Things have been busy of late and that means that other than a lot of additional shopping, sandwich making, car servicing and such there is the perennial issue of having the right flies. If you are a social angler not being able to match the hatch or fool the fish is simply a matter of annoyance but if you are a guide it represents a most serious professional faux pas. I have to admit that I did once forget to take the rods with us in the car but I pride myself on finding a solution to finicky fish even if I have to chop up a pattern on the river to make it work.

Flies of course wear out, they get lost, hooked in bank-side herbage, caught in client’s socks and clothing and even simply fall out of one’s hat or fly box. In short they have a limited lifespan. With windy conditions, a bushy stream and an impatient and unskilled client their longevity is only marginally better than that of an unstable sub-atomic particle. More than a few give up their brief lives without ever having been presented near to a fish. I figure that if flies had feelings they would undoubtedly feel disappointed, perhaps even insulted by the way they are discarded with gay abandon. Trouble is, as one of my favoured writers, John Geirach, points out, to be of any use at all flies must be “thoughtlessly expendible” and that is pretty much it.

With all of the above then – there is the necessity to match the hatch, carry plenty of patterns, replace those lost and worn out and still have flies that are sufficiently efficacious to satisfy both discerning trout and fussy clients. One then has one’s work cut out work that frequently requires long hours at a hot vice in the wee hours of the morning.

Guides want their clients to catch fish and we want them to catch fish on the flies that we supply and recommend, but we don’t want to be spending an hour constructing a pattern that as likely as not will end up in a bridge support before it gets wet.

Guide flies are therefore a little different to standard shop bought patterns. Firstly I would venture that they are generally “more” and at least “as” effective. Secondly they are carefully geared to the likely requirements on specific waters with which the guide is intimately attuned. As far as possible they are equally durable, inexpensive and quick to manufacture and most of the time it is a huge advantage if they are also highly visible. People with sufficient time and financial resources to utilize guides are rarely blessed with 20:20 vision any longer, mind you neither are most of us aged, bent and arthritic guides either. For the client to miss a take is forgivable, the same doesn’t apply to the guide, so visible flies are a professional necessity.

So it comes to pass that I have been in need of churning out more than a few patterns of late and I thought that I might share a couple with you. You don’t need to be a guide to benefit from them and indeed anyone can make use of these invaluable patterns and adapt them to their own requirements.

The Key Patterns I like to carry are:

Elk Hair Caddis 

Once you get the hang of them Elk Hairs are pretty simple to tie, bleached or light hair makes them pretty visible and they not only make for great caddis flies but are respectable “bugs” covering any number of terrestrials, they will even fool more than a few Mayfly feeders much of the time. They have the added advantage of being one of the few patterns that are sufficiently aerodynamic to be easily forced into a stiff breeze when the need arises and equally act well as high floating indicator patterns when nymphing with a two fly rig. If there is a disadvantage it is that they are not that durable and require a palmered body hackle which if you are using genetics can be wasteful. On the smaller sizes you don’t really need body hackle at all and brushed out dubbing bodies will suffice. On the larger ones one can frequently use oversized hackle and trim them without ill effect. Either way they are patterns that you can’t really go without. Details of how to tie Elk Hair Caddis Flies can be found in my eBook “Essential Fly Tying Techniques”

Parachute Mayflies:

I carry virtually no “standard” or “Catskill” ties at all in my boxes, the parachutes have major advantages in terms of presentation, they always land the right way up, are easily spotted on the water even in small sizes and require less hackle to make them float. They can therefore be tied more sparsely than Catskill ties which provides in my opinion better imitation and improved economics. My standard parachute pattern is the BSP “Bog Standard Parachute”. The flies vary in only size and colour, but their manufacture is identical. Again this is a major advantage in production tying, once you get in the groove you can churn out effective patterns at a rate of a dozen an hour or more. The key issues for me are that the BSP’s don’t use any dubbing, they sport bodies of thread only. Thread colours are easily and cheaply obtainable in such variety that you can match near anything that you may encounter and for our streams the slim bodies better match the anorexic forms of most of our naturals. We don’t have fat mayflies for much of the time, simple as that. There is a post on this blog “Bog Standard Parachutes” which gives step by step instructions. Also there are two parachute patterns detailed in my “Essential Fly Tying Techniques” eBook demonstrating the various techniques of tying in the post and performing a “super glue whip finish”. (the SGWF is a boon to guide flies, it does an amazing job of increasing durability and speed of tying, most flies get lost before they get broken)

Parachute Caddis Patterns:

It is odd really that the Elk Hair Caddis is such an effective pattern, on our waters we don’t have a single natural caddis fly that would grow larger than a size 18 and most are considerably smaller. Small and micro flies require trimming down compared to their more robust brethren and the goose biot micro caddis is the perfect example. It is tied with exactly the same technique, thread body, post and hackle as the small BSP’s just that it sports neat little biot wings. As a guide fly it is superb because you can always pull the wings off and have a reasonable midge or mayfly pattern. It lacks tails of course but sometimes it will work if you are stuck.

Spun Duns:

I have written about variations of spun duns on this blog previously, in fact in the article “No Hackles” you can find a link to tying a pretty complicated goose biot spun dun. Most of mine are however once more simple in the extreme. Split tails (a twist of complexity to be sure but even guides have been known to give in to vanity and they just look nice). Thread bodies (again that ease of matching various colour variations) and a collar of semi-spun deer hair. These are superb mayfly patterns and have the major guiding advantages of being quick to tie, easy to see, floatability and near ludicrously economic. They can further be trimmed on stream to produce spinner patterns, floating nymphs, cripples and emergers if the need arises.

Drowned Midges:

These patterns are actually drowned anything, although originally designed to copy net winged midges they do a great job of covering cripples, stillborns, drowned duns, midges and even spinners and are so simple to manufacture that there is no excuse not to have dozens of them. Simple brushed dubbed thorax to imitate legs and movement and hackle point wings, added more from vanity than necessity. They aren’t visible patterns and generally get fished in tandem in much the same way one would a nymph, but they are effective. Detailed instructions in graphic and video format for this pattern are part of my eBook “Essential Fly Tying Techniques”

The Brassie:

If there ever was a quintessential “Guide Fly” then the brassie has to be it, simple, quick and inexpensive to tie, durable and deadly. It is my “go to nymph” when the fish are being difficult. We don’t have a lot of serious hatches and the fish rarely get the luxury of honing in on specific sub-aquatic forms. The brassie does a great job of covering tiny caddis larvae, baetis mayfly nymphs, black fly larva and more, plus it has that “certain Je ne sais quoi” that lures fish the world over. Tying the brassie is covered in “Essential Fly Tying Techniques” eBook, available from www.inkwaziflyfishing.co.za

Pheasant Tail Nymph:

In case I feel the need for something a tad more complicated the Pheasant Tail nymph covers more sub aquatic life, a universal pattern effective everywhere. Sporting on occasion a tungsten bead and always with my favoured peacock herl thorax for that added touch of sparkle. Another killer pattern in various guises. The PTN breaks one of the guide fly rules, it does lack slightly on the durability front, but wrapping the pheasant tail over a bed of thread moistened with head cement will provide additional longevity. The PTN is also covered in detail in “Essential Fly Tying Techniques” eBook.

