Recently in Fishing Flies Category

On Fly Talk, Kirk Deeter, co-author of the new The Little Red Book of Fly Fishing, offers some short video tips on the effectiveness of tandem rigs.

"The best trick of all," he says, "is to use an attractor fly--on the surface or on a nymph rig. I see it over and over when I put on a mask and dive with trout. The fish turns on the gaudy fly, and then eats the more subtle pattern."

This week's "working guide's" fly tying video by Michael Yelton features the Parachute Ant, a hi-viz version of the fly pattern than belongs in just about everyone's fly box.

Ants are often blown out of trees into rivers and lake margins. They can appear just about any time of year but they are a classic hot-weather favorite, especially when there are few mayflies around.

"My choices were obvious, if somewhat painful. I could get a second equipment bag to store the overflow — kind of a tackle-bag annex — or do the unthinkable. Maybe it was time to look through all those boxes and begin sorting out the flies, keeping those truly needed and removing the rest."

The Denver Post's Karl Licis lists his choice of ten "indispensable" fly patterns, beginning with the Prince Nymph and gold-ribbed hare's ear.

In the Detroit Free Press, Eric Sharp notes that while there are "12,000 species of grasshoppers worldwide, about 600 in the United States and 60 in Michigan," fly fishers can often rely on a single favorite pattern, like the Joe's Hopper.

"While the yellow body suffices 90% of the time I also carry a few tied with olive green bodies, picking the color closest to the hoppers I see along the shore. Remember, the most important color isn't on the back of the insect, which people see, but on the belly, which is most visible to the fish."

'CLEVER' is the word that leapt to mind when we first saw Tim Flagler's tricks for "trimming" fly tying thread without scissors, and for avoiding a tag end altogether.

Whether you're a novice or expert tier, his short video "Tips for Starting Thread" is worth at least a few minutes of your time. (It might even start a few of you tying.)

This week's 30-Minute Fly Art features the Strip Leech Fly (in honor of Gary Borger's birthday). As Gary's son Jason says, "It's a pattern that I tied a lot when I was growing up, and it caught me my first ever 6-plus-pound brown trout (from Wyoming's Green River) when I was 10 years old. It has done the deed all over the world, and for a broad spectrum of fish."

Ken Allen makes an interesting observation about how, prior to the arrival of entomology books, fly fishers mostly ignored middle-of-the-day fishing -- then they discovered the Blue Winged Olive:

"Average fly rodders turned their attention to these mayflies, and a tradition developed, particularly with the ubiquitous BWOs, a morning or afternoon emerger that pops to the surface at around 10 a.m. or 2 p.m., depending on genera and species." In the Maine Sunday Telegram.

"The callibaetis hatch through much of the summer. Swarms of the adult mayflies are evident on most days. Even so, most of the action for fishermen occurs below the surface. Fish occasionally will rise to the adults or pluck the spent insects that have returned to the water to lay their eggs from the surface, but day in and day out, they will pay far more attention to the nymphs and emergers." Karl Licis writes about a "summer staple" for lake and reservoir trout in the Denver Post.

"[A] trophy-sized phosphate pit largemouth destroyed a store-bought popper. The bent hook of the now bodiless popper hit Brown square between the eyes and gave him the incentive to create a better bug, as poppers are often called."

Charlie Brown describes the several steps he uses for making durable and creative top-water flies for largemouths. Karl Weixlmann on GoErie.com.

"I think it was Phil Esposito who had the right answer when asked many winters ago how to win faceoffs on a regular basis. 'Cheat,' he said."

John Pittaresi explains why he uses two-fly rigs, noting that even three-fly rigs have been used for hundreds of years. In the Utica Observer-Dispatch.

In this week's fly tying video, Michael Yelton lends his working guide's eye to the construction of a Yellow Sally (also known as a Little Yellow Stonefly). Yellow Sallies can provide great action when thrown toward an undercut bank or into riffles as the small stoneflies hatch on streambanks.

Image via Wikipedia

Recently retired fly fishing instructor Ken Allen of Maine offers some excellent tips on deciding fly choices, beginning with astute observation of insect size, color and silhouette. He also reminds us that seasonal color patterns make an excellent starting point:

"Early spring duns often have black or gray bodies with dark wings, tails and legs. In mid- to late-spring, brown, dark olive and tan bodies with medium-dark appendages predominate, and by early summer, flies often have light olive, cream or sulfur bodies and light legs, tails and wings." In the Portland Press Herald.

If you're not a steelheader or Atlantic salmon angler, you probably haven't heard of a Waddington Shank. One of our readers wanted to know how it is used in tying and fishing, and Phil Monahan obliges with a detailed description of this progenitor to the tube fly.

In this week's 30-Minute Fly Art "competition" on MidCurrent, Jason Borger and Jeff Kennedy tackle a Caddis Pupa.

Borger took inspiration from Gary LaFontaine's Sparkle Pupa, while Kennedy chose Larry Solomon's duck wing version, which "imitates the wings and antenna all tucked along the body just like the natural."

In this week's MidCurrent fly tying video, Tim Flagler offers step-by-step instruction on how to tie the venerable Glo-Bug, a fly that appeals to all egg-eating species and is effective on rainbows even outside the spawning seasons. But best of all: the Glo-Bug is super-easy to tie.

There are few fly tiers who haven't wondered whether they could turn their craft into a money-making business. But what if your dedication led to something even larger? That's what happened to Graham Owen, whose ultra-realistic flies are in such demand among Hollywood studios that he rents them out rather than selling them -- there's no other way to keep pace.

Alex Cerveniak interviews Owen for MidCurrent.

Bill May discovers that anglers who swing wet flies spend less time changing flies and more time fishing. He offers a few insights from his initiation. "Wet Fly Waterguides fished old-fashioned, winged wet flies, usually two or three flies at a time, and used floating, intermediate sinking and sinktip lines and full sinking lines. Were these guys onto something or was this just one of those historic things like black powder hunting?"

The late Fran Betters, angling and tying legend on the West Branch of the Ausable River, describes the local green drake hatch in a post-published article in today's Press Republican. "This hatch usually lasts from a week to ten days and the trout feed on both the dun stage of the fly and the spinners. During this period, there are other hatches occurring on the river as well. You will most likely see lots of Caddis along with some Gray Foxes and Light Cahills.'

Eric Sharp says that this year's Michigan Hex hatch may not produce the frenzy anglers are expecting -- making it a perfect time to tie on a streamer. "One of the best streamer fishermen I ever met is Doug Burroughs from Flint, who rarely uses anything but big subsurface lures. By contrast, I rarely use anything but dry flies. 'That's why you don't catch as many big fish as me,' he said...." In the Detroit Free Press.

For anyone interested in biological diversity or intrigued by pretty bugs, "Sunday Morning"'s segment on the art of Christopher Marley was a visual feast. Marley, a former fashion model who became a "bug artist," assembles colorful and interesting insects (mostly beetles, but just about anything eye-catching) into framed works of art, which he sells for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.

"You know," he says, "I've kind of had this vision for a long time, of what would God's living room look like? And I imagine that he'd have these framed pieces of all his prototypes, you know, everything immaculately portrayed and perfectly clean, and beautiful." (Watch the segment video.)

Also interesting is Marley's answer to the question "Isn't collecting rare species harmful to the planet?" Marley points out that rare insects will thrive wherever their habitat is protected, and providing local collectors with income increases the odds that they will become protectors of the environment.

Michael Yelton's fly tying instructional video for the week shows how to tie a March Brown Wet Fly, a great sub-surface springtime alternative.

When you see adult March Browns but aren't seeing many fish rise, Yelton says, "get over a riffle and strip or swing this fly through. You'll see results."

That's what 85-year-old Stanley Cooper, Jr. says of his craft after more than 50 years of wrapping, spinning and trimming flies.

Though he's tied commercially for large companies like Abercrombie and Fitch and Orvis, "These days, he’ll tie seven dozen flies in comparison to the 10 to 12 dozen he tied on a daily basis. To make a living, 'you’ve got to tie at least 10 to 12 dozen per day. Years ago, we tied a fly that was called Jassid, a very, very easy fly to tie. I tied 20 dozen of those a day.'” Joan Matsui in the Abington Journal.

As we perused more results of the Southwick Associates April 2010 Angler Survey, a couple of tidbits caught our eye:

• By far, flies and leaders are the most common purchase among anglers, both bought by about 50% of anglers, whereas fly rods and fly reels have made up around 20% of purchases this year. Waders and wading boots are both below 5%.
• Of those who've bought flies, nymphs and dries made up about equal portions of their purchases -- just over 30%. Saltwater flies make up less than 2% of total purchases among anglers in the suryey.
• And virtually no fly tiers have been buying vises. They're spending their money on tweezers, hair stackers and magnifying lamps.

Who says Orvis is a stodgy New England catalog company without a sense of humor? We predict the clever scripting behind Tom Rosenbauer's fly proposal will make it the Fall 2010 pattern of choice for those chumming tiger sharks on the west side of the Marquesas. (And that they will sell exactly one.)

In this week's fly tying video, Michael Yelton shows how to tie a popular terrestrial pattern, the Foam Back Beetle.

Yelton demonstrates how to tie a hi-viz version and describes it as a "tasty little morsel" -- something trout aren't used to seeing and a great producer when fish are focused on easy-to-grab terrestrials.

The subject of Jason Borger and Jeff Kennedy's 30-Minute Fly art this week -- suggested to Kennedy by fly tying and spey casting master Marty Howard -- is the Undertaker, a classic salmon and steelhead fly.

On May 29 at around 9:13 PM NOAA's radar registered a billion or two tiny dots over and around La Crosse, Wisconsin, on the Mississippi River. The sensitive scanner (no doubt operated by a fly fishing fanatic) shows in glorious scale why every year about this time bridges become slippery with insect bodies, windshield wipers become fly swatters, and campers suspect they may have stumbled into the remake of a classic horror movie.

The mayflies show "up as bright pink, purple, and white colors along the Mississippi River mainly south of La Crosse, WI. After the bugs hatch off the water and river areas, they are caught in the south-southeast winds while airborne for about 10-20 minutes." (Thanks to reader Bruce Harris for this link.)

Many of us have been caught in this situation: We're on a business trip or vacation, and some crystal-clear trout stream meanders into view. We might even have gear handy or know where to borrow some. But we don't have any idea what bugs might be the preferred meal for local trout.

This week Phil Monahan offers a few suggestions for how to begin fly selection on "trouty" but unfamiliar water.

Personally, parting with my several hundred Mustad 3406AC hooks last manufactured in the 1990s would be more painful than giving up a favored fly rod. There are too many memories of when the high-carbon, thin-wire, sharp-as-all-get-out hooks (thank you, Mr. Dremel) have made tarpon fishing look easy.

This week Keith Barton discovered a trove of old fly-tying hooks on EBay, sparking yet another obsessive and educational essay, this time on why hooks that are no longer manufactured (and available at $0.20 per 100) are a tiers dream come true. "As I watch and bid, I’m surprised at the brainwashing that’s occurred. Traditional fly tying hooks without kirbed point and equipped with the familiar down eye are moving smartly, but most of the other hooks are loved only by the occasional odd duck like myself."

Curtis Fry takes full advantage of a rotary vise while tying his "Big Red" San Juan Worm variation. "Fry lives in Orem and ties flies 'for pure necessity and as a creative outlet. I don't fool myself into thinking it is a cheaper alternative to buying flies. It's an addiction I am forced to abide.'" From the Salt Lake Tribune.

As part of this week's 30-Minute Fly Art session on bass poppers, Jason Borger includes a passage from his father's upcoming book Fishing the Film (stay tuned for more about that):

"The bass were always on time, waiting patiently for our poppers. We'd poke our way through the cattails and smack a popper to the surface, down the shoreline a short way and tight against the vegetation. It was the old Heave and Leave."

Herald-News staff photographer Dave Souza says you can catch almost anything on the six flies he mentions in this morning's column.

"The Bendback is my No. 1 fly. I never consciously did this, it just happened. I use this fly for catching just about everything, including a small tarpon while fishing for snook in Tampa Bay, Fla. The bending of the hook makes it ride upside down with the hook point up so in a way it’s a weedless fly. These flies are never usually made bigger than a 2/0 so they are great to cast even on windy days."

In this morning's Edmunton Sun, Neill Waugh writes about the notion that there is, as John Gierach has said, only one "right" fly.

"These were the 'spinner' version of the stream trout’s favorite food source; which meant they had already hatched, flown to the creek-side bushes to go through another costume change, returned to hover and dance above Prairie’s sparkling riffles, mate, lay their eggs, then die. If a mayfly was a fat German lady, this could make a pretty decent opera. There’s a lot of tragedy happening out there on an Alberta trout stream."

On MidCurrent this week, Tim Flagler shows how to tie a rather innovative nymph pattern in his video "Let the Fur Fly."

Tim's idea was to imitate a variety of flat-bodied nymphs, most of which tend to fall through the water column with curved bodies.

Michael Yelton ties a Drowning Cicada in this week's instructional video. He demonstrates how to tie a "cripple" variation of a Cicada, one that sinks a bit further into the film and shows more of a target to hungry fish.

Largemouth bass fly fisher Bob Pool has a reputation for tying big files -- and catching big fish. "The greatest mistake fly fishers make when they try to catch largemouths, Pool says, is they downsize far too much. They wind up casting a fly because they can handle it on their fly rod, and it's usually imitating something far too small for a big bass to bother with." Mike Leggett in the Austin (Texas) Statesman.

This week's 30-Minute Flies art by Jason Borger and Jeff Kennedy focuses on the Bomber, a pattern that has proved its worth as a waking and skating fly in places a far apart as Nova Scotia's Margaree and the Deschutes in Oregon.

And more of Richard Schaaff's fine photography graces MidCurrent's Fly Fishing Photography gallery this week.

What do you do when the water's surface is covered with insects and bubbles and you have no idea whether the big trout that are eating themselves silly have taken your fly or not? Simple, says Phil Monahan in this week's "Fine Lines:" use an indicator fly.

"There are few more maddening situations in fly fishing than watching fish gorge themselves right in front you but being unable to catch them because you can’t see your fly."

What does a Prince Nymph imitate? Is it a stonefly or isonychia nymph? Or is it a cased caddisfly? No matter. It works in almost every trout water you'll fish.

Tim Flagler's excellent video shows in high definition how to tie this classic go-to attractor pattern.

"It began raining soon after, gentle but cold. I pulled my hood up and stepped out into the river and cast to every fish-looking place, working slowly downstream, getting into the river's rhythm. Little by little, the work week disappeared."

Howard Meyerson contemplates spring fishing, dark flies, and having the water to himself. In the Grand Rapids Press.

The Sulphur Sparkle Dun is the subject of the latest tying video from Michael Yelton. Authored by Craig Mathews of West Yellowstone, Montana, the Sulphur Sparkle Dun is typically fished in slow to moderately slow waters, and can imitate everything from a tiny olive to, of course, the Sulphur (Ephemerella invaria).

As Jason Borger says of this week's 30-Minute Flies subject, "The Connemara is a fly that could sell itself on its name alone. It conjures up images of ancient ruins, mist-shrouded peaks, wind-swept vistas and shy, wild trout." See how he and Jeff Kennedy render different artistic perspectives.

Two weeks ago we published Tim Flagler's excellent video on how to use a Whip Finish Tool (watch "How to Use a Whip Finish Tool"). But what if you don't have a tool handy and still want a perfect finish for your flies? The answer is in this week's video on how to complete a whip finish using only your hands (and a bit of dexterity).

