusually was never in. So I missed him for, for quite a long time, and then a few times I went in and I, I spoke to him occasionally and stuff. But you wouldn’t know me from Adam really, you know. 00:42:23 Dave: Right. 00:42:24 Howard: And then it sort of it just became a little bit more. I started to do a lot more in the US and I got to meet him in one of the shop visits I was doing. And obviously he had a, he sort of, I’ll not say dig, but he did his little sort of rage bit and think about urine and. 00:42:42 Dave: All right. 00:42:42 Howard: He managed to get me proper on that one and I had to have forced myself. I tried to force myself not to comment, but I just gave in and commented. 00:42:51 Dave: Yeah, what was your comment? So Kelly was basically saying going kind of against your own nipping or, you know, that sort of thing. 00:42:57 Howard: Yeah, he was just he said some stuff about, you know, people fly fishing. 00:43:00 Dave: And. 00:43:01 Howard: Yeah, you can’t do anything else. And right. So I, you know, I chewed his, I chewed his head off. 00:43:07 Dave: Right. What’s the comeback to that? So, so what’s the comeback to you? Because you hear that sometimes people are like, I think it’s kind of funny, you know, because it’s like, oh, Euro nymphing. It’s not fly fishing, right? It’s this whole other thing. But is that kind of on the track Kelly was on? And then how did you counter? 00:43:21 Howard: Yeah, it was, it was that kind of thing. But, you know, I should have realized it was, you know, because I mean, the the guy does everything. He’s not really prejudiced against anything. It was just a, you know, it was just a stir up some some conversation. He did a good job of it, but he did. 00:43:36 Dave: Was this like through an online back and forth? 00:43:39 Howard: Yeah, it was just a comment on his podcast. He put his podcast out. I commented on it and then I ended up on the podcast. 00:43:45 Dave: Oh, cool. 00:43:46 Howard: Not that much longer afterwards. And, uh, yeah, and we, we’ve sort of, we sort of hit it off, I think with, we’re probably quite similar in terms of just speaking her mind and, you know, saying what we think. And so yeah. And then, you know, we, we approached him to, you know, to have a bit of a partnership with him on a project. He basically mentioned in passing that, you know, nobody actually does a specific streamer reel and does exactly what I want it to do. And we more or less said, well, maybe we can talk about that. 00:44:19 Dave: And there you go. 00:44:21 Howard: And there you go. 00:44:22 Dave: There you go. That’s awesome. Yeah. Kelly is obviously he’s a you know, I don’t know how you say he’s a firecracker or whatever. Right. He, I, I know his namings of his patterns. Right. And I think you, you are kind of have affiliated, you know, connected fulling mill, right. And some of that stuff. But Kelly’s got all these old names that are kind of, I don’t know what the word is for them. They’re you know, they’re not politically correct, I guess is the right way. Edge. 00:44:44 Howard: Edge is the right word. 00:44:45 Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And there was this post that went out a few years ago. And somebody, one of a big kind of another big person kind of railed on, just went off and it kind of went viral for a little bit. But, um, but I don’t think Kelly didn’t really follow up on it. Right. I think it’s just that stuff kind of comes up and that it sounds like the thing you guys had was much more. Yeah, kind of a better experience on kind of having fun with it. 00:45:07 Howard: Oh yeah. I mean, I’ll be honest, Kelly’s a, I’ve got to know Kelly reasonably well over the, over the last couple of years. And you know, he’s a great guy. I’ve got a huge amount of respect for him and some of the stuff that he’s done for for fly fishing. I use a lot of his patterns, you know, and it’s always it’s always quite funny because he is probably more well known for streamers, but he’s done an awful lot of stuff not relating to streamers, you know, like he’s, he’s crippled spinner. He’s a he’s an absolute mainstay for me. I love that fly. I’ve used that long before I ever met him. And, you know, a good number of my friends in England use that pattern as well. So, you know, he’s had a lot of impact on fishing. And I think, honestly, a lot of the stuff he does with his podcast and just the way he approaches some of the stuff he discusses, I think it’s really good for, you know, for creating a lot of conversation. And he’s a really good guy. He’s a really decent guy as well. 00:46:00 Dave: Yeah. He’s awesome. Yeah. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that episode. It sounds like that’d be awesome. Listen, after this, people can check out the one with Kelly. 00:46:07 Howard: Yeah, we’ve done a few now. I think we’ve done like maybe three. 00:46:11 Dave: Oh you have? 00:46:12 Howard: Yeah, we’ve ended up back multiple times. It’s um, colleague of mine from, uh, from heard he’s al he’s ended up on one of them as well with us. So yeah, they’ve been, uh, it’s been good. 00:46:24 Dave: What do you guys chat about? What’s for those that haven’t listened to Kelly’s podcast, is it kind of a free flowing? How does that podcast. What can we expect? 00:46:32 Howard: Here is what I mean. As well as being a world class angler, Kelly is a world class talker. 00:46:37 Dave: Yeah. He is. 00:46:38 Howard: And he’s he’s a, you know, shouldn’t joke, but he’s you don’t need to give him a lot of material to generate an hour long conversation. But it’s always good conversation. And it’s, you know, they do it based off questions that are sent in or occasionally something that’s happened, but they’re just really an organic, you know, an organic conversation, usually inspired by something that’s been, uh, something that’s been sent in a question, a comment or whatever. But they’re entertaining. And if you listen to it, a lot of it is gold dust. You know, it’s, it’s really good stuff. 