Pocket Water

What more can I say  but …

… and looking forward to many more over summer

After a bit of a lay off, I have added a new section here. There are numerous fly fishermen around Australia who are increasingly interested in taking the plunge and building their own bamboo fly rods.

In response we have set up a Bamboo Rod Builders chat session which will commence at around 7:30pm AEST every Wednesday evening. To join the chat, look for the "live chat" login at the top right of this page.

Most of the discussion so far has been about suppliers and tools. In an attempt to make this a little easier, we have started a new bamboo rod building page where we hope to gather some information that local rod builders might be interested in. The page can be found in the pages section to the right. 

The rod pictured is a new rod by local bamboo rod maker Nick Taransky, dubbed the "Tea Stick". Also, if you every wondered what the rod is in the top banner on this page, well … it is 6' #2/3 also built by Nick. It was purchased as a blank and finished off by Fatso and is a damn fine little twig to fish those mountain streams with.

Well, it's that time again, and the Fly Fishing Film Festival is coming around again fast. The Australian dates were released a while back (and I have been too busy to post them til now) but better late than never Last years festival was great (see previous post) and it was great to see so many anglers coming out of the woodwork to support this project.

The films this year include Trout Bum Diaries 2 (Kiwi Cammo), Running Down the Man and A Foam Odyssey. If the trailers are anything to go by it is going to be a spectacular evening.

Tickets are available online from the Gin Clear web site, as well as from some fly fishing retailers, including Alpine Angler.

Do yourself a favour and come along for a look. I might see you there 

Things have been a little quiet here of late, with some serious network down time as a result of a change of premises. Services seem to be back up and running again now though. If anyone has any issues let me know and I'll look into  it.

For now I have started the new year with the addition of a live chat room. Just fill in your desired nick name and click "Join". This one is a little sneaky and should get through the most corporate firewalls.

There are no rules governing it's use as such. At this stage I am trusting that users are mature enough to treat the service with respect. If it is abused the service will be removed.

The chat room is a free service, however if you are feeling generous there is a paypal link on the right. Any donations will help keep this site up and running and would be gratefully accepted.

Have fun

Blake 

For the past couple of months I have been working on a little side project. I have been indexing all the back issues of the magazine FlyLife. The search went live on the magazines website on Monday Oct 9, and the number of hits I have received is quite good (around 2000 or so).

The code is still being refined in what little spare time I have, but it is mostly complete. It can be found at http://flylife.pocketwater.com.au.