Blane Chocklett: Fly Design Innovation and Muskie on the Fly

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 561, with guest Blane Chocklett.

Getting Ready for Muskie Season

Blane Chocklett: Hi, I'm Blane Chocklett, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Blane, what's going on, man?

Blane Chocklett: Not much, just getting ready to start the muskie season, it'll be a grind for the next four months. I usually start muskie season late November and it goes through mid-March, and I usually shut it down when the fish start showing signs of wanting to spawn.

Tom Rowland: Huh, so why is that the winter time, is that water levels, what's going on there?

Blane Chocklett: So being in Virginia, I'm in that southern realm of the muskie range, so up north where muskie season generally runs from late summer through about now, they start shutting it down because it turns to winter up there. Being in Virginia, the southern lowest part of their range, we have a much longer season of that prime time, whereas up in Wisconsin and Minnesota they usually have October and early November as their prime time. Being in Virginia, with those mild winters, we keep the water temperatures in the upper 30s to low 40s throughout most of the winter unless we have a super cold one, so those fish migrate into what I call their wintering spots, and it condenses everything, and those fish are kind of in that pre-spawn feeding mode during the entire winter, to be honest. It really condenses everything, it makes the fishing a lot easier, especially backing myself into a corner a long time ago trying to catch them on a fly.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's one of the things I want to talk to you about, because the muskie is a very interesting fish, probably not for you, but it's surrounded by mystery, you've got it figured out now, but at one point it was kind of a mysterious fish. I grew up in Tennessee, the muskie is a native fish there, but I've had very little luck fishing for them, they really haven't been something I've fished for a lot, so excuse me if I don't know much, that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, I want to learn a lot more about them, and one day I'd love to catch one. But they were called the fish of ten thousand casts for so long, it was made out to be this fish that was so difficult to catch, why would you even try. And all of a sudden I'm looking at your Instagram and you're catching them on fly, doing all these things that are supposed to be not the way muskies behave, you're not gonna go cast ten thousand times with a fly rod, your arm would fall off. So you've figured something out, I'd love to know what that process of targeting that fish was like, going from that to being able to catch them consistently, and you're catching huge ones on fly.

Blane Chocklett: Yeah, well, it's been a long process, I've been guiding over thirty years, and a big part of that was growing up in that era where we started having incredible TV shows, Flip Pallot's show, Walker's Cay, and a really good friend of mine and mentor, Larry Dahlberg, came around doing Hunt for Big Fish, it started off as these little five-minute episodes that led into some other shows and morphed into the bigger show. I remember as a teenager, living in the sticks in the mountains here in Virginia, my parents had some property, and for us to get cable we'd have had to tear down too many trees, so we got satellite, but cable wouldn't run far enough, so the only way I could ever watch cable was to go see my grandmother, hang out with her on a Friday night, eat pizza, and get up Saturday mornings and watch ESPN Saturday morning outdoors. One particular morning Dahlberg was fishing for muskies up in Canada, targeting them on a fly rod, and that kind of sparked it. Around that same time my uncle and I were fishing on some of my local rivers here, the James and the New River, we were smallmouth fishing, and next thing you know a smallmouth gets eaten by a musky, and that triggered that whole thing with me, I was like, I've gotta figure this out. At that point I was starting to catch a lot of different other species, I was fly fishing at the time but didn't know a whole lot about it, and we had mentors come along, and it really allowed me to have a giant classroom, learning from all these different species and how they feed. I also met a good friend and mentor, Harrison Steeves, a biologist at Virginia Tech, and he had a good friend, Steve Hiner, an aquatic entomologist, I met them when I was in high school on the Jackson River, a tailwater here in Virginia, and Harrison, an incredible fly tier, taught me how important it was to match the hatch and figure out what the fish are feeding on. That all morphed into my career now as a guide, learning at a really young age, sixteen, how important it is to figure out what the fish are feeding on, and just having a God-given talent to be an artist, and I was able to take that artistic talent and put it into fly design, and having an understanding of fish behavior, it's just kind of in you, I don't know how to explain it, it comes with a lot of experience.

Tom Rowland: One thing, when you said you saw a smallmouth get eaten by a muskie and that really triggered it, I can think about the first time I ever saw something get eaten by a barracuda, and I was like, oh my god, I love that fish all of a sudden, and then it's like, now I know what a lure needs to do, now I know what a fly needs to do, now I know what these fish are looking for, because you see it in action. One of the things I was going to ask you was, how did you start to learn what these fish are eating, because I'm sure they have a variety of things they like to eat at different times of the year, so how do you diagnose what they're eating?

Blane Chocklett: For me, it all comes back from that trout background and learning from Harry, understanding the foods available in a given fishery. Early on he, I was able to get some books, McCafferty's Guide to Aquatic Entomology, and Steve Hiner the entomologist really made it clear how important it was for me to do that if I wanted to really understand fish behavior, because it's all connected, from when even predators, muskies starting off as a fry, what they're feeding on when they're small and what they go to when they move to different sizes, all predatory fish are like that. So understanding all the different foods in a given river, say the New River or the James here in Virginia, was important to me at a young age, being in school and taking biology, you have that understanding brought to your attention as you go through school, environments and fish behavior, ecosystems, so you study that, it was pretty easy at that time growing up in school and having the interest I did in fishing to want to understand what types of baits are in the rivers, smallmouth bass being predators, and kind of looking at it from all different food sources, and reading whatever I could, back then before internet obviously, and the information is so readily available now, it's a different world, but back then there wasn't a whole lot of information out there other than books and some shows. For me it was super important understanding that, what fish you're feeding on, whether it's bugs, invertebrates, other bait fish, or even other predatory fish, muskies are the apex predator in any environment they live in, and it doesn't matter, if it's acting and making these triggers that make these fish feed, it's going to look at that as a food source, it could be a smaller musky, it could be a pike, it could be anything, and it doesn't take much to get on the internet and see muskies eating anything from ducks to other muskies to other pike, and it's like you're saying with barracuda, muskies are, and we could dive into how they feed and what they're thinking, but it took me a long time to understand what I was really targeting, and I owe a lot of that to my dad, my dad always told me, if you're going to be stupid you better be tough, so I was too hard-headed and too stupid to quit, I saw Larry doing it up in Canada when I was younger, and I was like, we have them here and I'm going to figure this out or it's going to kill me. Meeting Harrison Steeves when I was sixteen and starting that relationship brought me more into the fly fishing scene specifically, and he introduced me to some of the shows still going on today, like the fly fishing show the Baremskis put on, I was able to meet a lot of these people I grew up idolizing, Lefty and Flip and Dahlberg, and most importantly for me as a fly designer, especially being focused on trying to catch muskies early on, a guy named Bob Popovics, one of the greatest fly designers ever, was very kind when I was very young, always willing to help me, and always told me to think outside the box, that great fly design always comes from problem solving. Learning all this stuff and falling into the right spot at an early age kind of put me in the direction where I am now, and without those people directing and guiding me, bouncing ideas off of them, and then having the unbelievable mind of Dahlberg, meeting him later in life, being able to see part of his show where he talks about why he was doing certain things, going into what I'd call his laboratory, designing flies and lures and explaining why they work, Dahlberg was telling me a while ago about Doug Hannon, the Bass Professor, and his philosophy on how bass feed, and that really stuck with me because it made so much sense. Living up here in the mountains, seeing fish in crystal clear water most of the time, you're able to see their reactions to what you're throwing at them, whether it's a positive or negative reaction, you're seeing a reaction, so you understand the triggering qualities versus the attracting qualities, attracting qualities are great, but the real deal is the triggering qualities that make them finally make that decision to eat it.