The Compar-ant:

This has to be one of the simplest patterns of all, I don’t use it frequently but when you need an ant then you need one badly. Flying ants have the ability to hook fish into selective feeding more than any other natural on our streams. The fish simply love them and you can sometimes break a hatch with an ant if you can’t copy the actual hatching fly. Trout will deviate from established feeding patterns to take ants and they represent a great trick to have up one’s sleeve. The Compar-ant is made entirely of synthetic materials, a poly-yarn wing and superfine dubbing body, has a superb and uncomplicated profile which I think better imitates the key segmentation of the real insect. It is well established that the thin waste and distinct thorax and gaster of the ant act as a trigger to the fish, one doesn’t want to mask it.

All the above flies can be varied in terms of size and colour to suit, with a few colour and size variations in each of the above you will still be carrying hundreds of flies, but they won’t take long to manufacture or replace, they will catch you fish almost anywhere that you go and you won’t break into a cold sweat of panic if you lose one in a tree.

Guide Flies are essentially simple and quick to tie, inexpensive, durable and effective. You need to be able to whip them out by the dozen but still fish them with confidence.

This post brought to you by the publisher of the world's most innovative fly tying book. Essential Fly Tying Techniques

One minute I am sitting tying flies, pondering the new fishing season and the vagaries of the weather that had required some subtle changes to the tactics on our local streams, the fish tucked up amongst the boulders out of the man currents,  and the next I am thrust into the world of  music concerts, all noise, video, security and crowds. Two worlds as divergent as you might be able to conceive, two kinds of rock if you will.

It all started with a phone call, not in itself a particularly unusual circumstance, an enquiry about fly fishing guiding from a party in an exclusive local hotel. It was coming into summer, the trout streams were recently opened from the winter closed season and the tourist trade was picking up in conjunction with the warmer weather. All to be expected, or at least hoped for.

The trouble was that I was due to be going to the Kings of Leon concert at the Cape Town Stadium and wasn’t going to miss that, a guiding trip could have made a late night out a bit tricky, fishing guiding generally requires considerable preparation, and an early start in the morning, things not easily accomplished if one is out on the town at a rock concert.

But the perfect solution was to find that the clients were going to be at the concert as well so there wouldn’t be a clash of schedules, the kicker was that they weren’t going to be watching they were going to be on stage playing. It turns out that Matt Followill is a very keen fly fisherman (actually a pretty good one at that I was to discover) and he was about as excited at the prospect of some fishing as I was at the prospect of the concert. Now in short order plans were laid and instead of simply watching the concert I was summoned to meet up with the band before they went on stage and a simple fishing guide from the backwoods ended up where only the most privileged and fortunate rock fan might dare hope to venture.

Under the stadium tucked away in an anonymous concrete corridor with the muffled sound of the crowds and the music of the supporting acts filtering down into the bowels of the massive structure I was surrounded by “Men in Black” lookalikes. All radios and ear phones, VIP badges and pre-concert tension, discussing the fishing potential of the following day with a bone fide rock star. Funny how a phone call can change your life.

In short “the weather was a bit dodgy, the prospects for some dry fly action were reasonable, there were a good number of micro caddis and a few midges about.” “I knew a lot more about fishing than I did about rock bands and we would give it our best shot in the morning.” I think that the mention of the baboons, the snakes and the recent sighting of a leopard on one of the rivers caused a little consternation for the men with the earphones but Matt seemed oblivious to anything but the prospect of casting a line on a Cape Stream. I liked the guy already; you need to be pretty focused to discuss dry fly fishing ten minutes before you get on stage to entertain a crowd of thousands.

On stage and in the public eye, a bone fide rock star.

The following morning we were on a gorgeous stream, the weather wasn’t great and there was a cold front approaching, making the fishing less than brilliant. A cold wind whipped down into our faces and the fish weren’t being particularly cooperative. You might imagine that my client, who has enjoyed some of the best fishing the world has to offer and who showed me images of massive striped bass and king salmon caught on previous sorties would have been discontented. Not at all, he had to good grace to suggest that this was one of the prettiest places he had ever fished and even though the fishing was slow he didn’t become disheartened, even after breaking off a couple of nice trout. It is tricky to get in the zone of fishing 7X tippet when your last trip to a river was to chase massive salmon on much heavier gear.  With the prospect of slightly improved conditions the following day we planned to head out again for the morning, time was limited, the band was off to Johannesburg the next day for a further concert.

Switching from guitar to fly rod and demonstrating the same skill with both, battling a nasty breeze on the stream.

We had more success this time, a few more trout rising and Matt enamoured with the idea of watching the fish rise up to the fly in the clear water. Both he and JT got their first African Trout, and seemed as pleased as punch that they had. The highlight: casting for a rising fish whilst baboons watched from the cliff faces above the river, not something particularly common in Nashville one supposes.

I imagine that to many Matt Followill is a guitarist, a music legend or heartthrob, but having spent time with him on a trout stream to me he is an angler, a remarkably passionate and talented angler, a man who like many of us carries the fishing gene deep in his DNA.

J.T. Williams, Tim Rolston, Matt Followill Elandspad River Cape Town

I listen to “Closer”, “Crawl” and “Cold Desert” in the car more often than I used to, but I don’t see a stage and a light show in my mind. I see a man doing what he loves, throwing a line over a trout, a smile on his face whilst the baboons appraise his casting from a vantage point on the rocks. It was great to be on the water with him and I am thankful of the opportunity to have done so.

Brought to you by Inkwazi Flyfishing Cape Town's best fly fishing guiding service.

A bad start to the day ends with some experimentation and a lot of fun.

Yesterday started a little poorly if I were honest, I was (at least I thought I was), due to be guiding a client on the local streams but we had battled to communicate due to problems with e mails and I was still awaiting confirmation of a pick up point. To cut a long story short, there I was bags packed, water booked, new flies pristine in their boxes, lunch and refreshments at the ready and with a full tank of gas, just no client. Turns out that when he had said “Saturday” I understood it to be this one and he had meant the next one and I finally established that at this very moment he was fishing a thousand kilometers away in another province.