00:47:15 Dave: Yeah, I love that. I think that’s the, I think the best podcast out there are just that right there casual conversations. I feel like that’s always, you know what I mean? It’s instead of having some set, you know, program on that. And I think something we get from our listeners a lot is, you know, casting, right? That’s a big thing that, you know, I mean, God, the basics of fly fishing, right? Is casting. I feel like that’s a lot of questions. Is that something that that you kind of are focusing on quite a bit? Do you do any education around fly casting and, and all that? 00:47:45 Howard: You know, I don’t personally anymore. I mean, I love to fly cast and it’s a massive part of my job, obviously being a, you know, a rod designer and developer. It’s like anything else in fly fishing, people get right into the weeds on it sometimes, and then you all then you get, you know, it starts to turn all militant and people start arguing over, you know, little points of nuance that really is it worth arguing about. And so I tend not to, you know, because I know as a having casted tournament style. 00:48:22 Dave: Yeah. 00:48:22 Dave: You’ve done it. You’ve been at the highest level, right? You’re there. 00:48:25 Howard: Yeah. Having casted at tournament level for a lot of years and no, really, I just cast to fish effectively because I don’t. Tournament cast anymore. You know, when I. I fish from a cast from a fishing perspective, a lot of the time it is not perfect because it doesn’t need to be. And it’s not it’s not supposed to be my basic casting stroke and everything. And, you know, my lines being out is all on point and everything’s as it should be. But I’m not obsessing over minutiae because I’m what I’m doing is fishing, you know? And I think sometimes the guys who really just go at it from a casting perspective rather than a fishing perspective, get a little bit too, you know? 00:49:13 Dave: Yeah. Too much. 00:49:14 Howard: Obsessive over some of. 00:49:15 Dave: It. 00:49:15 Dave: Yeah. I think when you take it to that level, it’s not yeah, that’s not worth it. That’s never a good place to be. Well, take us out of here with I want to hear about you’ve got a big event coming, right. The worlds are coming in Idaho. What are you going to be doing to prepare? You know, what do you guys think your chances are? It’s kind of been interesting because we’ve been talking about this. It’s like, well, you know, who’s going to take this thing? And obviously you hear a lot about the, you know, the European having such a strong, you know, all the teams over there. What’s your take on all this? Do you guys think you have a chance to take this one away. 00:49:45 Howard: Based off last year was in check. Check was a really challenging, not so challenging. It was a very diverse set of venues, a lot of different fish species, a lot of nuance to some of the fishing. And we practice well. And we had a good team and we stayed in the medal fight for pretty much the whole competition. On day four, we had, as does happen sometimes in these competitions. We had a particularly bad run of draws I had on day four. I ended up on a bad beat that hadn’t produced the toll for the whole week, and it also had a flood come down at the same day I fished it. 00:50:24 Dave: Oh wow. 00:50:24 Dave: You had a flood on the day? 00:50:26 Howard: Yeah, I got a flood on then because I was the bottom beat in the in the line of beats. I was on the very last beat. I didn’t get any clear water in my three hours, whereas the upper beats all got somewhere between an hour and thirty minutes of clear water fishing. So it really kicked me on the fourth day because I was in it. I was in and around the medals within range of the medals going into the fourth day. So even with a blank on the fourth day, I ended up finishing tenth. I think I was overall around about ten to the eleventh even with a blank. And the team, unfortunately, we we went from up in the medal positions to down to eighth on the fourth day, but we went back up to sixth, I think on the fifth day. So we were close. We, you know, so we, we were doing well this year in Idaho. The American team, obviously, they’ve got a really good team, a lot of the same guys as usual, it’s at home, although a lot of them aren’t from that area. They have had the advantage of holding the national finals on the venues. So they’ve pre practiced effectively which were not able to. The French always got to say the French have are going to be there or thereabouts. The Spanish team quite often are there or thereabouts or they had a tougher year last year with a lot of new people in the team. And then the Czechs will be right up there. So, you know, these things are incredibly competitive, will come with an open mind, as we always do. We’ll we’ll practice well. We’ll practice similar venues, uh, as best we can in the run up to it. We have some get togethers at home where I’ll sort of take them through the stuff that I know about the venues, having fished in that area, and we’ll come with an open mind and the right attitude, and we’ll try our best and hopefully we’ll come out somewhere in the wash. 00:52:19 Dave: That’s amazing. When was the last time the worlds were in England or anywhere over there? 00:52:24 Howard: Um, it was in in two thousand and nine, it was held in Scotland. 