Sight-Fishing Muskies

Tom Rowland: So in your fishing, you're sight-fishing these muskies all the time, you can?

Blane Chocklett: Most of the time, in the winter we have higher water, the leaves are off the trees so our water table builds up a lot more. What I figured out years ago, and this was from just getting my butt kicked and not understanding what it took to catch them, I had a buddy who was into musky fishing, I was the only person I knew that fly fished, but he met a guy who was really into muskie fishing on conventional tackle. Me being a smallmouth guide at the time, this is moving forward a little bit, I started a fly shop back in '95, right out of high school, two years into college, I just knew that's what I wanted to do, so I opened up a fly shop and was guiding, got a drift boat, but it didn't take long to figure out where muskies would be during certain times of year, especially in summer months when we have super low clear water, so I started seeing muskies, and I don't have a problem talking about it, I have a big problem with people targeting muskies in the southern range in the summer, because it's very easy to know exactly where they're going to be, they're going to find any spring, whether coming out from the bottom of the river or a trout stream flowing in, they're going to be in that cooler water, stacked in there like a parking lot. So before I knew better I'd have my buddy David meet me after guiding smallmouth bass, and we'd go to these areas where I would see them in the evenings as water temperatures were cooling, and target these fish, and it didn't take me long to figure out that the flies I was throwing had no triggering qualities at all. He'd give me an hour or two on the bow, throwing different variations of deceivers, synthetic style stuff, this would have been the mid-90s, but it wasn't until Popovics and his hollow-style flies, creating that illusion of mass, his Beast Flies, that changed everything. Until I started playing with that style of fly I wasn't getting the reactions I was looking for, because I'd fish an hour or two on the bow knowing exactly where they were, and my buddy David rowing me, put me in position, and I'd just give up after a while, and he'd step up with certain lures, especially at that time bucktails, big spinner baits anywhere from that long to fifteen inches, throwing it out there and he'd get a bite almost immediately. It was obvious to me as a guide understanding fish behavior and trout behavior why these flies had zero triggering or attracting qualities that made a fish, our average muskie's forty inches long. I also learned it's very apparent that muskies, being the most apex predator in any body of water they live in, are very cat-like and snake-like, they may feed once or twice a week max, and if they get a big enough food source they may not feed for ten days or longer, unless the right food comes along, they don't have to feed like the average fish does, trout or bass, because the foods they eat are pretty big, here locally most are suckers, hog suckers or red horse suckers, the average fish twelve to fifteen inches long, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if big food is available. The other thing about muskies, and the reason they're the fish of ten thousand casts, is they're so efficient at what they do, when they decide to go kill something they just go kill it, eat it, and go back to their lair and sleep until they decide they're hungry again. I've been able to observe these fish being asleep so long they'll have sand on their back, you could poke them with a rod and they won't move, you have to really shove a rod at them before they'll wake up out of this catatonic sleep.

Tom Rowland: Have you ever gotten one of those fish to eat after you wake them up like that?

Blane Chocklett: We have, and generally, this is summertime stuff, twenty-something years ago, a light bulb went off in my head, what you're doing is not right, messing with these fish while they're on springs, they're there for a reason. But what I have done is had some film crews here, if you want to take a GoPro on a shaft and put it down in their face, get their reaction and up-close shots, some people might see that as harassing them, but they've harassed me forever, same deal, the same as how I feel about permit, any chance I get to bother them I'm going to, because they've bothered me forever. So it's funny, once you wake them up they're pissed off, they really are, and they're one of the few fish that will make eye contact with you, once a muskie knows you're there and targeting them, they have a tendency to roll like tarpon, roll up by the boat, turn sideways, make eye contact, they're letting you know, I'm here, it's an aggressive display, this is my territory, I know you're here, I don't like you being here. A friend of mine from Buffalo came down to do a little video, starting his new career guiding, we got some underwater stuff of muskies on screens, weren't targeting them at all, just wanted cool video. This one particular day after we did that, there were probably seven or eight muskies stacked right beside each other, they lay right beside each other, looks like logs, a parking lot. Once you stir them up they take off and roll around out in the middle of the river. So we started fishing again for smallmouth, maybe a hundred feet downstream of where we disturbed these fish, he catches a sixteen-inch smallmouth, and it wasn't ten seconds before one of those fish that was pissed just crushed that smallmouth ten feet off the boat, and it happened to be a giant. It lets you know they have this whole mystique, this almost fairy-tale legend about them, people who really follow muskies, there's a lot of truth to it, but to see them react like that just makes you love them that much more. But that's part of the problem too, learning how to catch them, going back to just getting my butt kicked and not knowing what I was doing, because I really didn't have anybody to teach me other than the conventional tackle guy who was using glide baits, moving left and right, showing a lot of profile, and you could see they'd pick certain times when they'd hit it, when it was showing the most profile on a hang. So then I started thinking about the biology of the fish and their biologic makeup, which I think is highly overlooked. You could look at the face of a muskie, similar to a lot of fish with teeth, they usually have a longer face, barracuda, kingfish, Spanish, all those fish. I started studying how they feed, why they have teeth, that was a big part of the process of designing flies that would get these fish reacting positively. When you look at the biologic makeup of the fish and the food source in that given body of water, all these little pieces of the puzzle started coming together, you have bucket-mouth feeders that inhale baits, and then you look at trout, brown trout once they get to a certain length their mouth gets longer, bigger teeth designed to grab and hold on. So you start looking at how they eat and the best way of getting them to trigger positively is showing profile. The biggest part with muskies, to even get their attention at all, was to have something big enough that would make them want to see what it was, they are very curious creatures, but that's why you get follows for muskies, they'll follow baits, live baits, flies, but a lot of times they will not eat them, I've had muskies follow flies for forty-five minutes to an hour, you could be rowing backwards and just have them follow the fly up-river, sideways, wherever, and still won't eat it, and the reason is it's not doing what a prey creature will do, you don't get that frantic, I gotta get out of here, fight-or-flight. That's why the figure eight is so effective at the boat, because the bait fish is going to the boat, could be a log or whatever, it's like, oh no, and it freaks for a second, that's the most natural behavior, you've got this musky behind you, or a barracuda, or a kingfish, something with teeth behind you, you don't just ease out of there, you swim as fast as you can, that's the worst-case scenario for a bait fish, so when you hit that figure eight, it's the most natural thing you can make it right there.