Well there wasn’t much for it but to make the most of a bad job and go fishing anyway, you might imagine that this took some considerable time to decide, I think perhaps a nanosecond at least.

There were a number of local anglers in the car park, the nature conservation guys got a free packed lunch courtesy of the otherwise occupied and currently absent “client” and after a brief discussion and the standard “tight lines” we were on our way to our various beats. (Water hereabouts is booked on a section by section basis and one can therefore enjoy uninterrupted angling).

I did proffer some advice to a relative novice and suggested that he perhaps consider cutting down the diameter of his tippet a bit, it looked as though he was heading out after blue marlin. When I told him I generally fish 7X with the dries he commented that “I can’t use that stuff I just break off all the time”. I didn’t give it too much thought, I was heading for a day alone on the stream and I was looking forward to the experience.

Oddly I haven’t fished much for my own account of late and actually by the time I had hiked in to the section I was fishing and allowed the sweat from my brow sufficient time to stop fogging up my polaroids I was more than in the mood for a spot of angling and perhaps a little experimentation as well.

One of the great disadvantages of guiding all the time is that one sticks to what is known, practical and within the abilities of the client and that tends to result in a less than experimental outlook. The clients want to catch fish, I want them to catch fish and I thus forego much of the fiddling about that I am apt to enjoy out on the river alone. Of course fiddling about is a rather underrated skill and it can often result in breakthroughs of technique or at the least a bit of fun.

I rigged up with a small spun dun, there were no fish moving, the weather was rather variable and I determined that I was going to focus on just getting good drifts and if a fish came up all the better. There is something about a good dry fly drift that can bring joy to one’s heart, even if it goes uninterrupted by the attentions of a trout.

I am very much a fan of long leaders and have a tendency to over do things in that department, at least at the start of the day. Sure enough the 7X tippet was a struggle to turn over at the end of 20 feet of mono but I figured I would sort it out as time went on. After all I was fishing, fishing for my own pleasure and there was no pressure. I eventually managed to get the fly to at least hit the water in a slightly troublesome breeze and was contemplating whether I shouldn’t cut the leader back a tad, but then there was that awesome drift of the fly. The slack allowing the spun dun to ride the vagaries of the complex currents as though completely unattached and sure enough a fish thought that it was good enough to eat and promptly did so.  A fish in the very first run and I was feeling more than a little chuffed with myself.

There was little activity on the water, few rises, large numbers of micro caddis about and the odd mayfly popping off but it was nice to be out and I carried on with my casting and drifting of the fly over likely looking spots. Just having fun and catching some fish.

In fact I was enjoying it so much that for no particular reason I decided to fine down even more and put on some 8X tippet, perhaps those words in the car park were sitting deep down in my subconscious. I have taken to fishing 7X as standard, not because one needs to all the time but because then you get used to it,  such that if forced to go fine it isn’t a problem. I figured that maybe I should start getting used to the 8X stuff in the same way, if I lost fish it wouldn’t matter.

Despite the previously good drifts the soft Stroft 8X  produced an immediate improvement, I thought I was getting good presentation before but now it was awesome. The fly would alight like the proverbial thistledown and proceed to ride the currents with uninterrupted ease, just like the naturals that were beginning to show up more and more.  A few olives started to come off and I switched to a size 18 BWO parachute, I wouldn’t say that I was hammering the fish, they weren’t really rising but by day’s end I had landed somewhere between 20 and 30 fish, a few of more than respectable size and I had popped the tippet on only one small fish that had charged the pattern with such enthusiasm as to have taken me by surprise causing me to overreact.

This Olive parachute worked wonders on the fish, particularly once the BWOs started to come off.

I suppose that isn’t entirely extreme, a client recently told me that on his home waters when fishing the trico hatches you have to go down to 10X to have a hope of a take but still most local anglers here don’t go close to that fine.

I am not sure if the tippet is much less visible but it certainly does aid in presentation, with soft landings and quality drifts time after time and in the end that has to improve the catch rate. What puts everyone off is the risk of breakage.

There are three or four things which make an essential difference to this risk:

Firstly you want the hooks razor sharp, you simply cannot apply a massive strike force to such fine nylon, I always sharpen my hooks but take extra care when fishing this fine. (for the record, barbed hooks are hopeless for this game, the barb stops the hook penetrating and you will lose fish after fish if you use them).

You want to have a long leader and perhaps a boiled one, the stretch again adds a level of protection from sudden lunges by the fish.

You really do need, and may well battle to find, a soft actioned rod. I dislike fast action rods at the best of times and for this work they are hatefully inadequate. I was using a relatively inexpensive Stealth Deep Red #3 weight which is wonderfully good at protecting find nylon.

You need a reel that will spin smoothly and you need to develop what cricketers refer to as “soft hands”. Those aren’t the ones you dream about giving you a massage when you get home, they are the ones that allow you to instantly back off pressure and let line run off the reel when needs be.

The only way to develop these skills is to force yourself to fish lighter, fish softer and get the feel of it, it is quite remarkable how hard you can play a fish on such gear with some care. Please do also always net the fish, removing a hook without benefit of a net with such fine tippet makes it all to easy to have the fish slip from your hands and end up with a fly in its lip unnecessarily.

One final point, it is equally a good idea to glue the leader into the fly line so as not to have any knots. A sudden catch of the leader / flyline joint in one of the snake guides as a good fish makes one last plunge is a recipe for disaster.  You can download a pdf file on how to make this super glue joint on the following webpage: http://www.inkwaziflyfishing.co.za/Leaders.pdf I am further hoping to post a video clip on how to achieve this joint easily within the next few weeks. Thanks for reading and “tight lines” , if you are fishing fine, just not too tight.

No Hackle Flies,

Or should that be no hackles no flies?

You will be well aware by now that fashion industry has done a bit of a hostile takeover within fly tying circles, pushing up the price of particularly saddle hackles and denuding shelves of the dry fly purist’s most prized possessions. All in the name of the latest fashion fad: feather hair extensions.

Of course fashion is a fickle mistress and it has always amazed me that women around the world will follow the opinion of some unspecified and self appointed luminary who ups and decides what this year’s hem line, fabric  colour or hair style will be.

This lot have managed to convince the fairer sex at different times that outer garments should vary from Islamic propriety to hooker like knicker flashers, somehow they have persuaded that propolis, avocado, soya beans, cucumbers, natural essences, bees wax, or even volcanic mud is good for the hair, complexion or libido.

