What is really needed is a rehab clinic for fly tiers that have entered that hideous tertiary phase…some polite nurse behind the counter to welcome the twitching wreck of a man that brakes for road kill.

I admit nothing, and removing the taxidermy kit from the back seat would be a good first step, but like all addicts, I talk a better line than I practice.

It always starts innocent enough, driving a back road enjoying the evening and a flash of color by the center line has me applying brakes, frantic downshifting, and a drag chute. Safely off the pavement its time for a furtive glance in both directions and then check the latest offering of the Asphalt Gods.

Any real tier worth his salt can tell sex, species, approximate the decay level, cross reference it with his mental inventory, and determine value – before he locks the brakes up.

We’re sicko’s, masterless ronin, owing allegiance to nothing, other than the knowledge that steel belted radial season is open year round. The real trick is getting the game processed so’s not spend the next decade in some gladiator academy, protecting our hindquarters.

The same mantra applies when your dimwit neighbor shows up with a dripping carcass, you mentioned the “fur and feathers” thing, granted it was after the third beer, now there’s blood dripping on your doormat, it’s time to fish, not just cut bait.

Birds are easy, the skin is loosely connected to the rest of the critter, and even a dull Buck knife can quickly cape or remove the portions that you want. To complete the task just scrape any fat off the skin, and then stretch the cape feather side down on a piece of cardboard box. The skin will dry and harden within a couple of days. Oil will seep out – the more fat left on the skin, the more oil – but this can be wiped away during the drying process. Cornmeal applied to the skin will absorb all oil, and not be toxic to your dog, after he inhales the cape off your tying bench.

Hides are more complex, as they have much more connective tissue attaching them to the host animal. Same rules apply, you need to scrape all the fat off the back of the hide, then tack it up (hair side down)stretched onto a cardboard surface. Hides take a lot longer to dry as they are much thicker, and can contain much more sinew and fat.

If you engage in this behavior, remember that Mrs. McGillicutty will take a dim view of you pelting her tabby on the lawn. It won’t matter how legitimate the kill was – or who done it, you’re toast.

Ditto for all birds and mammals in or out of season, you are culpable and will be ticketed if you attempt to take any animal parts from the roadside. It’s a fair assumption, that might be a high value target and you may have swerved intentionally.

In California, all road kill of size is picked up by the California Department of Transportation and incinerated. Their concern is the health risk; all animals have ticks, fleas, and assorted blood sucking things attached to them when alive. Most will quickly depart a corpse, but you’re at risk for whatever may be present, including rabies and assorted other maladies.

I’m just prepping you for the time when you round the bend of the river and allegedly spot a Great Blue Heron in pristine condition, cold as stone. I’ll let you wrestle with the moral and criminal repercussions on your own.

Technorati Tags: road kill, fly tiers are disgusting, rehab

Fly Tying is one of those rare disciplines blending art and science. An endless source of frustration and pleasure, interspersed with fits of genius, artistic tantrum, and drudge.

There are really only three types of fly tiers; Beginners, Experts, and Opinionated, and like any art form is replete with sub-schools, trends, false prophets, and is always on the brink of total revolution. New materials are always the catalyst for change, with much of the old thrown out and whatever is “new” trumpeted as the one true path.

Somewhere in all of this is the aspiring tier, surrounded by Bibles, dusty tomes, and countless magazines, usually without the materials cited by the prestigious authors, and hanging somewhere near financial insolvency, trying to keep pace.

You’ve completed the introductory and intermediate fly tying courses offered by your local club or shop, and are now left to your own devices to plod your way to your Brown and Black belts. You have an awful lot of mind numbing repetition to endure before your flies resemble those you’re using as models. There is no fast path to competency, but there are many things that you can focus on during apprenticeship to make it less onerous and more engaging.

Material Shortcomings

The material problem will always be present, half of the new fly patterns you’ll read about are “new” only because of the use of some revolutionary material, guaranteeing if you?re using magazines as inspiration, you’ll be making frequent trips to the fly shop.

New materials are a given in this craft, as synthetics slowly replace all of the exotic birds and beasts we’ve used in the past. In many cases the synthetics are much superior to the original – only Luddites and old guys with a lifetime supply to mourn their passing.

At this stage of your indoctrination you may believe tying an Adam’s without the proper materials will yield a fly less successful. Not true, all you’ve done is invent a new fly, no thunderbolt will strike you dead, no crime has been committed, and fish will eat your Adam’s minus Grizzly hackle just as fast as they’ll eat the normal pattern.

