Dead Drifters Society: A fly fishing podcast
Escape the Chaos: Finding Tranquility Through Fly Rod Crafting
Ever wondered what it takes to build the perfect fly rod? Leonard Rainwater joins me for an intimate reveal of the craftsmanship behind rod building, the delicate art of fly tying, and the pure joy of breaking bread baked with your own hands. Prepare to be hooked by our shared tales of fishing adventures, culinary quests, and the simple pleasures of creating with care and patience.
Settle in as we navigate the world of fly fishing, from aligning rod spines for the ideal cast to choosing the right feather for that irresistible fly. We'll unravel the intricate dance of rod mechanics, the anticipation of trout season, and the camaraderie found in the angling community. Alongside this, Leonard and I reflect on our past cooking careers, finding comfort in solo dining with the help of an air fryer, and the zen-like satisfaction derived from kneading dough to perfection. It's an episode that connects the dots between our passions for the great outdoors and the warmth of the kitchen.
As we wrap up, we delve into the heart of the rod building community, sharing stories of unexpected journeys that lead to lifelong passions and the excitement of preparing for the awaited trout season in Oregon. Whether you're a seasoned angler or your interest is just beginning to bloom, this conversation is an invitation to explore the harmony between life's simple tasks and the grandeur of nature. So, whether you grab your rod or a slice of freshly baked bread, join us for this episode brimming with laughter, learning, and the undeniable call of the wild water.
https://www.instagram.com/rainwatersrods?igsh=MWNkcjh1eHE3aDRsMQ==
Ever wondered what it takes to build the perfect fly rod? Leonard Rainwater joins me for an intimate reveal of the craftsmanship behind rod building, the delicate art of fly tying, and the pure joy of breaking bread baked with your own hands. Prepare to be hooked by our shared tales of fishing adventures, culinary quests, and the simple pleasures of creating with care and patience.
Settle in as we navigate the world of fly fishing, from aligning rod spines for the ideal cast to choosing the right feather for that irresistible fly. We'll unravel the intricate dance of rod mechanics, the anticipation of trout season, and the camaraderie found in the angling community. Alongside this, Leonard and I reflect on our past cooking careers, finding comfort in solo dining with the help of an air fryer, and the zen-like satisfaction derived from kneading dough to perfection. It's an episode that connects the dots between our passions for the great outdoors and the warmth of the kitchen.
As we wrap up, we delve into the heart of the rod building community, sharing stories of unexpected journeys that lead to lifelong passions and the excitement of preparing for the awaited trout season in Oregon. Whether you're a seasoned angler or your interest is just beginning to bloom, this conversation is an invitation to explore the harmony between life's simple tasks and the grandeur of nature. So, whether you grab your rod or a slice of freshly baked bread, join us for this episode brimming with laughter, learning, and the undeniable call of the wild water.
https://www.instagram.com/rainwatersrods?igsh=MWNkcjh1eHE3aDRsMQ==
This is something I've learned Building rods. You learn what to do and what not to do. You learn what not to do faster than you learn what to do. First, second, third rod I built. I thought I was pooping in tall cotton and I'm like dude, I'm gonna be the next, whatever. And then you start casting. You go why are these things so hard to cast? Hmm, why is that? Well, I've got this beautifully built rod and it won't cast with a crap. What did I do wrong? You take it apart? Ah, I had my spine on. The bottom was off, but my tip was on and the middle section was off. So the rod didn't know what to do it's like. So that's when you learn. Well, your lines have. Your spines have to be aligned. Which way is easier for you to bend Forwards or backwards? Well, you gotta have the rock, you gotta have the spine with the eyes. Welcome to Deadly.
Andrew Barany:Directors Society. All right, here we go. Here we go round. Two ding ding, ding. Round two Leonard Rainwater welcome to the podcast. How's it going, buddy? Hey, andrew, how you doing? Man, I'm doing good. Yeah, just a random update. I've been making bread lately and I'm proud of that, so I just wanted you to know that.
Lenard Rainwater:You know what I make bread as well. Really, yes, I do. It is something that I got into having a little man. I think it's like we talked about working with your hands. Just there, a few bread, pizza dough. You know what kind of bread do you like making? Well, so far, I'm Hungarian.
Andrew Barany:So I've been making like a Hungarian fried bread mainly, but today I stepped into making some sandwich bread because we decided that we, when I say we it's an interesting thing when a female says we, it means me, me too, yeah. And then when I say we, it means me, so I don't know why I say we, but yeah. Anyways, I've decided to start making some sandwich bread and found a recipe on Instagram and I was like, well, no time, like now. So there's a book I want you to get.
Lenard Rainwater:It's called Water Salt Flower Yeast, yeah, by a guy named Ken Forkish. Okay, mind Blower, it's really. Yeah, I'm really into the Polish, which is a Polish fermented bread. Okay, I make a big, I make two one-pound bulls, you know, and it just, it's awesome, it is so good.
Andrew Barany:It's, um, I don't know how many like non-preservative containing breads I've really ate throughout my life. I feel like most of the breads have always been from stores that definitely throw preservatives. I mean, I've had like some fancier breads and stuff that maybe don't have it, but there is a certain texture and taste that you just can't beat making it yourself. It says eat me and uh, eat me in four days or I'm going to bolt?
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, pretty much.
Andrew Barany:Well, when we go through Brad like, we like, uh, eggs with toast and then kids lunch, and so we go through bread quickly enough, Um, but I'm always not always pleased with the breads we get, you know.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, so yeah, not bread talk though.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, I made a pork roast the other day. Oh, there we go, there we go. Little pork roast, sauerkraut dumplings, you know? Oh, the Czechoslovakian side came out of me with a little German. No, angry, hungry, thirsty people, yeah.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I uh well, I used to work at the keg and prior to that I was uh a cook at, um, dairy Queen, and so I've spent so much time in kitchens and when I like was I don't know, maybe 24, 25 was when I stopped working in those types of things and, uh, I decided that I did not like cooking at all. I hated it because I was never cooking for myself, I was always cooking for others. And so I just like put this weird mindset in my head and I've broken through it um the last couple of years where I'm like, oh, I don't hate it, I just like I prefer cooking for others, like I don't want to go sit and make a full meal for myself, like me and the wife, sure, but just myself. No, I'm going to go buy something.
Lenard Rainwater:Like, my wife went to uh. She jumped on a plane today with the girls and they went to Disneyland. They left from Portland. We just got over about two days of ice, ice, storms, you know, freezing rain and all that. I mean it just crippled everything Cause she jumped on a plane this afternoon and they went to, uh, anaheim, california, to Disneyland. So you talk about I'm home alone, what I do went over to the store, got some yeah, my age, uh, tots and nuggets in the air fryer. There you go With uh, you got to have the uh, you got to have the buffalo wick sauce and some and some ranch and life's good yeah.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, man, um, air fryer, shout out air fryers. Those things limit, limit less. The only thing I've found that doesn't make, amazingly, is um, pierogies. I like tried it a few different times, once not boiling it, once boiling it. It just doesn't do it. But I mean you can do corn and the cob, you can make like some crazy good. Um, um, oh geez, You're losing words in our brains and nighttime and such uh, grilled cheese there you go, oh, there you go.
Lenard Rainwater:So we do, we do nachos and orange, you what?
Andrew Barany:We do nachos and orange. I've done it once and yeah.
Lenard Rainwater:You got to put the either tin foil or the parchment paper down, or you're cleaning that thing and trusting. Yeah, let's talk about fishing. I mean, geez, we pretty soon, if we keep talking like this, martha Stewart's going to pop in and give you comments.
Andrew Barany:That reminds me of that one video where she's like just a couple ounces of vodka and she looks like glip, glip, glip, glip, glip, glip, glip, glip. It's like five to 10 ounces of hard bar. Nice, yeah, um yeah, fishing I've not really been out since last weekend and it's been a struggle. Not really. I like going at least once a week, but You're lucky, yeah, I. Steelhead is the time where I like I've sat down with my wife enough times to be like hey, listen to me this even when I like don't you know a full season of winter steelhead fishing. You know there's been years where I've gone, for there's the first year I got one and last year I got six grabs and zero landed. So even through all that, for some reason I yeah, it's a you can freeze your butt off and get one pull.
Lenard Rainwater:That's all you need. I'm coming back.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, and it's funny too, because even when I first started steelheading which was not the first thing I did on the river, but in a sense it was like when I started dumping time into the rivers and stopped going to the lakes basically I went three months with basically like maybe three, four trout, which at the time was fine because I just like that fishing, but then when I got that first steelhead, I was like, oh my God, this is something that I love. And, yeah, now it's like when December comes around, all I think is like you know, everyone's like, oh Christmas, and I'm like dammit, I need to get out on the water.
Lenard Rainwater:The springers start coming in here really quick. February for us, springer, salmon, steelhead start coming in, so it's going to start kicking off here pretty quick. B runs coming up soon Up the Calamity, the Lewis, the Cali, it's up the hoe, you know all the big boy rivers where you're swinging big flies and big rods, and so we're kind of getting ready for that. Got sports shows starting off here next month in our area down here. So it's going to be a lot of education, throwing out a lot of English pretty soon. So we're just doing our part to get ready. So I'm ready.
Lenard Rainwater:Finally, I think when we recorded the first time and it didn't work out well because we had internet issues and I figured out what it was, it's me yeah, I don't have a booster out my shop Because usually I don't take a radio with me. I just got a little, got a little AM FM, old school Heck, I don't know what branded is. It's like an Emerson or some, something you buy At the Dime Store when I was a kid and I just listen to football or whatever. But yeah, no, the internet's not so much out there, so sorry about that.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, well, it was funny because like it held strong for like I don't know, it must have been like 60, 70% of our recording. And then that last little bit I mean the audio was fine but, you know, trying to do the YouTube thing as well, obviously we want to try to get that. But yeah, you know what 103 episodes in, and I don't think anyone's ever thought about it Besides for me, how many times have that to either redo episodes or, you know, spend so much more time trying to edit out you know some weird stuff and it's a bit of a challenge, but obviously I love it and I think a handful of people out there love it. So you know, we put in the effort where it needs and I mean, I've never had a bad time, you know, talking fishing with anyone. So even when it does work out, it's like I didn't waste however long we chatted for it. Just more information from my brain to. You know, I can't remember anything else around me.
Lenard Rainwater:I can't remember anything else around the house, but I can remember our conversations we have what we call several reminders from the ladies of the house, and he usually starts out with are you kidding me? Yeah, ends with really, really. Come on, I have to tell you this again.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, yes, you do. Well, shout out to the ladies. We're sorry.
Lenard Rainwater:We try. We love the death.
Andrew Barany:Have you ever seen the red green show? That's what my dad used to watch it. Oh, I used to love that show. I was a duct tape fanatic when I was younger, but duct tape they don't find us pretty, they might as well find us handy. Right, that's right.
Lenard Rainwater:It's back on down here on the, on the freebie which is a part of Amazon. Okay, they have the red green show on.
Andrew Barany:That's awesome, man, that show, I'd watch that show. And why am I just forgetting all things in my brain? Because we're at that. You're at that age, my friend. What's going on here? I'm, I'm, I'm getting old, damn, steve Irwin. That's the guy. Ok, not not Steve Irwin. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy used to watch him all the time, massively. He was all hit with reptiles and I liked duct tape and I think that's a pretty good childhood, I mean duct tape and red.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, yeah, I want to make you have a duct tape because I was like, let's see if we can do this. Oh yeah, that's funny, it is. It was good. Now my crafts are different. They have consistent, expensive feathers and expensive threads and expensive, expensive threads and expensive tools to tie them on and Well, you can't see them all here.
Lenard Rainwater:I have three vices on my bench here. This is this is the makeshift bench. Okay, nothing special to look at so I won't show it to you, but it's like everybody. Every other fly tires bench. You should be proud. There is crap all over the place and it's an organized pile.
Andrew Barany:An organized mess. That's what I have going on here. Mind you, it's pretty clean right now because I cleaned up yesterday, because it got you know there's that breaking point with your, your fly dying desk.
Lenard Rainwater:Do you have the little hole right in front of your vice and just everything's piled up around it and you think that's okay.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, like I had. It was getting to the point where every time one tool hit the table, it vanished for at least three minutes while looking for it, and then I'd be like, oh, there it is, I'd use it, put it down Then. And so I was like, all right, um, but yeah, so I was recording with um, with Ryan. Uh, brian Morgan and I don't know never met him. Yeah, he's, he's okay, he's not not the greatest, but you know he's and he's a dad and um, he's okay, he's okay. Well, he inspired me to clean my table up because he's like hey, man, I just clean, spent this time cleaning up my stuff and then when we like got on together, he was like I can't find anything.
Andrew Barany:No no because stuff is put away properly and like, how are you supposed to find it in those scenarios?
Lenard Rainwater:So yeah, he and I went and did a tying around Christmas time and we went to a friend's house a friend of a friend's house and excuse my loud stuff there, um and uh, and I told him. I said I had to clean my bench off just to get all of my tools together that I thought I might need. And uh, yeah, and I forgot the ones that I did need Hair stackers. I'm like, oh man.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, so trying to stack them by hand, oh, I just didn't forget it and just I ended up.