Over the years women have voluntarily  (frequently at great expense), allowed themselves to be incased in painful whale bone, dipped in volcanic springs or pierced with metal objects in almost every portion of their anatomy. They have primped and preened in front of mirrors ranging from the still reflective surface of the common or garden pond to the burnished metal of a conqueror’s shield.  They have ironed, curled, cut, blown, died and dried their hair, they have permed it, plaited it, woven it and covered it with wigs, hats, ribbons and flowers

And now, NOW! as an affront not only to their own senses of propriety but equally in a declaration of war against fly anglers the world over they are weaving our treasured feathers into their pampered, coloured, conditioned, hot ironed and waxed locks in yet another wanton frenzy of unabashed consumerism. All apparently in the name of beauty.

Mind you even the most callously chauvinistic of us would have to admit that the hair extensions are a tad more comely than plastic curlers and they represent less of a danger to your eyesight should you roll over in bed for that matter. Still it ain’t right, there are any number of animal parts with which the ladies might adorn themselves and one would have to suggest that delving into the fly tying box is just taking things a little too far.

At least hair extensions aren't quite as dreadful or dangerous as curlers.

From now on selecting a date might get even more complicated, no longer enough to pick a curvaceous blond with the aforementioned belt wide mini and a whale tail of black lace, you will now have to ask if her hair extensions are the required light dun size 18’s that you have been seeking out for those essential midges and will have to invite her to stay over that you might pluck the odd feather whilst she snoozes in post coital bliss.

Really not only has the world gone a little mad but it is making things darned inconvenient for those of us wishing to simply whip up a few mayfly patterns and head for the water. Apart from the allure of actually fishing,  being “on the water” is also one of the few means left to avoid the fashion houses, the cosmetics counters and previously mentioned consumerist frenzy undoubtedly occurring right now at a shopping mall near you. Time on the water is sacred, time on the water with sufficient flies is not something that should be messed with, even in the name of beauty.

Anyway enough of the frivolity, what is to be done? Carefully selected genetic roosters have a naturally determined lead time before they produce perfect dry fly saddles and of course it won’t escape your notice that they can only do this once. The upshot being that there is a shortage of feathers and that the shortage is expected to last well into 2012.

With that in mind it is the perfect time for inventive fly tyers to revisit some ideas of no hackle flies and even synthetics which will obviate the need for the products of our slow growing cockerels.

Indeed to my mind it wouldn’t be a bad thing if these became, to borrow a phrase from the fashion fundis  “in vogue” and it would be wonderfully ironic if by the time the sellouts in the feather world have spent their twenty pieces of silver they were to find that demand from trout anglers was at an all time low.

I can understand that in the business world one needs to take the best price, but to leave all of your loyal customers in the lurch for what will surely be a flash in the pan is lacking a bit in terms of customer relations.

Therefore I thought it appropriate to investigate some other fly patterns, devoid of genetic hackle and just as effective.

Comparaduns, Spun duns, F flies and the like will cover a lot of bases on the stream allowing the fly tyer to either do without precious saddles or at least save their stocks for essential patterns only.

A number of flies, like this thread bodied Spun Dun offer alternatives to using hackle

So for those willing to take up the fight, and of course those who have already exhausted their supply of suitable hackle and are now visiting discotheques in the hope of finding the occasional plume on the dance floor here is at least one option.

The Goose Biot Spun Dun,

This is a tremendously effective and highly adaptable mayfly imitation that can be modified to suit almost any hatch and happily requires not a single fibre of hackle, genetic or otherwise.  The spun dun is effectively an offshoot of the Comparadun , the greatly vaunted invention of Caucci and Nastasi and brought to public prominence in their book “Comparahatch”.

To be honest I can’t find who came up with the spun dun, it could indeed been have invented first for all I know. What I can tell you is that it is a little easier to tie than the Comparadun and boasts a far slimmer abdomen than can be obtained with the Comparadun version. It also has the benefit of its own personal life jacket of hollow deer hair butts set about the thorax region that greatly enhances its buoyancy.

To tie:

• Lay down touching turns of thread preferably 120 Denier or similar, you are going to need some strength when you tie in the hair collar.
• In my version keep the tag end of the thread on top of the hook to assist in splitting the microfibbet or nylon bristle tails. You can use other materials for the tails if you wish.
• Tie in two microfibbets or bristles from a Hamilton’s nylon brush (the fibres should be tapered).
• Pull the tag of the thread up between the tails helping to separate them and splay them apart.
• Tie in a dampened goose biot of suitable colouration, (you can use just the thread, dubbing or any other abdominal material if you wish, it makes little difference).
• Wind the thread to just behind the eye of the hook and follow with the body material.
• Tie in a small amount of dubbing to neaten up the thorax (this is entirely optional)
• Now select a bunch of deer hair from the skin and remove the under fur before stacking in a hair stacker.
• Align the hair on top of the hook shank, just behind the eye of the hook and tie in, adjusting the overhanging tips to the length you wish for the hackle
• Tie down tightly with three or four wraps of thread, don’t allow the hair to spin.
• Cut off the tag ends of the hair leaving a neat thorax of butt ends.
• Take the thread to the front, stand up the hair with your thumb nail and build a neat ball of thread in front of the hair to hold the wing vertical.
• Whip finish or use a super glue whip finish and cut off the thread.
• Watch the video if you wish to see more clearly the sequence of tying.

This post brought to you by the publisher of the world's most innovative fly tying book. Essential Fly Tying Techniques

Disclaimer: From time to time these posts attract advertising and the publishers of the blog have no control over advertising content, nor do we gain any financial benefit from such adverts. Whilst they may be of value to you please do note that their presence does not imply any endorsement or recommendation of the products or services offered by anyone associated with this blog. Thank you.

Understanding Nature’s Energy Equation.

I have recently spent two very pleasant days on one of our better freestone streams, one fishing for my own account and the other guiding a very amicable, knowledgeable and competent angler. The waters hereabouts are currently still running quite full after the winter rains, in fact the season itself has only been open for a matter of weeks.

Despite the freestone nature of the waters however they rarely if ever actually get dirty with perhaps a little hint of tan colour from the peaty grounds at their source being as bad as things are going to get. That means that much of the time one can sight fish although in the high water that is still tricky it is on occasion possible.

Now the odd thing about that past couple of trips was that the fish weren’t exactly where I was expecting to find them. Generally speaking in higher water one would seek out the wider sections where laminar flows make for easy pickings. Water that as the levels drop into summer will be either devoid of fish or at least practically unfishable, too still and too shallow to allow anything like a sufficiently delicate presentation.