The Deceiver, as Jason Borger points out, is not just a fly pattern, but a whole family of fly patterns. Lefty Kreh authored the Deceiver in the late 1950s as a streamer that would be easy to cast in wind and would not "foul," working from similar all-purpose saltwater patterns already created by anglers like Norman Duncan, whose "Inside Fly" may well have been the progenitor. (Duncan, by the way, was also the originator of the Duncan Loop knot, later popularized as the Uni-Knot.) Lefty's original fly was an all-white pattern, but as Borger and Jeff Kennedy show this week, the fly lends itself to a variety of colors, materials and styles.

Image via Wikipedia

"Hair from the pigs is particularly popular in the U.S. as it retains air bubbles under water making it ideal for tying fishing flies. They come in three colours, bright red, blonde and black with a cream stomach and they are lardier than most breeds, making them perfect for Parma ham-style cuts."

What kind of pattern might a person tie with pigs' wool? Check out expert European tier Davie McPhail's Pigs Wool Mayfly Gnat below. McPhail uses the pigs wool as dubbing, in part, he says, because it dries extremely quickly.

(Thanks to Gary Eaton, MCCI for the link.)

Image via Wikipedia

Brian La Rue writes about the huge BWO and midge hatches going on right now on the Lower Shoshone near Cody, Wyoming. "'Peak time for the hatch is from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.. Heavy hatches of midges are on the water to add to the fun. For patterns, try dries like size 16 to 22 olive snowshoe sparkle duns, olive CDC emergers, para-midges, hatching midges, Griffith's gnats and parachute Adams.'"

Meanwhile Karl Licis tracks the intense hatches being seen on the Arkansas. "Even when surface activity is not evident, BWOs are still part of the picture. Two- or three-fly rigs are commonly used on the Arkansas. An effective springtime combination consists of a weighted golden stonefly nymph, trailed by a bead-head Pheasant Tail or similar pattern that might suggest a Baetis nymph to the trout. "

In the Denver Post, Karl Licis profiles the "Sage of the Arkansas," who at age 81 still guides almost 100 days a year.

"With Paul Fling, Puterbaugh authored and illustrated 'The Basic Manual of Fly Tying' and 'The Fly Fisherman's Primer,' both still available after several reprintings. Upon retiring from the Civil Service in the mid-1980s, Puterbaugh moved to Salida to be closer to the Arkansas."

Tying an X-Caddis is the subject of Michael Yelton's latest weekly tying video. Originally created by by Craig Mathews and John Juracek specifically to imitate a Caddis cripple, the X-Caddis has become a seasonal favorite not just on Western US rivers but just about anywhere that "blizzard hatches" make for finicky fish.

Image via Wikipedia

Read more about the Adams on Midcurrent.

As fly tying tools go, whip finishers take the award for being least obvious in function and design. But in reality, a whip finishing tool is so effective that there are few excuses not to learn how to use them.

Fortunately, Tim Flagler is both an expert tier and video producer, and his video demonstration on how to use a whip finish tool is best we've seen. As you can see, a few tips make all difference.

Image via Wikipedia

"Allbaugh uses an intermediate sinking line and a 9-foot leader that includes a 20-22 inch tippet. Two 4-6 inch droppers are tied to the leader using heavy 26-pound line. 'That's pretty heavy stuff,' he said, 'but the stiffness in those droppers keeps the flies from twisting around the terminal part of the leader.'"

The Kennedy/Borger 30-Minute Flies contest this week shows the two artists' different interpretations of a Soft Hackle.

Kennedy says: "Went digital on this one. I produced a series of flies in this method for Fly Fusion Magazine. Recently, I completed a fly for a soon-to-be-announced Patagonia program using this same method." Borger comments: "For this soft-hackle, I wanted a thread body and that 'low water' feel, so I spent a couple of minutes getting a bit of carefully applied shadow and shine where I thought it most important."

After apologizing (profusely) for using the word "noodly" in describing bamboo rods, Tom offers eight really great tips for fishing wet flies, including: doing it under the right conditions (water temps above 50 degrees and good current), when to use winged vs. non-winged patterns, and regulating swing speed.

Jason Borger and Jeff Kennedy square off once again this week on MidCurrent with sketches of a Hex Dun. Borger notes: "I have a pile of memories that revolve around balmy evenings, moonless nights, and the slash-and-crash rises of big brown trout." Kennedy found similar inspiration: "Sometimes depending on the weather, you would find locals shining the trees with flashlights looking for the first signs of the Hex hatch."

A few weeks ago Jeff Kennedy and Jason Borger challenged one another to draw a new, identical fly every week for a full year. To make it even more interesting, they agreed that neither artist could spend more than 30 minutes on their work. The result: we get to see how two different expert anglers and artists perceive the same pattern. Check out their efforts to capture the essence of PT Nymphs in this week's installment.

Image via Wikipedia

"The Muddler Minnow is a favorite meal for Browns. You should carry a selection ranging from large, size 4, through small, size 12. Big ones can be fished deep or shallow to imitate minnows. Small versions provide a good imitation for Caddis flies and other bulky terrestrials. If you're fishing Muddlers wet, give them some action." In Oregon's Democrat Herald.

You don't have to be a fishing guide to understand the importance of sharpening hooks. Just watch hundreds of fish eat flies and check the hook points when they come unhinged -- usually the point will be rolled, dull, or even rusty.

This week Phil Monahan provides an excellent reminder on why and how to sharpen hooks in MidCurrent's Fine Lines.

Ever fished a "cripple" fly pattern? It might seem the odd man out in your fly box until you find a pod of trout that have keyed in only on emerging Baetis that haven't escaped their shucks. In this week's new fly tying video, Michael Yelton ties a Pheasant Tail Cripple, a great all-around pre- and post-hatch pattern.

In this week's new MidCurrent fly tying video, Michael Yelton ties a Partridge Orange (aka Orange Partridge), a fly pattern that has not only stood the test of time but has gained new popularity with the resurgence in wet fly techniques.

I sat down with the folks from the Gateway Hook Company this week to see first-hand whether their patented "easy on/easy off" hook-eye made sense. Gateway, which has been field-testing their design for several years now, has come up with an eye that facilitates the use of a simple slip-knot loop in the end of the tippet to attach or remove small (or large) flies. Anything that makes attaching 6X tippet to tiny flies easy catches our attention (witness the Tightline Magnetic Tippet Threader), so I was eager to put my hands on the product.

True to their promise, the eyes I tested were very easy to use. You tie any sort of slip knot in the end of the tippet, loop it over the eye, and slide tight. Gateway touts a simple double sliding loop which is very easy to tie and offers the advantage of making it possible to quickly remove the fly by pinching the knot with your fingernails and sliding it open. Until someone shows me some data on this knot's strength, I'll reserve judgment on whether it makes the perfect connection. But the ease with which the system allowed attaching and removing flies was impressive, and if you're looking for simple, this is it.

Especially for those whose sight and dexterity are not what they once were, the Gateway™ should streamline the traditional chore of changing flies in poor light and challenging conditions. Guides, especially, will probably love it since half their time seems to be spent changing flies and retying tippets. According to Richard (Bo) Hoag, Gateway's owner, the product line will be available early June 2010.

If you've never fished a Gurgler pattern, you're missing one of the more interesting experiences in fly fishing. Developed by the late Jack Gartside, the Gurgler has found use on both coasts of the U.S. as a striper and all-purpose saltwater fly, and in interior lakes and rivers as one of the most effective large- and smallmouth bass patterns there is. (Del Brown and I even spent a week fishing yellow Gurglers for permit in the 1990s and caught two using the odd but effective bugs.)

This week Michael Yelton demonstrates how to tie a Black Gurgler, a great low-light version of the pattern.

"Genetic hackle," "barb density," "symmetry" and "rachis" -- they're all terms that you might use to impress the uninitiated at the next fly tiers' meet-up. But what do they mean, exactly, and why does the world's supply of feathers depend on a few smart breeders who've tweaked evolution on behalf of fly tiers? This week Phil Monahan answers the question What Is "Genetic Hackle?" and touches on other secrets of the well-feathered chicken.

It's difficult to imagine an adhesive that works on wet tissues, but that's just scientists think they may have come across while studying the silk of caddisfly larvae. The double ribbon of adhesive secreted from the insect allows it to bond to sand grains, leaf piece or almost anything else in a typical stream.

"Silk from caddisfly larvae - known to western fly fishermen as 'rock rollers' - may be useful some day as a medical bioadhesive for sticking to wet tissues," says Russell Stewart, an associate professor of bioengineering and principal author of a new study of the fly silk's chemical and structural properties.

"I picture it as sort of a wet Band-Aid, maybe used internally in surgery - like using a piece of tape to close an incision as opposed to sutures," he adds. "Gluing things together underwater is not easy. Have you ever tried to put a Band-Aid on in the shower? This insect has been doing this for 150 million to 200 million years."

What sets caddisfly silk apart from that of spiders or silkworms? A process called "phosphorylation." Read more of the fascinating University of Utah College of Engineering report on Eurekaalert.org.

Michael Yelton's newest fly tying video features a WD40 Brown Variation.

Originally developed by John Engler on the Frying Pan River as an emerger pattern, the WD40 also serves as an excellent all-around choice as a sparsely tied nymph.

Mark DeFrank won the Pennsylvania State Fly Tying Championship last week by a tying a fly he had never tried before: the Henryville Special, a classic adult caddis pattern. "'They give you the recipe and materials, but how it looks is up to you. Working with the duck quill wing was the hardest part. The quills pull apart real easy when you work with them. You have to be careful.'" John Hays in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

If you like catching fish on your own flies and are looking for something to fill up an empty corner of your fly box (the one labeled "I don't know what this is, but it works"), this week you can watch Michael Yelton tie a Foam Back Humpy in our latest fly tying video.

The Foam Back Humpy is virtually impossible to sink -- making it one of the best rough-water searching patterns.

Ever wonder how a fly pattern makes it onto the radar of fly supplier Umpqua or into an Orvis or Cabela's catalog?

What you and I choose to fill our fly boxes with each spring is largely determined by the selections these suppliers make months ahead of time, based partly on price, availability, and quality. But sellers are always in search of new eye-candy, especially the pattern that will break the mold and promise more and bigger fish. (The old saying that flies are designed to attract fly fishers, not fish, is as true as it ever was.)

This week Phil Monahan answers a reader's question about what -- from the perspective of the supplier -- makes a fly innovative enough to be considered "new."

Bill Barker still prefers pre-sunrise fly fishing for steelhead on Oregon's Umpqua. But memories of fishing with his dad -- who used a combination of bladed lures and whole crawdads, which they caught using baited burlap sacks -- once spurred him to try the technique himself.

"The river was full of large Cutthroat which, being highly carnivorous, didn't hesitate to nab an attractive crawdad. These big guys later disappeared, along with crawdads - their prime food source - when gill netting nearly exterminated the runs of salmon. Salmon carcasses, after spawning, provided food for crawdads and other organisms they thrived on - a nasty little ecological domino effect that nobody was aware of until much later." In the Gazette Times.

"When Rim Chung came to America, little did he know he would create what might be the most effective fishing fly ever devised for Colorado's South Platte River.
Perhaps it was inevitable. When he arrived in Denver in 1968, the elements for development of the RS-II were already in place." Karl Licis profiles tier Rim Chung, whose slender-bodied RS-II ("Rim's Semblance #2") broke rules about fly shape and became one of the most popular nymph-emerger patterns in the U.S. West. In the Denver Post.

In the London Times, Brian Clarke offers a well-written take on why creating "smudges of light and color" are actually what we aim for when tying trout flies. "Refraction distorts the trout's view of its world, as well. Just as it can prevent us looking down through the surface completely, refraction can prevent a trout looking up through it, even by a tiny amount."

February approaches fast, and as water temperatures begin to rise (yes, it will happen) midges will give way to larger bugs. The March Brown is one of the first big flies to appear on late-winter waters, with trout keying in on nymphs and eventually dries.

This week Michael Yelton demonstrates how to tie a March Brown Nymph in his newest fly pattern video. March Browns usually begins to appear when the water reaches about 42 degrees. Nymphs tend to be fairly large -- usually size 12 to 16 -- and trout will key onto these early-seasons nymphs and their emerger stages before they do most other insects, if only because of their size.

It would require a fly box the size of an aircraft hangar. The giant metal fly that floats above Bryan Whitaker's Round Rocks Fly Shop in Logan, Utah had a hard time gaining acceptance from traffic cops and locals, but now it might just be the world's most expensive fly. Price tag: $150,000.

"According to Whitaker, the day after Carlson's people installed the fly a Logan city code inspector came by and said it didn't meet the city's sign regulations. In the end, the giant fly was officially designated a sculpture and allowed to stand." Jay Patrick on HJNews.com.

Clear water, heavy pressure, stocked fish -- they're circumstances that challenge almost every avid trout angler eventually. Wild fish junkies we may be, but you don't have to be a hatchery-truck chaser to find yourself casting to fish that don't respond to "classic" presentations. In this week's "Fine Lines" column, Phil Monahan answers a reader who wonders whether there aren't certain flies and tactics that work better with stocked fish.

Dr. Bob Bosworth, a retired physician and fly fisherman living in Denver, CO, came across a Fish Hook Cactus in the southern deserts of Arizona thirty years ago and was inspired to clip off some of the sharp spines. He then created an inventive fly recipe that used the curved spines as hooks -- and began catching fish.

"George Montgomery, curator of botany at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, said spines from Ferocactus wislizenii, the plant's scientific name, are similar to wood. 'They're rigid and solid,' he said. 'And they're very hard. They're like modified leaves. Just like most wood, it has a lighter specific gravity than water.'" Abby Lowell in the Juneau (Alaska) Empire. Thanks to readers Brad Elfers and Kurt Iverson for this link.

New on MidCurrent this week, Michael Yelton demonstrates how to tie a Gray Scud. Not an insect, but a shrimp-like freshwater crustacean, scuds are a key trout food source in slow-moving, nutrient-rich streams.

Scuds can vary in size from less than 1/8 inch to more than an inch, and can be cream, olive, tan, or almost black in color. This gray version is a "general-purpose" choice, but anglers will often produce fish by using a variety of more vibrant colors, particularly orange or pink-orange.

In this morning's Denver Post Karl Licis profiles Ed Engle, who took up rock climbing, poetry, environmental biology and fighting forest fires before becoming a sought-after fly fishing guide and prolific author. "His first fishing book, Fly Fishing the Tailwaters, appeared in 1991, followed by Splitting Cane in 2002, Tying Small Flies in 2004 and Fishing Small Flies a year later. Trout Lessons is to be published in August."

Image via Wikipedia

"He swears the fish mistake the coffee bean for a water beetle. I think it's more likely the fish are fooled into thinking the bean is a snail suspended in the water column. I didn't have the nerve to ask King in front of his audience if high-test beans work better than decaf."

In this week's new video, Michael Yelton ties the Soft Hackle Pheasant Tail nymph, an appealing variation on the classic pattern. Yelton has a way of making the complicated seem simple, and this video teaches a bit about both soft hackles and standard methods for constructing one of the most effective subsurface patterns ever devised.

Pheasant Tail Nymph on Wikipedia.

This week on MidCurrent we celebrate "vise season" by beginning a new series of fly tying videos courtesy of guide Michael Yelton, whose soft North Carolina accent belies a deep and practical knowledge of fly patterns. Yelton's first video demonstrates how to tie the Para Wulff.

"The standard Wulff dry fly has two hair wings tied upright and separated in place of what would normally be hackle tips suspended in the hackle collar, creating the illusion of flapping wings. The ParaWulff design combines the two with the parachute hackle tied on each side of the calf's tail 'V.'"