Lenard Rainwater:what I was doing I was tying what we call a. A hobo cat is then what it is it's it's a coastal deer hair wing instead of a elk hair. You know, elk hair goes back. I don't know.
Andrew Barany:If you can't see it, go to the other side or the other side, yeah there we go.
Lenard Rainwater:So it's not, this is just through your little cat is. You know, it's not a wing like that. What it is is we wrap a coastal deer hair and we spin it. Uh got that idea from Uncle Cheech and uh kind of took it and ran with it and uh and I played with threads, but I think the best, the best thread I use is eight out uni. Uh, all of uh brown kind of a brown, all uh all of done. I don't know why I'm attracted to that color and that's the color I love. I use it for everything, but for spinning deer hair it bites nice. Um, ryan about slapped it out of my hands when he saw what I was using because it wasn't semper fly. And uh, I pulled out a some semper fly classic wax in the same color, that everything was okay, nice.
Andrew Barany:So uh, I'll do a little tip that someone gave me I can't remember who gave it. So when you're spinning deer hair, if your thread is um able to go flat, if you spin your thread out so it's more flat, it won't cut as easily as it's like. I use, uh, gsp 100 generally when I'm tying things that I want to, you know, really crank down on. One issue with the GSP 100 is that it cuts through deer hair quite easily, um, so I'll spin it counterclockwise just to uh make the flat, and then when I wrap it and cinch down on it, it doesn't, uh, it doesn't cut through it as easily. Just a random tip.
Lenard Rainwater:Well, I'm just taking deer hair and I'm making a dubbing loop out of it and I'm putting it in the dubbing loop and then spinning it and it's turning into a hackle, oh okay. And you wrap it and pull it back and, uh, what it does is it basically encompasses the last part of my catas. Tie it off and I trim the bottom flat. So now you've got all those beautiful deer hair stacked backwards with a piece of CDs, two pieces of CDC underneath it. That thing will ride really high in the water and it won't sink, cause that deer hair is hollow. So you got hollow deer hair with CDC and uh, I use squirrel, uh, I mixed up my own squirrel dub. Now, reason why we call it a hobo catas is because it looks like a traveling sedge. But uh, it's, it's light, it depends on the light it's in. I can tie it with uh kind of a natural, lighter deer hair, or I can tie it with a dark deer hair, coastal deer hair, and uh, and it just you can manipulate it by size to make it look like that travel exedge, cause when that squirrel hair gets wet it goes really dark. So what I've done with that squirrel, with that squirrel hair, is, I've blended in in my, in my, I have my dubbing mixer, which is a can of air and a uh Ziploc bag, and I just shoot the air and mix it up and uh, that way I'm not fraying or chopping fibers, cause I've already made everything smaller and I'll put different colors in it to kind of collect light and it, and it works. There's something about that mix. Um, that works. I had to write it down because I knew it wouldn't remember it. And uh, and I tie, I tie that, and I tie those at a number 10. And I also, uh, change everything around with the same idea, but we tie October cat us the same way, but in a size 10. And Ryan swings I tied up about a half dozen of them and he swings them up on the Lewis and he says these things are deadly. He just he catches fish on them. They catch fish. So he's been encouraging me to turn it into a umquat and I'm like, yeah, I don't know if I want to do that yet. Yeah, I'm having fun with it still.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, but yeah, it all started with fly tying for me. You know this whole fly fishing thing. Age nine started sitting down with my dad. I had a little Stevens. Oh, it was just Sullivan, little Sullivan or Thompson. Uh, clamp on the table, wise. I still haven't. Actually, I gave it to Ryan when he started tying oh yeah, and he got a little practice on and he tied on that for about three or four months and then he got into uh, he got into uh, into debt with Renzetti. Yeah, so I'm a regal. I'm a regal HMH guy.
Andrew Barany:So I have the traveler Renzetti. Yeah, it was weird, I think, one of the bearings inside busted but for so long it was seized. So I bought the uh, Stonefo, um, which I'm super happy. I mainly, you know, price point put out of the way. But it's those bases, you know, like the traveler Renzetti just got a little base, that thing's massive. You got a big base having a nice base and or like I don't really like clamping them down on the table just cause you can't move it, but it is very efficient for holding still, Um, but when you're tying like um, you know, like you know, like you know, like you know really intricate things, you don't want your vice to wiggle on you. And then when you're tying big nasty streamers or whatever, once again you don't really want your uh, your base moving, nice, moving around. So I but yeah, and then one day I decided to men handle this Renzetti and I grabbed everything and I just like popped it and then now it swivels again. So it's really stiff, but it also doesn't have that nut, that or that uh, a little handle the tying down, I guess. Yeah, so this is going to be my son's first vice. You won't know how lucky is to have such a good vice.
Andrew Barany:To start, you send it back. You know, and I I thought of that, but I am notoriously bad for ever doing that. Um, I've, I've sent, like Intel, I made these hats. I never sent anything, never sent a letter, never sent a package, Um, so the idea at the time of sending something back was like mind boggling, and I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was. You know, you've never done it. It's just, it doesn't seem as easy, Even doing the hats, like by the end of it I was like, oh, this isn't that complicated.
Andrew Barany:You know, write down some address, you put it in a box, you ship it off, all good. But, yeah, I, uh, I've been very fortunate that my fly shop shut out Robinson's outdoor store. Um, they take care of me. When you know things need to be repaired or whatever, or warrantied, they send it back for me. So, um, but you know what this is, you know it's my traveler advice. So it's, it's, it's there to travel. It doesn't need to be perfect. I've seen this one guy I don't know if you've ever um, Captain Quinn, on YouTube.
Lenard Rainwater:No.
Andrew Barany:And Instagram. Um, he's like a big a bad guy and, um, long story short, one of the videos I watched him tie a fly. Uh, he had a block of wood, yeah, like six by six, just a chunk of it, and he drilled out a hole on the side and stuck an actual vice like vice grips, and so he had pinch his hook, put it in there and that's what he was tying on, so it's like it works. Yeah, I mean, now I'm a little bit better with my money, so I don't buy anything that's flashy right off the bat. I think about it and then go buy it.
Lenard Rainwater:No, I, you know it's funny. You know we talk about tools. Um, I bought this regal because I needed something for dry flies. Um, this is my. This is how my brain works. I use my peak for tying midges, um, small stuff, just because of the way it is. I use my regal, which I absolutely love. My regal, shout out, regal, awesome. Not a sponsor of the show, but hey, this is what we're doing. Maybe one day, yeah, maybe one day One day. Uh, I love my regal. Um, I use it for tying, like, uh, all my mid-sized stuff.
Lenard Rainwater:But the HMH, this old school, 40, 40 something year old H and HMH, this is the bad boy. Uh, this is where I tie all my big bugs on, and this thing will hold. You can, you can hang a 10, uh, a 10 year old child off the end of the thing and it will not release. Um, yeah, it. Just I don't know what it is about this. They haven't changed the way they made these things. This was a gift. Uh, mike McCoy, uh, used to tie on this for years and he said and I got too many vices and I go. Well, if the HMH needs a home, he goes, take it home. All right, hurt my feelings. Yeah, he's tied a lot of Atlantic salmon bugs, a lot of bench, bench uh showpieces, a couple of them been in, uh published and uh. So this sits here and I tie big bugs on it once in a while. So about it? So, yeah, I don't have one, you need three. Actually, I have four. Another one out of the garage I use for something else, but I use it for making.
Andrew Barany:You know I was for the stone fault um price points, obviously up there. Have you seen this one? Yeah, my friend Bruce has one that this is my favorite part. Yeah, move the different. You know, you got your dry fly um vice that just clips on, reminds me of my drill at work. And then you got the, also the tube fly one which comes with a bunch of needles that you can put the plastic. But that's why I went for this one Um plus the big the, the large base. That was for me. You know, obviously I tie enough flies to to justify this kind of purchase. Um, but prior to that, yeah, the the regal the traveler or not the regal um the rinzetti traveler. And then before that it was just a cabela special and I grinded on that cabela special to the point where the threads aren't threads anymore, they're just couplings. I guess Nice.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, what's your? What's your thread choice? What do you go for GSP?
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I mean honestly. Yeah, gsp is probably 90% of what I use. I do use the UTC, like 70 and 140. Um, but I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to realize that I don't always need to use such a thick thread. So instead of the GSP100, I'll use like a GSP50 or something equivalent to that. But yeah, I'm this last or since the Seas, the steelhead season really started to kind of kick off, especially at the bench, because you know we start tying the flies a little bit before we go fishing. I've been learning so much tying the classics and really one of them is like laying down thread properly and like smooth and all that, but then also not always needing like such a thick thread, especially for when you're tying in like delicate stuff. So yeah, for a while there it was like I was always tying streamers and Euro jigs and stuff like that, so I really didn't care if I was using like a really strong thread. But yeah, we're growing up, we're learning a few things.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, I'm a big 12-off, 14-off, 8-off. I'll pull out the big dog when I need to, but I have a light touch and I use 12-off for everything. Wollieburgers, it's just funny. I don't know what it is. I love the way it lays down. Yeah, I'm not a big GSP guy, but hey, it's all right.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, it's one of those things that we all learn from either different people or just buy flyshops, carry different stuff and, the end of the day, as long as you can get your hackles to stay on and make the fly look good, you've got years to learn and improve and figure out what you like. But yeah, the GSP to me has been a good one and I pretty much unless I'm doing ahead now, like finishing off my fly or doing a butt section that I want to be bright, it's basically always GSP but white I guess any thread really, but white and then for a long time I was just using Sharpie to color things up. But now that we're getting into the hoity-toity classics, I'm buying silk threads that are $10. For one thing, this is Canadian money, so $10 is probably the equivalent of a dollar.
Lenard Rainwater:50 cents American yeah, 50 cents, 50 cents something we don't have taxes for taxes, for taxes, we just have everything else in the world to pay for it.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, they put a tax on the tax that's being taxed, right, and then they tax us for it. Yeah.
Lenard Rainwater:It helps with the whole. We can go 75 different directions in this Yep.
Andrew Barany:They were not allowed to talk politics, politics, only fishing politics.
Lenard Rainwater:That's right. Yeah, I won't even talk about that because I just get all upset. Yeah, yeah, I quit reading Fly Fishman Magazine. I don't know why I got one day I got it and I opened it up and I just got upset. I'm like this is not what it used to be. It went really political and I'm sorry, I was a 20-year subscriber and I'm just like one day I'm like I'm not enjoying this.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I think one of the big ones for me was like Keep Fish Wet, that movement that started, because prior to that movement and like my knowledge, I didn't really handle fish as amazingly as I can now. So, yeah, there's like a big learning curve there, but I really liked it because the Keep Fish Wet was like a pretty positive movement. Yes, most people prefer, you know. I mean I posted once a photo of me holding a steelhead with one wool glove on it. Just, I couldn't get it off. It was pouring rain and blah, blah, blah. Excuses aside, yeah, I got chewed out really well for it and so I, instead of just, like you know, bantering back and forth with the people on Instagram, I also looked through their feeds and realized that they were holding fish like in what my perspective wasn't the greatest either. So I just went to research and read a lot about handling trout, mainly in salmon, and then I just started implementing those things that I learned.
Andrew Barany:And so now if I see someone's kind of mishandling, you know I'll just private message them and like, hey, man, like awesome catch. You know, or I'll leave it alone or the other. Really depends on the scenario. But you know, now younger kids and that are getting into fly fishing. They see this like keep fish wet thing. So there's like a lot stronger movement towards, you know, just them wanting to do these, these proper etiquettes with fish handling. So yeah, I like that one. But politics, yeah, I don't really go on Facebook for that reasons that maybe it's not so much now, but when I was in it. You know, I like Instagram because people are pretty damn positive and I guess I also surround myself with you know like yeah, so.
Andrew Barany:I got my horse blinders on. These days I focus on the good and positive and it seems to seems to work. I mean, we can always look for the negatives, but yeah, yeah, I have a huge box full of magazines, old magazines, fly tying magazines and stuff and I breeze through them. There's some cool articles. The history is always a cool one, to kind of go over it.
Lenard Rainwater:I like. I like you know. That's kind of what inspired my style of you know, when I have a rod building is. I remember being a little kid and my dad was. My dad was a fly fisherman. He was. He was a good fly tire, he was very creative and crafty. A horrible caster oh God, it's a caster and he never caught fish. But he, I'm like dad, you don't catch fish, he goes, I don't care, he goes, I'm not outside, I don't care. So and fishing with him you learn to appreciate everything. He had a. His first fly rod he bought for himself was an old Lama glass G 1000 back from the 80s and I have it. When he passed away eight year, eight, nine years ago and I have that rod and it kind of is and it is. Seeing that rod as a kid and then as an adult it kind of sparked something.