Perhaps it was a lack of insect life , there weren’t any real hatches on either trip, although there were a few midges and micro caddis knocking about. Not enough to bring the fish up really and we saw few rises on either day. Despite that I was still focusing my attentions on the flats, classical dry fly water with laminar flows, clearly defined current lanes and bubble lines that should have been heaving with trout. But they weren’t and without rising fish to assist it was a case of hunting them down and drumming them up, if that isn’t an oxymoron in the first place.

I have always felt that the best anglers are in tune with nature, one of the great levelers of fly fishing is that you have to deal with things the way they are on the day. The trout, the weather, the hatches (or lack of them) nor the water levels are going to give a jot about what you want. Nature is as you find it and although we as a species are so used to manipulating it to our own ends when you are out fishing a little humility goes a long way. So despite hoping, even expecting the fish to be on the flats and willing to come up through the shallow water to take a dry fly that just wasn’t the case.

Now one of the great lessons of nature is that everything and I really mean everything lives by certain rules. Not the sort of rules laid down by politicians, with hidden agendas and frequently a lack of pragmatic purpose, no, natural rules are always pragmatic. If you see a fish in a particular spot on the stream trust me that he (or she) is there for a reason, you may not know the reason but it isn’t random. Wild animals don’t have the luxury of random behavior and one of the greatest rules of all is that you have to take in more energy than you burn up. If you want to grow fat, produce eggs and sperm and have sufficient life left in you to enjoy mixing the two it behooves you to build up something of an energy credit over time.  The two obvious solutions to this are to either take in a lot of energy (that is food) or to be very careful with what you expend. Most animals actually take advantage of both depending on circumstances.

So anyway back to the fishing, there wasn’t anything much of a hatch on and the fish were going to be doing all they could to get what food they might manage at minimal cost and we found almost all of them in precisely that sort of spot. Right in the backs of the pockets.

At first glance the pocket water, and particularly this early season and rapidly flowing pocket water, didn’t look like a low energy place to hang out. But we only found fish right at the back of those pockets and on one occasion were able to sight fish to a trout that was clearly visible even in the undulating current.

He was doing exactly what nature intended him to do, sitting quietly in the midst of the maelstrom without so much as a flick of the tail until he decided to intercept a morsel from the drift.  I have watched this behavior over and over and it rarely fails to fascinate me. Despite the fact that so many angling books have neat little diagrams of cartoon like fish hiding from the flow behind the boulders that is actually something of a rarity in my experience. They might expend little energy in such a spot but they can’t see the food coming. So certainly in our waters they are far more likely to be balanced in front of the rocks, either submerged ones or not.

The trout have learned that they can balance on the pressure wave in front of the boulders in exactly the same manner that a dolphin will balance in front of a moving ship. The only difference being that in the trout’s case the water is moving and not the rock. In each instance there is a defined pressure wave where the water is unable to escape and is forced to “bounce” back providing a counter push of equal and opposite force. With its tail delicately on that boundary and with some pretty canny adjustments of balance a fish can sit in such a place all day and barely move a muscle.  He is in effect “body surfing” on the wave and holding station as a result.

The additional benefit is that the fish can see and intercept any food both surface or subsurface coming through the pocket, has maximum time to spot it and can measure if it is worth giving up the comfort of his aquatic cushion to grab it.  Particularly in the higher water conditions with which we found ourselves it was obvious that being at the head of the pocket, even if it could provide some protection from the current couldn’t give sufficient time to select food items from the drift.

So was it that virtually ever fish taken on both days, well over 60 of them, was taken from the very back of the pocket water. The fish coming up to a dry or intercepting a nymph at the very lastmoment when you have convinced yourself that the drift is already over. For the angler it can be problematic, not least because unless you know about this little trick of the trout you will continuously lift the fly off just as it is getting into the right place and if you are fortunate you will hook more than one by accident as you lift up for the back cast.

There is a further trick to fishing like this though, you have to cast short with a long leader and you have to get close. Any line or leader touching the water at the very back of the pocket were the current speeds up will drag the fly immediately. This is “high sticking” as we call it around here, virtually dapping I suppose.

Any amount of actual fly line beyond the minimum will sag as you hold the rod up and equally drag the fly. These trout in the pockets are no less aware of drag than their smooth water counterparts and we never had a single fish take a dragging fly. Presentation is the business here, presentation and a knowledge of where to look for the fish.

There are numerous other examples of the energy equation. EI-EO=Growth, (where EI is energy input and EO is energy output). If you want to become a better angler it will do you a lot of good to spend some time considering that equation each time you head out onto the water.

It is probably the same equation that causes fish to feed at times when the hatches are at their heaviest and perhaps even focus on only one insect at a time for that matter. Mad rushing about isn’t going to pay dividends in the long haul and the fish know it. . It is infuriatingly the same equation that says to the fish, don’t bother to feed at all if there isn’t a lot of food about. On very fertile streams that actually becomes something of a problem because if the fish have decided not to feed , well you simply can’t catch them. On my slightly acidic home waters the fish can rarely afford to be quite so choosey and although they will make the most of things when there is food in abundance they can’t really afford to miss out on a meal, even a small mouthful when it presents itself. So they will usually be very careful not to burn energy unnecessarily whilst at the same time giving themselves the chance of a meal should one come along.

It is fascinating stuff, but as with all things in nature, eminently logical when you take a good look at it. It is one of the reasons why I do so love to watch fish when the situation presents itself, you can learn a lot by watching the behavior, particularly if you keep a mind on that equation. There is a purpose to everything and understanding that can’t fail but help you to become a better angler.

Mind you I am being a bit smug, as I said, we got it wrong to start with. Which brings up another great law , this time of fishing “if what you are doing ain’t working, do something different”.

Brought to you by Inkwazi Flyfishing Cape Town's best fly fishing guiding service.

Dislaimer: From time to time these posts attract advertising, the writers of the blog have no control or association with such adverts nor do they receive any financial or other remuneration from such advertising. Whilst they may be of interest and value to you their attachment to these posts does not imply recommendation or endorsement of the products or services advertised by anyone associated with the Fishing Gene Blog.

Cultures all over the world have rituals for the breaking of drought conditions and the calling up of the Gods to provide rain for precipitation starved crops.

The North American Indians had a rain dance, although some suggest that this was just a way of getting around the laws preventing them from performing the sun dance ritual. They were after all at the time somewhat under the colonial boot and rather restricted in their movements. Actually the Osage and Quapaw tribes made rather a business out of rain dancing, with local knowledge of meteorological events they offered to perform rain dances for settlers in exchange for tradable goods. Their descendents are now working for CNN on the weather channel.