The only difference between what you’re tying and what a professional ties, is how many fish it will handle before exploding. That talent you’ll acquire as part of the mindless repetition part. Substitute freely, and throw the result in your fly box, as nothing beats the thrill of duping a fish with something you invented.

What Works, Good Design Principles

Solid construction and good design are your immediate goals. Construction is learned through understanding the limits and proportions of fly tying. Limits are inflexible and exceeding them will weaken the finished fly.

There is only a finite segment of hook shank that is flat and level, exceeding that will cause tails to point downward, or hook eyes to be filled with hackle barbules and cement. Later when fishing and the fish have a sudden weakness for Pheasant Tail nymphs, your last one can’t be threaded on the leader…that is a crime.

Proportions are similar to limits, but they are flexible. Fly components are measured by hook gape, or shank length, depending on how your instructor or favorite book taught you. Tail length can be shortened or lengthened without compromising construction, so proportions are guides, not inflexible limits.

On rare occasion the properties of a tying material will make proportion a limit. Duck Quill wings on traditional dry flies are a great example, the material is both fragile and rigid, absorbing head cement like a sponge. Once dry they can easily spin a 7X tippet like a rubber band during false casts, especially if oversized. Beautiful to look at but poorly designed for fishing.

You look at your latest handy work, an Adam’s with no Grizzly hackle and your hackle tip wings are at different heights. What do you do? You put it in your fly box. Trout’s eyes are mounted on the sides of their heads, much of their visual plane is monocular vision (only one eye can see the object), if it’s hungry your wings won’t matter.

Coming Out : Imitation versus Impressionism

This will be your first significant test as a fly tyer, this is where you will vacillate uncontrollably, dipping your toe first in one, then the other – trying to find who and what you believe in. No author or magazine can help you, this is the test of tyer-as-artist, and likely you will see merit in both camps, but will slowly trend towards one or the other as your craft matures.

Imitation is exactly what it implies, you prefer crafting replicas of actual insects, and as a fisherman you believe them to be more effective than generalist patterns. Isn’t this the reason why you wanted to learn to tie flies, so that you could have better more exacting choices?

Real insects are hard and shiny as they wear their “skeleton” on the outside, imitation often leads to the use of synthetic or shiny materials to simulate the real bug. Compensate for the lifeless and hard materials with some that add movement or motion. The photograph is motionless, but the real bug squirms and wriggles, it is a living insect you are duplicating, not the photo.

 Flies catch more than fish, flies catch fishermen too. All of us are guilty of the “..if I were a fish I would eat that” logic, which probably hinders us more than helps, as we have no idea what trout think. One thing is true, exacting imitations are pure sex, we want them bad, and the entire angling industry panders to our obsession, with our paycheck the obvious victim.

Impressionism is simulation of an insect, roughly matched to shape, size and color, but with little detail. Impressionistic flies may be general enough to represent all three aquatic food groups with a single pattern, with only the hook size changing. Other flies may acknowledge a damselfly has three paddle shaped gills as a tail with a tuft of marabou, the expression that the damsel has a more substantial tail than a mayfly, but it is not copied beyond that.

This is the fun part, where your experiences are married with the practical and the theoretical, where myth is confirmed and legend can be discarded, it’s the crucible where “your” flies are born.

Which path you prefer is inconsequential, you can fiddle with materials, you have license to alter proportions, you can make flies that resemble nothing, everything, or something – and you’ll be catching fish with all of them.

Fly Tying, the Craft is not the Art

Fly tying craft is disguising a hook by imitating common fish food for use with rod and reel. Fly tying art is the rigor of perfecting these techniques to produce flies worthy of framing, or showcasing the talents of the tier, never to  be used in anger.

At times it’s tough to distinguish between the two, the lines are fluid making it difficult for an apprentice tyer to gauge progress. Much of your angling is reduced to a few trips per year, and the confirmation of your flies effectiveness will not be regular. Magazines and books are constant companions at the tier’s bench, and what you create will be compared to the photographs they contain, it’s important to distinguish art from craft, and to compare apples with apples.

A talented tier can create flies that ignore all proportion, stretch known limits, are extremely difficult to tie, and require exotic materials. It also may take them 3 or more hours to tie that fly, it represents art of the highest form, but can be confused with functional patterns by the unwary.

Putting it all together, the Art of Domestic Bliss

Every rule of fly tying has been broken by flies that are the exception. All limits shattered, all proportion thrown by the wayside, and herein lies sanctuary. The most important rule is do they work, not are they beautiful.

Fish are stupid, have poor vision, and are not vocal, they’ll never sing your praises.

You will have to tie many thousands of flies before proportion and construction are second nature. During all this time, you will evolve many theories, you will read many more, some may hold water and some may not.