Designing Flies With Real Swimming Motion

Blane Chocklett: It is, and so then you have to impart these qualities into a design. You have lures that are jerk baits, soft plastics that do all kinds of crazy non-mechanical motions, but the problem with flies is none of that, they didn't do that, you had pulsing qualities, you could make them hover using neutral buoyant materials, feathers streaming off the back that might flutter in the water, but we didn't have any crazy swimming motions like you get with lures. So that was my lifelong process, that was the holy grail for me, to design flies that would do that in the water. Popovics' hollow flies and Beast Flies got the fish's attention with the mass, but we would have a whole lot more follows than eats, so then you figure out how to make a fly kind of dart and move around, we figured out using the whole muddler-style head, a bulbous head with deer hair, or synthetic fibers, creating a massive head, and what happens when you strip that, it stalls out faster because of the bigger head and wants to kind of kick off left or right, or up and down, and then you make a hard strip and the fly will turn off. All those things started getting fish that would actually eat the fly, and Dahlberg's diving head creates bubbles, dives down, floats up, you could do quicker versions, but the thing is it'll dive slowly and hover, and that's one thing a fly has over lures generally, you could keep it in their face for a long time almost like a gnat, and I always tell my clients that's what you are, because you have to make that fish want to get tired of it being in their field of awareness, and they don't have hands, so the only way they can get it out of their territory is to eat it, or bite at it, whether or not they're hungry.

Tom Rowland: One thing I saw on your Instagram that I thought was very interesting, you said you were cobia fishing, and the cobia and the muskie had a lot of similarities in what they wanted and how they fed, what do you think about that, what did you discover about the cobia, because they're a funny fish, they can be the most aggressive fish in the ocean, the stupidest fish in the ocean, and also the smartest, pickiest fish in the ocean, to where the fly rolls across their head and they will not eat it, and same thing, if you get them eating live baits and then throw them dead baits and they see how easy that is, you can forget about catching them on a lure or fly because they're keyed into something. What did you discover about the cobia and the muskie?

Blane Chocklett: Well, like you were saying, initially they could be that ballroom, the barroom brawler, the biggest meathead in the room, but they have a very fast learning curve. Virginia, I'm sure you're aware, the trouble cobia are in all over the country, they've been targeted by a variety of anglers, from the Gulf all the way up to Virginia, and in the bay they migrate up our way, usually in the bay first part of June. The Chesapeake Bay is one of the largest estuaries in the world, and a lot of the cobia spawn in the bay, so you have this huge migration of cobia that come into the bay, and what's happened over the years since the striped bass populations died off in the bay, the cobia became a very important fishery for all these captains and anglers because there wasn't a whole lot else to fish for, and so the cobia towers were invented, huge towers where people target these fish. Generally when cobia are not messed with, and I've caught them in different parts of the country, they can be pretty easy to catch if they're in that mood, but like you said, they can not be in that mood, and then you've got to feed them like any top predator, just like feeding tarpon, you've got to do everything right to make them eat, and that's what I kind of fell in love with, getting into cobia fishing here in the bay later on, after everybody's like, any given day in the summertime there may be a hundred boats out there on these fish, and it doesn't take long to know where the fleet is, the bay's only so big, you get out there and these fish may be running down an edge of a bar, streaming by, up on the surface, you get a hundred boats casting at you just like tarpon season, these fish become super weary, you have to put it in their field of awareness at the exact right time and turn them into the predator that they are. Designing the flies like the Game Changers that have that three-dimensional profile and swimming action with all these built-in triggers, I was able to figure out, you put a certain fly in front of them and they just didn't do it, come up to it and veer off, and I've noticed, I don't know if you have, that you have about twenty feet max on these fish, as soon as they see it, if they're going to eat it or not, a lot of times they'll end up following it but they're just playing with you. I have caught cobia on figure eights just like muskies, which is super cool, I even stuck a seventy-pound cobia last summer on a figure eight, didn't have enough force to get a hook in him, fought him for like twenty seconds and he spit it out, their mouths are so tough it's hard to get a good hook in them sometimes. But what I noticed is their behavior when they're being finicky was very similar, you do that fight-or-flight, put a fly within ten feet of their face as they're cruising, once they see the fly you start running it away from them, that triggers them to start running after it a lot of times, but once they have that field of awareness where they start realizing there's a boat out there, I'm starting to see that a lot here, especially as they're getting pressured so much, you have about a twenty-foot area where they're going to eat it, same with muskies now, in our rivers, they're getting pressured, we love all our fish to death, it's good that we have a lot of anglers going after these fish because the more that appreciate what we have the more we can protect it, but on the other side it makes the job a lot harder to catch them regularly.

Tom Rowland: What's funny about fish like cobia, cobia's a good eating fish, so very few of the legal fish are getting released, at least where we are, that cuts down on the learning curve a lot, because if a fish gets caught and released and caught and released, like a trout in the Madison River, they can be pretty spooky, bonefish, tarpon, permit, people don't kill them a lot, so you can recapture the same fish, and I think with a fish like that they get even more spooky. The first time I ever went to Louisiana and fished for redfish down there, oh my god, these redfish are incredible, they're the stupidest fish I've ever seen but also maybe the most aggressive, and my friend who lives there said, well, every legal redfish gets killed, so they only fool them once, and I thought about that, there's something to that, all these other fish we're catching and releasing over and over, that makes you wonder about the fish's brain, what is it that they remember, is their brain capable of that, I think it probably is, they have a negative experience with a bird or whatever and tend to avoid those situations.

Blane Chocklett: Yeah, but it is kind of interesting to think about with the cobia, what if everybody was releasing them, how smart would those fish get. I just think it's the boat traffic more than anything, they may see their butt, they're not by themselves right, so I don't know if they have that cognitive of a brain, but I do think they have a negative feel when they sense a boat and then visually put eyes on it, and I think that's why you have that short window where you have to have positive triggering qualities that make them want to eat. Especially here, you hear about North Carolina, when they're migrating through there, the captains say they're dumb as dirt, and I truly believe they're just not seeing the pressure until they get into the bay, then they're getting hammered every day, it becomes a very tense situation, it's a survival deal bred in them for sure, but they definitely get smarter, and you're right, if you get inside a fly cast away, a good eighty feet, and you don't make a good cast and they follow, that fish is going to be hard to catch, but sometimes we'll fish cobia in two hundred feet of water, bringing up a fish and fifty or sixty cobia come up with a snapper, they're just curious, looking, and every one of those fish will eat anything you put in the water because it's the first time, then they lollygag on the surface, go down, you bring them up a couple times and then they're just not going to play that game anymore.