Bulgarians have the Paparuda, where a girl (There seem to be a lot of girls involved in this rain making business, in fact they seem to have pretty much cornered the market), dances through the village in a newly fashioned skirt of fresh knitted vines and is splashed with water at each household. A curiously wasteful process if you are in the midst of drought one would think,  the Romanians have a similar ceremony the Caloian,  whilst the Albanians have the Dudule.

The aboriginal peoples of the Kimberly region of Western Australia pray to Wandjina spirits who apparently control the coming of the rainy season and laying down various laws for the people. These spirits however obviously have limited geographical powers because apparently as you travel east fiddling about with the weather becomes the prerogative of the Yagjagbula and Jabirringgi. Amongst the pastoral Karimojong  people of Uganda the calling up of rain is called the akirriket a ceremony mostly involving the killing of a bull of specified colouration, generally black (an apparent link to the dark rain clouds that were sought after), slaughtering bulls seems to be almost as prevalent as deflowering when it comes to calling up the gods..

The Balobedu people of Limpopo province have their very own Rain Queen Modjadji. Apparently the rain making skills were originally gained via some rather dubious incestuous impregnation of the king’s daughter Dzugundini ,precise information on whether her father or brother were responsible seems to be a little cloudy (if you will pardon the pun)  Apparently there is something to her skills if not meteorologically at least horticulturally speaking. Her powers are reinforced by the presence of a rather luxurious garden surrounding her home and for good measure she has a cycad named after her Modjadji cycad

It seems to me that a lot of people are having a good deal of fun with this little rain making business, deflowering of maidens, incestuous liaisons and the ritual killing of bulls would appear pretty darned entertaining compared to our locally reliable but never the less rather stayed rain making processes.

Down here in the South we have a far less troublesome means of calling upon the meteorologically inclined deities. It doesn’t require any particular amount of dancing, no sacrificing of bulls or deflowering of maidens. It is called the “opening of the trout season ceremony” and is performed each year in spring by the Piscatorial peoples of the Cape Province, a loose band of hunter gatherers centered around the Limietberg of the Western Cape and descended from ancient angler tribes made up from the amalgamation of the Strandlopers and the famous dry fly fisherman Jan Van Riebeeck..

All that is required is for the designated day for the commencement of piscatorial activities on the local streams to be defined That being September the 1st and the notional commencement of spring. We can go for months without the normal degree of wet weather but come September 1st, rods in hand, newly tied flies sparkling in neatly laid out rows the heavens will open with a vengeance.

As the day approaches the gods lull the believers into a false sense of security with fair weather and warm breezes, thoughts of sacrifice and maiden deflowering are put to the back of the tribal minds as preparations are made for the great day.

Tribal elders are consulted as to the best patterns and equipment and local sages are visited to obtain permission from the ancestors to be allowed to practice the fine art of angling and for the payment of dues for the royal privilege. Artificial flies are manufactured from the skins and feathers of animals and birds collected during the winter months and the piscators parade the fields , their clothing adorned in multi-coloured decorations of imitative insects. The crowning piece being known as “the fishing hat” offers signs of importance based on the numbers and exuberance of the decorative pieces. New acolytes are required to wear clean breast coverings “fishing vests” similarly bedecked with various shiny gadgetry whilst the elders having earned their colours on previous hunts are granted permission to daub their attire with blood and fish scales as signs of their seniority.

Preparations start in earnest on the eve of the opening ceremony, much fuss is made over the selection of gear and the previous mentioned adornments and then if the Gods are pleased the wind starts to whip the treetops. Dark clouds gather on the horizon, (much the same colour as the slaughtered bulls of the inland tribes) and the heavens open. Water descends from the skies in sheets as the laughing of the ancestors can be heard over the roar or the wind (some people think that this is just thunder).

Eventually the tribal council declares that the opening day is a complete bust for yet another year and the piscators return to a life of bull slaughtering and maiden deflowering as the rivers flood once more.

In time the deities will tire of their little game and fishing will be possible, but right now it is time to further adorn my fishing hat, perhaps if I can cram a few more feathers on there next year we will actually get to go fishing.Failing that and being a confirmed vegetarian there is only maiden deflowering left as a form of entertainment at least until the World Cup Rugby starts in a weeks time. Or of course I could waste another morning writing a nonsensical blog post if things become really tiresome and the maidens don’t pitch up.

If you are similarly frustrated take a look at my latest eBook Essential Fly Tying Skills available on line from www.inkwaziflyfishing.co.za or Netbooks, (www.netbooks.co.za), or over the counter at Netbooks in Milnerton,  Wild Fly in Nottingham Road, Fly Talk at Eikendal Somerset West,  Mavungana in Dullstroom and Johannesburg and Frontier Fly Fishing in Johannesburg.
If nothing else the skills demonstrated should mean that your fishing hat can be better festooned and the wrath of the Gods avoided if we are lucky.
You can also check out the promotional video about the book on You Tube at Essential Fly Tying Techniques

Launch of the World’s most innovative flytying instruction book.

It has been a dreadfully time-consuming exercise it has to be said, enough so that had I known the amount of work required maybe I would never have started, but that said my new eBook “Essential Fly Tying techniques” has now been “officially” launched. Perhaps most gratifying of all is that it has received some very very positive reviews from those who have seen the finished product and some very well-respected names amongst them.

Tom Sutcliffe, the elder statesman of South African fly fishing and well-known fly fishing author provided a wonderfully positive review of the book on his website “The Best Way to Learn Fly Tying”

Tom is the author of “My Way with a Trout”, “Reflections on Fly Fishing” and “Hunting Trout” a new version of the latest title is due for release shortly so I am even more grateful that Tom found the time to review my book.

The book contains some 80 full colour graphics, over 30 video clips of essential fly tying techniques and complete flies, full instructions on tying 14 killer patterns which at the same time illustrate the various techniques highlighted and one hopes it will indeed prove to be a new standard in fly tying tuition.

Some comments from reviewers of the book to date:

“This publication bridges the gap between traditional books and on-line video”…..Ed Herbst Editor of Piscator Magazine.

“Awesome, I wish I this had been available when I started flytying”…. M Spinola, SA Commonwealth Flyfishing Team and bronze medalist in the SA National Championships.

“This is perfect, the video clips fill in the gaps that step by step sequences in traditional publications can’t cover and the patterns shown can form the basis of any worthwhile fly box……..MC Coetzer, Protea Team Angler and Coach of the SA Junior World Championship Team.

