A recent trick to winter flyfishing depends simply upon the weather. For instance, last winter there was hardly any snow—so little, in fact, that I’ve never seen a winter that dry in the central Rockies in my lifetime. I’d call it a drought. This year’s winter started with parallel results, but finally it began to [...]
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Simple (Puffy?) Sculpins
When I look at a sculpin, I see a bottom dweller with a huge head, big pectoral fins, and a long, skinny body. I always wondered about an easy way to incorporate these characteristics into my sculpin imitations. One day, while looking at a pink Puff bonefish fly, I had my answer… Use brass or [...]
Creativity At the Vice
Do you ever have days at the vice where you just sit and think… ” What can I come up with that’s new, cool, catches fish, and will put a new spin on my flies?” This thought is what makes fly tying the backbone of this technical sport. That day where you’re sitting at your [...]
Fly Tying Tutorial : Nehil’s Foam Stone Fly
A few years ago I saw a foam wing salmon fly nymph pattern that was killer looking and very popular on the Yellowstone River in Montana. The fly was called “Real Black Stone” if I remember, but I never found the pattern available commercially and never saw a recipe or a tutorial. The fly was [...]
Getting Dirty
If I had to think about the one style of nymph that’s caught more large fish than any other it would have to be… Well, being completely honest it’s technically not a “nymph”, it’s an annelid. Yes the mighty worm! From the simple San Juan to the heavily weighted pig sticker they simply get munched [...]
Fly Tying Tutorial : The Double Whammy
A Double Whammy has solved some of the toughest hatches. Our friends in England have been fishing soft hackles since the late middle ages (medieval times) as some suggest they date back to the 1400′s or even earlier. The soft hackle was a little late in coming to the United States, the mid 1970′s to [...]
Clear Cure Goo Products Rundown
While epoxy is a well known fly tying material, it has been scarcely used because it was a real pain in the you-know-what. It was like trying to juggle within a time limit. You have to mix it, hope you got the proportions right, then hurry and get it in place all the while keeping [...]
CDC & Quill Parawulff Fly Tying Tutorial
The idea of using tying materials to enhance a fly pattern’s effectiveness is as ancient as the inception of fly tying. In fact, it could be argued that the practice of manipulating both old and new materials in different ways into both old and new fly patterns comprises a large part of modern fly innovation. [...]
Nautical Attitude
I had a lot of success with Magpie Nymphs. However, unlike its dry counterpart; the mosquito, a Magpie Nymph does not imitate a mosquito very well. But this got me to thinking, “What wet fly does?” Besides, the best places I knew of to fish for trout had lots of mosquitos. I noticed in the [...]
The Magpie Nymph Fly Tying Tutorial
I enjoyed a lot of success as a kid one summer with a traditionally tied mosquito dry fly, but then one day it stopped working, just like that. Ah, such is trout fishing! Further observation revealed that the fish had switched to sub-surface feeding, so I was forced into fishing nymphs. I caught a few [...]
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