Keith Barton of Singlebarbed.com demonstrates a clever technique -- how to make oversized feathers act as hackle on smaller hooks -- and illustrates it was some very nice photos. It's a follow-up to his earlier piece on techniques he learned from tier Calvert Bird.

Chester Allen ties so many flies to the tune of Christmas jazz that he can't help but hear Dean Martin and The Vince Guaraldi Trio while casting flies in heat of summer. "Last winter, I tied most of my Iris Caddis - the best fly to drop onto the water when the fish swirl for caddis flies during the midsummer - while listening to Dean Martin Christmas records. Martin's smooth, lush voice burbled 'Rudolph the red-beaked reindeer,' on my internal soundtrack when I tied on an Iris Caddis during a smokin' hot evening on Oregon's Deschutes River last July." In The Olympian.

Image via Wikipedia

Gartside was taught how to tie flies at the age of 10 by Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox outfielder. ("I wormed my way up to the table and asked if he'd show me how to tie a fly," said Gartside. "They sat me down at the vise. Ted went though the motions to show me how to tie a woolly worm.") Among his best-known original patterns are the Sparrow, the Soft Hackle Streamer, the Pheasant Hopper, the Gartside Leech, the FishHead, and the Gurgler. His designs have been featured in Eric Leiser's Book of Fly Patterns, Judith Dunham's The Art of the Trout Fly, Lefty Kreh's Salt Water Fly Patterns, Dick Stewart's Salt Water Flies, and Dick Brown's Flyfishing for Bonefish. He was one of the first fly tyers to be profiled in Sports Illustrated (October 12, 1982). (From Wikipedia.)

From Robert H. Boyle's Sports Illustrated profile: "To describe Gartside simply as a hawker of stream-side flies would be like calling Nathan's Famous frankfurters mere hot dogs. Along with John Betts, who ties with synthetic materials (SI, May 4, 1981), Gartside, who ties almost exclusively with natural materials, is in the front rank nationally, which means the world."

Video of Jack Gartside tying his Secret Sand Eel.

Moms don't raise many sons like Clarence "Simon" Schultz anymore. After growing up hunting and fishing to feed his family Schultz, at age 89, still hunts morels and fly fishes (selling flies has one of the many things he's done to survive). He takes a special pride in authorship when it comes to the 1,170 fly patterns he's come up with on his own. Lest you think that he's merely an imitator, his collection includes 1,094 flies that he tied himself but that were invented by other tiers.

"As we visited, he began pulling one ring binder after another, each filled with carefully catalogued flies tucked in clear plastic sleeves. Each notebook held more than 300 flies, every one a different pattern. A carefully printed note in Schultz' writing tallies the flies: 2,264 unique flies in all...." Sam Cook of the Duluth News Tribune.

You can see a few images of Schultz's extraordinary collection here.

Chester Allen (who sadly will be leaving the The Olympian in January, a victim of the downturn in newspapers) explains as well as anyone how fly tying is like wood carving and traces his obsession over many decades. "For years, I had boxes of trout flies that never got wet - until I started fly fishing in warmwater lakes and ponds. I discovered that crappie, bluegill, yellow perch and even bass will eat ugly, poorly tied trout flies. Eventually I reached the most dangerous point in fly tying - or lure making. That's when you stay up late listening to jazz on public radio stations and tie weirdo flies."

Just as Japanese angler Manabu Kurita's bass is about to be certified as tying George Perry's world record for largemouth bass, Bill Baab's new autobiography about the famed Georgia angler is published by Whitefish Press this month. Baab, the former outdoor editor for the Augusta Chronicle, "traces the life of the man who hauled in the 22-pound, 4-ounce largemouth in 1932 that was certified as the world record for a species that spawned a global, multibillion recreation industry." Rob Pavey writes about the book in this morning's edition.

(Read Scott Bowen's entertaining April Fools piece on fly anglers breaking the George Perry bass record.)

"As water temperatures drop, fish generally migrate to deeper pools or to those areas of the stream where currents are the slowest or softest. Because most coldwater lies have slow currents, the flies we present will drift by at a very slow rate, and fish unfortunately get plenty of time to evaluate it." Rich Culver delivers excellent advice about why soft, "self-motivated" tying materials make more sense as the temperature drops. In Alaska's Capital Cities Weekly.

I had the pleasure of spending a lunchtime with Jerry Hubka and Rick Takahashi not too long ago. The two fly fanatics, ex-art teachers and long-time friends told me about the challenges of putting together their new 1000-plus-pattern book on midges. "It just kept growing and growing," Takahashi said. "When we started, we thought that 400 patterns would be a lot to handle." Hubka commented, "The hardest part ended up being deciding which patterns we couldn't include."

Modern Midges: Tying and Fishing the World's Most Effective Patterns
was published by Headwater Books in September and contains an enormous library of flies and recipes. If you fish or tie midges, I think the book belongs on your list.

Charlie Meyers also wrote about the book for the Denver Post: "The book on midges just completed by Fort Collins anglers Rick Takahashi and Jerry Hubka ranks among the most useful fly-tying compositions to hit the shelves in years."

Image by kasperbs via Flickr

Andrew C. Revkin also profiled Logan for The New York Times back in 1998: "Wielding a paintbrush with bristles finer than a baby's lashes, he dabbed varnish onto a near-perfect imitation of a green drake, or Ephemera guttulata, a burrowing aquatic insect. Hidden in the one-inch curl of the creature's body was the only obvious sign that it was not real -- a fish hook."

Of course Logan is only one of many tiers practicing the art of ultra-realism in fly creation. More devotees: Graham Owen, Steve Thornton, and Paul Whillock.

Proponents of the practice of ripping the tops off of mountains to extract coal may have finally found their worst enemy: the mayfly. According to Bloomberg's Jim Efstathiou Jr., "Without fresh permits to dump debris, mines may shut by 2012 in states such as West Virginia, he said. 'The future of mountaintop mining looks bleak,' [analyst Kevin] Book, who is based in Washington, said in an interview. 'Ripping off mountaintops gets cheap clean coal, but there's no way to do it without environmental impacts.'"

This week, Phil Monahan's "Fine Lines" column takes on the challenge of explaining how best to hook big trout on tiny flies. "I have such a hard time getting small hooks into fish-even small fish, especially when swinging emergers," says reader Joshua B. "I get frustrated feeling the tug, only to set the hook and pull the fly right out of the fish's mouth."

Excerpt: "This is a very common problem, and I threw the question out to some guide friends who regularly fish with tiny patterns. Jackson Hole-based guide, tier, and author Scott Sanchez notes that Joshua is facing more than one problem: "There sound like two issues: Small hooks and swinging flies."

Looking for an inexpensive way to make fly tying more enjoyable this winter? Inventor Keith Barton sent us a pair of his new patent-pending "Sixth Finger" tying scissors a few weeks ago, and although I've tied mostly saltwater flies with them, I can vouch for the concept of spring-loaded scissors that fit (and stay) comfortably in the hand as something of a godsend. I'm beginning to test them with tiny midges too (as many as I can stand) and find that I prefer the precise control that my old dual-finger-loop pair didn't give me.

The secret to the way the Sixth Finger scissors work is the single finger loop welded to one side. It's positioned so that when you release the scissors, they stay resting in palm while you do other tasks: wrapping hackle, gluing, selecting feathers, finishing, stacking... whatever. This design could have been done wrong -- the blade points could slip too low in the hand when you release the scissors, the balance could be off, the shape of the handle could be too wide or too thin, or the workmanship could be shoddy. But Barton -- who by the way has been writing some pretty insightful stuff about fly tying on his blog SingleBarbed.com -- has combined utility and high-end construction in a delightful little tool. What's more, they cost only around $20 (plus shipping).

You can buy Sixth Finger scissors from MidCurrent, or by emailing Barton directly.

Tom gives five reasons there are so many flies and fly variations out there to choose from. He also reveals his favorite, go-to fly in this latest podcast.

Excerpt: "There God knows how many fly patterns sold in the world today, and that's just the ones that are sold commercially. When you add fly patterns that may not be commercially any more but are still listed in books somewhere and that fly tiers tie themselves, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fly patterns. Why are there so many? First of all, the good ones never go away. So if you look at a pattern like a muddler minnow, a crazy charlie, the Clouser minnow, Royal Wulff, Dave's Hopper, pheasant tail nymph... these flies have been around for fifty years or more because they work."

Tom's favorite go-to fly? The parachute adams, in sizes 10 through 24.

Combining the constant-motion softness of marabou feathers with a woolly worm fly, Russell C. Blessing's Woolly Bugger did what most great flies do: it improved on an already workable idea, and it helped those of us less apt to make a perfect presentation catch more fish. Blessing passed away at the age of 74 last Wednesday at his home in Pennsylvania.

Tom Rosenbauer recommended the Woolly Bugger as one of eight essential patterns in his The Orvis Fly-Tying Manual, "the Woolly Bugger was first tied in 1967 by Russell Blessing of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who added a marabou tail to a Woolly Worm in an attempt to imitate a hellgrammite, a big mean larva of a dobsonfly. I saw the fly about five years later on the upper Beaverkill. I was sitting on edge of a deep pool with Ron Kusse, a bamboo rod maker who was running the old Leonard Rod Company at the time. It was one of those midday breaks in August when you realize you won't catch a fish for seven hours, when the sun leaves the water. 'Wanna see something amazing?' Rod asked."

As Gary Soucie wrote in his book Woolly Wisdom, Blessing had some specific advice on how to fish his favorite pattern, starting by "dead-drifting the Bugger, 'to see what happens.' If that doesn't produce, he will add jigging motions on the strip, jig it back at the end of the drift ... and across the current and let it swing, use hand-strip retrieves. 'Sometimes,' he says, 'it takes fast strips. Some of the guys around here will strip it as fast as they can.'

'Almost everything works, some of the time.' Amen to that."

This week on MidCurrent, Joe Grobarek talks about our Fly of the Month, the Parawulff -- a now-classic pattern that Jack Dennis concocted from the best features of the hair-wing and parachute dry flies.

"In the spring of 1931, the fly fishing duo of Lee Wulff and Dan Bailey could be found fishing the prolific trout streams of up-state New York using Lee's new and revolutionary hair wing dry flies. Adorned with buoyant and sturdy buck tail fibers on their wings and tails, Lee's new creations were a far departure from the sparse dressings of the day. As these flies first hit the water, we began a whole new era in dry fly trout fishing ... sturdy attractor flies with meaty silhouettes that rode high in the water and fished well in fast currents."

John Merwin asks whether the tiny Yo-Zuri crankbait, which is no larger than a #10 dry, qualifies as a fly and settles on the answer Lee Wulff gave him long ago: "a fly, by definition, had nothing added to it that would impart action in the water. No spinner blade, propeller, wobbling plate or lip, wiggly plastic tail, and so on." On Fieldand Stream.com.

This morning Keith Barton writes an extensive review of Mike Valle's new book on the history and lore of Catskill dry fly tying on Singlebarbed.com. "Considering the materials and techniques of the day, no bobbins, 3/0 silk thread held with clothes pins, the lack of genetic hackle, the paucity of blue dun - a color that permeates Catskill flies, few synthetics, and no domestic supply of fly tying items - most ordered from England, their skill, especially the Dette's and Rube Cross, is astounding."

You can also read an excerpt on the Quill Gordon from Tying Catskill Style Dry Flies on MidCurrent.

Yesterday Morgan Lyle called Mike Valla's new book Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies (Headwater Books, August 2009, 534 color photos, 252 pages) a must-read for those who love fly fishing and fly tying. As Lyle says, "Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies is above all a fly-tying book, and tiers will love learning the details of how the masters plied their craft. Precisely what vises they used, what surgical instruments they used as hackle pliers, what color thread they used (you might be surprised), what they discovered when they dissected Rube Cross's flies - this stuff is priceless."

Buy Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies on MidCurrent.

In this morning's Denver Post, Charlie Meyers interviews four Colorado experts on the techniques they use for reaching fish that have gone deep. Fly designer John Barr has two favorite fall flies, one of them " a large, top-water fly with a rabbit-strip tail, a marabou collar, large eyes and deer-hair head tied almost vertically for maximum water movement when stripped. 'You want to be able to spray water, push a gentle bow wake or everything in between,' Barr says of a pattern designed for calm conditions."

"Fine Lines" columnist Phil Monahan takes on the first real "stumper" question from a MidCurrent reader. Read what Brian O'Keefe, Paul Schullery and other experts come up with as possible answers to a New Zealand angler's dropper-fly puzzle.

Morgan Lyle passed along word this morning that Fran Betters, "champion of the West Branch of the Ausable," died on Sunday. As Lyle says on his new blog The Fly Line, Betters was one of the most innovative tiers of his generation. His techniques spawned new classes of trout flies that in turn became the inspiration for thousands of other tiers. For example: "The same construction using snowshoe hare's foot fur instead of deer hair became the Usual, a generalist emerger/dun that has caught trout from coast to coast, while the basic structure of the Haystack was tidied up to become the Comparadun and Sparkle Dun -- slim, flush-floating flies that catch trout where traditional hackled dry flies won't."

Be sure to read the full tribute on Lyle's site.

OK, the dog days of summer have come and gone -- evenings might even be leaning toward brisk where you fish -- and the secret hopper pattern isn't producing. But water temps won't drop enough to produce a consistent BWO hatch for another few weeks. What now?

How about an ant pattern? This week Joe Grobarek provides our first weekly Fly of the Month installment with his look at Transparants. As Joe notes, ant patterns are a great choice among terrestrial flies, and they can produce surprising results when nothing else will.

I bushwhacked up a tributary of the Big Thompson in Rocky Mountain National Park with Tim Romano yesterday and got my first taste of what a little walking can get you, even when the parking lot is overrun with trekking-pole-wielding seniors just bused in from Denver. Though nothing we hooked exceeded 12 inches, sight-casting to fish in brilliantly lit water provides a thrill that lasts for hours, if not days. Perhaps the best part was knowing that whatever fly we tied on would likely work, as long as it looked edible and wasn't too big to fit in the brookies mouths. Drag was the only concern, and even there the fish cut us some breaks. Time passed way too quickly.

In the Estes Park Trail Gazette, Mike Oatley takes the "big uglies" strategy one step further, fishing private water for big rainbows on the north fork of the North Platte in Colorado, where he proves that too much attention to the hatches could interfere with some very good fishing.

"'Got to have some Sparkle Duns. How am I going to catch fish during a PMD hatch without any Sparkle Duns?' The answer is, by fishing something else. Pick a fly, fish it well and you should move fish. If you`re not moving fish, then start thinking harder about what the fish are seeing and what to imitate it with. It`s logic that applies almost everywhere."

This year marks the 50th anniversary of United Fly Tyers, the country's oldest fly tying club. UFT's periodical, Roundtable, was the first and, at one time, only publication dedicated to fly tying. Members, men and women of all ages, continue to hold meetings on the first Thursday of each month in Woburn, Massachusetts and welcome any one interested in fly tying.

Members, past and present, and the public are invited to United Fly Tyers 50th Anniversary Gala on Sunday, October 25, 2009 from 5-9 in the evening to be held at the historic Longfellow's Wayside Inn, Wayside Inn Road in Sudbury, Mass. The evening's speaker will be Jim Krul, Director of The Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum in Livingston Manor, NY, and the Gala will feature door prizes, raffles and special events.

For more info, contact Leslie Wrixon at 508-733-8535 or by email at lesliewrixon@ityeflies.com.

