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Saturday February 6th 2010 (3 days ago)
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We're chained to our computers, thinking about fly fishing.
This blog is our outlet to keep our heads from exploding

Another one!

Blog: Permalink | Comment | This day | Archive |
Published: Saturday February 6th 2010 (3 days ago)
Updated: Monday February 8th 2010, 5:17PM
More about: Books | by Martin Joergensen

Innocent fly anglers can also be lured into spending money on odd and probably worthless causes and products.

Below the somewhat longish page meant to entice you to buy this fantastic book.

If you thought that online scams only were executed by Nigerians and always included millions of dollars and a widowed queen from an almost unknown African nation, think again. Innocent fly anglers can also be lured into spending money on odd and probably worthless causes and products.

Loyal longtime readers of GFF will remember this blog entry from early 2006 where I found a site touting a book titled “Some Guys Catch All the Fish: What Other Angling Experts Won't Tell You!”. I managed to get my hands on the book, which was a far cry from the nice, hardbound book depicted on the website, but looked more like one of my early school projects, photo copied and spiral bound, with very few B/W photos in lousy quality. I will not get more into the quality of the text, but let the fact that I never reviewed it suffice as a measure.

I just stumbled over another web site like the one mentioned back then. The traps laid out to lead me here were really intricate, and sure tells me that the people behind are not doing this for the sake of my blue eyes, nor to make my fishing better.

I was browsing YouTube for videos for our new video channel, and noticed this odd video.
The video is called Fly Fishing Book, but it's not a book (duh!). It's not even a video. The “video” consists of 6-8 slides of text telling the viewer how to get a fish that runs towards you under control. “Stand on your toes and raise your rod over your head as high as you can”, “Quickly strip the line to pull up any slack”, “Be ready to palm the reel of the rod when the slack is entirely gone”. OK there you have some secrets revealed in this stirring video! Pick up line!? Whoa! I had never thought of that! Palm the reel? Brillant! Except my reel has a brake and no palming options...

Well, never mind this bland and obvious advice. It's not there to educate you. It's there to lure you.
It's pure bait put out to get people like me and you to go to a web page called Fly Fishing Book Review. I won't link, because linking will just aide these guys in spreading the message and raise their positions in the search engines, and they don't deserve that.

You can copy and paste the URL (flyfishingbookreview.com) into your browser to see the page. It's almost totally empty, doesn't have a single book review in spite of the title. It is text only, has about 10 pages, all have titles like
Easy Fly Fishing Instructions
How To Fly Fish
Fly Fishing How To
Fly Fishing Report
Fly Fishing For Beginners
and so on. I sometimes work with search engine optimization and can recognize a bait page when I see one, and this is as good (or as bad) as they come.
This page has absolutely no valuable content, but has one purpose: to appear in search engines and link and lead on to another site called Fly Fishing Secrets located on an address called fly-fishing-skills.com (no link again, copy and paste). The individual pages contain no specific advice on any of the very common and broad subjects, but contain lots of text, which is there for the sake of Google – not you. Each page has one link leading on to the target page. The one, which sells the book.

That page starts like this:
“How I Accidentally Stumbled Onto The 'Deadly Tactic' That Consistently Sends Trout, Bass or Salmon Lunging For My Line Every Time I Go Fly Fishing!”
So there! The tone is set. Using this secret tactic you can win every time.
It goes on:
“The story will shock and delight you! It’s an amazingly simple ‘fly fishing’ revelation that consistently triggers the most shocking and powerful strikes you'll ever experience...and if you're like most people the results will leave you stunned, breathless and smiling so hard your cheeks will hurt the very next time you go fly fishing! Impossible? Not if you believe the rave reviews from top fly fishermen and hot new comers...”
Smiling so hard your cheeks will hurt! Mighty tempting indeed!

But go on down the page, and you will find some of the hallmarks of pages selling the ordinary as a miracle cure:
Testimonials
Check lists (many!)
Lots of bold and underlined text
Precise numbers (27 most deadly fly patterns, not 20, not 30, but 27!)
Promise of secrets revealed
Words like free, 100%, risk free and guaranteed mentioned numerous times
Stamps and seals (100% guaranteed)
A signature (In blue ink... online? A signature? It's like Readers Digest marketing material)
Credit card logos and PayPal link, but no price (buy now and no price!?)

In the very bottom it says: “You must hurry, there are only a limit number ‘insiders’ allowed (Jeff can pull this offer at anytime without warning) and I’m taking all the risk here.”
Since the copyright notice on the page reads 2008, it has been on there for at least two years, so the rush seems to be limited.
There is no price of course, but I can tell you that it's £25.00GBP.

Well, apart from all these telltale signs, how can I be sure that this is some kind of moneymaking scam?