Lenard Rainwater:I was trying to be like everybody else with my rod building, trying to match and be like the, the uh Aral, winston's and the Sages and and at the time Diamondback was a pretty good rod company. There was another one, uh Fisher, out of Carson city, nevada. He was pretty good. They're really good company, but when he passed away, they, uh, they closed up shop. But what inspired me was is those classic looks and just not minimalist, but classy, but sexy but functional. And uh, I think that's. You know, you have one of my rods. They're nothing special, but they perform well.
Andrew Barany:Sure, I think it's a special rod of mine. It's, it's, it's up on my my top two favorite rods, so yeah it's a two your own horn, but it's a nice rod.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, I thank you. It um, I believe, using good components, good craftsmanship, good blanks and build them right, and that'll be a rod you passed out. Yeah, that's, that's my theory.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, if he can try it out of my cold dead hands. No, I'm getting buried with that rod cremated. Whatever All my rods, no one's taking these from me. Yeah.
Lenard Rainwater:I think when I go, my wife's going to make the whole little bit bigger to put all the ones I'm going to. She asked me. She goes do you need another? She goes, what are you doing? I'm building a rod for who Me. You don't need another one, my wife so. So she goes and buys fabric and all this other stuff and I go do we need to go through your little craft area? So that's kind of our joke. Yeah, it's all good. So yeah, hey, I want to show you something. I want to show you something, yes, so this I'm going to do a little light here. There you go, a little buckeye burl for you.
Andrew Barany:Isn't that?
Lenard Rainwater:beautiful. Yeah, this one Eyes in it and everything. That's pretty cool. So this, we just did this between the first one that we filmed or we recorded and yesterday. Okay, so we I put the tendon in this a couple of days ago, but yeah, this is going to go. I have this one in a couple others for a show. Oh, there we go For a show that I'm doing in. Get back a little bit further.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, there we go.
Lenard Rainwater:Here. How's that that is good? So for a show in March, and we're going to have booth number six at the big shot out here at the Northwest fly tires and fly fishing exposition in Albany, Oregon, March 8th 8th and 9th.
Lenard Rainwater:So I'll have 12 rods on display and we're kind of digging deep here, building a trout switch, nice little 10 foot, 10 foot, six, four way, and that's a talent blank. The mandals were made back in the 80s and they the company that brought them out basically revised that whole, revised the rod line, and I'm going to fix my light here. Here we go. I revised the rod line and modernized the, the materials and these rods are just. They're amazing. You have one of the old you have you have that's what yours is is a talent and it just I believe it, it lightens the sensitivity on them. Actually they're a little bit lighter than the one you have now, and by maybe an ounce. So yours is about four and a half because it's a big rod. And but yeah, the nine foot six, five weight that I have I just got them last, last year, last week, thursday they're going to be a cannon, they're going to throw some lines seriously, and the 10 foot six, four weights are going to be really nice too.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, that's exciting man. So when you say switch you're, you're talking like a bit of a two handed rod as well.
Lenard Rainwater:It is, it is going to be a two handed rod, cool yeah.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, Trout space the the thing I'm also going to get on this year. That's a big plan for my, my, my thought process is, if I can get pretty good at trout spay too, then I can do a bit of trout spay guiding um, which no one's really doing right now, which would be cool. We've talked about it a few times and amongst the, the guiding crew and I, you know, I love casting a single hand um, but a lot of areas where we are, unless you're on a raft, can't. And then I love swinging flies. I love, you know, casting a spay rod. That to me is like I get sad that I can't do it all year round, but that's not true, it's just I wasn't doing it all year round. So, yeah, definitely getting into the trout spay this year, because I think that's a really, a really cool way of doing it.
Andrew Barany:You know, everyone gets to the point um eventually, where, you know, I guess, like your dad, where he didn't even care if he caught a fish, he just wanted to be outside. I'm, you know, as long as I can cast, I'm pretty happy. And then if I'm casting spay, I'm slightly happier. Something about it, the rhythm, the way it clears my mind. All I'm thinking about is the cast single hand. Obviously, we're still in that realm, but casting, I get a little bit more in that zone.
Andrew Barany:Um, yeah, it's, it's a fun one. It takes time to learn. It's not like you just pick up the rod and you go and you're casting. You know right for distance. But yeah, dry fly, trout spay is a thing for me. This year that's going to be, um, definitely, when I go up to Cranbrook and I go out a couple of days off, it'll be streamers for bull, bull, trout and then trout spay for dry flies, and I'm just going to do that and then when I get back, it's a little bit of Euro until steelhead season and then it's back to swinging flies and back to swinging me, swinging the meat, and uh, yeah, it's cool, though you know fly fishing, you can just immerse yourself in so many different avenues. You know, wherever you are in the world, there's something you can do. And if it's a fish, heck. I've caught a seagull on a fly by accident. Well, not by accident, I guess, the bird didn't do it by accident. I wasn't expecting it to really happen. But you know, as long as it's it's out there, you can catch something.
Lenard Rainwater:So yeah, I hooked a mud hen once, yeah, and I wasn't trying, yeah.
Andrew Barany:I've had eagles take my fish.
Lenard Rainwater:I've been swooped a couple of times.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I mean, all of a sudden there's like massive birds just right there Grabbing.
Lenard Rainwater:You know how big an eagle's butthole is. It's large. It's 10 feet from you. It's that big around oh man, that's funny.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I guess so. And perspective, all in perspective, right?
Lenard Rainwater:It's all in perspective. He was. I hooked into this fish. I was up at Coldwater Lake and there's a, there's a little piece of piece of what was left of the creek. You know, it was this big mountain of dirt with a tree on it and usually in about early summer there's an eagle that sits up in the top of the tree and that eagle just kind of basically scans the area for excuse me and it sends a. If you hook a fish and it splashes, you see them pop off the tree and they start flying around and the next thing you know you've got an eagle over your shoulder watching you reel in this fish and he's just doing the eagle thing and then he'll swoop it. Yeah, never been that close to a bird, or you can hear the wind going through their over their wings. It's like, wow, that thing's huge.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, there's a. There's a little lake kind of close to my house. It's called the Rans Lake. That's where I spent a lot of time when I first was starting fly fishing. It's a nice small lake. You're pretty much guaranteed to catch a fish if you add your fly in the water. And yeah, I learned very quickly that when you'd see the like you knew there was eagles around because they're always there all year round. And so the second you'd hook a fish and you get close to the surface, you just like look around and you'll see them coming in. Yep, and right before they come I would just drop my rod, or not drop it, but like lower my rod tip, let the fish get deeper. Eagle flies away quickly, pull it up and at it. But if you're not on your game with that, yeah you're, yeah, yeah, you have a lost fly. You need to retie and get back in the water. So where?
Lenard Rainwater:you have an eagle that's scooped something up and the hook's still in the fish and your fish is flying off.
Andrew Barany:Yep, I've had a few of those where it's like, do I try to fight this eagle? Right now? This hook set the bass style really tricky. It's like the grease, your rod, the one that you sent, that one can probably pull them in, but I don't think so. Yeah, they're pretty. I was that's one thing that like when it hooked and I was like holding in and like you know, drags just go and nuts, I was like I don't even know if this bird knows that I'm, like you know, connected to it. Probably think you're just going to be a draft around you or something. That's funny. Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah, about the wood that you use for the real seats what are the main woods that?
Lenard Rainwater:you use. Main woods that I use are big leaf maple and what we do is we look for trees that are not diseased but sick. What we mean by sick is everything up here has a layer of moss because, just like up by you, it rains a lot here. So we get about 40, 45 inches of rain here in Southwest Washington a year. That's the average. So sometimes you get more, sometimes you get less, and so we look for the big moss pads and we kind of peel it back on some trees that look like they've been hit by the beetles. So we look for, and what that does is that keys the tree to put up a defense, and we can also peel back the moss and look for a white powder. It's called a preem spalt and that means the tree has a fungus in it. So that's for the maple and what we're looking for. We're looking for a barrel, a big growth on the outside of the tree and we're looking for that spalt. So when we cut it, you get. You get the little lines. You'll see like there's a little black line, like right here. Yeah, you'll see a little black lines, and what that is is that's the tree's natural defense to keep the fungus from attacking the wood and what that does is that puts a pattern in the wood that we want, and we've learned to cut our wood a certain way to where we enhance that. That's the big leaf maple.
Lenard Rainwater:Another tree that we use here is alder. We have a lot of alders here and when an alder will fall we'll watch that tree and we'll cut the end off of it and it's not the root end, because sometimes there's a little bit of lifelapse there of. What we want is we want that tree to kind of be alive a little bit and what it'll do is it'll make a natural defense inside the wood, again with the black line, and that's called spalting as well. It's a fungus that attacks the tree. So we want the tree to naturally spalt and so after about probably four months we'll go to the alders and if you see a little black line in the cross section of the tree and then we'll cut it, and we cut it in a cross section so it looks like basically a bug pattern. It's kind of cool.
Lenard Rainwater:And another favorite of mine is the buckeye burl spalted buckeye burl. This wood comes out of California and it's getting harder and harder to find because of regulations for harvesting wood in California is becoming near, it makes it difficult to where people are, like it's not even worth it anymore. So what we find, we get and we hold onto it dearly for special projects. But I tell you what man? This buckeye burl, one of my favorites, and so, yeah, I use the buckeye, the maple and the alder and then we do different things with it. We'll diet, we'll do fun things with it and it looks cool when we're done with it.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I don't think I ever realized, I guess until I got my burkeimer, how nice it is to have a nice real seat. I mean, obviously it's not a necessity. If you just have like a standard black real seat, you can still catch fish.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, but from a builder's point of view, I'm gonna put the money thing on it. Yeah, my goal is to say you call me and say I want you to build me a rod and this is what I want. Okay, what kind of insert do you want? Oh, I don't really care. Yeah, you do. You don't realize it, but you do, because when you're walking through that rack of rods at the flash up and I want you to do this for me I want you to walk through a rack of rods and say, all right, this is what I have at home. What's gonna make me here, pull out of my credit card and lay down some hard earned money. I want that rod to say take me home.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, and I think a nice piece of wood, good looking hardware, good finish, good thread wraps, nice color, nothing bright and gaudy, but just something. Just subtle and sweet. We call it subtle but sexy and the something you'll take home and be the envy of fish camper with your buddies or whatever. Hey, no, that's where'd you get that? I ordered from a guy down in the States and then you send him my way.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, 100% man, it's like you just nailed it on that, the like I got. I like Echo as a rod brand for especially my client rods, because it's very inexpensive for warranty tips or I can just buy new tips and stuff. But then for my nicer rods that are just for me to be using, yeah, having something that stands out and it's like getting a haircut or putting on a nice suit or something you just makes you feel good. Yeah, there's a lot of little levels to it when it comes down to it, but I now have such an appreciation for a nice, real seat that I just never knew was. Oh, it's gorgeous. I you'd be proud of my son Today.
Andrew Barany:He we went to the fly shop to spend more hard earned money on threads, like I said, and some other feathers and whatnot. And he was like, well, we're walking to the store. He's like, dad, you need a new rod. It's like, oh, yeah, you can go to your mom's bed, we're going to look at a rod. Today I was like, all right, man, so we go into the shop and he's running around doing this thing and he's like, dad, I found the rod for you and walks me over to some Burkheimer rods and he's like that one right there and I looked at it and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be the rod.
Lenard Rainwater:I was walking out with a rod today but Well, let me guess it was a 13 foot two hand.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, it's almost like you know me. It was no, yeah, man, it was a nice rod and you know. But he has very expensive taste, that little one. I guess it's my fault because I have expensive taste when it comes to my fly fishing gear, which you know, if you fly fish once a year, maybe you don't need the if you have the money, but if you don't really need the top line and everything, but if you're like me or you know go out enough where it's like lifelong passion, then having that top line gear, I mean can't stress it enough.
Andrew Barany:I was talking with Ryan about like a dry bag, having a good dry bag If you're in the bush, whether you're fishing, hunting or hiking, having the right gear makes those wet days or cold days dramatically better. So yeah, for me a good dry bag, that's very important. Having you know a nice rod. Definitely it doesn't make you necessarily cast better right off the bat, but it will help a little bit. And then you know, maybe bigger fish I would never cheap out on a reel, but if it's like just for you know your average size, trout, then a reel like I could, you know, cheap out on a little bit or go less expensive, but then line I'll never cheap out online. That's one thing you know. If it's, you know, $160 versus $100, I'm getting $160 one.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, I'm an SA SA MPX guy. Andrew, I like my Andrew line. Have you tried?
Andrew Barany:that Infinity line by SA I think I have. Yes, that is my favorite dry fly line. It can toss dry flies and just drop them down so gently and then with my four weight I was casting mini sex junjins. No problem with a four weight, just you know it was it was. It's such a nice line. I'm sure they'll come out with something else and obviously I haven't tried every line out there. But yeah, big, big fan of the Infinity line.