"Half-a-thousand feet later, we soaked our hot feet in the stream and breathed deeply of the fresh air, cooled by the willows and massive sentinel cottonwoods. The fly box came out, as did a 3-weight rod and a fist-sized reel older than both of us. Most of the flies -- the patterns anyway -- were generations old, a reminder that anglers who waded before us had the right ideas about what attracts a trout's attention...." Dave Buchanan clambers about mountain streams and beaver ponds and advises that an angler can learn as much about reading water from flipping short casts to pockewater as they can from big rivers. In the Grand Junction (Colorado) Sentinel.

This week on MidCurrent fly tier and macro-photography expert Neal Osborn looks at the steps Tarpon Toad author Gary Merriman follows to tie his famous tarpon fly. Showing the exact materials and techniques Merriman uses, it's a handy follow-up to our "Inside the Box" piece about Gary from June.

New on MidCurrent this week: a chapter from Mike Valla's brand new book on Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies. "Quill Gordon" traces the history of the famous eastern fly pattern from the those who first recognized the value of stripped peacock quill to the tiers who turned them one of the most recognized patterns of all time. Valla's insight into the personal whims of the great tiers is accompanied by images of their final product, courtesy of the Catskill Fly Fishing Museum and Center. Even for those who never plan to visit an eastern U.S. trout stream, it's a unique look at fly pattern evolution.

Buy Valla's new Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies on MidCurrent.

Here's an interesting look at how typically reliable hatches can leave anglers scratching their heads. On Colorado's "Dream Stream," even guides are having a hard time taking trout on tricos, even though there are plenty of tricos in the air and on the water. To blame? An abundance of food in other parts, or fishing pressure driving browns to feed at night. "Another school of thought suggests that with an abundance of aquatic vegetation along the river bottom, fish might literally be lurking in the weeds, out of the view of fishermen. With a wealth of other feed in the river, they have no need to come up for the tricos." Karl Licis in the Denver Post.

According to the United Press International, museum officials suspect that thieves of who stole an irreplaceable collection of bird feathers from the Natural History Museum at Tring near London might be supplying fly tiers with the priceless loot. "When museum staff took an inventory, they found 299 birds [missing], all members of brightly colored species such as the bird of paradise from New Guinea and quetzals and cotingas from South America."

Some of us are not natural entomologists. We couldn't find reason to pay attention in biology class, and we have a hard time with minutiae in general. But fly fishing draws us closer to insects and demands at least occasional attention to the details of insect life cycles.

Fortunately, there are folks like Ralph and Lisa Cutter who are both fly fishing school instructors and well-known cinematographers. This week we're happy to help along the bug-challenged in our crowd by highlighting the Cutters' video "The Mayfly," which shows in great detail how burrowers differ from clingers and swimmers from crawlers.

"When fishing egg patterns, I use two different techniques, and I fish both methods using a full floating line. The first method is the standard 'high stick' nymph technique. I use a 9 to 10 foot leader, a few BB-sized split shot (depending on the flow and depth of the water I am fishing) and a single egg pattern." Rich Culver offers a couple of tips on using egg patterns during spawning season on Alaskan salmon rivers. In southwest Alaska's Capital City Weekly.

"Hoppers are also very angler friendly. Unlike one of the late summer's other great hatches, the tiny Tricorythodes mayfly, you don't need perfect vision simply to tie your fly on, much less actually see it on water. Most hopper patterns are tied on a No. 6 or 8 long-shank hook, which is huge for a dry fly." And don't forget that the "hopper-dropper" combination can make a great rig for hot summer days. Lawrence Pyne writes about the joys of summer hopper fishing in the Burlington Free Press.

Ed Engle goes fishing in Rocky Mountain National Park with buddy John Gierach and despite knowing that mountain stream fly selection is simple, stuffs the box with variety anyway. "Over the years I'd managed to jam it so full of flies I couldn't really tell what I had. That doesn't make much sense because when it comes down to it, all you really need for most Colorado small streams is size-16 dry fly and a lightly weighted Gold-ribbed Hare's Ear nymph or wet fly." In the Boulder Daily Camera.

"Clearly you don't need a fully dressed Atlantic salmon fly to catch a fish with a brain the size of a peanut any more than you need a vintage Bentley Continental to buzz down to the corner store for milk and eggs." The Associated Press profiles tier Marvin Nolte, who's been tying professionally since 1993 and whose traditional Atlantic salmon flies sell for $175 each.

The fast-growing corridor between Fort Collins and Denver, Colorado attracts plenty of attention these days, and it's not surprising that the Federation of Fly Fishers wanted to test the waters for potential new participation here. (As a matter of fact, MidCurrent just relocated to the Fort Collins area to be closer to fly fishing's geographic "hub.") The last Conclave I attended was at the public high school in Livingston, Montana, though, and the contrast between an old railroad town and I-25 in Loveland couldn't be more dramatic. Wednesday afternoon Angling Trade's Tim Romano and I found ourselves test-casting fly rods in plushly carpeted 100-yard hallways and being offered beer by carefully groomed caterers. Fortunately we had just spent the morning testing Moffitt Angling's hookless-fly system on the Big Thompson (more on that later) and still enjoyed the memory of soft grass and classic water.

It seems the FFF is not in such a big hurry to move to Loveland after all, said Reporter-Herald writer Steven Weinmeister yesterday. 'We're not going to have an office here for a long time,' said Phil Greenlee, chairman of the board for the federation, which is based in Livingston, Mont." But Loveland is doing a great job of attracting new business even in a down economy, and anyone who tells you that the fishing is better elsewhere may be trying to steer you away from their favorite water.

The highlight of the Conclave this year seems to be the number and variety of fly tiers on hand. (Next year, please put the kids' fly tying workshop at the front of the auditorium rather than in the back corner.) Lots of big name tiers showing their stuff, lots of innovative materials and patient teachers. We're going back to day to look at some clever new glass bead flies that demanded more than 10 minutes of our time.

"Despite the few quirks encountered in the early days of the conclave, Chairman of the FFF Board Phil Greenlee said the organization was optimistic about the results of the conclave and glad to be hosting the event in Loveland. 'We're really delighted to be in Loveland,' he said. 'It's the best facility we've been in.'" Carl McCutchen of the Loveland Connection.

"Some waters, such as the fabled rills of the Catskills have been analyzed by some of the best fly-fishermen. Every free stone turn and slate drop-off on the Beaverkill, Espopus, Neversink, and many others have had tens of thousands of infinitely precise presentations offered there each year." Newspaper publisher Oak Duke describes how minute variations in bug size and color often dictate success on individual streams -- especially eastern streams crowded with "chest-wader pilgrims." In the Norwich Bulletin.

"Our guide scooped the fish up in his big net and plucked out the little fly that had fooled so many trout that afternoon: a pattern of Dye's own design called the Pearl Jam -- nothing but a slim body of pearl flash wrapped onto a curved hook with a tiny tungsten bead at the head, in size 22 (or was it 24?)." Morgan Lyle takes a trip to Colorado and discovers that tiny flies work just as well as they do in New York -- especially if you have a talented guide like Bob Dye spotting fish. In the Schenectady Daily Gazette.

"I'll start at the beginning. We arrived on the river prepared to have a pleasant morning of no-brainer dry fly-fishing to a little size 16 tan caddisfly that had been predictably trickling out of the riffles first thing in the morning. The word was that all you needed was a size 16 or 18 Puterbaugh Foam Caddisfly imitation, and the trout were yours." Fishing the South Platte in Colorado, Ed Engle shows how even the most careful approach to fly selection and stream reading doesn't always solve a mystery. In the Boulder Daily Camera.

A pretty handy and often-forgotten tip comes from entomologist, University of Maine instructor, fishing guide and author Kevin Tracewski in an article by John Holyoke. "'For people who are interested in keeping track of [which insects are hatching], it's as simple as turning on your porch light at night and checking your door screen in the morning,' Tracewski said." Tracewski's comments on hatch timing and "degree-days" are also worth noting. In the Bangor Daily News.

"Feeling the sting, the brown swam back across to the back eddy and sulked. I only had to replace 24 inches of 7X and tie on another Size 22 Trico spinner. No sooner had I accomplished it had the trout drifted back across and began feeding again." Bill Ferris's story about finally catching a large brown reminds us that not all fish are put off by having a few flies tattoo their jaws. In the Cumberland County Pennsylvania Sentinel.

Most of us think of terrestrials only when most of the early- to mid-summer hatches wane, making it easy to forget that unique opportunities can arrive in almost any warm weather. Case in point: a carpenter ant "hatch" that provided lots of action in Estes Park waters last week. As Mike Oatley notes: "Excess queens leave colonies, fly off and drop their wings, with the intent of starting a new colony. For a few days, maybe a week or so, these big, black ants are everywhere, and the trout gorge on them." In the Estes Park Trail-Gazette.

"Even on the darkest night, the angler's eyes become adapted enough after 30 minutes or so that newly hatched insects floating down the river can be seen 10 yards away." Eric Sharp offers several tips on fishing Michigan's Hexagenia hatches, which peak in late June and early July.

"The fly plops on the surface with all the stealth of a plane crash. And like an obese kid headed for fat camp, the trout can't resist one last mega-meal." Mark Freeman describes the five-week frenzy that lasts through the end of June on Oregon's Rogue River. In the Mail Tribune.

Morgan Lyle describes one of his late favorites, the green rock worm -- an imitation of the larval stage of the Ryacophila caddis fly -- as a wonderfully simple tie that seems to work almost everywhere. "Even to a trout that has never seen a real Ryacophila, this little bug must look like something good to eat. In fact, a little pile of them on my kitchen counter, next to the coffee maker, completely grossed out my wife. That's one mark of a killer fly." In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

Mike Conner gives excellent advice on what to stuff in your saltwater fly box for Florida summers, and includes pictures of lots of flies -- everything from clousers to crease flies to coneheads. "On mudding stingrays, it's best to fish a fly that stays up in the water column, preferably something that stands out color-wise in the milky water over the ray's back. Black, brown and purple does this well, and a bit of flash will help." On FloridaSportsman.com.

"As with that 'good walk spoiled' sport [golf], you use your hands, forearms, biceps and back to really cast / drive far, but with close-range bass-fly action near lily pads it's a short cast (like a putt) that will turn the trick. If possible, you want that fly to plop on a lily pad, so that you can gently ease it off, and twitch it above the imagined bass." Steve Hickoff gives an excellent description of what fly fishing for bass is really all about on Fosters.com.

"As one example, when the shadbush (shown) is in blossom along northeastern trout streams, Hendrickson mayflies start emerging. So when I see that tree in flower, I know not only that it's time to get on down to the river but also what fly patterns to take along. " We'll add to John's phenological examples the fact that when the royal poinciana is in full bloom in south Florida, the first really big numbers of tarpon will be moving through. From FieldandStream.com.

Besides offering what are no doubt the first pictures of fly fishing doyenne Joan Wulff casting a tenkara rod, a new post on the Tenkara USA blog includes some intriguing thoughts from tenkara authority Dr. Hisao Ishigaki on how simple trout flies can be: "It should be noted that Dr. Ishigaki is a leading specialist in the field of 'Visual Training," which is used regularly by different groups of individuals, including professional athletes, and he used that to study the vision of fish, particularly mountain trout. Ever since then, he's been tying one fly pattern, which takes seconds to tie, and many times is tied using only black thread from a $1 store, and some rooster hackle."

Morgan Lyle also talks about the talk Dr. Ishigaki gave at the talk at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum Saturday, noting that even Ed Van Put is enamored of the technique: "About 10 years ago, Van Put was given a tenkara rod by a Japanese ambassador and 'just went ballistic with it,' he said. 'I started fishing with it every day, and I've used it every year since.'" (From DailyGazette.com.)

A free MidCurrent t-shirt goes to the first person who shows us an image of someone using (successfully) tenkara in saltwater.

Call them a secret weapon, or refuse to admit that you carry them at all, but I know few top trout guides who don't carry ant patterns in their fly box. For those who want to get serious about tying ant patterns, AntWeb offers high-resolution photos of ants from almost all regions of the world, from the Cyphomyrmex wheeleri of California to the Dolichoderus quadripunctatus of Austria.

John Weiss learns nymph fishing from the pros and discovers that no matter how deadly the fly pattern, confidence is the essential ingredient. "When trout feed on the surface and I have the right fly, I love it. It's elegant -- the line shooting out in long looping arches and firing back, trout slurping the stylish fly, the hook set, the bend of the rod, the tug of the fish. Then there's nymphing." In the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin.

"Only weeks before a sniper's bullet found its way into Sgt. First Class Marvin Johnson's chest in 2006, he had managed to find a fly fishing rod in the middle of Iraq. He would steal away in quiet moments to practice casting -- whipping his fishing line into an empty, sandy lot in Baghdad, slowly pulling it back in." After meeting Marvin Johnson, whose left arm was paralyzed as a result of his wound, fly fisher Jesse Scott of Edmunds, Washington developed a device, the Evergreen Hand, that allows fly fishermen with one hand to tie their own flies. You can see a video of how the Evergreen Hand is used to tie flies on the Federation of Fly Fishers Web site. Chris Fyall writes about the friendship that produced the new tool for disabled fly tiers in The Enterprise.

"The life-like replication of a damsel nymph on it's way into the shallow water to emerge as an adult is obtained by short casts of the fly to about 10 feet from the shoreline. Allow the fly to sink a little and then retrieve it at a steady pace. The fly should travel at about 5 seconds per foot." R.J. Mere provides a good intro to fishing damselfly patterns on SeacoastOnline.com.

For more on damselflies, read Evelyn Spence's "Damselfly Days" on MidCurrent.

This week on MidCurrent we take a look inside the fly box of shop owner and saltwater fly innovator Gary Merriman. Merriman's name isn't immediately recognizable to many anglers. But his now-famous tarpon Toad fly gained him cult status among guides and anglers who've used it for the past fifteen years to fool tarpon.

Although he's been fly fishing the Keys since the early 1970s, it was Merriman's use in the early 1990s of neutral-buoyancy flies that swam -- rather than classic patterns which rose and fell in the water column -- that changed the sport for him and for the many anglers and guides who later picked up on the idea.

It may not be the best way to make extra cash in your spare time, even if you can tie a fly every two minutes. "Gone Fish'n Tackle Company promises to pay 50 cents per fly. But Consumer Reports' Greg Daugherty says here's the catch. 'After you pay for the materials from Gone Fish'n, you'd have to tie more than 30 flies an hour just to make minimum wage,' he explained." Jeff Ehling of Houston's KTRK.

Singlebarbed's Keith Barton says mohair -- Angoran goat fur -- provides a soft but durable base for just about any natural blend of dubbing colors. His instructions on how to use a $15 coffee blender to turn a $1.50 skein of mohair yarn into bags of useful material, and then how to mix it with animal fur, are worth printing and saving. "The weave of the yarn dictates how small you'll have to chop the it to reduce it in your coffee grinder. Sometimes twisted, others are woven - just make sure it's 100% Mohair without the weave being a different material."

Funny how flies can help you remember specific days on the water -- especially when those days turn out to be barn burners. I'll never forget wading around half a dozen other frustrated fly fishers on Montana's upper Missouri and landing fish after fish by carefully drifting biot emergers just beneath the film. At the time I didn't even know what a "biot" was; I just thought it was a fancy scientific contraction of some sort. (A biot is actually a single fiber from the leading edge of a primary wing feather, usually of a turkey or goose for us tiers.) Fortunately my partner had fished the upper Missouri for three days previous and had restocked with biots and biot cripples.

