Last night, I slumped back in my chair and away from the tying desk. It’s lit like an operating room. With three hi-wattage beams shining on one very small object from left, right and center, my eyes don’t miss much. Combine that with 2X-power readers and some steady...
You probably make a lot of assumptions. Me too. And though we all understand the folly of assuming things, life isn’t long enough to track down and test every piece of knowledge for ourselves. So we collect information, we discard it, or we add it to our reservoir of...
All long term anglers find a set of files to believe in. We attach a confidence to these patterns that carries over from the moment we form the knot to the hook eye. We fish better with these flies. We make them work. With more focus, we refine each drift with our...
A lot of things in fly fishing are borrowed and re-branded as something new. And the further along we travel into the age of information, the more accepting the average angler becomes to these new ideas (or old ideas re-branded). Once upon a time, cones and beadheads...
This simple nymph is a winner. The Bread-n-Butter looks enough like a mayfly nymph, enough like a caddis, or enough like a small stonefly to be a very productive pattern. Whatever trout take it for, it gets attention and seals the deal frequently. It’s on my short list of confidence flies.
Yes. It looks like a Hare’s Ear nymph. Half the stuff in my box looks like a Hare’s Ear or a Pheasant Tail. When you turn over rocks to see what kind of bugs trout are eating, most of what you find fits under the category of “little brown things with some moving parts.”
My theory of fly selection is based in simplicity. I don’t carry hundreds of patterns, because I’ve found that I don’t need to. And carrying fewer flies forces me to adjust my presentation — to fish harder — instead of blaming the fly and changing what’s on the end of my line.
Good things happen by thinking outside the box. Norms are for normal people, and in the strange world of fishing, there aren’t many of those. At some point, every type of fly has been used against its intended purpose, because fly fishers are a creative bunch — not so normal, really — and the penchant for experimentation is urged on by the trout themselves. Everything works sometimes.
So here’s a list of flies and techniques that do double (or triple) duty.
The old man and I spent a few more silent minutes together. We watched the growing cloud of energetic midges again, and he pointed out a few rises on the surface that I never saw. But I believed him. Somehow I knew he could see things that I hadn’t — that he understood things that I didn’t.
** Note: This February 2016 story is revised and revisited here today. Sawyer skidded the truck sideways a little and pulled the e-brake as we lurched to a stop in the fly shop parking lot. He looked at me and grinned. "Be right back," he yelled, and he jogged up the...
“It’s Mop Fly mania, I guess.” That’s how a fishing buddy described it in a text, along with a link he sent to another Mop Fly article. When the Wall Street Journal writes about a fly pattern, you know the fly has made it to the big show. Now, smart fly shops are even...
Trust. A fly fisher’s relationship with his or her confidence flies is rooted in the belief that one pattern will get the job done over the others. Our best patterns have caught so many trout that we trust they’ll work again. But that trust is earned over time, and...