“This has to be the easiest way to learn,…engaging, ingenious and comprehensive, …this book is surely the first of its kind in the world…..Dr Tom Sutcliffe, Author of “My Way with a Trout”, “Reflections on Flyfishing” and “Hunting Trout”.

So pleased as I am with the response now comes the hard part, marketing the book and I am hoping that those of you out there in the fly fishing underground can assist. The book is available directly from me at Inkwazi Fly Fishing both on a retail and wholesale basis. It is also currently available from fly fishing retailers and bookshops: Netbooks (On line book store), Mavungana (Fly Fishing retail in Johannesburg and Dullstroom), Wild Fly (Fly Fishing retail Nottingham Road) and hopefully more stores will follow shortly.

Retailers:

If you have a retail outlet anywhere in the world and would like to see a review copy of the book contact me on inkwaziflyfising@iafrica.com and I shall endeavor to provide you with a sample, alternatively if you can’t wait I will include a demo version with your order just so that you can see what all the fuss is about..

I am expecting reviews of the publication in key local and overseas magazines shortly and shall no doubt be able to keep you all posted in terms of progress there via this blog.

Magazines:

If you edit a fly fishing magazine and would like a review copy to feature your comments in your publication please again contact me and I shall willingly send you a review edition free of charge.

For more information you can see a breakdown of the contents of this unique eBook on the following You Tube Link

Individuals:

Should you wish to place an order you can do so by mailing me directly Mail Order Enquiry or you can download an order form from our website at http://www.inkwaziflyfishing.co.za/ options are available for both retail and wholesale orders from this page. Order your copy before the end of September and I will cover the postage no matter where you are in the world.

If you have seen the finished product please do feel free to leave a comment on this blog, it helps others to find it and of course provides unsolicited review of what I think is an exceptionally useful publication.

Now it is only a couple of days to the start of the fly fishing season on the streams of the Limietberg and hopefully I will once more be able to re-acquaint myself with rod , line and moving water, too much time in front of the computer can make Jack a dull boy, or indeed if not dull at least more than a trifle frustrated.

Thank you to those who have supported this blog to date. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to receive updates if you wish.

The book contains detailed graphics and embedded video clips

We all I am sure have at some point tied and fished soft hackle patterns; there are those of us who embrace these simple and mobile flies to the same degree as Sylvester Nemes who proclaims addiction to these amazingly effective and relatively simple patterns.ref:  (“The Soft Hackle Fly Addict”).

Having fallen in love with these patterns though I can’t be the only one who has ventured forth and purchased a packet of grouse or partridge hackles only to find that the feathers are all too large to tie the flies in the classical style. Even if you buy a skin there are going to be a lot of feathers that you can’t use on trout sized patterns. It looks lovely and simple, perhaps stripping one side of the hackle and tying it in point first to create a highly mobile emerger wet fly. But what about all those over sized feathers?

I fish predominantly small streams with good insect populations the vast majority of which are tiny, a size 14 would be a veritable “whopper” and that leaves me with a lot of hackles that are simply too large to tie in the normal manner.

Well having played about with a lot of different experiments, most of which failed dismally it has to be said, I have found a way of using oversized hackle to manufacture very nice and more than acceptable wet fly or soft hackle patterns without wasting. Now I am free to tie patterns of almost any size, for stream or stillwater use and no longer am frustrated with the wastage that occurred previously. In fact it opens up a whole new world of tying flies because you can utilize all manner of feathers which you thought previously were unsuitable.

Here is how you do it:

• First pull the fibres at right angles to the stem so as to align the tips of the fibres as much as possible.
• Then cut or tear the fibres off the stalk and hold them on top of the hook shank, points forwards over the eye.
• You now need to measure them so that you get the degree of “overhang” that you require, this will determine the “size” of the hackle in the finished fly.
• Swap hands and tie down the hackles leaving the points hanging over the front of the hook, they will be fashioned into a wet fly or soft hackle collar later on.
• Cut off any excess and add a tail (optional) and a body of whatever material you wish to use, silk, floss, dubbing.
• Once the thread is back at the eye of the hook you now pull the fibres down and around the hook before bending them backwards over the body and form a neat head of thread in front of them. The fibres should now look to all intents and purposes as though you had wound them around the hook.
• Form a neat whip finish and you fly is complete.

Below are graphics of the process from my soon to be launched eBook “Essential Fly Tying Techniques” this book provides graphic and on page video clips of all the key techniques required to tie myriad flies.  This is but an excerpt and example of a little bit what is contained within the book.  There are over 100 pages, over 80 graphics, 35 video clips of key techniques and entire flies , basic entomology and fly identification and lots of great tricks which will help you tie flies like the one shown here. The video clip below is an indication of what you can expect from the eBook but is not in the exactly the same format. If you would like to pre-order a copy of the book please drop me a line on the following link. Pre-order enquiry Essential Fly Tying Techniques

Click on the images to see them at full size for greater clarity if you wish.

The possibilities are endless, here are a few different versions of cheater soft hackles just to show some options.

Olive Cheater Soft Hackle with tails

Orange Cheater soft hackle

Silver Cheater with golden pheasant

Brought to you by Inkwazi Flyfishing Cape Town's best fly fishing guiding service.

They always say that it is easier to find a good wife than a good business partner, I am not sure the same doesn’t apply to a fishing partner for that matter. There is something about having a fishing buddy whose approach is similar to one’s own that makes it “work” compared to fishing alone or with others.

On a river the pace is probably the most important, I rather like to stick on a feeding fish until I either spook the living daylights out of the thing or catch it. That can mean fly changes, leader changes, waiting things out, repositioning and generally fiddling about for quite some time. Partners who deal well with that appreciate the same courtesy when they are “on” fish but it takes a certain outlook to achieve.

The rabbits, the ones who want to run upstream, slamming down a fly in likely looking holding water as they flit past don’t take well to this kind of perseverance, they grow impatient and when they start to leapfrog you or indeed cast over your shoulder then you know that perhaps their outlook isn’t quite the same as yours..

Not only that but things change as time passes, I rarely finish a beat these days whereas we used to fish a lot more water in a day, perhaps the fishing is tougher or perhaps we are just getting old and slow. I like to think that we are becoming more patient and resourceful but of course that is a biased view, I am not going to admit to anyone, never mind myself, that I could have slowed down.

One perhaps requires different attributes in a good boat partner but the same considerations hold sway, you need someone of similar ilk. It isn’t so much about who can row the best or even whether they are likely to club you about the head with a wayward cast now and then. It is more about having the confidence that they are fishing as well as you are.

For example when I fish with my regular boat partner we always start off with different lines, and stay that way unless one of us starts to club the fish. Doing this you get to cover more water at different depths and are then more likely to find the fish, or at least that is the theory.