Tom Rowland: I think it's the curiosity side of cobia that's very similar to muskies, they don't mind hanging around the boat once they know you're there, but the likelihood of them eating is a lot slimmer.

Blane Chocklett: And this summer we were fishing some bridge pilings in the bay, and there was a school of maybe ten of them, mid-forty-inch fish, really nice cobia, trying to pull them off with flies, and they ended up going to the transom with the motor, they had some curiosity with the transom, and muskies do the same thing. I've had one client specifically, running up in a jet boat years ago to get into this one pool, I'm at the bottom of the pool, I said, go ahead and stand up, stretch your line, get your fly wet, we'll move up here a couple hundred yards. I've got the motor on probably going about five miles an hour, cruising up the edge, and his fly is literally right beside the motor, five feet from it, and a mid-forty-inch musky comes up and eats it right at the transom, right next to the motor, taking out ten thousand casts. The same deal happened with these cobia, we pulled them off the piling with the fly, but after they got off the piling they lost interest in feeding, then they saw the motor, all of them got behind it, just kind of hanging with the motor, and the captain I was with said, hey, just drop the fly back there, I dropped it back to the transom, couldn't see the fish because they were directly behind the boat, I was up at the bow, put it right at the edge of the transom, started jerking the fly, making it turn and jerk, and one of those bigger ones came up and engulfed it. I think it had to do with that jerk, showing profile and acting wounded, but you could do that a hundred times and they won't eat it either, that's the thing about these fish and their curiosity, the cobia's known for getting tough to catch and hanging around the motor or side of the boat like that, or right on the chum bag, and people free-gaff them because they can't catch them on rod and reel.

The Path to the Game Changer

Tom Rowland: I want to talk about your path to the Game Changer, because it's really what you're known for, I like looking at your stuff because you fish for all these what I'd call weird fish, even though I don't think there's such a thing as a trash fish, I love all fish and all tackle, smallmouth, largemouth, bowfin, snakeheads, any of it. What you've created is really interesting and unique, most things I see in fishing are just a variation or evolution of something else, but what you've created, the first time I saw it I was like, that is totally original and absolutely unique, and then what I've seen over time is this is not just a fly, this is like a platform, that's what you refer to it as a lot, a tying platform, not unlike, maybe somebody creates a new lure like Larry Dahlberg's Whopper Plopper, that's so unique and original, and then other lure companies do something similar. You've created a new lure platform with a fly, this Game Changer, if anybody doesn't know what it is, how would you describe it?

Blane Chocklett: The Game Changer, I had a problem calling it that, a bunch of buddies of mine, I'm generally shy by nature, I don't ever want to come across as cocky, but the Game Changer was a bunch of buddies telling me, I was like, look at this thing I've been messing with, and telling them how the fish reacted to it, you look at the action in the water, and they're like, man, it's a real game-changer, that's exactly what you need to call it, and it sounded pretty cocky, but that's what it is, it was backing myself into a corner years ago trying to target muskies on a fly rod and guiding for them, a school of hard knocks, learning from making terrible flies, thinking you have the answer, and going back to what Popovics was teaching, good fly design comes from problem solving.

Tom Rowland: What did the early Game Changers look like, the first evolution of this thing, because some of my things just look horrible, I know what it needs to do and I'm not the artist you are, I go to the vice and create this thing that's the worst-looking thing ever, and then you refine that process. I know that's what you've done, but I'm interested in what did the early horrible flies look like?

Blane Chocklett: What's really ironic is a lot of times guiding I'm constantly, waking up from sleep, always really into what you're doing, especially early on it's everything to you to be successful, making this your career, your success on the water with clients directly impacts your wallet, so I was obsessed with learning from these great designers and tiers. I got obsessed with creating a fly that would look and swim like the real thing, have these non-mechanical actions that make a lot of the hard baits and soft plastics so successful, like flukes or jerk baits or glide baits. There's a lot of attempts and failures, one of my most successful fly patterns I ever created was called the Gummy Minnow, created back in the late 90s, my first attempt at a fly that looked and swam like the real thing, it failed miserably at swimming like the real thing but had the exact look of the bait, glass minnow or silversides or anchovies. I guess the thing that's really helped me in designing is if I don't have a material I'm looking for, I'll figure out a way to make it, or ask enough questions, if you ask enough questions a lot of times you'll find the answers, and having a fly shop at that time I had customers in different fields, chemists, people in petroleum products, I would have this idea, I want to make a sheet of this material with adhesive where I could build a fly from the inside out to create a three-dimensional look, laminate materials over it, add feathers if I wanted, how would I go about doing that, is there something out there I'm not aware of. I would get vats of different stuff from some of these chemists, it was funny, I failed miserably at chemistry in high school, but I'm sitting here playing with this stuff, and I finally met some people in the textile industry, and ended up falling into the right lap of this one guy who said, we've got some stuff, I can send you some products, and I'd already had the fly in my mind, I just didn't have the materials to make it, so once I got the materials, the Gummy Minnow literally took me five minutes at the vice to put together.

Blane Chocklett: Back when Cape Lookout, North Carolina became super popular in the late 90s at Harkers Island, kind of the who's who of fly fishing would come there, and Popovics would come down, after meeting him in the early to mid-90s I created that fly right in '98, and I never fished it, it was late in the season, September or so when I finally got the materials, and I hadn't fished it, but I tied a couple hundred of these Gummies to take down to Harkers Island for the false albacore blitz. Tom Earnhardt used to have a party there, Jones Brothers Boats would go and they'd have a pig picking, kind of a big industry party to celebrate fly fishing, that was a really big deal, a great way for me, in my mid-20s at the time, to get to see people like Lefty and know some of these industry leaders. My problem with the Gummy is it's all acrylic materials, most people would say it's not a fly at all, so that's what I was worried about, I had no idea if it was going to swim, it would stretch three times its original length, so I thought it would take these flies and let Bob Popovics decide, because he was the only one at the time playing with a lot of synthetic materials, silicones and all that kind of stuff, and I was like, if anybody would say this is a fly or not, he would be the one. I found him, he was the first person I saw there, and I bothered him enough, what do you think of this, and he loved it, wanted to know all about it, said hang out here for a second, this was in the backyard of Tom's house, right along the water, I remember the sun setting, I was in line to get the barbecue, and Popovics comes back and goes, I want you to come meet somebody, several hundred people there, spotlight coming down from the house, and right in the center of this crowd is Lefty. So Lefty's in the middle, and you know Lefty, how great he was, and Bob said, I don't know if you know Lefty or not, and I said, well, I've met him a couple of times, I didn't think he'd remember me from Adam, but he did, he had my flies, he had the best memory of anybody I've ever met. Lefty's like, these are great, how do they work, and Lefty being Lefty it's like, this would be like rolling a bottle of wine in a jail cell, a bottle in a drunk tank, right, he was super positive and helpful, along with Popovics, Lefty took several of them, and being as humble as he was, he goes, you mind if I have a few, and I'm like, are you kidding, you can have as many as you want. That was on a Saturday night, this was back before cell phones, or ones I could afford anyway, and that next Monday, Lefty was leaving the next day, but that next Monday I got off the water and a guy had a message at the hotel I was staying at to call my wife, so I called her and she gave me this number to the Fly Czar at Umpqua Feather Merchants, so I call him and he's like, I haven't seen the fly, he goes, I got a call from Lefty, without a doubt he says you guys need this fly, and that kind of started my designing career.