Andrew Barany:I like the textured one. It's, I think, like $10, $20 more, but I like texture, like my fingers, you know, for men that use hands and so having some kind of feel and even that sound. You know, when I start to hear it in my guides I know I'm ready to cast that feel it's. It all kind of comes together. So, yeah, I mean, when I first started fly fishing, everything I bought was off recommendations of others, and sometimes they weren't even, you know, like the one shop I used to go to they set me up with. Yeah, it was a Sage rod, which I still have it. It's broken but should send it in as well. I've already sent it in though. I sent it in, bought it back a year later and then went out to fish and, like really nice brown, broke it in half and I was like yeah, I don't care.
Andrew Barany:I don't even use my Sages anymore. They're my backup rods. To be honest, like they're I give my Sages to. I gave one away not long ago to a friend of mine. I was like here and he was like whoa, like isn't this an expensive rod? And I was like, yeah, you can say that.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah.
Andrew Barany:I was like, if you break it, that's that. He's like oh okay.
Lenard Rainwater:The only Sage rod. I have one Sage. I have two Sages, okay, and I don't fish them. Yeah, one is an RPL plus four weight and I don't fish it because you can't get them anymore. And when you do get them and you have to, when you send them back to Sage it is you experience this they only make two, they only make two products out of Bainbridge Island anymore and the rest is all brought in from overseas.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, and they have to whip out the mandrels, they have to fire up the ovens. They have. It's a process. They have to make that one part and they're not in a big hurry to do it because they have to break down a production run to do it. Yeah, so I've learned through the hard way of buying blanks from a Patriot factory up here in Woodland Washington that I buy 12 plus extra tips because a customer will break one, and that way you don't have to bother anybody to break a rundown, it's just just by smart and yeah. So if you break a rod, I'll replace it. I have no problem with that, because I break things all the time.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I'm clutched, hey man. And rods, you know, they're so strong until they're not. I guess that's like anything. But you know, I've landed steelhead on you know a handful of those rods up there, and then or salmon, or whatever, and a simple branch has broken rods in half. Try to, you know, lifting a rod or a branch out of the water because I think the rod can handle it. Rod breaks, they're not made to do that.
Lenard Rainwater:Not made to do that, not made to go straight up? And then you go like this no, when you see people do that, it drives me nuts and I'm probably going to catch crap for it, and you probably will too. But when I see people in pictures and they have their arms straight up in the air and they're stripping in a fish, I want to just reach up and slap them in the back of the head and say 45 degrees, arm out, use the taper of that rod. Or when you see people grab a rod, their rods, and they hold it like this oh my God, don't do that either, because that's you're going to break that rod.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, I watched a video not long ago of this girl on Instagram. She was just a spin caster rod, so we're okay, guys, we're okay. But she hooked into a nice fish and then she was bringing it in and then grabbed the rod and it just snapped right where her hand touched and in the comments it was brutal, kind of, to be honest. But the rod mechanics, that was a big thing actually for learning how to cast a rod properly. To the extent that I'm no master by any means, but I can do things Understanding rod mechanics. And I actually heard I wish I knew which episode, but it was on the wet fly swung podcast and the gentleman was talking about rod mechanics and how your rod always wants to be that round shape, straight, pointed up, and when it bends it goes into an oval shape, which is then where the energy is created and stored, and then it wants to automatically snap back up to that round shape that it is. So that little bit of knowledge really did help understand rod mechanics and then realizing that, especially when you first start and you don't have a ton of guidance, you think and you probably have casted power bait or something like a big lure, so you're used to putting the lure behind you, tossing it out, and that's loading the rod. So learning how the rod gets loaded and how it transfers the inertia that's created there was a big step to actually I learned that I spent some time casting and I got better, dramatically better, within that, basically a year, and now casting is no issue in terms of I can do it all day long.
Andrew Barany:Mind you, I'm not casting 10 weights or 14 weight rods, but my eight weights single hand, two handed all that I'm now focusing more on, obviously, line placement, if it's a two handed rod, and or if I have back cast room.
Andrew Barany:But I now know what the rod needs to do to make things happen. And so if I can just pay attention to what I'm doing and realize like, oh, I didn't actually let the rod load there, I was too fast, I was too slow, and then you start to build these little tips in your head and another thing was just being able to point out what you're doing wrong, if you can have someone either watch you and be like okay, you did this or that, or I've talked to people, I just filmed myself casting, and then I, like what sports players do is rewatch their games and learn from their mistakes. So same thing If you can't cast lessons dramatically, you can't cast lessons. I would dramatically say that's your first step. But if you're really not wanting to go towards lessons, then it's like learn what is a mistake, what you, how to correct it and then still fish that cast if you're fishing, taking a step further.
Lenard Rainwater:And so you talk about rod, mechanics, rod. I look at parabolic, I look at energy, we look at kinetic, the kinetic, the kinetic. We look at kinetic versus potential energy. We look at, like I said, parabolic, parabolic and friction, Our friction's the nice, nice. Oh sorry, you saw that, that yeah amen, it's okay, it's hot down here.
Andrew Barany:I like baloney. Oh, I've shed it off like three layers. I won't go any further, though You're not getting in. Thank you Showed a nicer. It's all right, man Outwear pants either. I know the wife's been gone for a few hours, but we're not taking a step further.
Lenard Rainwater:I'll snuggle with the dog tonight. There you go A little. 14 pound carrier, he's my partner, anyway. No, but this is something I've learned Building rods you learn what to do and what not to do.
Lenard Rainwater:You learn what not to do faster than you learn what to do. First, second, third rod I built. I thought I was, you know, pooping in tall cotton and I'm like dude, I'm going to be the next, whatever. And then you start casting. Why are these things so hard to cast? Hmm, why is that? Well, I've got this beautifully built rod and it won't cast, for the crap.
Lenard Rainwater:What did I do wrong? Take it apart. Ah, I had my spine on. The bottom was off, but my tip was on and the middle section was off. So the rod didn't know what to do, it's like.
Lenard Rainwater:So that's when you learn oh, your lines have, your spines have to be aligned. Which way is easier for you to bend Forward or backwards? Well, you got to have the rock. You got to have the spine with the eyes right, 180 degrees below the eyes. So, because it's easier for you to bend forward right With your spine. So, and then I learned that maybe I'll add an extra couple extra guides. Why is that? I'm going to reduce the friction because that's how everything works. Line rubs against your eyes creates friction, especially dry when you're practicing, and it's one of those things we develop. I developed over the years and finally perfected it to where you're using all that energy in the rod but I'm not having to expel more energy to make that rod work. I'm making a rod do all the work by adding extra guides. I've reduced that friction. So when you you come up with that whole stroke and you bring it forward, you're pushing, you're not ripping it forward like all.
Lenard Rainwater:You see a lot of these guys. You can just hear the. You can just hear everything creaking and cracking and making noise. It's like they're not made to make that noise. Why is that doing that? Well, they put so much force and energy into that and they bring it forward and they try to cast. You know they're casting a whole 80 feet all at one shot. It'll do it, but it doesn't like it. That's where you get failures If you get micro cracking. So I'm not saying, be gentle with them, use them. But you talk about mechanics and pressure. They're not made to go up, they're made to be held like this. And when you're playing that fish don't go up with it. Cause now what you've done is taken all that pressure and put it towards the tip, and that tip by itself can only hold two pounds, yeah, two pounds of pressure.
Lenard Rainwater:Two pounds of pressure you can break 14,. I've seen this takes more than that. Yeah, for it takes more, less than two pounds to break. So think about two pounds of pressure and this fish is doing a tap dance at the end of your line and he's about maybe a pound, but he's tugging and you're going up and creating more. And what's going to happen? Yeah, you're going to break your tip and people, a lot of new fly fishermen and even some older ones don't realize that. Yeah, it looks cool in the magazine, but there's also a warranty claim. That's going to be happening too If you're not doing things right.
Lenard Rainwater:So you know, watch what you're doing. But what we, what, what I do with when I, when I design and build, build my rods, is I think of how do I want this to fish, how do I want this to look when I, when I cast this rod, I'll be able to do I'll throw all 80 feet in four strokes, four forward strokes. Yeah, and you're, and you're done, and that's something we've, really I've had some help dialing that in and I'll say in the last probably five, six years, we've got it. Yeah, and you know.
Andrew Barany:I'll vouch for that. The first time I I casted that six weight with an eight weight line. I casted that six weight line on it because I just had what I had. So I didn't have a six weight or I guess it's a. Is it a nine foot? Not in a hard time, it's a nine six. It's a nine six. There we go. So yeah, I mean, as far as I know, I'm no guru with lines, but you know a nine foot you usually put the right size line, but if you're up towards a 10 foot rod you can go up a line size within recent. Yeah.
Andrew Barany:And that rod's heavy enough in the butt you can go up to almost, and that's the first thing I noticed when I was casting it, because we obviously talked about the extra guides on it I casted out basically my whole fly line, maybe like two wraps on my real left, and I had never done that before. I can do it with my Birkheimer a little bit, but not as easily as with yours. So casting that rod, we won't tell Kerry. We won't tell Kerry. We won't tell Kerry. Yeah, here's a good guy. He doesn't listen to my little, my little dead drifters podcast. He's too big.
Lenard Rainwater:You should have him on, though he would love to do it I bet I would love to have him on. Yeah, here. He's a good dude man. I'm supposed to have coffee with him here in the next couple of days.
Andrew Barany:Nice, he set me up yeah, he builds beautiful rods. I mean, they're the first that stuck out and that made me weaken the knees. Let's say, you know, I was like, because I was always like sage, sage, sage. And then my one buddy was like, yeah, but what about Birkheimer? I was like what the shit is Birkheimer Like? What are you even talking here? And then he's like try this. It was a five weight, it was a dry fly rod and I cast it and I was like, oh well, I guess I'll see you at the. He works at the shop. So I was like I guess I'll see you there soon.
Lenard Rainwater:And I have. My wife gave me some money for my birthday. Yeah, I've told you the story that I love telling it. And she goes go do what you want with it. I go, I'm going to go get a Birkie. And she goes are you going to buy one or build one? I go, what do you think?
Lenard Rainwater:So I call up Kerry and said hey, can I come to the shop? Well, yeah, come on down. So I bring him a six pack of heffy and heff vice and he loves heffa vice and beer and he puts it in the fridge behind his desk and I'm like you're not going to offer me one. He goes shop's still open. Well, you rat, anyway. So I said, hey, I want a eight foot nine, four weight deep action load DAL, they call it. And he goes you want the honey, you want the honey stick. And I go yeah, I do. And I want a four screen. And he made my grip for me and it was cool and I built the rod and showed it to him. When I was done I handed it back to him and he's like dude, he goes. Yeah, he goes, one job.
Andrew Barany:Nice. Just, it was a thought when we were talking about that picture. Perfect, the person has the rod straight up and the tips just bent over. One thing I do with my clients I haven't mentioned it before on the podcast, but I feel like it's been a while when I get someone that's new to fly fishing, one of the first things I go over before we get on the water is I pretend I'm the fish and I do things and get them to feel the rod in action.
Andrew Barany:So one of the things I do is I teach people about using the backbone to turn fish. So what I'll do is I'll get them to hold the line at first, I'll walk back, I'll basically put it up. So it's just the tip. Let's say, you know, and I'll be like okay, I'm putting a decent amount of force in my arm right now, how does that feel? And they're like yeah, I can feel it. And I'm like okay, Now I'm going to reel up. So now I'm going to use the backbone of the rod and I lift and right away their arm comes up with me and I'm like okay, now I'm going to turn the fish and I pull it over to the side using the backbone.
Andrew Barany:Use the backbone on the other side and they're like their hands doing the same thing that I'm doing and I'm like so that was using the backbone. Now I'm just going to go back to the tip section, hold the rod up and I'm like here, I'm trying to turn, you Are you turning? And they're like no, so I'm like okay, so the rod tip is not utilized for trying to pull fish. In the rod tip there is part of the whole, basically the shock system. That is the rod. I don't know if that's the greatest way to say it, but no, you say it to the whole rod, use the whole rod.
Andrew Barany:Use the whole rod and then, you know, I always put in a little bit like okay, and then once they're close to the boat, obviously things get a little bit different. You can't use the backbone when you have a 10-foot rod and the fish is in five feet from the boat. So at that point you want to put your arm back, still trying to use the rod relatively straight but pulling him in a sense, and that alone has helped so many of the clients I've had that have never fly fish before be able to land fish. I think it was with David Flaherty, not sure if you know him.
Andrew Barany:I know Ryan knows him but we were talking about you know what looks good in photos and stuff like that, or videos of people spade casting, and he was like man I watch so many because he's a big spade fanatic, so he's like I watch so many people doing spade casts and it looks good, but it wasn't actually an efficient cast. They lost so much energy here, here, here, whatever. So like things that look good in pictures. Excuse me, things that look good in pictures don't necessarily mean they're the right way of doing it. So same as you're saying you know someone's got their rod straight up and the tip is almost touching the butt end. I don't necessarily think that looks cool, but to someone that's never really fly fish they'd be like oh man, that's. You know, it's a great picture. Great appetite, great picture.