I recently went fishing on my own on a good sized lake where we have had considerable success most of the time despite the fact that we might have frequently had to work hard to find the fish to start with. Rowing out in the boat alone was a rather strange experience, not unlike the early days of being divorced. One can revel in the space, the comfort and the fact that you can put stuff anywhere you darned well please but after a while you sort of start to miss the company.

Without a partner you can’t check the depths as well and can only fish one line at a time so you run a greater risk of passing over a pod of fish without knowing. In boat fishing two heads and indeed two lines in the water, are better than one.

The second day I fished with a new boat partner, now I am not in anyway suggesting that this person was at all inadequate in the piscatorial arts, just that as a new quantity I never quite put the same amount of faith in his fishing as I might with my regular partner’s fishing. I was never quite sure if he was covering the water the same way as we would normally or that if he was casting shorter than I was whether he was really fishing at a different depth despite the variation of lines.

You see to my mind when boat fishing , and particularly during the phase of trying to find some fish the onset of doubt is always just outside the metaphorical door. The onset of doubt is the kiss of death to boat fishing. If you aren’t careful at some point doubt creeps in and you find yourself either helplessly going through the motions with little or no expectation of result or you start to switch lines, flies and locations in some mad and hopeless frenzy. It reminds me of my youth, out surfing alone on a perfect break, you are fine so long as you don’t start to think of sharks, once you do you have a maximum of ten more minutes in the water. The mind has tremendous power and if you start to think that you might not catch fish you probably won’t.

So if you have a good fishing partner look after them, they are really gold dust when you get right down to it, they may simply make the trip more enjoyable but if they are really good, they will probably improve your catch rate too.

Winter is here in the Southern Cape, the rivers are closed, the rain pours down and temperatures have dropped to the point where fashion gives way to pragmatism in an effort to avoid hypothermia.

Winter here is like a Tigerfish strike, short lived but violent, the wind whips about, snow falls on the high ground and the temperatures plummet. It’s not fishing weather at least not in the worst of it, so most of us batten down the hatches, get in a bottle of scotch, turn the heaters on and take to watching DVDs or tying flies.

I suppose that tying flies when you can’t fish is akin to writing poetry when you can’t be with your loved one, not exactly the same but at least it maintains some level of contact.

All of which got me to thinking about fly tying and perhaps more so why some anglers manage to avoid it for their entire careers. To me tying your own flies is part and parcel of the fishing process. Catching fish on your own flies has a purity to it, some sort of Zen significance lacking when the fish chomp down on a pattern from the store.

This isn’t unique to fishing, I have a client who manufactures his own bows, arrows and even flint arrowheads to go hunting. In fact he is something of a collector of flints for the purpose and has bits of it from all over the globe. Obviously the game isn’t just about killing a deer, he could do that as well with a rifle, it is the process that makes it worthwhile, the connection and I suppose at some level the idea that one is “self sufficient”. Whichever way you look at it, I do think that tying your own flies adds to the experience and no doubt in my mind makes you a better angler to boot.

But I do recall the early days of tying my own flies, to be honest they were pretty dreadful and for a long time I figured that they were worse than the shop bought ones. So I would “hold them in reserve” for when the fishing was easy or the shop ones ran out.

Interestingly and I suspect that this is true of many, at some point one experiences what a business speaker would refer to as a “paradigm shift” and from that moment on one has more faith in patterns of your own manufacture and a heap less for the bought ones, in fact a heap less for any that you didn’t create yourself, even if donated by a supposed expert.

I can still recall one of the favourite patterns of my youth, it was tied on a long shanked #12 hook, had a brown cock hackle tail, copper wire rib, a black hackle and a wing-case manufactured out of yellow floss. It was a carefully thought out fly too. The tail was pretty standard, the peacock was cheap and readily available the hackle was simply because I had already decided that movement in a wet fly was important to me and the yellow floss wing case? Well simply put it was all I had to make a wing case with ( sometimes pragmatism outweighs artistry, even in poetry)..

I fished that fly on reservoirs over much of southern England with good effect, in fact better than good effect and it caught fish wherever I went. I doubt that it was the comely aspect of a well tied fly that did the business though, it was that I had confidence in it. Confidence is a big thing in fishing and perhaps that is why some people never get the fly tying bug. For them the confidence comes from a purchased pattern whilst for us fly tiers it is the exact opposite. It is just a little tricky to make the transition, if you are used to using shop bought flies you are going to experience doubt and doubt can be fatal. Work through that doubt however and your confidence will soar.

There are a number of oft quoted advantages to tying your own flies:

The financial benefits are questionable, if you tie basic patterns the way that fishing guides tend to do then it in undoubtedly an economic imperative. If you regularly wander into fly shops and pick up esoteric materials and the latest gadgets you are probably going to spend more than you bargained on your new found hobby.

Perhaps to me the greatest advantage is that you can get exactly what you want. You want an Adams with a black parachute wing to fish in the late afternoon for better visibility you can tie one. You need your nymphs with a hint more lead or a slightly more brushed out body, the solution is at your fingertips. That is the real advantage, the shear control you have over what you choose to tie and what you choose to fish.

Almost every fly in my boxes has been tied with a specific circumstance and often location in mind, sure they work in other places too but the originals are all manufactured with a purpose. To imitate the early season black micro caddis on the local streams, to drum up some action in high water when a bigger fly is usually better or to make it easier for my clients to pick up the size twenty that they are forced to fish in low summer flows.  To me that is the essence of tying your own flies, you have control and with control comes confidence and with confidence comes fish.

If you have never tied a fly before in your life don’t be put off, it is fly tying not rocket science and even the most ham fisted can manufacture at least the odd passable nymph that will catch fish. My father always told me that “if you are going to do something do it well”, I think that is disingenuous advice to be frank and far prefer the alternative version “ if you want to do something it’s Ok to do it badly, at least for a while”.  Adults tend to shy away from doing things badly, somewhere; deep seated in our subconscious is the idea that the days of doing things badly are past us. Rubbish, if you want to learn to do anything you have to do it badly for a while and with fly tying it doesn’t matter. You can always take a sharp blade and destroy the evidence if you turn out a real clunker.

I am not only tying flies to occupy myself this winter, I am working on a book on basic fly tying techniques, particularly with the idea of helping people get the basics right and get past that “doing it badly” phase as quickly as possible.

I don’t really think that you will ever reach your potential as a fly angler until you tie at least some of your own flies, but it isn’t so much that which drives me to encourage people, it is the fact that I know your enjoyment is likely to take a leap at the same time as your effectiveness.