Tying Flies

There is something good about creating a physical thing. As a marketer I get to make things like mailers and posters and the like; feeling the actual object is the best part of it.  I know I've done something, it looks good, and it's in my hands. While that is a nice feeling in the workplace, it is blown out of the water by the feeling of completing a really nice fly. I've tied flies since the age of ten or eleven; my father was kind enough to show me how, and he started me off with a woolly bugger. That first night I tied some respectable flies under his guidance, and since then I've been addicted to it.

Woolly Bugger

The first years were good fun.  While the flies I tied with my dad were nice, the ones i tied on my own were little monstrosities.  There was no pattern, just my wee brain looking at bugs and crabs and minnows and trying to make imitations out of a box of hat-feathers and some materials filched from my dad's tying desk. They were all unique, these proto-flies; they were colorful and shiny and generally shapeless and I was learning so much from these little blobs of feather and thread. I figured out hackle and dubbing and half-hitches and how to spin deer hair.  I figured out that my bobbin tube would cut my thread if I wasn't careful, and that my dad's rotary hackle pliers were way more convenient than my spring-loop ones. When I had learned as much as I could from wild experimentation, I shifted gears and upped the ante: I started tying known patterns.

My fly-fishing experience began with dry-flies.  We would use poppers and foam beetles to pull chunky bluegills from sandpits along I-80, and we would use Humpies and Adams to trick little brook-trout and cutthroat from streams up in Wyoming and Colorado.

Adams

Humpy

 It makes sense, then, that the first patterns I learned to love to tie were dries. Adams were always the easiest for me. The dubbed bodies and simple hackle were quick and fun to tie. After I figured out that most of the fish didn't care, I left out the hackle-tip wings and liked it even more. Humpies were another favorite, for three reasons: the name, the fact that they float like a cork, and because they pulled trout from those fast riffles like it was nobody's business. I would spend hours after school at my desk, listening to oldies radio and tying crude imitations of these awesome patterns under an old drafting-table lamp. They looked pretty close to the original patterns, but there were aspects that definitely needed work. Proportions were tricky at first.  I ended up with a lot of flies with too-long bodies, hackle crammed toward the front of the hook, and lots of hook eyes with excess materials over them. They did catch fish, however, so I didn't mind so much if they were lop-sided or a little out of proportion.

After catching fish on frumpy flies for a few years, I graduated college and moved out to Washington, where I was blasted with a sweet deluge of new fishing opportunities. The first two years were mostly gear fishing, mostly for salmon. I learned how to fish a corky and yarn, how to find a spot to fish during the Pink salmon run, how to get my butt seriously handed to me by a fish, how to fish a jetty, why it's important to rinse your gear after fishing the salt, and so, so much more. With that influx of gear-fishing knowledge, my fly-fishing and tying sat on the back burner, except for a few trips to the Cedar and Yakima rivers.  This year, however, I felt a serious need to get back to the long-rod, and I found myself under-gunned and poorly provisioned. I wanted to catch a salmon on a fly. I had two 5-weight rods and a bunch of little-bitty flies. This would not do. So, after getting an 8-weight setup, I sat down at my vise and began the current phase in my fly-tying adventure: the Anadromous fly period.

Since the pink salmon were running, I started there. Turns out, anything pink will catch them, so I made a few pink Clousers, a couple of pink Comets, a couple pink Turds, and some pink Marabou Leeches. It was at this point that my girlfriend started to notice that I had gone a little fly-crazy. I would come home from work, eat some dinner, do a little research on the internet, and tie flies while she would watch tv or read. Then I realized that there were steelhead in the rivers, which meant I was at the vise even more.  I have yet to catch a steelhead on a fly, but there is a noticeable lack of space in my fly-boxes due to the piles and piles of steelhead flies.

Steelhead Flies

During this fly-tying extravaganza, I started paying attention to things I hadn't when I was tying trout flies. Wrapping tinsel was no longer just a thing to do to make a fly shiny; I needed the wraps to be even and level. Finishing a fly with a lumpy head started to bother me, enough so that I bought a whip-finisher after years of using my fingers to make half-hitches. I had my girlfriend buy a jar of Sally Hansen Hard as Nails, a fingernail lacquer, so I could get shiny heads on my flies. Do any of these things make a difference to the fish? My guess in probably not. But they were making a difference to me. I was making flies to fish with, yes, but I wanted them to be really, really cool. I wanted to catch a fish on a fly that could be in a shadow-box on my wall just as easily as in a fish's mouth. There was no real reason to it, other than I wanted the things I was making to be awesome. I wanted, and still do, I suppose, to hold in my hand a thing I had created and be impressed with myself. I'm not sure if this happens to many people who tie flies; I'm sure there are plenty who just want to tie a few patterns that they know work and can be happy with that. That satisfaction, though, that feeling of accomplishment you can look at and hold, that rarity in today's world, that is something which links all tyers together, and is something that the world could use a little more of.