The Trek-Tech Blog reviews the SmithFly Digi-Pouch and they like it.

The guys over on Trek Tech Blog put the Digi-Pouch through a couple months of tests and wrote a nice review of it. While not strictly fly-fishing it’s a great testament to the usefulness of our gear in extra-piscatorial activities. It’s a brave soul that straps his wife’s DSLR to his pontoon boat in a gear test, but I appreciate the faith in our gear! Pay them a visit to read the whole post.

 

SmithFly Digi Pouch, $60, www.smithfly.net.

The Good: Keeps your DSLR and car keys dry as a bone. Room to boot.

The Bad: Still looking for it.

The Ugly: The light grey color doesn’t match the rest of my mint green and burnt orange fly fishing gear.

The SmithFly Digi Pouch is an 18 ounce roll top dry bag (6” Diam x 13.5” H) that is designed to accommodate a Digital SLR camera while on the water. Like the other modular pockets and packs designed by SmithFly, the Digi Pouch attaches to SmithFly’s base vest and waist packs utilizing the military derived MOLLE (pronounced “Molly”, like the lady) system.

Over a period of 3 months the Digi Pouch was strapped to my waist while wading through my favorite fishing grounds and to the side of my pontoon boat while punching through rapids. Though I do not typically carry a large heavy camera with me while fishing, I stole my wife’s DSLR and stowed it in the dry bag for testing purposes.

The Digi Pouch easily contained the Canon EOS Rebel XTi with the base 18-55 mm lens attached. The throat of the dry bag is very wide allowing the camera to be easily loaded and unloaded and the roll top portion of the bag is tall enough (10”; approx. 3 rolls worth) to give the user enough room to adequately seal the bag over large bulky items. The Digi Pouch provides complete brief submergence-proof dryness to your goods as long as the opening rim surfaces are clean and pressed firmly together while rolling the bag closed.

 

Diablo Paddlesports and Earl in the Hospital!

Diablo Paddlesports and a couple of good looking Shorthairs.

This morning I was made aware of a new boat that has given me paddle lust. The Diablo Paddlesports hybrid Sit-on-top stand-up-paddle boat. After successfully launching my home-built Wee Lassie I thought my next boat would have oar locks and be of the drifty dory type hull. But this whole stand-up-paddle situation looks mighty tempting especially for its usefulness in the salt, which my pretty little Wee Lassie will thankfully  never see.

From the looks of the photo above one of the founders of Diablo Paddlesports runs shorthairs, which are cool, but not as cool as Setters, sorry guys.

And I heard this morning that Earl Scruggs has been hospitalized. We hope its nothing serious, get well soon EARL!

UPDATE 2:45 p.m. – We have learned from the Scruggs family that Earl’s hospitalization is not a cause for great concern, and that he is feeling much better.

Rent a Drift Boat? Yes you can.

A rented drift boat from Gott's Landing in Mio, Michigan.

What to do if you want to float a river in a drift boat and don’t already have one?
Rent a Drift boat!

The Au Sable river’s Trophy Water below Mio Dam is fairly big and while wadeable in many stretches, most of the wade access points in the big water are fairly difficult to wade, and the parts that are wadeable are crowded. My accomplice had fished the Au Sable last year and decided that the only way to effectively fish the trophy water was from a drift boat. Trouble is neither of us have one, yet. So we rented one for two days, covered the water very  thoroughly, with every tactic we could think of, had a blast, and learned a lot about some new (to us) water.

The boat pictured above is the one we rented from Gott’s Landing Trophy Water’s Fly Shop on the Au Sable River in Mio, Michigan.  While its not a marvelous wooden beauty, like we typical fawn over at the Fiddle and Creel, it worked fairly well. One thing we did was quiet down the oar locks with some duct tape. Before we did that they were super sloppy and sounded like we were slinging around a bag hammers in the boat, trout just love that. The folks at Gotts’ Landing also run a shuttle service for your tow vehicle for an extra ten bucks, well worth the money.

So the next time you’re thinking, man that looks like good water, but I just don’t have a drift boat, call some local fly shops and RENT ONE!

By the way, that really fishy deep run and subsequent junction of two threads in the background of the picture, looked like it should hold some nice fish, and probably does, but I couldn’t get them to chase anything. Alas, there were plenty of other great spots that did.