Author Charlie Craven gives detailed instructions on how to tie a biot emerger on his Web site. His pictures clearly show how the biot creates a nicely spiraled rib as it is wrapped forward on the shank.

It may be the fly fishing world's worst-kept secret, but I'm always surprised by the number of anglers I run across who don't have at least a few parachute Adamses in their default fly box. The parachute version has all the advantages of the classic (see Paul Schullery's "A Great Salesman"), but with a highly visible "post," typically of white calf-tail, although some even prefer a fluorescent orange.

As Morgan Lyle notes this morning in "The Guessing Game Begins," the parachute Adams isn't just a great early-season pattern, since it does a credible imitation of blue-winged olives, but it also tops the list of flies for general prospecting. ""It's just such a great all-around imitation of so many different bugs," [the Flyshack's Mike] Bokan said. He noted that parachute-style flies ride with their bellies flush on the surface, and can suggest either a newly hatched dun or a spinner that's already mated and returned to the stream to lay its eggs."

Answering a number of recent questions to MidCurrent about freshwater fly selection, Phil Monahan gathered an impressive list of "Top Ten Fly" choices for this week's "Fly Lines" feature. Brian O'Keefe, Tom Rosenbauer, Buzz Bryson, John Merwin, William Tapply, Bryan Gregson, Zach Matthews, and even Phil himself revealed their favorite ten flies. Very interesting stuff, especially when you consider the range of experiences these "guides, writers and fish bums" have had.

Question: How do you organize your fresh water fly boxes? Do you have a Top-10 list of dry & wet flies that you'll always carry?

Answer: There are lots of ways to organize your flies: by season, by species, by kind of water, by fly style, by color, and so on. Experts will obviously disagree on both of Mark's questions, so here's a sampling of responses from guides, writers, and fish bums of every stripe.

Edward Muzeroll, who in "real" life is a designer for Bath Iron Works, where they may AEGIS-class cruisers and destroyers for the U.S. Navy, spends his free time dressing classic Atlantic salmon flies. You might get a sense of his interest in detail from his photographs of natural and ordinary objects, but he was also kind enough to put a collection of salmon fly images up on Flickr for the world to enjoy. (First seen on the Daily Fly Paper blog.)

In a new podcast, Tom Rosenbauer, author of several notable books on fly fishing techniques, describes how he organizes his dry flies, wet flies, nymphs and "prospecting" flies for trout, and includes suggestions for must-have patterns and types of boxes to store them in.

Excerpt: "I have lots of fly boxes and I store them in a drawer -- not that I'm that organized, believe me. But I have my bass flies, and my steelhead flies and my various types of saltwater flies, just so that I can grab three or four boxes when I go on a fishing trip instead of having to take everything I own. Now there are some crossovers, of course. When I go Atlantic salmon fishing I might grab some steelhead flies, or when I am going steelhead fishing I'll definitely grab my plastic Atlantic salmon flies box just because you never know when you are going to find some steelhead that are in the mood for a small, swinging fly."

"This tough little bug also has the punch to produce two separate broods each year; rare among mayflies, it yields a second hatch almost precisely six months later, in late September and October -- just in case we didn't have enough fun first time around. " The Denver Post's Charlie Meyers says the time is right for BWOs in Colorado.

Anyone who's experienced the joy of teaching a child to tie flies will appreciate Pat Rollins's description of an afternoon spent fly tying with his son. "'Which one of these is the right color gray feather?' he asked as he held up four bags of dyed gray feathers. 'They'll all work,' I replied. 'But if you want to make a gray ghost exactly like the one in your hand, hold it up to the bag and match the color.'" In the Laconia, New Hampshire Citizen.

Marietta, Georgia artist Lincoln Stone doesn't like people walking by his art without stopping. Maybe that's one reason his flies, made of poplar and metal, will appear in a Cabela's showroom in Billings, Montana this year. "Stone began tying the world's largest --- and likely most expensive --- trout flies last year. Each is 4 feet wide and sells for $2,950 (desktop models go for $350). They represent the Royal Coachman and the Grizzly King, two world-famous patterns. The actual flies are about an inch long, but Stone's superflies, created in partnership with Atlanta marketer Warren Grant, fit nicely over a fireplace." Karen Rosen in the Atlanta Journal-Consitution.

PERHAPS YOU'VE HEARD of the George Perry bass record. More than seventy-five years ago, Perry caught a 22-pound, 4-ounce fish on a Fintail Shiner lure made by the Creek Chubb Bait Company. His fish --- landed prior to the existence of the IGFA but recorded by Field & Stream as a world record --- has become mythical in stature, inspiring tens of thousands of bass anglers to try and catch a larger fish, and even becoming the subject of a best-selling book.

Even we've been bitten by the bug. Last summer we did a round trip of some popular south Georgia bass sloughs, throwing hair bugs, poppers, clousers and bunny-fur leeches and having a whale of a time watching big and small bass try and commit suicide over a variety of flies. Along the way, we stopped to buy some bug spray in the tiny town of Crayville and were astonished to find that almost all the local fishermen used fly rods. Casual questioning produced the surprising reason: rumors of a secret fly that had broken Perry's bass record not once, but many times, and that had even thrown long-time friendships and family loyalties into question. The fly, we heard, was about to be the subject of a court case.

Recently Scott Bowen agreed to go to south Georgia for MidCurrent and look further into the story. What he found surprised us, startled us, and confirmed what we had always suspected: that the right flies will out-fish hard-body lures, jerkbaits and even live minnows when it comes to the very biggest warmwater fish.

Read the full story in "Operation Quittman."

One of our favorite books on soft hackle flies (also known as "flymphs," "winged wets," and a variety other names) is in its second edition and shows little signs of aging. The Soft-Hackled Fly, the 1975 original, helped create a resurgence in what many fly fishers had dismissed as an arcane method of tying and presenting flies. Prior to this book, soft-hackles had lost favor to the more "scientific" imitations of dry flies and nymphs. Now few trout shops don't offer at least a few "spiders," "wingless wets" or "soft-hackle emergers." Nemes's revised 2006 book, The Soft-Hackled Fly and Tiny Soft Hackles: A Trout Fisherman's Guide (Stackpole, 221 pages) is an enriched version of the earlier book with more photos and more patterns -- he even tackles tiny midges and tricos -- but the same unforced writing style that makes the book a pleasure to read.

Nemes, predictably, is a purist. (He once responded to someone who asked "Do you ever tie your flies as beadheads?" with ""Why don't you just get a spinning rod?") But he demonstrates that all the careful attention to color, materials, and tying techniques that are so important to dry flies and nymphs matter just as much in what looks to be the very simple construction of soft hackles. Soft-hackles, you might say, are only as simple as you want them to be.

Jack Gartside began tying soft-hackles as a teenager in the 1950s after reading a Ray Bergman article in Outdoor Life magazine titled "Basic Wet Flies for Trout Fishing." He then did the thing that most of us do, which is to tie and fish ever-more-complicated imitations. But he later became attached again to impressionistic flies and even began including soft-hackle concepts in his saltwater patterns.

You can see a great selection of soft-hackle patterns on Hans Weilenmann's Flytier's site. For more on the history of soft-hackles, check out Flymph.com. And for more on the techniques used to effectively fish soft-hackles and other wet flies, read John Likakis's "Swinging Wet Flies" on MidCurrent.

The Soft-Hackled Fly and Tiny Soft Hackles: A Trout Fisherman's Guide on Amazon.

Field & Stream's John Merwin weighs in on a new hookless-fly rig that has recently caused disagreement among even the purists. Does it provide another way to reduce fish mortality, or does it rub against the collective zeitgeist of the sport? Merwin says, "The advantage lies not in hooking more fish but in doing less damage to those you want to release. The mechanics of Moffitt's system are such that it's virtually impossible to hook a fish in the tongue or gullet, inside the gills, or in the eye, as sometimes happens with conventional flies."

On Fly Talk, Tim Romano notes the uncanny success of some fly fishers who outfish the hardware guys when it comes to catching hawg largemouth -- among them, Conway Bowman. "Bowman states, 'I sat there the other day watching a number of bass boats compete by chucking huge jigs along this piece of water for a couple hours. I watched from shore, let them all leave and waded shallow throwing a small Meat Whistle and absolutely cleaned up.'"

Coincidentally, for the past two weeks MidCurrent has had an investigative reporter in the tiny Georgia hamlet of Crayville researching rumors that a group of fly fishers there repeatedly topped the Perry largemouth record (read Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World-Record Largemouth Bass) in the 1960s -- all on a fly that no one will reveal. Be sure to check back in early April, by which time we expect to have the full story and maybe even a picture of the fly.

Ken Allen talks phenology and suggest Maine should follow the lead of other states in touting the dates of fly hatches to grab more business from anglers. "For example, during most years on my home river, a tiny water, red quills (Ephemerella subvaria) start hatching in early afternoon around May 7 and kick off the spring's first consistent dry-fly fishing. It has always astounded me how predictable this hatch can be on this water. The emergence begins when water reaches about 53 degrees Fahrenheit and red trilliums bloom on drab banks before the greening starts." In the Kennebec Journal.

A new podcast by Tom Rosenbauer includes his favorite techniques for using multi-fly rigs to catch trout.

Excerpt: "This is a new craze that is actually an old craze. Back in the nineteenth century, people used only wet flies on multi-fly rigs. They would use as many as fifteen flies on a leader, and they would throw this what they called 'cast' of flies out there and let them swing in the current. Some of the flies would swing under the surface of the water, and some would sort of dap just under the surface of the water. So they were imitating emerging flies and flies skimming across the surface. It was quite effective, but I don't think any of us what to deal with fifteen flies on a leader."

Read more about multi-fly, dropper, or tandem fly rigs on MidCurrent.

I'll never forget the first time I wrapped thread around a bunch of deer hair and spun it around a hook shank. I can still see the hair as it flared into a tightly packed ball that just begged to be trimmed into shape. Of course hair is useful for much more than just bass bugs and water-moving saltwater flies. It's used by expert tiers of caddisflies, stimulators, hoppers, and even comparaduns and small mayfly patterns.

This week on MidCurrent, Charlie Craven lends his experience as a professional fly tier of thirty years to the smart selection of hair. As Craven says, "All hair is good for something, but it may or may not be just right for what you have in mind."

Marcus Schneck reviews the new guide to Pennsylvania hatches just out from Headwater Books. Pocketguide to Pennsylvania Hatches (January 31, 2009, 160 pages) by Charles Meck and Paul Weamer pays close attention to phenology -- the study of periodic natural occurrences, such as blossom appearance and migration -- as background to insect identification and pattern selection. "Individual entries provide essential information for each insect, such as common and Latin names, size range, time and date or emergence, descriptions of all the life stages, behavior and tactics, notes on the streams with premier hatches of that insect, the recipe of materials to use in tying the imitation, and special notes about the insect."

Pocketguide to Pennsylvania Hatches on Amazon.

The widely regarding British tier Paul Little shows Financial Times reporter Bob Sherwood just how hard it is to marry the wings of a classic salmon fly. "Little is well known for tying the classic salmon flies popularised by the Victorians, who made them using all kinds of exotic materials, typically marrying tiny strips of different feathers together to create multicoloured wings. Nowadays, such flies are destined for frames rather than the riverbank. Indeed, I have seen anglers vying to spend several hundred pounds on a Paul Little fly at charity auctions."

Midwest fly tiers have something new to look forward to next weekend, in the form of the first Celebration of Fly Tying show kicking in Wyoming, Michigan (just outside Grand Rapids). Thirty Midwest "yarn spinners," including master tiers Ray Schmidt, Jeff Andrews, Gerry Worden, Chris Soule, Jim Reed, Julie Nielsen, Kevin Feenstra, Dick Walle and Chris Helm will display their works on large-screen TVs and mingle with the curious. Check out a few of the interesting patterns in Howard Meyerson's article in The Grand Rapids Press.

Chester Allen says that all one really needs to do in this whacked out economy is go fish. But that didn't keep him from adding Turbo Popper Foam and vintage camping trailers to his list of new desires. "A famous fly angler named Enrico Puglisi was hawking a new kind of popping bug -- one made with cupped foam sheets that gurgle through the water and would surely seduce summer bass on the little lake near my house. Suddenly, buying sheets of Turbo Popper Foam in every color available -- and every model of Turbo Popper Fly, well, except for the giants designed for sailfish and marlin -- seemed like the thing to do." In the Washington State Olympian.

Neal Osborn offers a rich resource for fly tiers who want to do take better photographs of their flies -- and for photographers who might wish they could tie better. His FlyArtStudio.com was first noticed by Cameron Mortenson of the Fiberglass Manifesto blog: "Check out Neal's Valentine Edition of Art-Fly which is a monthly slide show giving you a glimpse into the photography techniques Neal is experimenting with and flies he has been tying. I am impressed." Also be sure to check out Osborn's Photography articles, which offer interesting guidance on macro photography techniques.

As Morgan Lyle notes, you can waste a lot of time in late winter waiting for the first Quill Gordons to come off on eastern streams. Try dark, slim-bodied stonefly nymphs or very small soft hackles to imitate midges and you may forget all about the large mayflies of spring. "The most common winter stoneflies are slim and dark, in size 14 or so. They really get moving around in February, and by March, it's common to see them walking around on the snow alongside the stream." In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

Glen Davis admits that his Art(iculated) Frog is not "practical" in the purest sense of the word, but it sure is fun to look at and more than a little inspired. Using clipped deer hair, rubber legs and three hooks (two of which are cut at the bend), he's crafted something that makes me want to go hop into the canoe right now. "When I first got the idea it was because of three criteria that I didn't like about typical Deer Hair Frog patterns: Loose feathers, hair and marabou catches air, making them difficult to cast. Feathers do not store well in fly boxes, often coming out broken or bent. The frog patterns looked like good attractor patterns but not very good frog imitations. The Art Frog was my response, the closely clipped and tightly packed deer hair frog does not catch air like its feathery counterparts."

It's no secret that fly tying is emerging as the craft that may keep the fly fishing business afloat in 2009. If you've attended any of the recent shows in California, Colorado or New Jersey, you saw tying demonstrations that were packed to the gills, while the destination and high-end product booths were (with some exceptions) unusually quiet. Is it only about affordability? Or, as Jay Buchner says at the end of this Nick Cunkelman profile, is there something in the art of fly tying that, by bringing folks together, makes it one of the richest parts of the sport?

"'If you're not used to tying with the hook up,' he says during the shrimp fly demonstration, 'then you might stab yourself several times. I've done this many times, and I've even managed to stab myself just now.'" In the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

African poverty and more than a little greed have led to an epidemic in illegal trades, including those for the feathers of endangered birds like the African Gray Parrot. Many buyers acquire contraband feathers unwittingly or under the presumption that the seller is licensed, so it is worth noting that the bad actors behind the Gray Parrot trade apparently don't bother to pluck the birds in question. 353 parrot heads and 2000 tail feathers were recently confiscated from a Cameroon smuggler. "Interestingly a search of ebay, shows that there is a substantial trade in the red feathers of the African Grey. The feathers appear to be used for craft and fly fishing. On 24/01/2009 there were 16 auctions for feathers with one seller parrotinthegarden having 125 feathers on auction, supposedly molted by his African Grey Pandora!" Dave Harcourt writes on the topic in Eco Worldly.

"If I had just two fly designs to use the rest of my life, I'd choose Compara-duns and Cul de Canard (CDC) Emergers, which possess the three critical pluses for making any pattern worthwhile. They work superbly, have the durability to catch myriad fish before wearing out and prove easy to tie." Ken Allen's observations on the effectiveness of dry flies end with some advice about which flies to tie and why. In the Kennebec Journal.