Blane Chocklett: But going back, that one fly failed miserably as a swimming fly, it had triggering qualities because of how realistic it looked, and it's great if you pitch it into visually sight-feeding fish, it's worked extremely well on all types of tuna species, but I was really wanting it to have that swimming action, that was the biggest thing, because what really triggers fish to come to your offering is movement first, if you can get them moving toward what you're doing, keep them enthralled, and then have that last bit be, is it food, that instinctual, innate, biologic deal that makes every predator do what it does, you just eat it.

Tom Rowland: Absolutely nailed why I think we don't have any good permit flies, it's motion, that's what I'm all about, the motion, maybe you come up with a Game Changer crab one of these days.

Blane Chocklett: Well, I have some stuff. So that gummy was a failure, and I'm like, alright, obviously this isn't moving like I want it to, how can I get it to move, so I started looking at jointed lures, hinges, and stuff, that would work. So what I decided to do is take a piece of Silly Skin and put mesh material in it, and started putting these little joints made of Silly Skin, that was the first one, the joint was Silly Skin. At that point I was just trying to get the movement, and then it was like, man, this is a pain, this is way too difficult to do, but it started answering questions. Then I started using, there was a really famous guide here in Virginia that a lot of us look up to, named Chuck Kraft, who passed away a year ago, really the first fly fishing guide for warm water too, his main target was smallmouth bass, he's a legend, had a lot of outside-the-box flies, called the Creelex, and the CK Baitfish, a synthetic head with a shammy tail. So I started trying to go off that, playing around with chamois materials, getting a little bit of movement but still not that three-dimensional serpentine action I was looking for, and then I started playing with bending wire, and that came from trying to make a longer platform for muskies, because a lot of times you didn't have longer fibers that have motion, so I started adding joints to my bigger musky flies to create maybe another three or four inches, just to get a bigger presentation and bigger profile, more attracting qualities. Then I noticed by adding a joint or two, it would kind of fold up and collapse, started getting more of a serpentine motion, but it still didn't have that three-dimensional realistic profile, it was still a fly with an impressionistic view. So that kind of shooting ahead after just terrible flies, finally came back to what really makes a fish swim, looking at the biologic makeup of the fish, just like looking at the biologic predatory instincts of why fish trigger on certain things and why they don't. What makes a fish swim is you have their fins, their muscle, and most importantly their vertebrae, it's just like a steak, the vertebrae is what allows all of it to work. So I started looking at lures, the Sebile Magic Swimmer is a prime example, and a lot of variations of these jointed hard baits are starting to create a vertebrae, so I was like, okay, well, we have enough chenilles and materials on the market, what if I just start creating these little micro small vertebrae and connecting and connecting. I first originally started with a B chain, and that was a major pain in the ass, trying to tie materials onto B chain and have enough weight to move, it would work but was super hard to do, but I knew at that point I was on to something. I was just playing around with a paper clip one day, and I was like, if I bend it and do this I could create an interconnecting chain, start at the tail and work forward, tie one section at a time, get to the final hook, then make the head, I would maybe have what I'm looking for. So the first parts of those, I would have one or two that would swim and the rest wouldn't, and I'm like, why is this not working, so I had to go into an engineer's mind and figure out why. What I found out is you have different types of flows, laminar flows, and flows that are more like an obstacle, called turbulent style flows, and what I found is a lot of the flies I was tying, keeping them sparse, the water was not being interrupted by the materials, water was flowing through the fibers, not being disrupted or redirected around a solid mass like a lure or a regular fish's body. So I figured out I had to create basically a skin, a more dense material that would not allow water to penetrate through the fibers, basically creating a ramp for water to flow over. That's the biggest problem with fly design over conventional lures, most of the stuff we're using pulsates and moves, and that's kind of how we get our motion, so I'm looking at it another way, I don't want pulsating movement, I want a rigid body that doesn't fluctuate much, because that changes how the water distributes around the body of the fly. This took a long time to figure out, like I said, not very smart, it takes a lot of trial and error.

Tom Rowland: Might not have been smart in the classroom, but dude, you're a genius when it comes to this.

Blane Chocklett: It's also a necessity, your success on the water is directly impacted. I love trout, I don't ever want to take anything away from trout fishing, but I don't know if I have ADHD or whatever, I lose focus really quickly on stuff. Larry has this thing, when you start you just want to catch a fish, and a lot of fish, that whole progression, I love it, and as a guide I kind of got tired of just trout fishing, so with such great smallmouth history here, it made sense to start targeting them, and I love the aggression but also the technical aspect. If you look at some of the really good designers and legends in our sport, a lot of them had a smallmouth bass background, Lefty and Joe Brooks and Bob Clouser, smallmouth are a great fish to study because they have so many different levels of how they feed, and as they grow they're very aggressive but also very technical, especially when you get pressured fish, the bodies of water I grew up fishing are a lot of catch-and-release now, as we moved in, especially in the bass world, as these fish get caught over and over they get a lot smarter. It was a great classroom for me to take these flies, especially the Game Changer, and start seeing how these fish reacted, being able to see all these great lure designs and adapting that to a fly, I think that's really overlooked, especially by trout fishermen, and that's where the majority of fly tiers reside. The majority of fly tiers are starting and pursuing trout, and in that world a lot of times the spinning rod is looked at as evil or wrong, you're not going to learn anything from those guys, well, let them spend an afternoon with Larry Dahlberg, you can learn a lot from those people, a lot of those people are far more skilled at what they're doing than you will ever be dinking around with a fly rod, because you or those people don't have an open mind. I think a lot of the saltwater tiers look towards lure design like you did, and that's the way you're going to progress, it's kind of the white-belt mentality of learning from anyone, and when you get that closed-mind focus that's the depth of your learning curve, if you're not looking to people who are being successful, even if they're worm-dunking and kicking your ass, well they're doing something right, try to figure out what they're doing.

