JackGartside.com info – Roccus Writing

Readers respond to the JackGartside.com summer 2010 newsletter

A few days ago I sent out the first JackGartside.com newsletter since Jack passed away. Jack’s mailing list is no small thing — about 4000 addresses. There were quite a few responses, all of them unfailingly encouraging. Here are a few of favorites…

“I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Gartside during my tenure at MIT. Just reading about his life and his passion inspired me…I would often carry his guide books to read when on the T or when I had some downtime. He was a workingman’s fly fisher. No frills…pure passion.” Perez

“He was the closest real life version of a fictional character that I ever met.” Phil

“The hotel rooms in Roscoe, although cheap, sure look it! The Hendricks House with its garish new paint job is referred to by locals as the Sunoco Motel. The Rockland House has supposedly redecorated their rooms but that could mean just putting the hinges back on the doors and flushing the toilets every Friday. The only alternative to the Roscoe Motel really is the Baxter House a so-called B & B across from the Live Bait Bar & Grill….now how’s that for the name of a restaurant in Trout Town USA? Well enuf fun here…..Are you going to the induction?” Howie

“Mike, by any chance are you Mike Martinek? Believe it or not I was Mike Martinek’s swim instructor at overnight camp when he was a chubby 12 yr. old. I am still recovering over 50 years later.” Eric

Also, Gerry Karaska passes along that the Summer 2010 issue of The American Fly Fisher (by the American Museum of Fly Fishing) has a nice piece on Jack.

Jack’s Home Page on Facebook

Happy to report that Jack’s Home Page now has its own Facebook page. Why a Facebook page, you’re wondering, when there’s already this wicked awesome web site with its own blog? Well, a limitation of blogs is that they tend to be “newslettery” in tone due to their inherent structure. Visitors can’t really talk to each other. On Facebook, however, visitors can talk directly to one another, drop in any time to share a joke, a comment, a story, a piece of personal news, or anything really. You can upload a picture, a video, start a discussion, suggest an event. So Facebook offers a nice way for the community of Jack’s fans and friends to keep in touch with each another and even make some new friends.

Hope you like it and visit often. Jack Gartside’s Home Page on Facebook

Yet again: More new stuff on the web site

As a follow-up to Jack’s post about credit cards, here are a few other new additions to the web site. Hopefully this will be the last post of this type for awhile–we need to stop coding and get to fishing! But if nothing else it gives us a chance to post another picture of a sexy girl in a French maid outfit. 🙂

RSS Feed: We now have an RSS feed for the site. Actually, we have two: one for articles and one for the blog. What’s an RSS feed? We’re not 100% sure, but one of Jack’s readers (MarkS) suggested it and since it was raining that day and we were tipsy on drambuie we said, oh well, what the hell. Actually, an RSS feed is a kind of “live” bookmark you can add to the bookmarks in your web browser. Whenever new content is added to the site, the bookmark displays it automatically, saving you the trouble of visiting the site to see if there’s anything new.

New Mailer: We upgraded the software that runs the mailing list for Jack’s newsletter. Jack used to just enter email addresses manually in the address book on his computer which made subscribing and/or unsubscribing from the list a bit of a process. Now you can do it all yourself. There are also security safeguards in place so that you, and only you, can add or remove yourself from the list.

New Pointless Poll: The old software we used to publish the Pointless Poll was limited to five poll choices. We’ve now got a new one that allows up to ten. It also allows you to leave comments (a feature we haven’t turned on yet but will in the near future).

Language Translator: We’ve added a Google gadget that translates the entire site into any one of a dozen languages at a single click. It’s located in the sidebar on each page. The translations are not 100% perfect, but hopefully are good enough so that non-English speakers can understand the gist of the pages they’re reading. Several caveats about the translator: 1) whenever you use the pull-down menu (located at the top of each page) it reloads the whole site as English again. Of course, you could run the translator again, but you might be better served to navigate using the text links that appear at the bottom of each page; 2) for those making a purchase, the shopping cart and checkout pages are not translatable. Sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about that.

Old Pages and New Pages: We’ve upgraded the content on a lot of existing pages and added three new ones: a page about JackGartside.com, a page for the downloadable order form (for those who prefer to order by check or through the mail), and a page describing Jack’s security and privacy policies. You’ll find all three on the Contact & Ordering menu.

