Keeping My Sanity When Winter Blows In

I know I live in the land of "The Greatest Snow on Earth", but that really doesn't excite me the way it does so many others.  Give me a sunny May afternoon floating around one of my favorite bass ponds over hurtling down the side of a frozen, crusty, mountain any day. 

Ice fishing doesn't really do it for me either, so I've pretty well resigned myself to tying flies and shooting/pouring baits during the frigid months.

Bass were on my mind for much of the winter, so I tended to focus on creations to appease them.

Recently, after I had my little adventure on the new trout stream, I was bitten by the trout fly bug.  The sickness came on slowly,

but with a cold and gloomy Saturday, and an out of town wife, I was soon overwhelmed and couldn't stop myself from tying.

I tried a lot of new ideas I had kicking around.

I guess the trout will tell me if they were good ideas or not.  I've also decided I want to try catching some larger trout this year, so I whipped up this sassy bugger.

If nothing else, I would imagine the smallmouth will thunk him.

I'm really pleased that the forecast is largely a good one so that I can go fling some of these bugs around soon.