I tried to fish for trout on the Guadalupe Sunday without a split shot, and ran into two problems. The flow is so slow, and the river is so shallow, that the weight of my attractor–a girdle bug tied on a muddler hook–was still causing too many hangups in the rocks. I had wrapped them 10 times or so with .025 wire. I re-tied this week with .015.
It raised a problem for me, how do I tell last week’s girdle bugs, which would be just fine in heavier water, from this week’s girdle bugs? I searched the internet, where writers suggested you should organize your fly boxes by weight. Fat chance that. My fly boxes are filled with good intent, but this week’s organization is largely chaos by the next time I go fishing. I do manage to keep nymphs in one box, streamers in one, dries in a third, and little tiny things I can’t see anymore in a fourth. And I like the notion of loading what I actually plan to fish in still another box. I tied this week’s girdle bugs in brown, which contrasts from the prior week’s black. Of course that means this week I have no black girdle bugs to fish.
I also had some 5x Umpqua tippet that was rotten. How old was it? No clue, but it couldn’t have more than a decade. I guess after a few decades none of us are what we were.