I am now accepting credit cards

By popular demand–and due to the diligent and exceptional efforts of my webmaster Mike Quigley–I’m now accepting credit cards. This is a big step forward for me, and an exciting one, since it makes ordering a lot easier for my customers (and hopefully gives my little business a boost as well).

So, to all my readers who prefer to pay with a credit card, I can now say, Welcome Aboard. And of course those who prefer to pay be check can continue to do so.

FAQs–Frequently Asked Questions

Just taking a break from writing up my newsletter for April. In it I try to answer some of the more frequently asked questions that have been put to me over the years. Since many of my blog-readers may not receive the monthly fly fishing newsletter, I thought I’d post the questions and answers here as well. If you’d like to receive a newsletter, by the way, please sign up for it on the home page.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. (and this is the most-frequently asked question)

Do you personally tie all the flies that you have for sale?

Yes, I do personally tie each and every one. Which is why I sometimes get behind a bit in filling orders, especially during the busy winter months (January and February especially), when I’m traveling a lot. If you order selections of flies, there’s generally no delay in getting these out; I usually have most of the selections on hand. It’s the orders for individual flies that take a bit longer since I often have very few individual flies in stock and must tie each one to order and I tie each individual order in the order in which they arrive. Since I’m a fairly slow and methodical tyer I may tie up only about three dozen flies on an average day (that is if my eyes and back don’t act up on me, in which case I’ll tie fewer). Eventually, though, all the flies get tied and everybody’s patience is rewarded. The best time to order individual flies or those flies not offered in selections is generally April through July and again in September and October, when I’m traveling less and I have more time to tie.

2. Do you have a shop?

No. Because of the web site, many people make the assumption that I have a shop or operate a large fly tying consortium but this is far from the truth. A laugh, really, since there’s just me, myself, and I to do all the tying, packaging, writing, and all the other chores that need to be done.

3. Do you make a good living doing what you do?

An honest answer to this is: Hell, no!–BUT I make a great life.

4. How long have you been tying flies?

I was taught to tie my first fly by the late, great Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox. This was in 1956 or 1957 (can’t remember now exactly which year). I was just a young lad at the time and Ted was my idol. At the time I had never seen a fly tied before but I figured that if Ted was interested in fly tying, this was something I’d like to know more about. I’ve been tying regularly ever since.

5. Where do your fly-tying ideas come from? Or, another variation of the same question, What inspires you to come up a certain pattern?

These are difficult questions to answer meaningfully. I’m an habitual experimental tyer and my tying area is often a chaos of materials. Out of this chaos, I am sometimes moved to create order. Ideas come to me most often when I’m bored with the repetition of tying a single pattern over and over again, flies that require no thought to their construction or design but only rote mechanical skill. It’s then that my mind is free to range over the possibilities that exist within all the different materials spread out before me. Once I focus on a particular material (say a pheasant feather), I try then to imagine all the particular uses to which that feather can be put. And so on.

It should be said at this point that I have hundreds of ideas in the course of a year–but only one or two of them ever turn out to be GOOD ideas; the others not so good, some downright foolish. But it’s the pursuit of the good idea–that perfect expression of a perfect fly, for instance–that keeps me involved, enthused, and searching–and occasionally satisfied. After many years of tying, the successes remain and the failures are forgotten.

Spring cleaning on the web site

Ah Spring. The ice is melting, the winds are howling, the streams are streaming. Jack and I have been hard at work making some fundamental changes to the site. Hopefully most of these changes will be transparent to you (because they’re supposed to be). One thing we did was switch hosting companies. Goodbye Earthlink after seven years, hello Lunar Pages. Earthlink was an OK host–but just OK (lately their servers had gotten really slow). We also upgraded a lot of software that runs things on the site, from the mailing list to the pointless poll. Should you care about any of this? Well….probably, nah.