Collect real bugs from your favorite streams and imitate them with the materials at hand, forget about what you don’t own, use what you have. Every fly you tie hones your construction skills, even if it never sees action.

A small coffee grinder used with a skein of yellow, red, and blue yarn, can yield every color in the rainbow, chop the segments shorter than an inch, and use the Artist’s Color Wheel to make your fur colors. Fly tying is actually many disciplines, some not related to fishing at all.

Test materials and flies in your bathtub, learn what adds life and motion, and what makes your fly ride upside down. You will find that physics and proportion are tied together, you can take license with proportion knowing what the physical change will be in its aerodynamic or fishing qualities.

Exploit the materials available to you, leverage your friends. Do you hunt ducks? Does your neighbor? More importantly, does your neighbor notice the bald spot on his Airedale? Be wary, as 20 lbs of fresh killed deer hide will have to be treated immediately, right after you resuscitate your wife…

Fly tying is a mess maker hobby, filled with odiferous and objectionable items. You will need special storage arrangements to retain domestic bliss. Rotting flesh and moth infestations will be unpopular, seal everything separately to minimize infestation and odor, and use incense cedar rather than mothballs, as moth crystals smell equally bad. Open drawers mean your dog is eating your purple buck tail, or your child is reaching for the porcupine. Be alert that everyone in the household may not share your passion.

You need to address the storage issue almost immediately, and with a permanent furniture purchase. An old vanity table and a chest of drawers will work, both are garage sale fodder, tear the top off the desk and build a new larger work surface. Line both with incense cedar slats from the hardware store. To be allowed into your house, refinish both, as a $25 garage sale purchase can turn into something much better looking if sanded and finished properly.

After all this, you will be confronted by many critics that will find fault with your finest work. Most will have their paws in your fly box to assist you in “lightening” it, but the real critic is the trout, stay focused and please the fish first. Remember you started this bestial trek thinking you would catch more fish, and you are much further along than you think.

Technorati Tags: fly tying, fly tying impressionism, realistic imitation

They say “revenge is a dish, best served cold,” and I’ve got the ultimate prank for them mooching fish buddies of yours.

You know who I’m talking about, that erstwhile pal that always has his mitts in your fly box, “What’d you catch him on, I ain’t got none of those, gimme some.”

Introducing the water soluble thread.

Just try to keep a straight face…two casts and your pal is fishing a bare hook. 6 or 7 “Dissolve-O-Nymphs” later, and you wont have to worry about him demanding more of your precious Pheasant Tails.

Technorati Tags: thread, water soluble thread, fly tying

Managed to track down some more bulk tying material sources, figured to pass them on.

Vinyl Cement comprises about 50% of the head cement market, it is a flexible bond that is used for working flies, slightly opaque and has a dull finish, so it is not used on “presentation” flies that require a transparent high gloss finish.

Available under a blizzard of recognizable names, all are descended from the venerable HH-66 cement from Mauritzon Inc.  A gallon may be a bit excessive, but a quart is merely $14.40 – that is a lifetime supply. Quarts of thinner are available for $8.55. Thin the cement to water-consistancy before using.

The motherlode of Tungsten beads, brass beads, and tungsten barbell eyes is available in China. Unfortunately their web site leaves much to be desired, but TopMim International appears to be the source for everyone. The manufacturer is JinJu Powder Metallurgy Inc, whose site mentions minimum quantity is 1000 beads. Both sites mention supplying beads to the fly fishing industry, and their bead photos can be found on many middlemen sites in the US and Europe.

I sent them an email to get their price list, hopefully it is in Euro’s or Dollars.

If you are unwilling to take on international trade, Rings & Things has the round 2mm – 5mm copper, silver, and gold, beads for $1 per 100. That is about 1/4 the price of your fly shop. Buy 1000 (2mm) and the price is 50 cents per 100. (Minimum order $25, make sure you get a catalog) Can’t beat the price.

Eidnes Furs has some nice prices on animal pelts. We don’t need the fancy #1 quality, the damaged #3’s will do just fine. They have some interesting feathers as well – but the pelt prices are cheap.

Technorati Tags: fur, vinyl cement, fly tying, tungsten beads

Banish the thought from your mind, tying your own flies is not cheaper than buying them. Measured simply in dollars, the two aren’t even in the same zipcode. There are some benefits to fly tying that can’t be quantified and may tip the scales a bit.

The Numbers Game

If we look at the cost of trout flies, they range from $1.50 to $2.50, with the bulk of the standard patterns at the lower end of that scale. Assuming the typical urban angler gets away 6 times a year for a fishing excursion, and buys about 2 dozen flies for each outing, he is out of pocket about $300 per year.