Andrew Barany:So that being said, you know, don't always trust everything, you see, I guess. But knowing your rod and you're probably going to get it, or at least when you got thick skulls like us, it takes a few you know, things broken to really get it through our head that this is how you have to properly do it. When I'm landing big fish, I generally don't carry a net so like, let's say, I'm fighting spring salmon or chum or you know, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. I'm going to go and get a fish I'm an order chum or you know, coho, it's risky business doing it the way I do it and it's not for everyone. So I won't say that you know this is how you should do it. But what I do is I get the fish close to me.
Andrew Barany:The fish is tired out, it's ready to get landed, it's kind of rolling on its side. I know that it's now the optimal time and I don't want to let the fish rest too long or else it's going on another run and just extend the fight time, which we don't actually want to do. When we're fly fishing. We want to get that fish in as quickly as possible. But what I'll do is the second, I realize the fish is ready, I rip off a dramatic amount of flying in a short period of time. No idea how much that is, but it needs to be about two rod lengths more. And then, last second, all I'll do is I'll let go pull my hand back rod pointed behind me, basically and I'll grab the line, bring my rod, put it in between my legs just in case I lose that line. Then my rod's still pointing out the way I want it to, and then I hand, bomb the fish in, grab the tail, and you know, bob's your uncle. We've landed the fish and most of the time, if I do lose the fly line in trying to scramble for it, I'll grab the rod's back in action or it was between my legs, pointing out towards the water, grab my rod. I'm still on the fish I've landed.
Andrew Barany:I haven't had a huge number of steelhead. I think I counted it about 10 or so, but that's 10 enough fish for me to keep going back every year. Anyways, I haven't lost a steelhead doing it and I've lost very few coho or spring salmon ever doing that. But I see a lot of people I mean, let's not drag them up onto the beach. That's numero uno of not what we wanna do. Especially people are like oh well, they're just going to die for the salmon. It's like well, you know, if I don't find someone for you for a short time they'll die.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, it's like if that fish is in there to spawn, we need it to go back and spawned. And if you've already caught 20 fish today and you're coming back tomorrow and next weekend and next weekend and next weekend, you need to handle these fish the best you possibly can because we want them to spawn. If they don't spawn, they don't come back. Well, they don't, they're dead. Their kids don't go. So, yeah, doing it that way was the only way I found, because, like trying to land a big fish in a net by yourself, you're going to end up using the rod tip in a way you shouldn't. So I just canceled out the whole rod or the net. I just like, even when I'm still heading by myself, I just don't bring a net because you know that's part of the fun, like, oh, can I land it by hand? But, yeah, definitely, just, you know being thoughtful on every movement, even though you're probably shitting your pants because you got a big fish on. But thinking of the rod, you know that's what I'm taking over. It can be I can turn a spring salmon on an eight-weight single hand. Mind you, I haven't caught like definitely 20 pounds springs. I've pulled in maybe even a little bit heavier, with an eight-weight single hand and my rods basically pointed at them. It looks like I'm fishing for tarpon or something. It's the rod so straight and I'm using the backbone like nobody's business.
Andrew Barany:Another little thing that I do with my reels is like I set the drag so that when I pull hard and fast off pulling line off the reel it won't fray up or birds nest on me, but not hard enough to actually stop these big fish. And then you know a lot of my reels I'm able to palm. I like that aspect. So I actually will let the fish start to run and as it's in its run I'll put hand pressure on it to give it more drag, or maybe my fingers, whatever I feel is necessary, and I slow it down that way just because I've had it where I've had a big fish kind of close in and he freaks out, starts running and I have my drag crank too high and it just breaks off. So now I go with really low drag.
Andrew Barany:I should probably just get into click and pull reels. It's to the price point that's kept me from them. But that's really what I wanna be, that's what I would like to have on my trout setups or my space. What I use, yeah, they're classy. You know, I sit there with my pinky up, you know, as I'm cast in the whole time, because they're just classy, they look good, they sound good, you know you're gonna laugh at this.
Lenard Rainwater:I still use my old school flugers. Yeah, fluger, betta list 1400s Nice, I love them. People make fun of me about it. I don't care, just holds on.
Andrew Barany:Hmm, ha ha ha, Totally different subject my son's grandfather, my wife's grandfather, so great grandfather, I guess. He asked me, he's like "'Hey, I wanna go with Luca Rod" and I was like "'Oh yeah, sure, no problem". He actually, because we talked and I was like "'I just want him to fly fish, "'I don't even want him to know there's a spin caster, "'til he's in his teens or something'" and then he could go down that route if he wants.
Lenard Rainwater:You could make bad decisions on your own.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, yeah, you go when you got your license and drive yourself places. You can do what you want, son. No, but he was like "'Yeah, I got this three-piece rod that I used to use, "'back when he was traveling in the military and stuff'. "'and he was like I'd love to give it to your son' and I was like that's super cool. It takes me down there. It's a three-piece. G Loomis.
Lenard Rainwater:What is it?
Andrew Barany:Yeah, g Loomis. So it's a three-piece that. But then he gave me a Mitchell 300. You remember those reels? Yeah, and I have two of them already. So now I got three and that one is in mint condition and I'm not a huge fan of spin casters these days, but obviously they always have their place, no doubt about it. Just the old Mitchell's man, those things are bomb proof. They still make the parts, yes, they do. They still make the springs for their reels that are I don't know how old the Mitchell 300 is, but it's old. But then the spools you can change out the spools. I got eight spools now.
Andrew Barany:Nice, I got like one of them is broken, it's a part reel. And then the other one back when I was spin casting, that's what I used and boy is that just such a nice reel. But I kind of, when he gave that to me or gave that to my son, I was in my head. I was like you just gave him like a three-piece rod that was custom made for you back in the day when that shit was expensive. It's expensive now. And then a Mitchell 300 for my four-year-old son. So now we have it set up with a really heavy, with a really heavy fly in the house and I just get him to throw it around. He's something like there you go, we're never going to use this on the water son.
Lenard Rainwater:Those little Loomis rods are back in the day, are pretty good stuff. And you talk about Gary Loomis. He's still around. He's 80 now. His son, brad, is who makes my blakes. Okay, so Patriot Factory is his company and his dad started Edge North Fork and Brad went on and did his own thing in 2014. And that's who makes my blakes. And I'll tell you what man. They're awesome, awesome.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, that is pretty cool. I'm very happy with them.
Andrew Barany:That's a little bit of the history. Man, you get into fishing, you start to find fishing buddies all around and stuff, and then you start to find when you really go down and deep into these rabbit holes we call fly fishing or anything really I guess. But this guy that's been these rods you heard about this is. It all connects in some cool ways. So that's a really cool piece of information. I mean, obviously it was a family business and it's still thriving in a new way, but still thriving.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, loomis sold to Shimano and Lama Glass there's no longer in Woodland anymore. It's a cool thing about Southwest Washington. People don't realize that a lot of the rods that are built, you know if for industry are made right up the road 10 and a half miles from my house. And you have G Loomis, you have Edge, you have Lama Glass, shimano, okuma. A lot of those companies are right there in Woodland and you know. And then there's some smaller companies that have their blanks made by these other manufacturers. I mean there's a.
Lenard Rainwater:It's funny you talk to some of these executives that, like that North Fork composites and I was talking to Alex, he's one of the owners and they're just sitting there just standing in the hallway, you know talking, and he's like, yeah, he goes, we're. You know we're kind of getting into new water where we're building, not newer water, but we're starting to take on more clients, is we're? I guess Moonshine rods is going to be starting. The blanks should be made here in America. Now, cool, they were made over Korea and yeah, they're going to be made by Edge. So it's kind of funny, is you? Look at a lot of these rod companies and it's just like paper towels. They're all made by three. Three different people, just different label.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, well, and it makes sense, because you know we're in a niche within a niche within a niche type thing. Or you know we're in fishing, but then we're in fly fishing and then, talking to you, we're in rod building.
Lenard Rainwater:So how much? What do you think the percentage? A little trivia here. I learned this and blew my mind Of the fishing industry. What percentage do you think fly fishing is?
Andrew Barany:I'm going pretty low, Just I don't know, but I would say like 15% Bingo.
Lenard Rainwater:Did I 15%? 15 to 17% of the rod sold In the world fly rods.
Andrew Barany:Sorry, what was that last question? I kind of was in my own head space that I got that right 15% to 17% of the rods sold in the world are fly rods.
Andrew Barany:Wow, yeah, so, and then that point that's just strengthening my point that we, you know you learned, probably on your own, quite a bit, but then you eventually started talking to other rod builders and you get information. You bounce stuff back and forth but there isn't, you know, the same amount of rod builders as there is fly anglers. So you actually, you know, you're condensed down and it kind of makes sense that they're all in this one area in Washington. Basically, it's crazy, because you know you needed to learn hey, come to my house, let's build a rod together. Now you're hooked, you're like oh, oh, boy, I build rods now.
Andrew Barany:And you know, that's one thing I always thought about when I heard how the like fly tying used to be back in, like you know, europe, when people had literally like ride their horses across the country to go to one farm that has this one bird they're looking for to get these feathers, and then they would like travel back. So it was like you know you don't have. Like today we got the internet, but back then it was like all by hand. So a lot, or like learning you know through word of mouth where to go or who to get it from, who has the materials, you need all these things. So you know, kind of like rod building or anything, that's that niche inside of a niche, you know thing.
Andrew Barany:You've got these people that obviously want to start building rods, like you at one point, and then eventually you start learning other people, either in your area or online or whatever, depending on the times, and then you know you guys link up and next you know you're like oh, this is the son of Jean Loomis, is you know, or whatever. It's pretty cool though, and I like that because, like you said, you know you got five paper towels and they're all made at, or three paper towels and they're all made at the same factory. What other kind of stuff is? I mean Red cars? Yeah, it's all the same, eddie Max.
Lenard Rainwater:But you know we talk about this as you know interests and you know, like I said, you know, in our earlier conversations, if it hadn't been me returning a pair of boots, I don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you about this Back in 1996.
Andrew Barany:You know, I reminded you that that was only four years after we were only four years old, yeah, and I was 20 or so.
Lenard Rainwater:You're on that. Get that back out. Yeah, thank you, you're awesome. It's really giving me a feel, man, I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it, and but it's kind of funny, you know, like my wife says she goes, you know, everyone's got a river of energy that flows over your head. Sometimes you just got to be smart enough to grab what's floating by. So, very fortunate, love what I do. It's not my real job, but hopefully one day it will be Just waiting for that phone call. Yeah, come run my shop, yeah, but yeah, so we're busy. We're getting ready for season's going to start here. It's January, february, march, april and then April, end of April, trout kicks off here in actually not here, but in Southern Central, all over the state of Oregon. So I saw a lot of my rods, my a lot of my rods, go over over to Oregon out of state. Some of my bigger stuff stays locally, but I found a customer base for some reason not in my old state, and that's fine with me.
Lenard Rainwater:Pretty much word to mouth. You know a little. Do an Instagram at Rainwater's Rods and that's about it. You know, yeah, I'm going to get a website, but I'm not in a big hurry for it. I mean, I just upgraded my business cards this year, yeah, yeah. I mean just got stickers this year, yeah. So yeah, it's good. You know, just kind of have fun with it.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, and it's you know, things that progress slowly tend to stick around longer than something that blows up really quick.
Lenard Rainwater:Well, I think it's my baby, you know, and I tend to, and my wife gets it because she sees that I I'm always improving something and she goes well. What are you going to do now? I go, well, I'm going to replace my drying motors. So, and she goes well. What are you going to get? I ended up getting a nice top to Curtis over a FlexCote and I got a real nice four rod 18 heavy duty commercial four rod drying system. I'm going to buy another one this year. I bought that two years ago and I said, yes, time, I'm just slowly building, building this up so to one day I can take that big order. Yeah, in another big order, in another big order. So I have to have 20 rods done and shipped by the end of, by the end of April, beautiful, so good stuff.
Andrew Barany:I love it. I'll give yourself a pat on the back, man. That's obviously awesome. That's awesome the passion that you have with it. I mean that's the cool thing that I love of talking to people about fishing. It's so easy, but you see the joy in people's face, whether it's them actually catching a fish or talking about what they make. You know, I mean I tied my first a general practitioner with Ryan the other day and he's actually looking pretty good. There's things I could definitely improve on it, but I sent it to like five people like yo, look at this and they were like this is cool. You know, and that's something I love is like, well, I don't have send this before as well on the podcast I read cap, I guess.
Andrew Barany:But you can be on the water loving fly fishing. You can be at home tying flies, loving fly fishing and it's really submerse yourself. I never really with like spin casting. You know I didn't go home and set up my power bait on hooks or, you know, set up my floats when I was doing worms under an indicator. Oh, I just didn't see that Go over. Hey, can pass me that indicator. No kidding, it's called a float, it's a bobber. Yeah, we call it a bobber here.
