Braden Wells' Fishing Friends

     This week of our senior project Kellen, Jed, and I began to learn some new skills to apply to what we learned the past two weeks.  The main thing we worked on this week was learning how to tie flies, my dad had a bunch of old fly tying supplies, and Kellen's family had some as well.  Using these supplies we spent Tuesday and Wednesday learning how to tie different flies using youtube and some helpful advice from my dad.       Over these two days, we spent a lot of time testing different things to make our flies look good, from using different hooks, to different strings for wrapping, to different feathers for the tufts on the ends of the flies.   In the end, I had made two flies that I thought were really good flies, and Jed and Kellen each had their own flies that they tied so on Wednesday, we planned two fishing trips for the rest of the week.  On Thursday we planned to go out to the Clackamas again in the same spot we f...

       This second week of our senior project I, along with Kellen and Jed, tried to improve on the skills that we were building the week before.  This means that most of what we were working on was fly fishing itself, things such as knot tying and casting.  We also worked on planning out some things we were going to do next week, including learning how to tie flys as well as learning about conservation of native fish species as well as Oregon waterways.  We don't have a full schedule for this yet, so I expect that we'll do more planning next week.  We took Monday and Tuesday to be our planning days and we went fishing on Wednesday and Thursday.  Wednesday we decided it would be best if we stayed in town, as no one wanted to wake up early and we all had things to do in the afternoon, so we went fishing on the Willamette River.  Thursday we decided to go out further, going to the Nehalem River in the coastal range. These two trips allowed...

     My Senior project, in conjunction with Jed Whalen Stewart and Kellen Woodcock, is going fishing. It is, admittedly, a quite simple idea for a senior project and it almost sounds like a weekend trip instead of a project. But, while we made the idea of our project "fishing" the greater purpose around it is to learn about different aspects of fishing and different ways to fish. Currently, we are planning on going fishing, of course, but we also plan on learning important fishing skills, such as tying flies or different fishing styles, as well as trying to learn about and help out with the conservation side of fishing, whether that is helping out at a fish hatchery or helping restore streams and rivers in the Portland area. The Fishing Friends before our preliminary excursion on the Clackamas River     This is really a passion project for the three of us, and a good opportunity for us all to hang out doing something we all really enjoy. When we first ...