I did a little searching, and lo and behold! The company and name behind these hitherto untold secrets of fly fishing is Stonetree Ltd. personified by Andrew Barker, located in Reading in the UK. And Andrew and Stonetreee can also supply similar secrets within areas such as job interviews, selling, golf swings, kung fu and probably much else. Andrew Barker has at least 70 domains registered with fantastic names such as:
power-of-my-mind.com,
the-corporate-escalator.com,
mma-training-secrets.com,
powerofthedragon.com,
golf-secret-skills.com,
killersalestips.com,
ninja-training-secrets.com
and perhaps the best one
buildasellingmoneymachine.com

Build a selling money machine!

So right! My guess is that if you order this top secret book of fly fishing, you will most likely get a cheap, spiral bound photocopied pamphlet containing very ordinary tips presented in the usual manner of “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them”. These days I guess you might not even get a physical copy, but the right to download a PDF. Why bother mailing atoms to folks, when you can let the download bits?


More from Stonetree Ltd. Golf? Sales training? Job seeking tips? Trouble with the landlord? Wanna be a Ninja? We can help! Notice how the same guy has a testimony in several of the setups. Why bother getting new stock images? He looks trustworthy, dosn't he?




The whole idea of this type of scam is form over substance. Since there is very little substance in any of the material you try to sell, you are forced to package it in the most glorious promises. Wind your audience up so much, that no one dare say bah!

The emperor's new clothes.
Simple as that.
He has nothing on!




Part of the blog chain "15,000 trout"

Gotta try carp

Blog: Permalink | Comment | This day | Archive |
Published: Friday January 29th 2010 (11 days ago)
Updated: Friday January 29th 2010, 7:45PM
More about: Carp | by Martin Joergensen

Carp fishing with a fly has been suggested to me several times, but I never tried it.

I have always connected carp fishing with warm days, oily water and tonnes of gear: feeders, bite alarms, chairs, and a gazillion other things, which I don't know the neither the name nor the function of.

A good friend, Nils, who used to be a hard core carp fisher, did mention going for carp with a fly, and I have seen enough and heard enough about carp fishing to know that it could be thrilling. Carp are often referred to as "poor man's bonefish" due to the sight fishing you do to catch them and due to their strength and long runs.

Carp fishing is also surfacing in our new video channel, and a Korean carp video is the most watched video on there - twice as popular as number two - and for a good reason! It's a beautiful video and the fishing does look very exciting. Other videos with carp fishing have been added, and they all make carp fishing look both interesting and exciting.

One thing, which I find nice about carp fishing, is that it seems to take place when it's hot - in the middle of the summer. Most fishing is dead here in the middle of the summer unless you fish at night, and having something to patch the gap between spring and autumn would be nice.

I have very little experience with carps, and the only places I have seen carps is in ponds in people's gardens and in lakes and channels in certain parks here in Copenhagen. And I'm sure that tossing a fly into one of these waters would stir more than the carp. I know of lakes that have carp, and some draining channels too, but haven't really pursued it any further.

Perhaps this summer? I might give it a go. Any GFF readers who have carp experience are welcome to mail me with tips and patterns, and we might see a carp on the fly article here sometime later this year.

A different tube system

Blog: Permalink | Comment | This day | Archive |
Published: Friday January 15th 2010 (25 days ago)
Updated: Saturday January 16th 2010, 4:30PM
More about: Fly tying materials | Tube flies | by Martin Joergensen

And I mean really, really different. Really!

Danish Morten Bundgaard approached me just before Christmas regarding a new tube system he had made for tube fly tying.
He sent me a link to a makeshift web site and I was immediately intrigued, because what I saw was radically different from anything I had seen before with regards to tubes. And as those of you who know me know that I have seen quite a bit, most of it covered in my large tube fly theme.

Morten's tube system is a rethought, modular system where each component is meticulously designed for its purpose. Most traditional tube systems consist of simple cylindrical tubes in different diameters, which you combine to your needs. You can add cones and dishes as well as different weights or add-ons. A lot of the contemporary systems such as those from Bidoz, Eumer and the late Shumakov introduce some premade shapes to the tubes, enabling the tyer to create different types of patterns.

But Morten takes a different approach. His system is in a way traditional with simple universal elements, which you combine to your needs, but the individual parts themselves are much more thought through, and are injection molded to get some special shapes and function into the tubes. Rather than straight pieces of tube, tubes in the Pro Tube System have bumps, stops, tapers and holes in the sides, which all serve a purpose in the finished fly. The individual parts of course fit together with the other elements in the system, and you can combine them in many ways.

A very small selection of the many components


You can get cones in several shapes, made of different materials and small propellers to add in front of your fly to induce even more attraction into your creation.
Morten has been kind enough to send me some samples and as soon as I get the time (ha!), I'll sit down and tie and shoot some photos of the parts and the flies themselves. Until then you can savor the large selection of parts on the Pro Tubefly System homepage.

PS: in an early stage of our correspondence Morten also showed me some tube fly vice designs, which looked very interesting. Hopefully these will find their way to the market as an addition to the selection of different tube tools already out there.

Flies tied with the new tubes






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