00:52:29 Dave: Oh, okay. Two thousand and nine. 00:52:30 Howard: So I was in that team. 00:52:32 Dave: Oh, wow. 00:52:33 Howard: Again, we had a we had a good team that year and we actually won it. 00:52:36 Dave: You did you won it in two thousand and nine. 00:52:38 Howard: As a team. We won in two thousand and nine. And then so basically it was it was four lakes and one river because the, the organisers, the Scottish organisers obviously wanted to showcase the lakes rather than the rivers. Um and also, you know, being cynical, putting, having four lakes and one river probably increase their chances of doing well. And it did, they came third. Um they finished third. I think France was second and we, we were first. 00:53:10 Dave: Yeah. 00:53:11 Dave: That’s it. So it sounds like two thousand and nine. You guys might be due for another one. How does that are you involved in any of that. The choosing of the the events, the locations. 00:53:20 Dave: No. 00:53:20 Howard: The in terms of who hosts the course, the competition that’s done by, you know, the organization, the host organization in whichever country will put in a bid to host the World World Championships. It would be good if there was another one in the UK, but it would need somebody to organise it. And it is a it is a monumental task in terms of organisation, sponsorship and funding. You know, it is a huge ask to lay on a world of a. At the level it needs to be held. So I’m unsure when the next one will be held over here. I mean, it would need people to step up to do it. You know, I might have been tempted to get involved at some point this year. It definitely won’t. 00:54:06 Dave: Be. No. Yeah. 00:54:07 Dave: That’s right. You got a big you got a big year. 00:54:09 Dave: I’ve got all the things going on. So yeah. 00:54:11 Dave: That’s amazing. That’s so cool. Just take us out of here with a couple of tips. We were talking dry fly fishing. Let’s just imagine somebody is going to be fishing that in June out there in your neck of the woods. northern kind of, you know, kind of England up there. What would you tell somebody? Would you tell give them different tips. Information fishing that versus say, fish in Idaho. Or do you have some general things you’d talk about? 00:54:33 Dave: Yeah. I mean. 00:54:34 Howard: Often the similar thing everywhere. But over here in at this time of year, right place, right time, we’ve been getting a lot of relatively strong easterly winds, which is a cold wind this spring. And getting out of that easterly wind into somewhere sheltered is the difference between the being bugs and rising fish and the being nothing. So get yourself in the right place. You know, if you’ve got a good day with good overhead conditions and the temperatures are right, you’re going to have a chance of some some fly if you’re trying to catch big fish, unfortunately, you’ve got to quite often put the miles in and look for them. But rather than fishing, you’ve got to do quite a bit of walking sometimes. And it’s it’s always at this time of year in the spring over here, it’s you’re trying to hit, you know, a moving target from an unstable platform, you know, so it’s a little bit, you know, it can be hit and miss. I had a week of fishing. I took a week off a couple of weeks back. I had a week of fishing. I had four tough days. And I had one exceptional day. It just down to conditions and just not getting on the fish. And a lot of times when you find them, if they’re up on the rising and they’re happy, provided you’ve got a pattern on that is, you know, acceptable to him in terms of size and the way it’s sitting in the water and color doesn’t have to be anything special. It’s just a good approach and a drag free drift. 00:56:02 Dave: Yeah. 00:56:02 Dave: Drag free. That’s what we here. Yeah. Drag free is the key. 00:56:05 Dave: Same deal. Yeah. 00:56:06 Dave: So you’re just yeah, basically the advice is get out there and, and look for the fish, find those fish that are actually happy and they’re rising and there’s a hatch and, and then fish them. That’s kind of the focus versus, say, getting stuck in any specific area. 00:56:19 Dave: Yeah. 00:56:19 Howard: And don’t get to don’t throw the towel in too quick. The day that I had a really good day a couple of weeks back, I could easily have walked off the river after the first three hours because it wasn’t happening. And I just moved and I went somewhere else. And I looked again, and all of a sudden I found something going on, and it just got better and better for a couple of hour period. And, you know, I put some, some really, really nice fish in the net in, you know, a short spell of time. 00:56:50 Dave: This is awesome. All right. Howard. Well, I think we could leave it there for today. Um, you know, as always, we leave a lot on the table. Definitely follow up with you again. We’ll have links out to the we mentioned before the Lateral Zone podcast you did with Phil. And we’ll get those Kelly Gallup episodes as well. So we can keep this conversation going. But, um, we’ll send everybody out to Hardy fishing dot com and Howard Croston fly Fisher on Instagram and yeah, appreciate all your time, Howard. We’ll definitely stay in touch. 00:57:14 Howard: Thanks, Dave. Really appreciate it. 00:57:18 Dave: If you get a chance, please check in with Howard. You can do that on Instagram. Howard, cross and fly Fisher. You can also find him at Hardy fishing dot com. Please let him know you heard this podcast. And, uh, and if you want to get a chance to check in with us, you can do that right now. Uh, go to webflow dot com slash pro. We’ll get you some details there and signing up for our next cohort when that thing launches and you’ll get access to trips, uh, gear, all sorts of bonuses, including the community. All right. That’s all I have for you today. It is late in the night, so I hope you’re having a good day. Good night. Uh, or afternoon, wherever you are in the world. And, uh, hope you’re getting on the river. We’ll see you there. And we’ll talk to you soon. 00:57:58 Speaker 5: Thanks for listening to the wet Fly swing Fly Fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit Wet Fly swing dot com.