Lenard Rainwater:That's why it's a bobber If you paint an orange. It's a float.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, it's, that's funny, but you know, you can just always be within it and you have a good friend group going where you can pass information along or fly you tide. And yeah, it's man the depth that you go with it. I mean, you see it in your rods, I felt it in your rod. When I cast it I was like shit, this man takes care of his craft. And you know, wasn't like that first rod or second rod you built. That shit wasn't lining up Talking about spines of the rod. Sure, let's go back a little bit on that. I didn't want to interrupt you at the time. So when you get your blanks, they're already cut into the sections you need. Or it's not just one long, because one rod comes out of one like it's one long piece that's been rolled.
Lenard Rainwater:No, no, educate, okay. So what they'll do is they have them tied, they have them cut into flags, okay. So all it is is the mandrel, the carbon. Here's a funny thing. I learned this and I was asking the guys up at. It's kind of cool is being going up to Patriot Factory, talon and talking with Jake he's one of the owners and Brad, and they're like hey, dude, anytime you want to come in here, just give us a call. That door's always unlocked, just come in that door. And I'm like okay. So I start poking around and talking to them and I said so, tell me about this. And what is this and what is that? And they're like everything's cut into flags over mandrel, under mandrel, over mandrel. So the pressure and this flagging, this carbon is very thin, but it has like a glued back and what happens is they store it at minus like 15 degrees and once that thing hits zero, it starts to get sticky. So when they roll it, they roll it really tight and then they bake it. Okay, so you have a butt section mandrel. You have a center section mandrel. You have three different sections for your mandrels. Right, and that's the core that the rod is rolled on and that's how they hang it and they bake it. There's a whole bunch of other things that goes on there, a little scrim and all this other stuff.
Lenard Rainwater:So the waste product which I told you originally. I was way wrong On my blanks. I said what's your waste? They say two inches per section, an inch at the tip and an inch at the ferrule, and it's not called cutting, it's called ferrilling. So what they'll do is they find that, okay, this is where your ferrules are gonna fit together, and then they'll have a mark All right, we're gonna cut the tip here, and then it's gonna be a nine foot rod, is gonna be divided by four, is gonna be like 29 and a 16th, and they'll cut it 29 and a 16th, find that middle, cut, cut 29 and a 16th.
Lenard Rainwater:Yes, they'll spit together and there's your lengths and they measure everything out and then as it gets bigger, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, to where your four piece, 10 foot rods are about 30, 10 foot six, four pieces, about 34 inches per section. So roughly and someone's gonna say he's wrong Well, I'm gonna use my word roughly in this conversation so there's a waste, it's not a waste. So there's a waste, it's not like you think it's one big long piece. It wouldn't fit in the oven, because then what they'll do is then they sand, then they remove everything and then they sand them wet, sand them, get them to the stress thing. I can't remember if your rod's smooth or not.
Andrew Barany:I'm gonna touch it.
Lenard Rainwater:Touch it.
Andrew Barany:I'm gonna touch it. I mean, I would say it's pretty smooth. Yeah it's sanded. It's out for one second because, since we're on, you know there'll be some video for some folks. This is the rod. So that's the rod, the hyperl, yep, and there's these three lines on it that I'm obsessed with. I don't know why those three dark spots. So that's the tree trying to repair itself or put a block Right Pearl, yeah, but the real seed is beautiful. And then help me out here because my brain's drawing a blank it's hardware.
Lenard Rainwater:The hardware is that comes from Snake brand which is made by Limkey Limkey concepts down in Roseburg, Oregon.
Andrew Barany:And you might be able to see the detail, but it basically looks like a rope or like it is rope yeah, it has. It has that rope, look it's beautiful. And then, right here as well, that rope is there. So it just it ties in so nice. This was one of the parts that I loved the most, and I really don't know if it's going to be able to be seen, but the gold thread you put in there, just the two little lines of gold thread, just makes the rod for me.
Lenard Rainwater:I still do that, but I have changed two things. One might yeah, you do it. That is an early rod. I built that probably a couple of years ago. My logo no, same logo, a little bit smaller. The new one Now. Now we have this, I'll use this one we now have.
Andrew Barany:Double R, yeah, so my, my bet section is not you need a new butt cap?
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, I think so. Anyways, the all of our butt caps now have hour. I say hour like I'm a big company. It's just me.
Andrew Barany:We clean up here, yeah.
Lenard Rainwater:We need to paint today. Hon. It's like, um who's? We got somebody hired Cause you know I don't paint, so we got the. We got a double R here on on the black. Um, yeah, and then I'll show you this. This is, this is really cool. Is I found a guy down here in Vancouver Washington, southwest Washington, not Vancouver Island, vancouver Washington. Yeah, it was a French settlement. Okay, sorry about that. Yeah, dang it. Get out here looking, looking for beaver.
Andrew Barany:Didn't have a beaver, beaver.
Lenard Rainwater:We like that beaver there, you know there we go. What would your beaver need to eat for? For? Uh right, so yeah, this is the shiny with the double R. Yeah, trying not to blind everybody.
Andrew Barany:Sorry about that.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, there, right there, there it is, and then yeah, there we go, and then this is our dark, just like you have. This is what it looks like.
Andrew Barany:And I guess for the people that are just listening, this is like the little. What would we call it? It's just the my logo. Well, yeah, but it's on the butt section. This is just like the end cap.
Lenard Rainwater:This is the butt cap on the hardware. There we go.
Andrew Barany:They're right there. Nope Down, yeah, right there, there you go. Clean.
Lenard Rainwater:The double R. That's the smoke. We call this a dark, as Mike puts it. It's dark. It's dark. A new color this year for Rainwater's Ross is a matte color of gray, which I love. Gray, okay, as you can tell. Yeah, I have gray and orange are my colors. Yeah, well, that's just dead hair. You can't really see it all that well. There we go Right there. Wow, that's crazy. So the double R again. I want to give a, I'd like to give a shout out, if you, if I could do. Sam Porter down at Hotfabs in Vancouver Graving. His parent company is called Hotfabs. He is a laser engraver slash pilot for Alaska Airlines and I found him online and what a cool dude. I told him what, what I'm doing. He's like I would love to do that. I think that is so cool. And I bring him something. He does my knife blades. I make knives too. I make handles, I don't make knives, yeah.
Andrew Barany:You really can't be that. One time I was like what's going on here?
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, so anyway, let's finish talking about your rod. What do you got?
Andrew Barany:Well, and then this is the other thing. So we talked to or you mentioned on the first podcast we did, and I guess now this is in the episode 35 episode you have extra guides on the rod so it's smoother to cast. Yes, one of the first things I noticed that you mentioned to me but I'd noticed once I actually was casting the rod is this guide is about a foot away from my cork, so when I'm casting it I'm going to drop it down and I need to grab my line. I only have to move my hand about a foot away from my other hand to grab the line, whereas every other rod generally there's either none, no guides on the butt section, or it's much further away, which has you reaching your handout to grab your line so that you know if you did nothing special, but that that would be a selling point for me.
Lenard Rainwater:That's kind of my signature. Yeah, I cost so much.
Lenard Rainwater:I cost so much when I started doing that, I cost so much flak for it, Until I put the rod in someone's hand and I said no, this is what I want you to do. I want you to foul that that up. I want you to loop that around. I want you to get that belly in the line and it loops around. I want you to make that loop around. I want you to do. I want you to reach up and have to do a quick cast and they're like dude. I see why you did that, Dude, it was 14.
Lenard Rainwater:When I did that, the number one thing that drives me nuts European rods, and I don't understand why they do this. They've got first guide is way up here, yeah, and what's that? When you're, when you're doing this and you're coming down and you're doing your drift, what happens? It goes around your rod. You're like man, come on, yeah, or you hook a fish and you lose the fish because your stuff's wrapped up. It's true, I've, I've.
Lenard Rainwater:I got that idea from watching these guys do competition casting and I was noticing that they were reaching so so much for their for, for, for their to do their strip. Saltwater. Guys like that extra, they like that extra height so they can get a good haul stroke in. But if you're, if you're doing a like, if you're doing a timed event and you're doing a cast, it's better to have that closer so you're not trying to reach for it and what that does is that's called a perf. I don't know that's called a perf. I call that layout or that build. It's called a performance build. So all of my rods now I've gone away from a standard build, Everything's from a performance build.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, so now the lake vouch. I have noticed that it wraps. The line will wrap around the rod a lot less, yeah, but one of the big things is yeah, like this is a streamer rod. So when I'm casting and I'm doing my thing, you know I'm in the zone and I cast out. You know, assuming all my line goes straight, it's very easy to get to the line.
Andrew Barany:But if I don't make that super long cast and I still have some down at my feet, I'm able to now grab the line and put it in my hand and start ripping back that streamer as fast as possible. There is basically no time loss from the cast and the grab. Like my hands come together. You know I done my cast, I'm in my line, I'm able to grab right here because it hangs down on a bit of an angle. I'm already in it. I'm not reaching out over here, I'm not even pull my rod back. I can literally and my first strip, at least for the brown trout on Niter system, it's got to be fast Like you hits the water start ripping it back.
Lenard Rainwater:Don't let it sink.
Andrew Barany:You probably have a heavy sinking line anyways to do that job. So, yeah, this rod is something that I vouch for every day of my life, just because of how well it's done me. You know, one of the first fish I got on it was coho, and then I got a really nice cutty on it and since then it's now just laid into some fish and it's had nothing but love for me, Like I've got a lot of fish in my hand. Um, like I. You know, when he sent it to me, obviously I was like you know, it's almost two years ago, I feel. Is that how long it's been? No, it's like a year and a bit ago. It's been two bucks, and time flies.
Lenard Rainwater:Times of 70 something episodes ago. Yeah.
Andrew Barany:Um, you know, it just has so much character, like the fact that it can go up two line sizes, no problem. Um, the way it casts is amazing. The way it plays fish. That tip section is just so sensitive. You know, I don't need to euro with it, but if I were to like it has the sensitivity to do so, you could do it. Um, but when you're actually fighting a fish and your backbone is so, so, so, so, so much, and your backbone is, you know, it's almost, it feels like almost half the rod, but then it's still so gentle, it's mind boggling to me because, like now, I've casted many other brands. You know, when I cast some sage rods they feel a bit like a broomstick now, because they're just so stiff everywhere All the way out of the tip.
Lenard Rainwater:It's, it's. It's sad what, what's happened there?
Andrew Barany:Well, they've sold the company so many times, so now it's a profit game.
Lenard Rainwater:They got the name, they got the name their news, their new CEO they have. They was told by the board of directors and this is a direct quote Somebody that was in the room it's all about the dollar, yeah make us money, making money To do that. You're not gonna be making much here, no, so far. Bank is basically this is what you're. We're making money, yeah.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, no, there's, you know. And then just a little details on this rod. When I like To a few people to cast and like, oh, my one friend was like holy shit, this is a heavy rod. I was like it's an older blank, so it's not, you know, the lightweight stuff that we're generally used to. But when he casted it he was like, oh Okay. And then I was like, well, you kind of got to catch a fish on it to fully understand. He did a nice fish on it and he was like, well, damn it.
Andrew Barany:And then I've passed this rod to Paul Morrell, which is a guide out in Alberta. If you're looking for a guide in Alberta, will plug for him. He is an awesome individual. I got a guided trip with him and we chat quite a bit. I put this rod in his hand and he was pumped right away. He was like that's a nice rod we're playing over. That came from buddy. I was like that is a nice rock. So yeah, it to me. If I could just use it all the time, I would, because it's my only rainwater rod.
Lenard Rainwater:Wow. Well, we got another one coming for you, just like we talked about Literally every sport in both the bad recording. I do have his little brother just arrived and I've got one set aside for you. It's a 10 foot 6, 34 it's. It's it's a combo weight, but it's more towards the four weight side, but it's 10 foot 6.
Lenard Rainwater:I call that my spring creek. That is our Dean does our spring creek blank. But I'm gonna build a euro style for you. You could do anything you want. You can bomb it. It's on a performance, it's on the performance layout, and you can go Streamers, you can go. You know size 10, 8 buggers, streamer, you can go. Light nymphs, you can go.
Lenard Rainwater:Drys, we do everything with it. We cast number 10, then black, black drakes, and then we'll go to number number 16, cdc, elkercatus, all one shot and it'll this. This blank will just Perform. Yeah, we've, we do. Oh, I didn't bring. No, I did so. What we've done is we found out that we like these, these. This is tubing actually, and what it is. It's 3k Carbon tubing and that's my grip. We were making our grips out of this. This weighs nothing, it stays, it stays cool in the summer and and and it doesn't get cold in the winter because your heat will radiate into it. And that's what we have found out doing our testing for this and it's it's pretty cool stuff. So we started.
Lenard Rainwater:Friend of mine who owns a rod company here in woodland Said Leonard, you got to try this. So I'm he. They gave me a couple of them and they're made by Patriot Factory as well and it's actually USA made products. Calm is there. Is there a website and you can order anything off that website. You can order these actually on that website. You just tell them what length the cut them when you order them. Your relatively cheap or eight bucks, beauty, eight bucks and that weighs like Gramps.