Jack Gartside ties a sand eel pattern -- a super-simple but deadly fly for east coast stripers in the early spring -- in a video from the Fall River, Massachusetts Herald News. "By the next month, stripers are eating the American Sand Lance, better known to the nonscientific fly fishing crowd as a sand eel. Average sand eels are no bigger that a pencil than has been sharpened a few times. Most are even smaller. They are found all over New England waters usually over sandy bottoms. Not known for their speed, they have a novel way to escape danger." In an article by Dave Souza.

"Our hackle for fly-tying in those days didn't amount to much in quality, so this might just be the way for us, in our callow youth, to improve our fly-tying supplies. I told my boss that we wanted a really mature old rooster, with fine, full plumage. He was amused and good enough to oblige us kids and got us the bird we thought we wanted -- that turned out to be one hell of a big, tough, mean and dangerous old bird." Gordon Wickstrom recounts a life lesson learned, courtesy of a mature cock rooster. In the Boulder Daily Camera.

"'Guys are pushing the envelope every time they sit down and tie some of the shiny, high-tech materials on a hook,' said Patagonia representative Jerry Darkes of Strongsville, an angling artist when he slips a bare hook into a fly-tying vise. 'And we're learning something new each day we spend on the rivers.'" In an article noting the explosion of interest in fly fishing for steelhead in northeast Ohio, D'Arcy Egan mentions three patterns that are staples: the black stone nymph, the sucker spawn fly, and the Boa minnow and Boa leech. In the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

You don't have to be a fanatical fly tier to appreciate the classic beauty of Spey patterns. There's something naturally artistic in their design, and much that is mysterious about their effectiveness. This week we offer a video from master steelheader and fly tier Dec Hogan that may help explain why anglers and tiers are drawn to Spey patterns. Watch Hogan explain the steps for tying "The Mahoney" to understand a little of the magic.

Excerpt: "Fly patterns that really get my juices flowing are Spey flies and derivatives of the Spey flies and Dee flies. Long flowing hackles. Simple elegance, if you will. They're just beautiful, beautiful flies. And a gentleman by the name of Syd Glasso several decades ago brought them to steelhead fishing in America."

Even the tedium of tying production flies hasn't caused Southeast Alaska's Trevor Gong to lose his taste for the fly as art. One of his Evening Star salmon flies -- a pattern first published in J.H. Hale's 1892 book How to Tie Salmon Flies -- was just acquired by the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. "'Basically you have a palette of colors, and you just start going for it, like you're painting,' Gong said. 'That's really the part that I like. A lot of these flies have married wings. You can take a feather and cut the barbs off and pull them apart. So you can take a lot of different colors and pull them apart and put them back together just like you're painting with color, as long as the feathers are compatible.'" In the Juneau Empire.

"Today, of course, most people consider nymphing a legitimate way to fish (although it's strictly a method of last resort for some anglers). But some folks who are perfectly comfortable dead-drifting a Pheasant Tail nymph through a deep run consider it 'practically bait fishing' (horrors!) to drift a Glo-Bug through the same spot." Morgan Lyle tries to decide whether producing fish after fish immediately marks a technique as cheating. In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

If glancing at a Glo-Bug doesn't give you a furrowed brow, you can watch Charles Meck tie one on MidCurrent.

This truism has popped up in more than a couple of newspaper columns this month: a fly fisher can never have enough flies. As an alternative to trout-shaped bottle openers, fish mugs and tarpon-scale ties, flies make a pretty handy gift -- they're almost never the wrong size (you just need to find the right fish), they last forever (or until they get eaten), and even if you already have one or two of the patterns, more is almost always better.

That's why we were excited to see that Joe Grobarek re-launched his "Fly of the Month Club" this month with an attractive new Web site. Joe is a former guiding client of mine (and permit addict), who developed the idea of monthly fly subscriptions about 10 years ago. You pay a subscription fee and Fly of the Month Club sends you a handful of flies each month, along with detailed descriptions of the history and use of the patterns. Therein lies the idea for the perfect gift.

As Grobarek says "To a fly angler, flies are the central focus of the sport -- it all begins where the tippet meets the fish. What fly fisher doesn't enjoy touching, looking and studying flies and the entomology behind them?" He also lets gift-givers send a personal message to the recipient. So if you're struggling to figure out what to get an angling buddy this holiday season, or if you're dropping hints to a spouse about what you might want in your stocking, check out www.flyofthemonthclub.com.

"The heart pounds faster when you drop a tiny hook -- with a razor-sharp point -- on the floor underneath the fly-tying desk, and you can't find the little thing. It's a temptation to just let hiding hooks hide, but that makes putting sock-covered feet under the desk an exciting adventure." Chester Allen ponders the inevitable as he considers tying 1,000 flies. In The Olympian.

Chester Allen receives a bequest of winged wet flies that remind him of the value of "old" ideas. "I later learned that some March Browns pop out of their nymphal skin before they reach the surface. At the time, I just wallowed in all those beautiful brown trout walloping my fly. I also learned to always look for unexpected weirdness onstream -- and not forget about the old ways." In The Olympian.

As Nick Mills observes, the question of whether one has too many flies never surfaces in the fly fisher's mind. Instead, he wonders only whether he will have enough boxes to hold them. And he offers this sage advice regarding holiday gifts: "Our dear Saint Nicholas, while a sterling chap in many respects, does not seem to know the difference between a Royal Wulff and a Disco Midge, so if you send a wish-list Poleward, be very specific as to pattern, color and size." In Maine Outdoor Journal.

Egg patterns, as common wisdom has it, are most effective during the fall and early winter when trout and steelhead feel the impulse to gobble up anything resembling roe. But devotees will tell you that they turn heads almost any time of the year. And when you consider that they are among the most easily tied flies, yarn Glo-Bug-style egg patterns are well worth considering as you sit down at the vise this early winter. In this week's video, Charles Meck shows how to tie one of his favorite Glo-Bug-style flies, the "Steeler."

Excerpt: "Two professors from British Columbia did a study in 1973 and they fed trout eggs in a trough, and they put in different color eggs. When they used one color only, they found that trout hit a blue-colored egg before any other color. But when they put a combination of colors in at the same time, trout fed more actively when they were fed black and yellow at the same time."

Morgan Lyle doesn't wrap lead around the shank of his Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear, but instead places it on both sides to give the nymph a flatter, fatter profile. Is it a better fly? Believing probably makes it so. "I've never been a good nymph fisherman, but I've made it a goal to get better. Having a fly I trust helps a lot, because nymphing takes a lot of faith." In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

George Grant, first known for his contribution of a distinct method of weaving hackles in the 1930s, passed away on November 2. Grant was much more than a fly tier. He was an ardent conservationist who contributed greatly to the protection of important rivers and helped ensure that stream access and protection laws were written into the books. His took up the causes of the Big Hole and Clark Fork rivers long before environmentalism was popular in Montana, and the facts that the Big Hole is the longest free-flowing river in Montana and that the Clark Fork was returned to life after years of mining pollution are largely due to his long commitment.

From Wikipedia: "Grant was one of the first anglers to realize that large trout fed primarily beneath the surface on nymphs, and that one needed to imitate and learn to fish this insect-stage if one wanted to consistently catch large trout. Grant's nymphs imitated primarily large stoneflies such as the giant salmonfly (Pteronarcys californicus), which grows up to two inches in length. In recognition for this work he received the Fly Fishing Federation's coveted Buszek Award in 1973."

"Color is a big consideration when choosing or making flies, and yellow is a time-honored fish catcher. The most obvious example is the Mickey Finn streamer, with a silver tinsel body and a bucktail wing in yellow-red-yellow. The Humpy is a classic attractor-style dry fly that's most often tied in yellow. And I've had great success on autumn browns with a yellow Woolly Bugger." In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette, Morgan Lyle points out that yellow is popular not just among newsstand browsers but big trout as well.

Fly fishing writer Morgan Lyle talks about the second annual issue of Hatches magazine, which launched in 2007 under the direction of Will Mullis and which features Al and Gretchen Beatty as editors. "Mullis has stocked the first two issues of Hatches with fresh, beautifully illustrated pieces on trout flies and how to fish them. Chris Del Plato's exhaustive piece in the 2007 issue on tying the Carrie Stevens-style streamer flies from the Rangeley Lakes region of Maine, most notably the Grey Ghost, sent me scurrying to my Tupperware bins to rummage for golden pheasant crest and wood duck." In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

The Foxboro, Massachusetts Bass Pro Shop gets this week's award for the most inventive way to get folks interested in fly tying. Personally, I'd love to see a surgeon-controlled robot out-tie the experts, if only to feel a bit more confident during my next visit to an operating room. But I'm not so sure a robot can transfer the mojo necessary to make a fly great -- even if for $1.6 million you'd think it should be part of the deal.

Not that anyone can afford to tie this fly -- or would want to, given the heavy metals content -- but at least now we know that the editors at the big tech blogs spend time trolling fly tying boards.

"It's the circle of life, really: man drops iPhone in river while fishing, iPhone dies, iPhone is torn apart, iPhone becomes fishing lure, iPhone catches dinner. Life goes on." Via Gizmodo.

"The strategy was simple: Cast flies to the bank or to nearby log structure. Hit the dark water and fishy places under overhanging trees. Then impart a realistic action to the fly by stripping and pausing so the fly suspends in the current imitating a distressed minnow." One of the best parts of this article by Howard Meyerson is the photo of the smallmouth flies he and guide Leo Wright were fishing with: Dahlberg Divers, Clousers, and sharp-looking microfiber CK Minnows. On MLive.com.

New on MidCurrent: Norm Crisp's video on "Collecting Stream Life for Better Nymph Fishing" is filled with tips for capturing subsurface bugs and improving your fly selections.

EXCERPT: "When you pull up that rock, if there is any current at all, as you pick it up and turn it over and move it around, suddenly those insects that were crawling around are going to be subject to far more current than they see in the stream and they're going to float away. You're not going to see what's really out there. So what we always like to do is to take a little kick net, put it down in the stream, reach upstream ahead of it, move the rocks around as much as you can, and let everything wash down into the screen."

As Morgan Lyle notes, before fishing with a single dry fly became the ultimate test of trout-fishing skill, tandem rigs were commonplace. While fishing the West Branch of the Delaware, he becomes yet another convert. "Blue-winged olives with size 18 bodies and tall smoky wings were on the water, but I didn't see any of them taken by trout. I became convinced that the rises were being caused by trout feeding on emerging mayflies approaching, but not yet in, the surface film." On New York's DailyGazette.com.

Pick any river lined with grassy banks and it's hard to go wrong with hopper flies in the heat of summer. Add wind and you have one more ingredient in what can be fabulous mid-day fishing. But as Eric Sharp points out, there are still a couple of things you can do wrong. One is to ignore the local hoppers' colors. The other is to choose the wrong size. "One mistake many anglers make is the same one they make with Hexagenia mayflies -- using imitations that are far too big. If you hold a grasshopper up to a hook gauge, you see that even the biggest are usually No. 2-4 in length, and most are about 4-8. You don't have to exaggerate the size to get fish interested in hoppers -- the insect equivalent of a submarine sandwich." In the Detroit Free Press.

Ed Engle writes of the awe inspired by Tricorythodes swarms. "What really distinguishes the tiny trico is that it hatches almost every morning from mid-June to September in astronomical numbers. Or more precisely, the females hatch every morning in astronomical numbers and are then joined by the males, who have already hatched in astronomical numbers overnight and are waiting patiently in the grass for mates. Once the females get into the air, they join up quickly with the males in what are called mating swarms." In the Boulder, Colorado Daily Camera.

Steelhead bum Rob Brown gets an unpleasant visitor who leaves behind a fly with seemingly magical abilities to get trout to bite. "As the house filled up with smoke, Hans told us of his numerous angling achievements and of the laudatory reviews they had received in the European angling press. It was obvious he'd read these reviews more than once and that he took them very seriously." On British Columbia's TeranceStandard.com.

How to tie a Klinkhammer Special.

"Edward R. Hewitt is credited with modifying an existing spider pattern in the 1920s into what he called the 'Neversink Skater Fly' (named after his home river, the Neversink in New York). Essentially all he did was reduce the existing spider pattern, which had a tail and some other extraneous parts, to its fundamental elements, which were two extra-long, stiff rooster spade hackles tied onto a fine wire, short-shank, size 16 hook." Ed Engle gives talks about Edward R. Hewitt's popularization of spider patterns and offers tips on how to tie and fish them correctly. In the Boulder, Colorado Daily Camera.

"The silt-laden water clears and as water levels fall, temperatures begin to rise. When the water temperature hits a steady 55 degrees, a massive bug known by entomologists as Pteronarcys californica -- the 'Giant Salmonfly' -- crawls out from underneath the rocks it has lived under for several years. It climbs out of the water where it breaks free of its aquatic body, sprouts wings and a brilliant orange torso and flies into the bushes for a massive mating ceremony." Alex Taylor writes about the massive stonefly emergence in Colorado's Black Canyon National Park.

But we particularly like the fly recommendation given by Nam Le in his report on the Cimarron Creek Web site:

"Went to the forks on Friday. It was great. Went into ute on monday. It was great. Went into duncan wednesday. It was great. Everything on top and there was a lot of big fish feeding on top. Just get down there, but load up on flies first. Flies/Methods Used: Chunks of foam. Tattered pieces of hair. Unraveled pieces of hackle. Anything that resembles a stone."

For a truly artful perspective on the annual event, check out Felt Soul Media's trailer from "The Hatch."

As the Hex hatch makes its annual march across the U.S., a spate of articles on how best to match these giant flies made their appearance this past week. First there was Eric Sharp telling folks not to tie their flies too big: Hexagenia limbata are not the size of small airplanes.

Then Ken Allen wrote a characteristically detailed piece in the Kennebec Journal on hex hatches and how they fit into the Maine fly mix, where they are often confused with green drakes: "The sole big deal about misnaming the bug strikes anglers with entomological knowledge as obvious. A true green drake (Ephemera guttlulata) is a different size and color than a Hex, so if you tell a fly fisher - say from Pennsylvania or even Portland - that he or she should bring Green Drake dry flies to a Hex hatch, the chosen pattern will be smaller and much greener than a Hex imitation."

Finally Paul Reynolds queries Eastern Hatches author Tom Fuller, whose answer on differentiation makes it apparent why the mistake is often made. "The differences between the Eastern Green Drake (3 tails on the dun) and the Hex hatch (two tails on the dun) are at best subtle. The Eastern has mottled wings, the Hex doesn't have the mottling, but does have veins. Coloration and size really depend on the waters where they're found and the fertility. The real difference is the double gills found on body segment #1 on the Hex. The Eastern nymph has single gills on body segments 1 through 7."

As if standing in water up to your navel at midnight weren't enough to keep the mind agile.

Artist and author James Prosek is enticed to fish for toothy machaca on Costa Rica's Rio Nino with an unusual proposition: they will use flies made to imitate nectar-rich flowers. "Gorinsky's first imitations of the flowers, tied with various dyed materials on hooks, were failures. They became waterlogged quickly and sank, or they did not have a convincing-enough profile on the water to fool the fish. But after much experimentation, he found the perfect material to tie his flower flies -- the bristles of cheap plastic dust brooms he bought from children on the street in San José, the nation's capital." In The New York Times.

"A Joe's Hopper was tied to my three-foot leader that tested eight pounds. This is no place for delicacy: keep the leader short and stout. Wispy leaders seldom can keep a big night-feeder out of the log jams or sweepers, and big fish are strong and heavy in the current." Dave Richey hunts down a hex hatch on Michigan's AuSable. In the Traverse City Record-Eagle.