Learning From Every Kind of Fishing

Tom Rowland: That's why fly fishing, in my mind, and I'm a lifelong fly angler and always will love it, that's held the fly fishing community back, I've followed your career for thirty years, you've done it all, Wyoming, the salt, I even had clients who used to fish with you back when you first got on with Scott fly rods.

Blane Chocklett: Yeah, and it's still a problem today, it's a sad story to be honest, it really bothers me about the fly community, I don't feel like, and I'm not trying to say I'm better than anybody, but I feel like my body of work over thirty years has proven that I love fly fishing. The sad thing is, Larry Dahlberg loves to come down and fish with me, I love having him, I learn so much from him, but a sad thing that happened last year, me and Larry and two other buddies were out fishing, and Larry, when he comes down, likes to know what's in my body of water, chubs, if you want to try to catch a bait to use as live bait, that's what I love about Larry, he's not afraid to, he always talks about how fly anglers are always looking through keyholes, and that's the sad part of why our industry hasn't grown as fast as the conventional side, there's too much resistance to change. It's a whole lot better than it was ten, twenty years ago, there's a whole lot more people with open minds, into traveling the world and catching exotic fish, that's helped the mindset, but there's still a community out there, this other guy comes by us and sees we have live lines out trying to catch muskies, and tries to turn this into, that's the only way I catch him now is on live bait, which is ridiculous, that's stuff like the saltwater community, you guys use whatever it takes to catch the fish, every day you want to catch up, you'll have a fly day, a bait day, unless you decide all I want to do is fly fish, which is fine, many do, but a lot of guides, some of the people I consider to be the very best, like a Richard Black or somebody, they're bait fishing one day, lure fishing the next, fly fishing the week after, catching them any which way they can, and they've got anglers that respect all tackle and can do it all, but as a guide, if you don't know what's going on with the bait, I don't know how you think you're going to be the best fly guy you can possibly be.

Tom Rowland: I agree, that's the thing that gets lost, if you're a fly fisherman you can only catch them one way. Does that bother you, that you had that encounter?

Blane Chocklett: Totally.

Tom Rowland: Why do you let that bother you?

Blane Chocklett: I don't know, I guess because it bothers me, we were out there enjoying an unbelievable couple of days of fishing, I have to guide through these fish, I enjoy it, it's what I do for a living, but I have to get my butt kicked every day with new anglers who want to catch a muskie for the first time, and it's mostly ninety-nine percent fly fishing. I know where these fish are, like on a certain tide where tarpon are going to come down a bank, at certain times of year I know exactly where muskies are going to be in any given body of water, and the only thing I can't control is my angler's ability and that fish's mood at that particular time, and weather, all I can do is put us in the best situation and make it happen. So when I have a guy I think is one of the greatest anglers of all time come down and he wants to catch him how he wants to catch him, I think it's fun to go back to being a child, go to a creek and catch chubs on worms, and then put that in front of a predatory fish and have it eat immediately. You may know exactly where they are, and you have to make them eat with a fly or conventional lure or whatever, they have to be in that mood, but with live bait it really teaches you where they are, whether they eat that day or not, but you put a lot of bait in there, they're going to eat it. This is the other thing I have a problem with, the conception where people want to get on soapboxes, exactly what you're talking about, how you learn from all different avenues of fishing, whether it's conventional, live bait, soft plastics, or fly. Larry told me a long time ago he's experienced, he's even taken a thermometer and put it in a muskie to see what its internal temperature was related to the water around it, to see when their optimal feeding time was, figured all that out by looking outside the box. The other thing he's done, he told me a long time ago, he used to experiment buying suckers from a farm and catching live suckers in the body of water that live with muskies daily, and without a doubt the sucker that lives in the body of water gets eaten ten times faster than the sucker from the farmhouse, because they don't know what a predator is, the fish that lives with that predator every day knows it's harnessed with a hook. Larry likes to take wire and run it through a fish's nose without using hooks, just to watch how muskies hold onto them, pull them up to see what size they are, then try to net them without a hook, but the cool thing is you learn predator-prey relationships, if a prey item doesn't act scared of the predator, the predator's like something's wrong here, so it doesn't eat it. I've seen days in clear water where you'll have all kinds of prey items, smallmouth or suckers, swimming right next to muskies and they don't even bother them, but as soon as you hook one of those fish and it starts struggling, you triggered it, I got it, it's gonna die, same thing with jack crevalle on a bull shark, they're swimming next to that fish's eyeballs for a month, and if you hook one it's an instant bite, that bull shark's been saying, you make one mistake and I'm gonna eat you, but if they do a weird kick, they're on it.

Tom Rowland: What advice do you think Larry gave you about that encounter?

Blane Chocklett: He was like, it's just disappointing, this is typical of why he got out of just fly back in the 80s, because of that mentality, and it's so funny when you get into the freshwater scene, if you don't do it a certain way then you're not applying, which is completely the wrong idea, if you want to become the best at what you do you have to understand all aspects of it, that's what Larry's taught me for years, and that's true, that's how I've been able to get where I am in this industry.

Tom Rowland: Another thing you're doing, going to other types of fish and places, making correlations between a cobia and a muskie, which a lot of people aren't gonna, I remember when I was first learning to fish for baby tarpon, I said I like baby tarpon because they're kind of like largemouth bass in a lot of ways, and this person I was talking to was like, there is nothing similar, that's the craziest comparison I've ever heard, I was like, really, they sit there under the trees and you throw something in and they come out and eat it, I think there's a lot of similarities, same mouth structure, they eat things the same, and for me I made a correlation that helped my fishing considerably, because I was very familiar with a largemouth bass, had no familiarity with a tarpon, so I took what I knew about a bass and applied it to the tarpon, some worked, some didn't, but some did work and made me much more comfortable with baby tarpon.