But there is one big change that won’t be transparent: Starting in April Jack will begin accepting credit cards. Folks have been asking for this for a long time (the old “just send me a check” doesn’t really cut it in the Internet age). It’s something Jack has wanted to do for awhile. The big obstacle was finding a web host and shopping cart that wouldn’t require us to redo the site using one of their boring, cookie-cutter page templates (if you’ve ever shopped at a Yahoo store you know what I mean). After months of researching, viewing demos, and making comparisons, we finally found a solution we like–foxycart. It’s the bomb–easy to use, 100% secure, and it lets us keep the look and feel of the Web site exactly as it is. Right now we’re just doing some final customization and testing and expect to go live in a couple of weeks. So we’re pretty psyched. I’m even wondering if (haven’t told Jack this) we should offer a prize or something to the first person who places a credit card order on the site.

My personal 2008 spring cleaning of fishing gear I just started today. So far it mostly amounts to returning a lot of stuff I bought last year that turned out to be junk. 😉

Orders for Individual Flies

Just taking a much-needed break from flytying. Although I’ve been tying mostly simple (and larger) flies this afternoon– Soft Hackle Streamers and bonefish flies–my back and eyes need a bit of a rest.

Since I sent out my last newsletter a week or so ago I’ve been getting lots of orders, mostly for selections, which people are often giving for Christmas or as gifts to themselves, but also for relatively large orders of individual flies (i.e. one of this, one of that, one of another). While sets are easy to prepare and to a certain extent anticipate, the orders for individual flies are not.

I’d like to point out here that I keep relatively few flies “in stock”–usually just the most popular patterns and sizes– and when I get an order requesting one of this, one of that, etc., I often cannot fill the order as quickly as I can an order for a selection of flies. As you may guess, it’s very time-consuming to go from one material to another, one style to another, one pattern to another. I often put these orders on the “back burner” until I have time to work on them. So I’d like to suggest here that if your order is for multiple “single” flies that you be a bit patient with me, especially at this busy time of year.

As most of you know, I personally tie all the flies offered on my website; they’re not mass-produced somewhere over in Asia or Africa (as so many commercially available flies are these days). There’s only one of me to do all the tying. I’m very meticulous and don’t cut corners and, as a result, I’m really not a very fast tyer. On a good day I can tie maybe only four dozen flies; most days it’s just two or three dozen. I wish it were otherwise but time is beginning to take its toll, it seems, and I’m slowing down a bit.

I do my best to fill all orders as quickly as I can but, again, I ask you to be a bit patient if you’re ordering multiple “singles.”

Welcome to Roccus Writing!

reno Hi everybody! Jack’s webmaster, Mike, here. And welcome to Jack’s blog. This is a new thing we’re trying, a place to put random bits and pieces that don’t warrant a few blown article: tips, product reviews, stories, fishing reports, pictures, jokes…really, whatever comes to mind. We hope you enjoy it. Please do make liberal use of the Comments link at the bottom of each post. Right now we don’t require a login to post a comment and all comments are displayed immediately without a waiting period. Hopefully it can stay that way, although if spammers become an issue we may have to make a few tweaks.

In conjunction with adding the blog, another thing we’ve done is deep-six the old message board. It never really generated much traffic and honestly, unlike me, Jack himself just isn’t a message board type of guy. We expect this blog format to be a more dynamic and interesting forum for discussion. Hope you like it. To use a Jack phrase, it should be a lot of fun.

So that this initial post isn’t totally devoid of fishing-related content, here’s a…

Cannibal Striper Report

Hugo Williams recently sent us some fantastic photos of a beauty bass he caught when it nailed a smaller one he already had on the hook. You hear about stuff like this from time to time, but nothing beats a first-hand report. Hugo wrote:

“I caught this striped bass, 43 inches long, 25 inch girth, estimated at 33.5 pounds , this morning – on a fly – although I was technically (inadvertently) livelining a smaller striper. I hooked about a 22 inch fish and then this big girl ate it. You can see the tail sticking out of her throat! Very exciting and my biggest striper ever. She swam away happily after being revived.”

Way to go, Hugo! And yes, I am jealous: sickly, despressedly, angrily, “why doesn’t this happen to me” jealous. I hate you, dude. Watch out for me in parking lots. Click the thumbnails below to view at full size. In the first photo you can actually see the tail of the smaller bass sticking out of big momma’s gullet.

Here’s the part I can’t figure out. Hugo, how did you get the fly out?