Lenard Rainwater:This is all made of cork. It weighs ounces. I mean, yeah. So we I'm starting people are starting to warm up to this a little bit. It's smooth, but when it gets wet it gets sticky. It doesn't get like you know, like yeah it, you won't lose it, and it's got a good feel to it. It's got a nice taper to it. It's 23 millimeters outer diameter, 22 millimeter inner diameter and it just feels good in your hands and we found that Our customers like it. I use these exclusively for a customer down in southern Oregon Yamzy Yamzy fly fishing another plug form Yamzy fly fishing, comm. It's start. They'll start fishing in April and they'll shut it down end of October. And we caught some nice fish 21 inch red, red sides, rainbows and I hooked into my first 20 inch, brookshaw. The thing took me for a run like I've never taken before and it was a lot of fun. But yeah, this is this is kind of a new thing. Now people, many people, poo poo it, but I love it.
Andrew Barany:You know, it's anything when something's new. You have the people that are still hell bent on the old stuff and the old cork that, the cork that you have, how do you? Because the cork actually has the diameter of the rod, whereas that, I'm sorry, it's not carbon fiber, is it's not carbon fiber? That other one, yeah, it's carbon fiber, yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense that my brain linked it to that. How do you get that on, since it's such a big hole? So do you have these little like caps that you put on the ends, or like?
Lenard Rainwater:no, actually this it's good fun. So your real seat right. So we're gonna use the new one. Make sure this is the right one here. Here we go. So the real seat goes right on, right, yeah, they got your real seat. And here's your, your keeper. You know, you got for your. That goes in your blank. So you've got this. And what I do is I put an arbor inside a graphite arbor and Then I have a Winding check butt cap that goes here. I'll just do that. Winding check butt cap goes here. It's usually like 8.5 millimeters, and then this is 18 millimeters on the outside, so that fits on. It fits over the rod, snug so it doesn't vibrate. And then I have it arbor in the middle and then your real seat just fits.
Andrew Barany:Just like that boom and we just built the rod to see. It's super easy. I don't know what you're talking about. This.
Lenard Rainwater:I don't know why. I think everybody should do. It should be a shop class. You know, we give away green, gold stars at the end of the, at the end of the class, so everyone gets feels participants. If you had, if you had funny one kind of thing? Yeah, no, but it's. It's easy, it takes me no time, I don't have to ream anything, I don't have cork dust all over the place.
Andrew Barany:It's nice, it's clean, it's cool and well, I'm very excited for that rod.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, you'll see that and you see it in the March.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, yeah, march is going to be, and then the March is right. No, that's the time where the trout you know, march is usually like mid-March and we kind of stop going for steelhead because they spawn in April. So I Usually don't go into April fishing for them, but I'll, I'll get close to it and then, yeah, then it's just dry flies. I'll probably won't do a ton of you're owing myself, just because at that point I can just do a long line and Either dries or nymphs that way. And I love watch, I love, you know, people like watching a bobber, an indicator. I can get down with that, but it's not for me. No, I way rather watch my line, just twitch and just, it, was that a rock, was that a fish?
Lenard Rainwater:and or Fish comes to the surface and we lead, I, I lead, I lead it, I pull it, pull tension on and pull it through and you feel that bump Downstream set. It's also it's.
Andrew Barany:I had the privilege of having this older. He was the oldest person I've had on my raft. I Don't know if he was 90 or going to be 90. It's awesome, and he just wanted no part of the Euro thing. Fair enough, whatever, move on. He outfished the Euro guy Doing his what he did and I was a tension. I'm sitting there rowing the boat putting Mon fish and I'm Hock eyeing what he's doing and I picked up a few tricks. But really it was just how dedicated he was to paying attention to what he's doing. That and we talked about it a little bit and he was like I pay attention.
Andrew Barany:You know a lot of people when they first get into fly fishing. You know their heads looking at the trees and stuff and that's great. Pay attention to the scenery. You're outdoors, it's beautiful. If you want to get on fish, you gotta be. It's, it's. Yeah, I mean Euro you. You don't need to necessarily be watching, but you'll catch more fish if you're paying attention. Obviously, but when you're long-lining and you just got, you know, nine to sixteen foot leader, maybe even a 20 foot leader, depending on what fish you're really going for and how spooky they are you might not notice anything if you're not hawk eyeing your line and paying attention to the water speed and all these little things. Because, yeah, and then, like you said, leading the fly a little bit and like having not tension but like enough that if something bumps it, you feel that that to me, the first time I ever Really got, which was really just a couple years ago like I'm still so new to fly fishing you know, you know it's dumped a lot of time into it yeah, when you have Just the lightest nymph and you're not even, you know it's springtime, the fish are coming up to the surface to grab dries and and they're willing to move for nymphs and all that, and You're just swinging a little nymph, basically, or dead, drifting the nymph down the run and it grabs. That is a fun take. Oh, yeah, it is.
Andrew Barany:You know, I put Kind of I don't know if I was really class one thing over the other, but it's like dry fly eats, streamer eats, long-line nymphing. That to me is like top of the run. If the old to the trout, then if we're going into bigger fish, I don't care if I'm not going catch a ton of fish. I want to swing that fly out. I want to. I want to go through a run and you know, give it a little wiggle halfway through the swing, give it a little couple of pokes near the end and then all of a sudden just be like you know fish on.
Andrew Barany:That to me is like so you know, as much as I love Euro and Euro really leveled me up quite quickly on knowing where fish are, especially in your system. If you never fished a system and you're going out there with you know, whatever, if you go with Euro, probably going to learn a lot in those In that time that you spend there, and if you spend like quite some time there, you're going to find some nooks and crannies where fish hide that you do very likely Might not know, unless you're some extreme water reader. So I chalk up a lot of my knowledge that I've learned and fish behavior and and you know, one of the first thoughts that came to mind, just saying that, was when I got into Euro and then it was going into spring and I was right at the bottom with my nymph Going through and I wasn't getting as many fish as one of my friends. That was better At your owing than me and I was like, well, not better. He just had more knowledge. He's very good angler all around anyways.
Andrew Barany:But oh, I mentioned to him. I was like, hey, zach, like what are you doing differently, man? And he was like, well, are you fishing the bottom? And I was like yeah, and he's like these fish are looking up, they're coming up to the surface. They might not even be fully on the bottom. You might be going under their bellies right now, yeah. And then he was like just bring up, don't, don't, yeah, don't be dead drifting it so deep. And Now that it's going up in the water column, there's more movement. So you can wiggle your rod, you can, you know, up and down a little bit, here and there, especially if you notice there's a current change, you can drop it or you lift it or whatever. And there we go, I'm catching more fish again, yeah, at one little bit of information.
Andrew Barany:So you know that that made me realize like, okay, fish are now moving up, like you know, seasons changing, I can change my tactic a little bit and I'll catch more fish that way. So you know, just years of trying, years of getting skunked, and you might, you might get better If you paid attention. No, patience engine got the patience. You got to have the patience. Yeah, I, you know, when I first started. I was when I first started to get fish consistently. I that's what determined a good day for me. And then, as I got better and better, and then when I started guiding, that's when I realized like, oh, I'm going to be fishing my whole life, I wasn't in a rush anymore to catch that fish. I wasn't in a rush to. You know, I still obviously like posting a photo of a nice fish and getting those likes or whatever, but honestly, probably 95% of the fish I catch I don't take it as a photo of the goal.
Lenard Rainwater:It's for me, it's not for everybody else. Yeah, that's my thing.
Andrew Barany:Steelhead are a little bit different. I want a photo of it. Oh yeah, I'll post it. But that's work, that's the thing. I wait a year for it, and then I might only get one chance for it, or get six and not land one. So yeah, I'm taking a damn photo of that fish and I'm going to show some people that. Yeah, it definitely involves.
Andrew Barany:You know, I have friends that started before me and I have friends that started after me, and so you can really see the stages of what people go for. Like, I have one good friend, and he was like yeah, I'm not really wanting to swing a ton this year, I want to work on some other things. And I was all good. And then he made a joke and he was like I just want to catch fish. And I was like, yeah, that's a good point. And he was like that's the stage I'm at. And I was like that's a very good stage to be at. I want to catch fish too, but now I'm getting stubborn because we're getting old. I'm younger than you, though, so there you go, I'll dive for it. I'm going to remind you this episode. That's good, I appreciate it, man.
Lenard Rainwater:It keeps me humble Like some eggs. Put the boxes in his place.
Andrew Barany:You get to that point. I even had a friend who is a I work with him and super solid guy, but he was like I want to catch steelhead this year and I was like, oh man, I'm not saying it can't happen, but like you got to put a lot of groundwork in. It's a work. I don't fish and you're.
Lenard Rainwater:I tell you what I pretty much. Yeah, it's a lot of work and sometimes it's more work than I'm willing to put in, so I'll just build rods for those who are good. There you are, Ryan, that guy's amazing. I fish, he and I fish together quite a bit and just just watching him, watching him from the day he got his first rod and actually he bought one for me and I didn't charge him much for it because you know we're good friends and it is one of my materials back and he, he took that rod and then he just kind of evolved and and watching, watching him and the patience that man has is it's a pretty, pretty cool to watch. He'll drill a hole until he gets something, yeah, and he'll keep going, and going, and going.
Andrew Barany:That's why his flies turn out pretty damn beautiful.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, I told him they're too pretty to use and he got mad at me. I said no, I'm just. You say the same thing about my rods. I say the same thing about your flies there you go.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, it's a well, one of the big things that you know, swinging for steelhead. We talked about this. I don't know if it was on the air or I don't know if we were recording at the time or not. But now that I've been using the more traditional flies, even though I'm swinging for steelhead, I'm still getting like rainbows and cutthroat from them, and that's because I'm not like I'm pretty. Last year I hooked six and lost them all on traditional flies. So this year I'm like no, it's happening. I realize that these long shank flies or hooks, I should say, aren't necessarily top grade for landing fish because the long shank they can spit it a little bit easier. There's less, you know, if you just have a little thing. I don't know if that's true. It's just kind of what someone mentioned to me and I was hurting after six lost steelhead. So I accept it as an answer. But yeah, using these very classic flies has taught me one being very sparse with my material so it can breathe and moot well, breathe, I mean like so it can flutter in the water properly and really come to life. Way easier to cast than using a giant tube fly and back when I tied tube flies all the time. It's not like you're throwing a feather duster across the day, it's like you're throwing a freaking yeah. So now I'm fishing these and then I know I'm so basic and not knowing things but you can get like heavier gauge wire for the hooks versus thinner gauge so you could have the same fly that gets down faster. So I don't need to put extra weight on per se. I can just tie a couple in the normal gauge and then a couple in the higher gauge and I can fish all the different water levels. So yeah, I'm pretty like I said, I want to get into trout spay this year. That's a big plan and I just really want to do a lot of wet flies, just those kind of classic looking ones that don't actually have to be tied classic for me to fish them. But yeah, just super sparse materials and very fishy flies that I can get down if I need to or do whatever. But yeah, it's been a good year, haven't? Actually? I got one bump from what I think probably was a steelhead one grab. It just was like one big boom. Well, that's not a branch, or more likely not a branch. I'll take it. Yeah, it felt good. So I was like. You know, maybe won't count it in my mind, but I'll still talk about it as it was probably a steelhead and that was on a classic fly. And yeah, I mean, it takes me probably about an hour or more to tie one. So losing them doesn't feel as great as a 20 minute tube fly. But you know, if you fish every weekend and you sit down and at least five days a week you can tie five flies, and if those five flies don't work, you just pack up, go home. No, I've got some other stuff, but yeah, I've.
Andrew Barany:And then the other thing I started doing because I was like oh well, the classic hooks seem to give me an issue last year. So I was tying them on shanks and putting a trailer hook, but all my flies now flip upside down because they don't have that heavier water. The hook bend, pulling it down. So I was talking to a few people and I also noticed that because I tie my I don't even know what this is called the trailer hook wire. It's a rotor. I tie it on the top of the shank. Now I'm going to tie it on the bottom, so that weight of the hook is coming from the bottom of the hook instead of looking at it Just like dumbbell eyes.
Lenard Rainwater:If you want the, if you want the, if you want to ride high, put them on top. If you want the right low, put it on the bottom.
Andrew Barany:And I will probably even go as far as taking a small piece of lead wrap and just tying that on on the bottom. You know I'm not trying to win any any fly tying rewards or. You know. I'm sure some classic people might say that's completely wrong to do, but I'm not really worried about that. I want fishability, I want my fly to sit the way I want it to sit the way that I tied it and and that's it. But yeah, it's a, it's a cool little thing. The whole classic and flies. They just I don't know there's something that speaks to me much louder. I always used to look at them and think that like, oh wow, that is really cool. Some of the more intricate ones that use, you know, $50 feathers no, one yeah.
Andrew Barany:That's. That's a little much for me, but yeah.
Lenard Rainwater:Argus, I don't need it. Nope, I don't even know.