Blane Chocklett: And that attitude is certainly not welcoming, if you wonder why the fly fishing sport is not growing well, that attitude of you bait-fished once in your life so you're not a fly fisherman, really, wow, okay, I thought I was a fly fisherman, that's the sad reality, but the one thing I have to always go back to, it's only one percent that actually think that anymore, but it's that little bit that bothers you, I guess because I've spent so much time putting the effort in to figure things out, it's kind of insulting to have someone make a comment like that. I was more upset the encounter was so negative to have a legend like Larry with me, but Larry's like, you just can't let stuff bother you like that, Lefty would have told me the same thing, but it's kind of hard not to. The funny thing I noticed in my career is when I first got started it was before A River Runs Through It came out, before you had a big influx of anglers, you'd see these guys in the Florida Keys, like a Fitz Coker, one of my best customers, who started out bait fishing, then caught tarpon every single way you could possibly catch him, until he got tired of it, he just wasn't into it anymore, caught thousands on bait, hundreds chumming, bunches on lures, so he was always looking for that next challenge, worked his way up from easiest to hardest, and then became a fly angler with no interest in going backwards. Like being a kid catching those chubs, you worked your way up to where why would you go backwards, you've done that a million times before, you're looking for the next challenge, and almost all fly anglers were like that, then fly fishing got more accessible, people would jump right in on a fish like bonefish and say, why would you ever spin fish for bonefish, I think that's where a lot of that attitude comes from, and not every fly angler has this attitude, but it used to be the path to fly fishing was starting with worms and bobbers, working your way up, and as it's become more accessible, more schools, more guides, more opportunity, you could cut that entire learning process out and just jump right in and catch a tarpon as the first fish you've ever caught on a fly rod, where a Fitz Coker had to catch five thousand of them on spin before he caught the one on fly, because he was trying to figure it out, and that's the one that got him the most excited.

Tom Rowland: Cool, whatever it is, that's fine, but this is an attitude that really bothers me too, it's like, bait is not your thing, that's cool, do your thing, but why do you have to criticize other people, and when you do it splits anglers, from conventional to fly, bait to lure, you see it happen all over the place, from salt water to fresh water, and when you have a conservation issue that's necessary right now, you need all anglers to unite, it makes it much more difficult when you're in-fighting, I call it in-fighting, and I think it's ridiculous and silly that a fly angler would care one way or another what somebody else is doing, or a bait fisherman wouldn't like a fly fisherman, or a lure fisherman would get upset with a live-baiter, why, what do you care, I guess if they're killing fish or something, but if you're having fun, that's what it all boils down to, if you're having fun and that's what you like to do, go for it. And in some other situations, like what you're talking about, you're doing something different to learn, maybe it's not even fun, maybe you're like, man, I'd really rather be fly fishing, but Larry Dahlberg can throw it into a teacup at eighty feet, and I'd like to see him do that, but this is what he wants to do, and maybe I might learn something.

Blane Chocklett: Oh yeah, a hundred percent, and I've been out there with him where last year my buddy Chris and I were like, man, we wanted to go fly fishing actually because it's so amazing. This is what I think is really sad on the side of what we've been talking about, the things I've gotten to see by not looking through a keyhole most people will not ever get to see, a prime example last year, within those four or five days we fished, I think we landed over forty some muskies, just playing around with the bait deal. One particular day we found, and this was very interesting too, we had a shakeup, a big influx of water, and a lot of times these fish will start moving, where I was fishing them all week they weren't in those spots, they moved to another place, and just by knowing this over years of learning fish behavior, especially muskie, I was like, alright, they're not here, it's obvious because we're using live baits and not moving them, let's go up about a half a mile or three quarters to a mile, they should be there, and sure enough, we had a big high-water event, this is where they were, we put the baits in, both boats fishing, and the baits got eaten within five seconds. We're both drifting down, Larry's in my boat, Chris and Josh in the other boat, and we both got muskies, and we noticed it's not running off like it should, something's going on, Larry's caught thousands and thousands of muskies on all types of tackle and he gets impatient, let's just go ahead and pull it up, we don't know what it is, but I said give it a little more time, he goes, let's see what's going on, this is acting weird, you can just run the boat over to where the fish are, we usually leave them alone so they don't know we're there, but we decided to run the boat over, he's reeling in without any pressure, and the next thing you know we got like four muskies, looks like a Medusa, one here, one here, and a fifteen-inch bait that's got a muskie attached to it on all sides. That lets you know where they are, and the other thing, I've had my butt kicked so much by muskies over the years doing it the harder way, it's kind of nice to know you can still catch them when you want to, it's a mental thing for me when Larry comes down, we're just going to go have fun, it's going to allow me to understand their behavior more, and even though you may have a day where the client's doing everything right and you're just not moving fish, if you put a live bait down there and catch them versus not catching them on conventional, that tells you you're not doing what they want you to do, and you need to change what you're doing. Doing it on fly is the hardest way for sure, but it's taught me so much about what fish want and don't want, being able to view it from all aspects reconfirms what I do know and don't know, and on the days that I don't do well, that keeps me up at night, what do I need to fix tomorrow, that's what keeps me going.

Tom Rowland: What's interesting about that too, you're comparing bait to fly, but you can also see it the other way, in a community of guides, some days the bait fishermen are not catching tarpon and the fly guys are catching them, they smoke them, I've seen that, like I had a livewell full of mullet and caught zero, and this guy jumped sixteen on the fly, what is going on, well maybe it's a worm hatch, something you can't replicate with your bait, so you see it both ways, and that's why I think it's ultra important to keep an open mind. But man, you've got an awesome mindset, no wonder you've been able to create what you have.

The Future of the Game Changer Platform

Tom Rowland: I want to get back to the Game Changer, one of the things I've been most impressed by, and it's funny because you said you lose focus, when I look at the Game Changer, I've never come up with a fly that has anywhere near as much potential, I've come up with some different flies, some kind of unique, but then I use them for a couple weeks and drop it and move on, or hand it off to a professional tier. You have stayed with this platform, and all you've got to do is look at your Instagram, you've done it with many different materials, for many different sizes, for many different species, you're using feathers, synthetics, everything you can imagine, taking other things like the mop tail for trout, that mop fly's super effective, the Chinese dragon kind of thing, you've got all this stuff working into this platform, and it's becoming more refined over the years, you may not see it as much as an outsider does, like me, the first Game Changer I saw didn't look anything like this, now it looks like a piece of art. What do you think the future of the Game Changer is, you're using it in nymphs, all different kinds of things, you even said you had a crab idea?

