bamboo shavings

More Vandalia Rodworks Press

wvangler — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:00:38 +0000

Brad Rice from WCHS TV (Charleston/Huntington ABC Affiliate) came out to the shop and did a nice story on my company Vandalia Rodworks. The prefaced the story with an encouragement for local fly fishing enthusiasts to “look no further than the Kanawha Valley for the perfect Christmas gift”. Geez, as if my two year backlog of orders wasn’t bad enough! Now I’m really covered up. I suppose I should probably raise my prices again soon, but even then the cost/benefit is not incredibly profitable. I enjoy making rods, but sure wish I could engage this type of great marketing with a business that turned a much nicer profit.

Link – Travelling West Virginia: Vandalia Rodworks

I’ve recently made an update to the forums on my start up website WVMountainsport.com. Hopefully that will cut down on some of the spammers. Encourage anyone you know who might be interested in any of the topics there to join up and join in.

Red Gold

wvangler — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:47:21 +0000

Sorry it has been so long since my last post(s). I’ll try to pick it up a bit this winter.

Update on the video progress: I’ve started tearing apart some of my footage and I still want more raw footage. The edge just isn’t there yet. I met with Dr. Todd Petty and got an hour’s worth of footage of him telling all sorts of great novelties and anecdotes about brookies, but I need more. More More MORE.

Till then, have a look at a fantastic conservation video done by a much more apt production company than my own. I’d like to get a copy of this sometime to see, but if anyone has a copy already and wouldn’t mind me crashing your couch to watch it, I’ll bring beverages.

Colorado Video Short

wvangler — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:04:28 +0000

Finally got around to putting some of my Colorado video together, enough for a short-fastandfurious-video anyway. Check it out…

Unfortunately, the resolution on the upload is not all that great so it is hard to see the fish in the water on the video, let alone the flies floating through the pools. I will probably upload a full resolution version in flash format to my website soon.

does that make me famous?

wvangler — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:51:52 +0000

I gots me benches featured on Buster Wants To Fish.

Check It

That and five bucks will get a cup of coffee at Starbucks…should they ever build a reasonably accessible one within an hour of the biggest city in West Virginia. But that’s another story.

steelhead on dries?

wvangler — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:17:13 +0000

Way.

Castaway’s Musical Utubes VI

wvangler — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:47:38 +0000

A few months back you may remember that I posted “Heart It Races” by Architecture in Helsinke. AIS is one of my favorites…def the best from down under. Dr. Dog is a band that I’ve come to like as well and that they did a cover of Architecture in Helskinke’s Heart it Races is only icing. I dig this cover. (also check out Dr. Dog’s “The Old Days”…great tune).

Just in case you missed the original version, here is another look at “Heart it Races” from Architecture in Helsinke (the original video is buried in another post…here is a more “live” version if you will)

This another one of my new favorite bands. The Seedy Seeds are from Cincinatti. They’ve got several tunes I like. Apparently they haven’t done any videos yet or at least I didn’t find any on my very short search on youtube. They are like a techno band with a shot of Appalachian banjo, the vocals are good too. All I could find on youtube were a few poorly filmed live performances. If you get a chance, listen to “The Little Patton” and “Changes Less The Moon”. This is a nugget from a performance last year…

New one from Deerhoof. Not their best stuff IMO, but worth a listen.

Smashing Pumpkins cover of Thin Lizzy’s Dancing in The Moonlight. Rock.

More on Colorado

wvangler — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:23:59 +0000

In anticipation for the WVU vs. Colorado game I’ll pile on one more CO post then let it rest. For my non-wvangler.com readers here is Chris’ video of the trip including his great photography.

Let’s Go Mountaineers!

Back in the Saddle

wvangler — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:24:15 +0000

I did some tweaking last night with my video editing software and it appears that I may be back in the video making business again. Shoo-wee, it has been a while since I cranked out some videography. Just so you don’t think I’m making this up I went ahead and took a portion of the summer brookiebum trip’s footage and put it into a short video for your viewing pleasure. This one took about an hour’s worth of post production so it isn’t overly polished. Really just an experiment in seeing how much stress the virtual memory on my machine would take. It went well. Also, on a somewhat related note, I have a wireless mic that works now. The last two were junk. So I’m ready to roll on finishing up the last bits of a DVD that I’ve been talking about for two years.

Framed

wvangler — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:35:37 +0000

Check it out. I’ve learned a new craft. I came into a motherload of matting material recently. Don’t ask don’t tell. So I bought a cheap, stress cheap, matting cutter. I boogered 4 mats before I finally started getting the hang of it. Still not frame shop quality, but it is free. Oh, and did I mention that I also got a small selection of framing material? So over the past week I’ve been matting and figuring out how to create a shadowbox for my Colorado Cuttslam certificate. I finished the matted part two days ago and tonight I made a frame. Everyone says making picture frames is really tricky, I didn’t have much trouble. Maybe I got lucky. Anyway, I still need to get the glass cut before I hang it up in my office, but here is the somewhat finished product. Check out the shadowbox of flies that were tied by A.K. Best.

Cuttslam Framed

A.K.'s flies

Hallowed Hell

wvangler — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:35:06 +0000

They jacked up the price of the 3 day license in PA, at least best I can tell. I don’t remember it being $40 just to fish 3 days. I’ll not be doing that again, at least not during this annual conference I go to in State College. I was able to fish for a grand total of one hour on Monday. I’m not used to fishing spring creeks or for that matter water that gets pounded. Keying in on fish that will only take a size 32 1/2 trico with exactly 13mm tails, not 12mm or 14mm mind you, is not my thing. They can have it. It isn’t a matter of being up to the challenge and some have said snidely that it must mean that I’m just not a very good fisherman, it is just that I don’t enjoy it much. And for those with the latter comment I’d be willing to either challenge the angler to a day’s fishing or a fistfight, whatever works best.

At any rate, I’ve now fished Spring Creek and Fishing Creek in Pennsylvania for two years in a row and I’m pretty much not sold on it. I’m sure if the fish were boiling the water and I had it dialed in it may be slightly different, but still. On Monday I fished the famed Fisherman’s Paradise section and in that one hour I caught three and moved about the same number more. I saw a ton of fish, but they were all pretty much sitting on the bottom. If I found a rising fish I was able to catch it without much fuss, but rising fish were hard to come by despite the clouds of tricos hanging in the air.

On Tuesday morning the skies opened up and the rain came down in buckets. After my conference let out at 4:15 I made my way back up to the Benner Springs Hatchery section of Spring Creek anticipating colored water and a good brown trout bite. I found the former but not the latter. There were literally thousands of BWO’s and other misc. insects on the surface of the water that evening and not one fish rising. I stripped streamers and did most of my magic tricks and only illicited one or two strikes and no fish. I had about given up when I went back to the bridge at the parking area and tried to fish the clear spring head that came out just downstream of the bridge. I noticed a couple of nice browns hugging the bank in the clear water and I made a cast just over one of the fish with a copper john. The fish moved a little like it came to look at the fly so I set the hook and hooked it right in the tail. The day before (on Monday) I took an asshooked rainbow as well (see photo). I suppose that the positive side of this is that if the fish isn’t big at least make it fun and tailhook it.

Next time I’m in PA it is either native brook trout freestoners or sitting around the Penn State campus ogling the young ladies.

The aforementioned spring

asshooked

Any trout in there?

groceries were plentiful

but these weren't hungy

farewell, forever