Andrew Barany:A match pair is like over 200 bucks, but I saw that I'm like, well, it's talking to Jason, he was last named Miller, Jason Miller, yep, and he's an incredible fly tire and he was talking about like there's a set of feathers that you know the left and the right, and that one set is $500. Mike, all right, I'm getting an abroad before I get a set of feathers for that kind of money there's guys, and there's guys that will spend that money just for that match pair.
Lenard Rainwater:So when they make those wings, those wings are dead perfect. Yeah, I'm like you know, I go. I'm just trying to get a good, even, a coating of of, of, of what is this as a solar is? Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Barany:We're simple. You know I'm simple, I like it, it works, I do. You know, and I feel like you probably are in the same kind of thing, like when I'm tying a fly. Now I really don't mind if it takes me a lot of time. I assume I'm saying with you and you're building a rod, you're not trying to rush the process, you want to start from a blank, which for me it's my hook, for you it's an actual blank rod and and you want to build it up so that everything's as perfect as you know how to do so far, and then your skills only improve. So I hope it will improve.
Lenard Rainwater:Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I make mistakes, just like everyone else. If people think that guys building rods don't make mistakes, you're surely mistaken. I've gone through and almost got first coat of finish on and realize all my labels run upside down. Or I realized, oh, the thread's not the right color. What did I do wrong? Oh, I used maroon instead of garnet.
Lenard Rainwater:Or you have a rod, what we call hopping off. It hops off the dry motor and it just sits and it dries and it just drips. I was doing your custom build this last couple of days and it's a 10 weight. The 10 weight is very light and it's all three piece graphite rod from Italy and it hopped off the for some reason. I don't know what happened. It just the drying motor just said I don't like you and kicked it off and I had to cut. And I was done I mean complete and I had to cut it all apart, start over again. As I was doing that, I was throwing up literally in my mouth the whole time as I'm cutting off the guides, off the titanium, stripping guides and cutting all the thread and making sure everything's right, resanding everything. Yeah, making mistakes sucks, but you know what? Never do it again. That's why I'm replacing the dry motor.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, there you go, we live, you learn. Yeah, I've definitely not rods, but you know, done woodwork projects where I glued something and I put it in a clamp and think it's all good. And I come back and somehow the clamp came off or glued weird, and I didn't notice it. And then I'm looking at this thing like, well, got a gap and moves, yeah, something I didn't notice. But good tradesman does exactly what you do and you put your pride behind you and you start cutting it back hard or redoing it and I don't know. That's, I guess, what sets us apart from people that take shortcuts, but it's right.
Andrew Barany:I feel like you're probably getting a little tired, since I'm getting a little tired as well. We've definitely been on for a couple of hours at least.
Lenard Rainwater:It happens like that. It happens. I don't know why we just don't talk on the phone.
Andrew Barany:I know Well, last time we call not last time, but a couple of times ago we ended up talking for, like I swear it was like almost two hours just on a phone call. It probably would have been a great episode as well, because we talked a lot about some good stuff. But yeah, it's never. It's not a hard thing to talk about fishing specialists no no, it's, and that's a thing too.
Lenard Rainwater:I love talking about it. It's part of my life. I wanted to be a gain warden when I grew up. We ended up working my summer job still, and my wife is the one that works for the Department of Wildlife. So it's, and you know it's good and I love it. It's good for you, it's helped me, it's helped me, I think.
Lenard Rainwater:The quiet, the solitude, the resets, everything it's. You resented it with nature and if you believe in all this stuff alignment with the world, and as men, we need to do that. We don't take care of ourselves enough. We take care of others. Sometimes we forget. As I'm learning as I get older, don't be afraid to take care of you. Take care of your family first. Take care of you, though, and as I'm getting older, I'm learning that I don't have to wait as deep as I used to. I don't need to as I used to be able to. I used to be able to wait across a certain part of the Truckee River, and it was pretty, pretty quick water and I would just walk across it like it was nothing, but now I wouldn't even do it. No way, I'm like I'm smarter than that now. Yeah, it's not all testosterone. There's a little wisdom here, but I think that we all need that. Everyone needs that release, just to kind of excuse the expression. Just get your shit right, you know.
Andrew Barany:So it does me a world of difference. I mean, I can go now some time without fishing, but I was partying extremely heavily when I was younger and then I kind of moved away from the city and drinking and driving was not an option for me. It just never has been. And so that was pretty much off the, unless I slept at someone's house, which was, you know, when you get older you don't really sleep over at people's homes as often as when you reach out to me. So you know, that was kind of, and I was like what do I do, what do I do with my spare time? And I was like, well, I love fishing. I haven't fished in, like you know, haven't really fished in like five, 10 years, basically because I was just partying my life away and then started going fishing power bait and worms and was like loving it, luckily picked up a fly rod along the way and then just submerged myself into it.
Andrew Barany:And you know, I've had multiple times in my life where there's been relapses of getting back into partying more than I want to do anything else, or drinking a lot and whatever it may be. And then I always like remember, like no, this is the more I want to be, and then I backtracked to where it was good, which was me just put on the water having a good time fishing and, you know, enjoying that. And you know, thank God for the podcast, thank God for everyone that listens, because they keep me going, keeps me level headed. When I'm not able to go fishing, I get to at least talk to cool people about fishing, learn a ton. You know I'm not really a tips and tricks podcast per se. No, a lot of them are, but there are plenty of tips and tricks that are brought up throughout this journey. So, yeah, shout out to everyone. Thank you for listening. Leonard Rainwater, we can find you at Rainwater Rods on Instagram Rainwater Rods.
Lenard Rainwater:You got it. There's two of us, brother, rainwater, rainwater Rods on Instagram, facebook, you guys, anybody has any questions, please reach out, and I'm also the guy that'll give you my phone number, and I've done it many times If you have a question. If you're going to go buy a rod, I don't expect you to buy one for me, but I don't want you to buy a piece of something. I don't want you to buy a regret, so I'll I'll steer you in a direction, but I'll ask you to say when you're ready to, when you're ready to buckle down and get serious, give me a call back.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, I've helped a lot of people and because someone helped me once bored once, still do, and, and you know, this is what the community is. We're a community. We help each other. So I don't have anything to hide. Everything I learned was from a book or from from somebody else. Information's there. You just got to go look for it. Yeah, yeah so, but just want to remind everybody the Northwest fly fishing and fly tires Expo, march 8th and 9th in Albany, oregon, booth six. Come on by, say hi.
Andrew Barany:Right on. I wish I could. Just I'm on an island and I need a ferry. I wish I could just pop over there. If I was on the mainland, I'd be down there.
Lenard Rainwater:I told Brian Ryan and I were talking about that. He and I were just talking about you. Actually it was last week and this like why don't you just hop the ferry? We'll pick you up in Port Angeles. It's three and a half hours.
Andrew Barany:I know there's it's just currency. Right now, canadians are just getting brutalized by things that we will not, we shall not speak of. No, it's equal. But I'm trying to keep my head above water these days, like, I make decent wage and all that. I make a good wage, I'm doing what I do and you got a family. Yeah, you got to take care of your family. I get it. I have a pack of hooks I don't know if I still have it the same pack of hooks that I just bought today. Actually, today was $16. And when I bought it it was $12.99. It was actually $16.99. And it used to be $12.99 before COVID and I was like holy crap. But yeah, I get groceries, you know, like you, know what's a gallon.
Andrew Barany:And you got one and a half bags and you're like what?
Lenard Rainwater:Well, that's the thing too, is we've noticed down here, you know we can, we can, we can share good buys and then keep talking later. But just for everybody, we're all in the same boat. I don't know what it is. I wish everybody would get it together and realize that you're not going to, you're not going to solve the world problems by whipping, whipping the middle class. Because I tell you what I can't do anymore we have to eat too Gasoline down here. I don't know what is it per liter up there for you guys, right now it's not too bad, it's one.
Andrew Barany:let's say 50 to 160 a liter.
Lenard Rainwater:And then so 328 gallon down here.
Andrew Barany:But during the summer on this island it was 210 to 215. Yeah, it was brutal, like I bought a truck. When I bought my truck it was about $110 to fill and I was totally able to afford that. I wasn't even making. I wasn't making the same amount as I'm making now. And then, you know, covid hit still had truck payments $200 to fill up my truck. Need to put at least $100 a week with no going out fishing. So realistically, like 150 a week if I'm going up to the river, just yeah, and now it's 150. I'm like this is so nice. When I go to Talbert it's like always like 50 to 60 cents less. So like when we were paying like 125, it was like 80 cents, 88 cents a liter.
Lenard Rainwater:I have an old 2004 F-250 diesel Super Duty, the old 7.3. That's what we use to pull a horse trailer with, we get hay with. If I'm going fishing for a couple of days, all my junk goes in there. I pack up Mike McCoy or somebody with me and she's old, trusty, musty, you know. But when it cost me $175 to fill a 35 gallon tank, she got parked, the batteries are dead, I haven't driven it in probably eight months and it's just I drive a. You know I have a foreign car. I drive to work every day and my wife drives a. You know she drives a foreign vehicle too, but you know, still you're getting decent mileage. You know 30s and 20s, but it's ridiculous. Yeah, I don't. I don't understand it.
Andrew Barany:But you know our government tells us you know, what's good for us, and I'll take it straight Anyway, anyway, without talking about politics, we somehow touched on it.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, you want to talk about money and religion next, and then we'll really talk about it.
Andrew Barany:What's religion for 200? Yeah Well, leonard, I appreciate your time. I know we had to do this twice this week, basically because that's all right, man, I loved it.
Lenard Rainwater:You see this, this show, this recording was not even close to the. I think this one's better.
Andrew Barany:You know what this one was. I liked this one. This was good. The last one. We had some cool topics, but it's I almost like that was our practice on. We got that out of the way, we came in strong and I think we delivered a really good, good episode.
Lenard Rainwater:So yeah, Ryan and I are talking, we're going to pick you up in Port Angeles and when you're ready to come down and fish, fish your rivers with us, we've we've already got kind of an itinerary to take Mr Andrew out and about and show him Southwest Washington water. Yeah, Okay, so what you gotta do is just hop the ferry, we'll pick you up, all right.
Andrew Barany:How much time do you need? One to three months, how long?
Lenard Rainwater:It's, it's all in your schedule and what your family will allow.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, okay, so not three months more, like less realistic.
Lenard Rainwater:We're going to do it late spring. We'll get the thought, we'll get the runoff done. Probably I'll bring you. We're looking at probably July, july or July or September We'll bring you maple syrup. Oh, there you go.
Andrew Barany:And they'll bring Ryan some jungle cock. Don't tell him, even though he'll hear this, but bring him some jungle cock. That'll be payment. Ryan, stop listening 10 seconds ago.
Lenard Rainwater:We don't like polar bear or anything down here at all. It's all black, it's all black, yes. I have a small patch of look at that.
Andrew Barany:That's just all, polar bear. I acquired this from an old gentleman who had passed away, so I guess not really from him. I don't know. That's my son actually throwing stuff where it doesn't belong.
Lenard Rainwater:So can you guys have polar bear in Canada?
Andrew Barany:Yeah.
Lenard Rainwater:We can.
Andrew Barany:We can have seal fur as well.
Lenard Rainwater:It is considered. We call it hold on a minute. That's a taboo, even though seal fur we'll talk offline about seal fur. I was given some albino gold retriever, as we call it, died Because we can't have that. It's not, it's fishing game. Commit US Fish and Wildlife. They've got that locked down tight. You can't get the good stuff. I've tied some killer steelhead collars and flies or details with seal fur. Oh my gosh, the stuff dubs so nice. Look at that.
Andrew Barany:Sitting on the desk. Yeah, I would say probably about. I think the person that told me said 80%, if not higher, of the polar bear that we have Only comes from rugs. Just a cool little fact. So it's like people that are looking actively for polar bear rugs. They take that, they cut it up, dye it and redistribute it. But there's, I know, one individual that is connected with one of the bands up north Native Band and they're allowed to hunt one polar bear a year I think it is and they don't need the fur. So he gets the fur and does the dyeing process and settles it. So anyways, food for thought. Now I know things that I might not bring over.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, we don't need the international incident. We have to have the ferry terminal in Port Angeles.
Andrew Barany:Yeah, If we were in Florida, I'd say Florida, non-resident Andrew Barony. We need legal substances down through the desk.
Lenard Rainwater:He's smuggling. Yeah, he's smuggling, he's got fur.
Andrew Barany:Well, he's trying to trade fur.
Lenard Rainwater:Yeah, you beaver love it, you beaver love it.
Andrew Barany:Hey, that's where it started from. That's our bread and butter out here, man, whenever I'm on a job site and I see a beaver, I run at that guy. All right, buddy, we're obviously getting loopy because it's late, but yeah it's 11. It's almost 11 o'clock in there. Rainwater Rods, instagram. There we go. We done, did it? Boom, be successful. All right, leonard. Well, you have a good night and we will obviously keep chatting. All right, bud, take care, cheers. Bye, granddad, bye.