Charles Meck offers an excellent rundown of trico (Tricorythodes) hatches in the U.S., including listing the biggest seasonal activity and the best places to find and fish tricos on both sides of the country. Here's an interesting tidbit on why you'll spend most of your time matching the olive-bodied female dun rather than the males: "Have you ever seen a male Trico dun? If you have you probably haven't seen many. Why? A few decades ago Robert Hall conducted a study of the Trico for his doctoral requirements. In that study he found that male duns often emerge from 10 P.M. until 2 A.M. So, don't worry about matching the male dun. The olive-bodied female dun emerges from 5 A.M. to 11 A.M. depending on the weather conditions and the time of year."

Tricos begin coming off earlier in the U.S. east than they do out west, and the challenge often becomes finding cool-enough air temperatures, as Bill Ferris points out on Cumberlink.com. "Unlike many other mayfly hatches the trico hatch begins along about July 5th and on any given morning until the first hard frost the little mayflies flutter over the riffles on many of our trout streams and trout rise to eat them. I'm told that the first hatching insects are about a size 20 and as the season warms through summer the size diminishes to about a 24 or 26. I can't see to tie a size 26 fly on my tippet so the smallest I tie is a size 24 but mostly I compromise and simply tie 22's."

Arkansas guide John Berry says that when it comes to high water, a San Juan worm and an egg pattern are perennial favorites among knowledgeable anglers. Besides, they are both incredibly easy to tie. "San Juan worms are the easiest fly there is to tie. They are essentially a strip of ultra chenille lashed to a hook. I tie two versions, a low water and a high water. I tie the low-water version on the Mustad 37160 hook (English bait hook). This is a heavy wire, wide-gapped hook that has an incredible amount of holding power. The hook is so heavy that it sinks like a rock particularly in the larger sizes. I tie them in size 8 and 16." In the Baxter Bulletin.

"Not to sound unappreciative, but it looked a little, well, effeminate to me with it's pink chenille body and gold ribbing. But I didn't say so to Gifford. In fact, I tied it on to my tippet as a gesture of appreciation for his thoughtfulness. I knew that if past was prologue, I'd snag the little, limp-wristed pink job on an alder bush by the third or fourth cast anyway." V. Paul Reynolds's doubts about his friend's fly are erased by ravenous brook trout. On RedOrbit.com.

The legendary Hexagenia limbata hatches that cause midwestern snowplows to come out of hibernation and make bridges unsafe in early summer are also one of the least predictable "macro events" in fly fishing. The only real answer, according to Eric Sharp, is to fish more. "At one point, a fish started rising closer than the length of my nine-foot rod, and when I dapped four feet of leader on the water I got an instant strike from an 18-incher. I'll never forget that night. However, I would rather forget the 200 or so other nights when the Hex hatch produced a few trout of moderate size, and the 100 nights when I got absolutely nothing." In the Detroit Free Press.

Looking for something to occupy your time during the runoff hiatus? Try damselflies, says Charlie Meyers. "In that eternal search for evidence of a just and beneficent God, we present for your consideration a simple insect, the damselfly. At precisely the time when rivers are overflowing their banks and the high country remains wedged in snow and ice, this compassionate being sends relief to frustrated fishermen in the form of what may be the perfect bug." In the Denver Post.

One of the truisms about fly fishing is that it provides fodder for endless debate, self-limitation being inherent in the sport. Often the focus of disagreement is whether or not a particular piece of gear, technique, or fly is legitimate. Since there is no central governing body of all things fly fishing, no rules committee or international court of appeals, and since fly fishers are probably more inventive than most other sorts of anglers, every so often the classicists rise up in anger over the introduction of a "new way." And that, many would say, is how it should be.

So it is with the latest fashion in England, which involves the use of "blobs," balls of fiber that are stripped through the water and have upped the catch rate considerably on English lakes. (You can see blob fly examples here and here.) "England fly-fisherman Jeremy Lucas said while the use of the blob and the booby - a brightly coloured lure with polystyrene 'eyes' - could encourage novices, it was 'repulsive' to see them used by experienced fishermen. He said: 'Most of us would wash our hands of it. It reflects fly-fishing in a very bad light.'" Keith Perry in the U.K. Telegraph.

On Oregon's Lower Deschutes and other western rivers, anglers wait for the annual phenomenon of the salmonfly hatch, which typically lasts only a couple of weeks. Paul Hansen, owner of the Riffle Fly Shop in Warm Springs and Bend, gives his advice on how to fish the early emergence of salmonflies, which, unlike mayflies, escape the water by crawling to the edges of rivers and streams. "'Same as every year, the first fish to look for (salmon fly) adults is in the big grass-lined banks and overlaying tree banks,' Hansen said. 'The riffles don't fish as well early on. That's the main mistake people make. Salmon flies crawl out and turn into adults, and fish don't see them until their emergence. The fish out in the middle aren't seeing any of them.'" Mark Morical in the Bend Bulletin.

In his fly box, Craig Mathews keeps a bunch of "good luck" flies that were tied by friends who have since passed away: Dan Callahan, Charlie Brooks and others. Steve Huff keeps a fly tied by his son Chad at age three. In his box, Arkansas guide John Berry had secured a fly tied by Chuck Davidson, "the river keeper of the North Fork." It was his only connection to an important mentor. But one day he just had to tie it on.

"To many trout anglers attuned to the cyclical rhythms of the streams, blooming lilacs herald the imminent arrival of the tiny yellow sulfur mayflies that are the third big hatch of the season after the popcorn caddis and Hendricksons." Eric Sharp notes the coincidence of lilacs blooming and little sulfurs appearing at late afternoon in Michigan, replacing the frequent Hendrickson spinner falls. In the Detroit Free Press.

Ever wonder how fly uber-vendor Umpqua decides which flies will make the catalog in any given year? Charlie Meyers explains in the Denver Post. "'We get many hundreds of submissions from all over the world from people who think they've invented something new,' [Bruce] Olson said of a process that ends with a sort of summit meeting that includes sales representatives from across the nation. 'They all get to vote on what they think will sell best in each geographic territory. A lot of things go into each decision.'"

"Mayfly nymphs live a life in the cold, rocky dungeon of the floor of a trout stream only to emerge for a few brief moments of glory before breaking down into their elemental parts. But the stillborns never make it clear of the water to enjoy that shining moment in the silver air. Instead, some brief bout of bad luck at a crucial moment changes their destiny." An unnamed but clever writer talks about stillborns and how to imitate them in the Cadillac, Michigan Cadillac News.

"Interestingly, Red Quill names the fly that imitates the male and Hendrickson the female. The two genders look so different from one another that fly rodders use a different imitation. The male has a mahogany-colored, slender body and the female pinkish and chunky. Both have smoky-gray wings, tails and legs." Ken Allen offers a primer on the first dry flies of spring, including insight into the appearance of Red Quills: "Interestingly, Red Quill names the fly that imitates the male and Hendrickson the female. The two genders look so different from one another that fly rodders use a different imitation. The male has a mahogany-colored, slender body and the female pinkish and chunky. Both have smoky-gray wings, tails and legs." On MaineToday.com.

The BBC is often lauded for its nature cinematography, and David Attenborough's "Life in the Undergrowth" is a perfect example of why. Take a look at the detailed camera work in the segment in which they capture the life cycle of mayflies on video.

More information on "Life in the Undergrowth" can be found on the BBC Web site.

The Hare's Ear nymph is one of those patterns that belongs in any trout fisher's fly box, in almost any season. The folks at The Hollywood Casting Couch demonstrate -- in a decidedly un-classic atmosphere -- the key steps in tying and finishing this useful pattern. This tying clip is from "Fly Tying: The Beginning" (The Hollywood Casting Couch, 2007, 2 hours and 35 minutes), a two-DVD set that teaches several classic patterns, including the Black-Nose Dace, Hare's Ear Nymph, Hendrickson, Caddis, and the Black Leech. As Fly Tyer editor David Klausmeyer said in his review of this DVD set: "If I were giving away awards for the best fly-tying DVDs, then 'Fly Tying: The Beginning' would walk away with the trophy for Learn While You Laugh...."

Sometimes it takes only a glance to know a fly is a killer pattern. So it is with the Blackus Biggisus, a nymph tied originally by John Fennick and later modified by Jeff Phelan of Westbrookville, New York. "'John would fish the Blackus Biggisus as a single fly, casting it across and downstream,' Phelan said. 'Then he'd just jerk the rod and jig the fly. I always fish it pretty much the same way but cast it upstream and across and let it sink. I always weight my Biggisus heavier than John did,' Phelan said." On RecordOnline.com.

In the Detroit Free Press, Eric Sharp says forget about trying to match the indecipherable early season hatch -- carry little black stoneflies, BWOs, Hendricksons, some caddis and a few Adamses and you'll be just fine. "If it turns out that the river you fish requires an imitation of a bow-legged yellow pine borer in size 21, you can buy some at the local fly shop. Otherwise, get out on the stream, see what's hatching and pull something out of your box that's close."

"She was fishing a green butt (my favorite soft-hackle pattern that imitates the emerging rhyacophilia caddis that was coming off then). She also was immediately into fish and was really whacking them. In fact, if the truth be known, she was outfishing me (it happens fairly often). About that time, Lori hit a big fish. I looked over and her Winston rod was bent nearly double." Arkansas guide and fly tier John Berry discovers that giving away all of his flies comes with a price higher than simply an empty box. In the Baxter Bulletin.

Jarkko Suominen of Finland took first place in the national competition, which was also open to the teams competing in the World Fly Fishing Championships that start today. Second place went to Sando Soldarini of Italy while Suominen's teammate Janne Pirkkalainen was third. Judges also gave special commendation to ten-year old Jacob Bond from Lake Rotoma, who has been tying flies for just a year.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Author and soft-hackle fly expert Sylvester Nemes ties the Tup's Indespensible, a fly first popularized in England in the late 1800s and early 1900s but still a terrific pattern.

Morgan Lyle found that with less time on his hands, he made some obvious choices about which flies to tie -- choices he probably should have made earlier. Among the decisions: tie more caddisflies, and tie smaller. "Sure, the mayfly is the 'fly' in fly-fishing. But as Rick Hafele, in his recent excellent book, Nymph-Fishing Rivers and Streams, writes 'there are more species of caddisflies than all the mayflies and stoneflies put together . . . you will encounter caddisflies, often in abundance, in just about any water you fish.' It’s time to tie some rock worms, Elk-Hair Caddis and soft-hackles." On DailyGazette.com.

The truth is that 'bug Latin' is really a misnomer. The classification of insects by genus, family and species really has nothing to do with classical languages; it was just a convenience for scientists (particularly Carolus Linnaeus) who needed to make up a unique name for every living thing a few hundred years ago.

And that really is why scientific bug names are important. It's the only way to refer to one specific sulphur or blue-winged olive, for example, as being different from another. But as Rick Hafele points out in "Basic Bug ID, Part I: Mayflies," the minute differences between bugs are mostly impractical to learn. More important is knowing what a bug is likely to be, based where it is and what it is doing. Only then should you break out the hand lens, and if you do, this article will give you the details you need to impress your friends (and antagonize your enemies). New on MidCurrent.

When Ray Schmidt let us peek inside his fly box last week (see "Inside the Box: Ray Schmidt"), we got curious about sculpin flies and who was tying effective imitations. We found André Brun's clever patterns, developed for Norwegian rivers and lakes, in the midst of our search. Brun uses Antron bodies and grizzly marabou dubbing to form the thick-bodied patterns.

Arkansas guide Duane Hada also wrote an interesting introduction to sculpins on his Web site. His advice on presentation is specific, and based on sculpin behavior: "Once I sight a target fish I cast well away and up current of the fish as not to spook him with the entry of the fly. I also want to have enough space to properly retrieve the fly. I allow the fly to settle to the bottom; hook up, by design, often will keep the fly motionless for some time depending on the spookiness of the fish. I then start crawling the fly slowly across the bottom toward the window of the target fish."

HERE'S A QUIZ: If big trout eat both large flies and tiny midges, how do you know which to carry in your fly box?

a. I carry both; you never know what you are going to come across.
b. I look at the food sources in the waters I'm fishing.
c. Not an issue -- I carry a dozen fly boxes in a vest the size of a type I Offshore Personal Flotation Device.
d. I use only flies that are enormous, because little fish can't eat them.

All of those answers are valid, of course. But if you are long-time Michigan fly fisher Ray Schmidt, there is only one correct choice: d. This week Schmidt, who owns the venerable Schmidt Outfitters in Wellston, Michigan and who has been guiding area rivers for decades, shares his personal fly box with MidCurrent.

If there is a "classic" largemouth bass fly, the Gerbubble Bug -- originally a square-bodied cork or balsa-wood fly developed by Tom Loving for fly fishing bass in the tidal waters of the Chesapeake -- would get many votes for the top position. But writer Amy Hotz is stymied in her search for the Bartlett's version, which is mentioned by Lefty Kreh in his 2004 book Fly Fishing for Bass. "My search for the elusive Bartlett's Gerbubble Bug continues. So far, I've visited every outfitter in Wilmington. I've traveled to Myrtle Beach and given the Bass Pro Shop the third degree. I've searched the library and the Internet and enlisted others to do the same. Still, no Gerbubble. Not even a recipe to make one." In North Carolina's Star News Online.

Well, Amy, we suggest noting William Tapply's description of the original Gerbubble's features -- hackle feathers inserted into slits cut along both sides of the cork body so that the fibers stuck out perpendicular to the hook shank, creating the effect of dozens of legs kicking at the water’s surface -- and substituting marabou for the hackle feathers. Then take the recipe to a handy fly tier who should be able to whip one up in about 5 minutes. It doesn't answer the question of why you can't find a commercially tied Bartlett's Gerbubble, but it's guaranteed to feed your addiction.

For more on the history of bass bugs, see "From Bobs to Bugs" on MidCurrent.

In northern climes, those of us who have been trout fishing all winter are ready to say goodbye to the midge and hello to a nice, fat mayfly. But anyone who fishes spring creeks and tailwaters will remind you that midges make up an important part of the trout's diet throughout the year.

This week on MidCurrent we add a new video for anyone wanting to add midges to their fly box, Charles Meck tying the Zebra Midge. It's one of the simplest ties there is, but in the past decade or so the Zebra Midge has proven itself in all sorts of water, in all kinds of conditions.

Chester Allen is prompted to try a ninety-year-old pattern, the yellow Knudsen Spider, after finding that all the new flies he's tied stopped working on sea-run cutthroats. "The fly, which was first tied by an Everett angler named Al Knudsen, has fooled fish since the 1920s. But I forgot about this terrific fly during the past few years -- mostly because I started tying sea-run cutthroat flies to match the little fish and crustaceans in Puget Sound." In The Olympian.

"The development of what became known as the gaudy salmon fly is attributed to Irish fly tyers who were pioneers in the development of bright and complicated salmon patterns. These Irish tyers took advantage of silk, silver and gold tinsel and rare feathers imported for the millinery trade." Don MacLean gives short history lesson on the origins of the Atlantic salmon fly in Canada's Cape Breton Post.

Arkansas guide John Berry was first turned on to soft hackles by author and tier Sylvester Nemes, whom he happened upon in West Yellowstone pizza joint. He offers some commentary on their use in this morning's Baxter Bulletin.
"The soft hackle is most effective when used as a searching pattern. Use it to cover large sections of water, when you do not know exactly where the trout are. I look for broken water, particularly below rapids. I face downstream and cast downstream to the right at a 45-degree angle to the bank. As soon as the fly hits the water, I strip it back a foot or so to sink the fly into the film. I keep my rod tip low to the water and track it as it swings in the current."