Blane Chocklett: All of it. Harry put me in that position, I could tell you a funny story, Harrison Steeves the biologist, brilliant, but he was also, when I met him I was sixteen, everybody knows him as kind of a curmudgeon but very intelligent and funny, and it was me and David, the only person I knew my age, the guy I told you about who muskie fished with me. We both, Harry and Steve Hiner both took us under their wing at an early age, and one particular day Steve Hiner had a guide trip, Harry tagged along, we met Harry down on the Smith River, a tailwater here in Virginia, we walk down the railroad tracks to fish these pools, we're all catching fish here and there, and Harry's on the other side of the river catching one after another, so after twenty minutes, David and I walk across the river, David gets to Harry first, five minutes before me, he's opened up his box handing David one of the flies he's using, and I'm like, so what are you using, and without hesitation he goes, screw you, you're not old enough. So I'm like, alright, at that point I was like, I'm gonna come up with a fly one day that he's gonna be dying to have, it hurt my feelings, I didn't know Harry that well at the time, but it pissed me off too, it sparked something in me. But it was an eye-opening thing, we were all doing decent catching fish, but Harry figured out what was up and was catching fish every cast, and it reinstituted in my mind how important the fly is, we spend so much money on gear and all that stuff, but it's the lure or the bait or the fly that's really the most important process of our whole sport, you have to deliver it to them, but what they see is directly impacting how you do on the water. That was my main goal at sixteen years old, until now in my 40s, that's what drives me every day when I'm on the water, I want to learn something new that I didn't know before that I can put toward the fly, and that's why there's so many different materials I use for the Game Changer platform, because at certain sizes and certain conditions these materials will do different things in the water, the clearer the water the more time the fish has to look at the fly, the more realistic and translucent the material needs to be, it needs that three-dimensional realistic swimming, profile, silhouette, and size are all super important, movement gets the fish to your offering, but it's like a trout in a slow-moving pool versus a trout in a ripple, they have to make an instant decision to eat it or not, the slower pool they can come up on a dry fly and look at it forever, decide is that the right color, they don't even see the color until they get right there, then they can say, well, that's a size 16 sulfur with that orange hue I've been eating, I'm going to eat it with confidence. I know all that by doing it, streamer fishing or lure fishing is all the same, you're trying to trigger movement to get them there, and that's why I have it in nymph versions, and I have these really cool shrimp patterns, my problem is I don't live anywhere near permit, but my goal is to figure out the permit fly, that's my next major goal, I just have to be able to put it in front of permit, I want to be on a bow, I don't have to be fishing, I just want to see how they interact with what you throw to them, I just don't have enough knowledge or advice.

Tom Rowland: If you're trying to create a permit fly, throw some crabs at them too, because the way I've been saying this for years, you can have a livewell full of crabs, and if they all die and you throw them at the permit, they don't look at them any better than a fly, sometimes they'll eat them, sometimes they won't, you've got to impart a little action, and it's not scent, you'll hear a lot of people say it smells like crab, put a little crab juice on it, I don't think so, it looks like a dead crab, they don't like dead crabs, you can sometimes catch them, but you throw a live crab out there that makes noise, clicks and makes an audible sound, the legs are moving so fast, moves its legs back in one direction, almost looks like a fish swimming, they can swim so fast, kind of a pear shape, the fat head part going forward because all the legs are going backwards, and certain crabs swim way faster than others, and when they see that, dude, there's a puff of mud four feet wide and they just ate the crap out of it, no doubt, and I have never thrown a fly at a permit that reacts that way, it's like throwing size 16 sulfurs at trout and they eat and eat your fly and it's no different, their behavior is exactly the same.

Blane Chocklett: Okay, I got it, right, you throw a jerkbait to a tarpon in a situation where they're exploding stuff on the surface, and they explode on that jerkbait exactly like they do everything else, you got it, you're not going to do better than that, but when their behavior is like, I don't know what that is, okay, I'll eat it, and they eat it, you're like, okay, we caught him, but that's not it, like we have it for bonefish, you can throw something over for a bonefish and they get super excited, their tail goes crazy, dorsal fin flares up, do all this cool stuff, but I just don't know, there's some permit flies out there and some guys doing it really well right now, secret flies, people catching more than they ever have, but I still hadn't personally seen it.

Tom Rowland: Maybe you can do it.

Blane Chocklett: Well, I'm not going to say I can, but I'm going to try, I think it's motion though, and sound, that's what I think, but I know a guy that knows a little bit about permit that has a boat that might put you on some fish.

Tom Rowland: That'd be awesome. A short story, exactly what you were talking about, I hate to keep bringing Larry up, but he's kind of my sounding board because he's done it all, I've been trying to play with this idea and talked to him about permit, he talks about going years ago, back in the 90s, where he'd go to a secret spot where all these permit were, he had a bushel of live crabs, got up on this hardtop T-top, was pitching crabs to these permit and breaking legs off, doing all this kind of stuff, watching the reaction of the crab to the permit with less leg parts or whatever, and he was saying there's a certain way they swim, he felt it was the swimmerets, and as long as they had one swimmeret working it would get eaten, but soon as he clipped those off it wouldn't eat anything anymore.

Blane Chocklett: I believe it, I know a lot of the best guys I know, when they have the opportunity to have crabs with claws or without claws, they go with claws, everybody wants them without claws because they don't like getting pinched going into the livewell, but these guys were like, that's the first time I ever heard that, and yeah, that's natural, he has two claws, and when you take those off it's not as natural, they'll still eat it plenty well, but I like that this guy, Mark Krowka, was like, man, if a permit gets bit by a crab claw, he just eats it even harder, you imagine the claw biting the permit on the face as he's eating the crab, and then he gets the super bite.

Closing

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man. I'm afraid we're gonna have to cut it close, but I want to do this again, I love talking about all this stuff, and I would love to get Larry Dahlberg on the podcast, maybe you can help me with that, and I would also love to fish with you up in muskieville, I don't know what your schedule's like, I can only imagine it's fully booked all the time, but if somebody wanted to fish with you, learn how to tie a Game Changer, check out anything you've done, where would they go?

Blane Chocklett: Well, unfortunately I don't have a website right now, I always call, I've been working on a website for a couple years now and just don't ever have the time to put it together, but the best way to reach me is by email at beachclutter@comcast.net, or Instagram or Facebook, private message me. This year I'm booked for muskie season, but I've got a lot of things in my future I'm really wanting to work on, and I feel like you're saying about the muskie, I'm really interested in a couple other fish species, hopefully in the near future I'll be able to spend more time doing that and design work with some of the companies I'm working with, especially the fly fishing companies doing my flies now, they're doing such a good job it's freeing me up to go explore other fish and species, I'm not saying I'll be able to do it, but I'm gonna give it hell trying, for sure.

Tom Rowland: I love it, man, I'm not afraid of failure, that's for sure.

Blane Chocklett: Yeah, well, failure comes, to get to the Game Changer I'd imagine there's been ten thousand failures, like the light bulb.

Tom Rowland: Oh yeah, like that was what Edison said, right, he found ten thousand ways not to make it.

Blane Chocklett: Exactly, yeah, that's awesome, man, it's true, I really appreciate you doing it, I really enjoyed talking to you, getting to know you a little better, let's get together and go fishing, man.

Tom Rowland: Let's do it, it's been a pleasure, man, I appreciate it, thank you very much, Blane Chocklett, thank you, check him out, definitely use his flies, check him out, alright, see ya.