For his flytying counterpart, if he had to tie that same 12 dozen, it is a different story. If we assemble a kit of the materials necessary, it may include:

Genetic Necks – 1-Rhode Island Red, 1 – Grizzly, 1 – Cream/Ginger

Dubbing Fur – Black, Brown, Olive, Grey, Cream, Yellow, Tan, Rust

Skins/Bird Parts – Partridge, Speckled Hen saddle, Mallard flank(natural and dyed woodduck), Teal, Pheasant Tail, Peacock Herl, Ostrich, Dyed Hen saddle (Olive, Brown), Saddle Hackle (grizzly, badger, brown), Turkey Tail, Goose Biots. Marabou (olive, black)

Animal Parts: Calf tail, Hare’s Mask, Moose Body, Deer Hair, Elk Hair

Synthetic/Man Made: Copper wire, Gold wire, Lead wire, Polypropylene yarn (white), Pearl Flashabou (or equivalent), Prewaxed Thread (black, brown, cream, olive), Floss (red, yellow), Brass beads (small, medium).

Hooks: Dry Fly (12, 14, 16, 18), Nymph (12, 14, 16, 18), Specialty (3XL 8, 10)

I wouldn’t be accused of flamboyance in the above items, this is a basic kit that can tie quite a few different patterns. There will be plenty left over after our 12 dozen flies, some of the above items can tie many hundreds of dozens before being exhausted. The above tying kit retails for approximately $461.00.

Note that no tools, vises, or other tying paraphernalia is counted in the above, this is simply a raw list of items that could tie 12 dozen assorted flies. Our assumption is that the angler buying flies is likely to pick 2-3 of each, and 12 dozen would be around 50 different fly patterns.

Using the “dollar” indicator only, $300 < $461, so buying flies is cheaper.

Granted, the additional flies we can tie from this kit will lower the per fly price in each subsequent year, but we’ll start to run out of items and have to restock. If you supplement the items with road kill, and catastrophic loss due to moth infestation, the calculation become unwieldy almost immediately.

If we acknowledge some of the intangibles, that may shift things. What a flytyer gets is a deeper understanding of fly design, movement, and aquatic entomology. He can tailor a fly exactly to the bug he sees on the stream, whereas the guy buying flies has to find an approximation – a standard pattern close enough to the natural that he can use effectively. This is easy, as fish are stupid. On rare occasion, nothing but the custom pattern will do, this is more the exception rather than the rule.

Assimilating all that tying knowledge will put the crafter into learning bug behavior. Reading countless articles on new patterns and absorbing their recipe will also convey how and where to fish it, how to recognize the natural when he sees it, and what unique qualities exist in the sillouette or style of emergence. Simply put, fly tyers will know more about bugs. How much is that worth?…A plugged farthing at a cocktail party, but useful as hell when fishing.

The second major benefit for tyers is that their season is longer than a fellow purchasing flies. Them cold winter months give the perfect opportunity to replenish those holes in your fly box. It ain’t fishing, but it’s the next best thing.

As a byproduct of tying, angler confidence is increased. You were there last year, they were eating “little yellow mayflies” – you spent all winter perfecting that pattern, now you’ll reap the reward. Confidence is akin to superstition, as we have all met the guy that claims, “I catch all my fish on a #16 Adams” – the fact that he has been successful (confidence) is enough for him to continue to force feed that fly for hours, regardless of what’s hatching.

The Deep End

Many fly tyers go off the deep end, and although it can be expensive, it is still a rewarding hobby. These tyers wind up owning huge stashes of fly materials, far in excess of what they can use in multiple seasons. Often these collections result from interests in fly crafting, attempting to tie traditional Atlantic Salmon flies using the original materials, and other esoteric forms of tying. They might live thousands of miles from any salmon, but it is the art and skill displayed that is the main event.

These tyers spend many thousands of dollars in materials, and have long surpassed any thought to the economics of their flies, they’re as interested in their craft as they are in fishing. Many sports have this same unbridled accumulation hobby, it still beats blowing your cash on cheap rotgut and hookers.

A “Deep Ender” is easy to spot, watch him make a fuss over the neighbors Pale Blue Dun cat, seven minutes later he’ll be throwing rocks at an orange tabby. He’s the guy that swerves his car at a porcupine, and is up to his elbows in the gut pile at the local duck club.

Word’s of Wisdom – always go fishing in his car, that way you don’t have to explain the rotting fox carcass under the seat to your wife.