My first exposure to flies tied on jig hooks was while casting oversized flies to snook. I was impressed with two things: the way the light wire of the hook made even four-inch flies easy to cast, and the hook-up rate. At first glance the 60-degree bend behind the hook eye makes flies look odd, like something that fell out of a hardware-chucker's Plano. But indeed they are castable, and very fishy. In fact while jig hook flies got their start with West coast anglers, many of the top permit guides in the Keys now tie their flies on variations of the bent-shank design.

Henry Cowen walks us through the beginnings of jig hook use by fly tiers and shows several patterns that have proven themselves effective not just for stripers, but for just about any saltwater fish that will fall for a streamer. Read "The Jig Is Up" on MidCurrent.

Though these patterns got their start on steelhead streams, a Times Herald-Record columnist notes that flies imitating sucker spawn can work on virtually any water with a population of suckers, even Catskill streams. "Here's what [guide Ron] Bierstine has to say about this peculiar but effective fly pattern: 'It was created to imitate sucker spawn in the inland streams which trout feed upon,' he said. 'It's perhaps the ultimate egg pattern. A small, soft, silhouetted fly that looks snotty in the water, not hard and unnatural. Drifts well and traps small air bubbles.'"

As a preview to his appearance in Ohio, A. K. Best gave Cleveland Plain Dealer writer D'Arcy Egan some insight into his sometimes contrarian take on the sport and how it is practiced. Among the tidbits: use a rod that allows you to land a fish quickly, even if you are fishing a small stream, and use common sense when tying mayflies. "Fly tiers leave a lot of stuff out, trying to match an insect perfectly. But they don't. Most every mayfly has a darker thorax than abdomen, but most flies don't reflect that. And they don't tie the wings long enough. Mayflies don't read proportion charts. Their wings are going to be as long as nature wants them."

You can also read A. K.'s thoughts on basic casting techniques on MidCurrent.

"I always start my winter fly-tying frenzy by creating the flies I’ll need in late February and all through March on the Yakima River. Blue wing olive mayflies hatch in waves — even during snowstorms — and I need lots of flies to match this hatch." Chester Allen explores needs versus wants as he fills the dark winter hours tying and getting ready for the first fishing days. In The Olympian.

In a bit of a muddle after ringing in the new year? Go for the fur cure. Mark Vagn Hansen offers a grub/shrimp pattern guaranteed to produce a baleful stare from any of your doggy friends. "Notice that puppet hair is best and that you want all the hair - guard hairs and underfur. The long often soft guard hairs combine well with the finer and often lighter underfur. Use a coffee grinder to mix the different materials and be careful not to overload it with too much material at once." On GlobalFlyFisher.com.

"My clients frequently ask how a fish can see and be caught by such a small fly. You have to consider a full-grown man eating M&Ms. They are small in relation to his total body size but he eats several of them at a single setting. Midges are the most available food source at certain times and the fish eat a lot of them." Arkansas guide John Berry suggests a few different techniques for feeding trout one of their favorite wintertime foods. In the Baxter Bulletin.

"Don’t try dying your own fly tying materials. If you can’t resist, know that the most easily dyed color is purple. It is achieved by trying to dye something black." Larry Myhre offers several bits of essential advice for the dedicated fly tier -- all with tongue firmly planted in cheek. In the Souix City Journal.

How to know without a trace of doubt that your recently tied fly is a good imitation? A spider crawls across the desk and steals it. Welshman Moc Morgan illustrates his column on flies with the example.

There are probably as many midge aficionados in the state of Colorado as in any other region of the world, so looking at the variety of choices made by anglers who swear by these tiny flies can be educational indeed. "As if you really needed to be reminded, all of us carry too many flies in our vests, even in the winter when nothing is hatching. Honestly, however, a handful of midge patterns chosen carefully for shape, color and size will catch 99 percent of the trout." Dave Buchanan gives a list in the Grand Junction, Colorado Daily Sentinel.

Why will a trout eat a fly that looks to us like a bare hook? Think “negative match.” John Merwin comments on a trout's willingness to ignore hooks while searching for its food of choice. On MidCurrent.

"Originally tied by Frank Sawyer, the Pheasant Tail Nymph is one of the oldest of modern nymphs. A few good wrinkles have been added over the years, such as the peacock thorax, optional beadhead, etc., but when you peel them away, it's still Sawyer's elegantly simple, generically suggestive, devastatingly effective nymph." Westfly.com delivers the recipe for the very popular and important nymph with typical care and detail.

After catching a nice landlocked salmon on a wet fly last week, Maine blogger Nick Mills asks why wet flies are so often overlooked. A bit of political trivia is attached to his sample fly, the "Parmachene, named for the secluded and very private water where President Dwight Eisenhower cast into the waters below Little Boy Falls to catch one of the many trout that had been dumped there in advance of the presidential rustication." On Mainetoday.com.

Carl Hiaasen is not your typical bonefish fanatic. For one thing, he is best known as a fiction writer, not a fly fisher. His name often appears when something ludicrous happens in Florida environmental politics, because he is outspoken about preserving what remains of the state's resources. But backstage he is, as one top guide noted, "one of the fishiest anglers out there."

This week Hiaasen shares the contents of his fly box with MidCurrent readers. How he describes his collection -- as a "horrendous mess" -- says a lot about how he manages to catch so many fish: he refuses to obsess over details, and he picks fly patterns based on experience and instinct rather than their popularity.

"The fly floats like a cork because its underbody is a loosely bound clump of elk hair. A vertical elk hair post makes it highly visible and is wrapped with brown or grizzly hackle. The fly's outer body is dubbed with glittery 'Ice Dub.'" CMO author Charles M. Obermeyer, of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, describes the durable, high-floating caddis fly that uses synthetic and natural materials to make it a standout in swift mountain waters. Ed Dentry in the Rocky Mountain News.

It would be hard to think of a fly pattern that is more versatile than the Muddler Minnow. Most of that utility, of course, comes from the fact that spun deer hair can be crafted to produce almost any profile of any prey that fish eat, from frogs and crabs to caddisflies and sculpins.

But it's also no secret that spinning deer hair is considered a secondary skill by most fly tiers. It's enough unlike other skills in fly tying that many of us never try it, which is a shame because it is both easy and rewarding. This week on MidCurrent John Likakis gives us a head start on deer hair flies and the Muddler in particular. In "Muddlers Made Easy," he tells what to look for in materials and how to tie both basic and streamer-style versions of this classic fly.

While it may be true that salmonflies share something in common with cinder and palolo worms, pass crabs, guppy hatches, and trico spinner falls -- namely the ability to thrash us into a Quixotic frenzy -- it's also true we'd rather be there than not. "Trouble with big, juicy flies is that they're like all those other larger-than-life events we dream about, yet only seldom are allowed to touch. Something generally gets in the way: Too much sun, howling wind, water the color of a mocha milkshake. We get there too early or too late, or find a small army bivouacked in the only spot where there's real action." Charlie Meyers in the Denver Post.

We often get inquiries from readers who are looking for advice about what they should put in their fly box for a specific region of the U.S. If they are planning to fish in Idaho, Oregon, Washington or Montana, we almost always include a suggestion to look at Westfly.com's detailed hatch charts. Although they provide the most detail for Oregon waters, the Westfly charts are a good start if you want an overview of the insects and associated patterns in each state. To get to the charts, click on the opening photo, then on a state, then on "Hatches" in either the top navigation or the text.

Alastair Robertson manages to throw in a bit of comic relief as he rails against the new Scottish law prohibiting fly tiers from using the fur from endangered animals. "If the rule extends to badger sporrans then I can tell you that Billy Connolly is in trouble. I once saw him narrowly avoid castration at a Highland games when a Dandidinmont, a breed of dog bred to kill badgers, had to be hauled back into the crowd before it savaged Connolly while he judged the junior Highland dancing in his kilt and badger." On Scotsman.com.

"The western terrestrials are, as a group, totally different. They often are made of foam with rubber legs and almost always have some sort of quick sight on them. They are oversized and resemble nothing I have seen in nature. When I first saw them, I snickered and passed on by." Arkansas guide John Berry discovers that the big, gaudy flies that stuff fly bins out west are effective on just about any water where trout feed on terrestrials. In The Baxter Bulletin.

"The Deschutes River boasts some of the best fly-fishing in North America. Anglers from all over the world travel to Central Oregon in search of the river's bounties of steelhead and trout. And late spring marks one of the best times to fish – when the salmon flies are hatching." For NPR, David Welch spends time on the Deschutes chatting with a salmon fly devotee, Jamie Zartler.

"Stonefly hatches on western rivers are like that: Covered with muddy water one year, launching a surface onslaught by hungry trout the next. So it is on the upper Colorado, which harbors a dense population of these oversized bugs, along with all the water vagaries to make a successful fishing scenario a sometime thing, maybe two out of five years if we're lucky." Charlie Meyers writes about the serendipity of chasing the stonefly hatch in Colorado in the Denver Post.

Dave Wolf makes an interesting suggestion in his coverage of the frenzy surrounding the annual green drake hatch in Pennsylvania: watch for the concurrent hatch of smaller bugs that will often be the target of the bigger fish. "Last but not least be vigilant for a 'masking hatch,' a smaller sized fly like the sulphur that is hatching at the same time the drakes are. If you want to take a trout on a drake imitation, keep on fishing. If you want to take more trout and large trout, switch over to the smaller pattern." In Pennsylvania's Lebanon Daily News.

"Charles R. Meck's supervisor at Penn State thought Meck was crazy when he retired in 1987 after only 25 years with the university. 'I quit the day I received my retirement health care benefits,' said Meck, who lives in Pennsylvania Furnace. 'My vice president asked me, "What are you going to do?" " Eric Smith profiles author Charles Meck, whose extraordinary knowledge of Pennsylvania hatches and trout techniques led to a second career in writing, for Pennyslvania's CentreDaily.com. Smith mentions Meck's new book, Fishing Tandem Flies: Tactics, Techniques, and Rigs to Catch More Trout, coming out in August.

Fishing Tandem Flies: Tactics, Techniques, and Rigs to Catch More Trout on Amazon.

Get out your flashlights. "Though numerous books and Internet sites list the brown drake emergence as June 1-July 4 on most Michigan rivers, anglers in recent years usually have found strong drake hatches under way by the third week of May." Eric Sharp records that brown drake hatches are already happening on the North Branch of the Au Sable, then gives the lowdown on feeding trout during those terrific evenings when the big mayflies fill the air. In the Detroit Free Press.

It may be that a fly pattern that once matched no living bug on Montana's Bighorn has grown into a classic. The lowly sow bug, according to local experts, is now providing a large percentage of the protein for Bighorn trout. And the favored fly is the Ray Charles, according to Ed Dentry in the Rocky Mountain News. "The Ray Charles is easy to tie. On a scud hook Size 14-18, tie in pearl mylar tinsel below the bend. Wrap two ostrich herls forward and tie off. Then pull the mylar over the fly's back and secure it at the head. Red 8/0 tying thread is used for eye appeal at the head."

"I smirked as Lori tied on the Big Ugly and cast toward the blow down. The gargantuan fly was all but too much for her delicate rod. It hit the water with a loud kerplunk and drifted downstream about two feet." John Berry fishes Buffalo Ford in Yellowstone National Park with his wife and discovers that even smart fish with plenty of insects to choose from will fall for an outsized, inelegant pattern. In Arkansas's Baxter Bulletin.

Craig Mathews is one of those guys who seems to have done it all. Formerly sheriff of West Yellowstone, Montana, he started his fly shop, Blue Ribbon Flies, there in the early 1980s. Then he and Yvon Chouinard teamed up to form 1% For The Planet, which organizes conservation donations by member businesses. Meanwhile he wrote a few books and produced a few videos on fly fishing Yellowstone Park and the Madison. And oh yeah, he authored a bunch of important fly patterns for both trout and saltwater fishing.

Given Mathews's energy, we had no idea what we would discover in his personal fly box. But here's what we found: Flies that are tied in 2 minutes but that can be made only from materials locked in his fly shop freezer. PMD nymphs that float six inches below the surface. And the signature of a custom fly box builder who lives in a teepee and charges hundreds of dollars for a single creation.

See Craig Mathews's personal fly selection.

Mention Bob Clouser's name in a room full of fly fishers and you are likely to see heads nod, mostly in recognition of the Clouser Deep Minnow. But the Minnow is only a small part of Clouser's contribution to fly fishing -- an offshoot, really, of his passion for smallmouth bass. Lefty Kreh calls Clouser "the best flyrod smallmouth man I have ever fished with." Perhaps it is because Clouser has spent more than a quarter century studying smallmouth habits and guiding for them on the Susquehanna River.

Clouser finally collected his extensive knowledge of smallmouth fishing in a well-written book that came out in January. Fly Fishing for Smallmouth in Rivers and Streams (Stackpole, 226 pages) is a treatise on all aspects of fly fishing for smallmouth: finding them, feeding them, casting to them and landing them. This week we're happy to share an excerpt describing the tactics Clouser recommends for presenting surface flies to his favorite fish. New on MidCurrent.

Fly-Fishing for Smallmouth on Amazon.

"One of the first advantages a beginner notices with dry flies is this: With a submerged fly, you are never quite sure that a cast has covered the fish's lie properly." Ken Allen writes about the coincidence of quill gordon and red quill hatches with the activity of Maine flora, and includes this great quote from William Tapply on dry fly purism: "However, at the risk of getting booted out of the Fellowship of Purists, I'll expose our secret: We dry-fly snobs like to catch fish as much as anybody. Sportsmanship, tradition, artfulness and aesthetic values have nothing to do with it." In the Kennebec Journal.

During my first few weeks of fishing in Montana in the late 1980s, I developed a bad habit. The problem was that every time I rigged my leader with a fly, I had a hard time not reaching for a size 16 or 18 parachute Adams. This was all well and good except for the fact that some of the places we were fishing -- Nelson's spring creek, Buffalo Ford, the upper Missouri, and Slough Creek -- deserved more attention than that. There were specific hatches coming off, and I usually caught fish when I tied on a close imitation.

Still, my guides invariably responded, when I dared to suggest trying an Adams, "Yeah, that'll prolly work." "Prolly work" from an experienced guide carries about the same weight as any do-or-die command, so I happily tied on a highly visible, high-floating and all-around pleasant-to-fish Adams at every opportunity. I didn't learn as much as I could have about the hatches specific to those streams and rivers. But I sure had fun.

In "A Great Salesman," Paul Schullery ponders those things that make the Adams such an important fly: its versatility, its simplicity, its irresistibility. But its pedigree, Schullery finds out, is what makes it really interesting. New on MidCurrent.

Diana Rudolph is the subject of this month's "What's In Your Fly Box?" feature on MidCurrent. We've written about her before (see "Subsurface With Diana Rudolph"), but not until recently did we have the privilege of seeing the contents of her personal tarpon fly box.

Rudolph, who owns the current 16# tippet record and was the first woman to win the prestigious Don Hawley tournament, loves tarpon. And she loves tying with chicken feathers. We got more than a few good ideas from her choices for clear-water and backcountry fishing (the Mullet Toads sent us on a frenzied gray yarn hunt), and we're guessing you will too. Wonder what is the most current and effective selection of tarpon flies for difficult fish? This is as good a look as you're likely to get.

By the way, if you happen to be anywhere near the Florida east coast, Rudolph will be the speaker at tonight's meeting of the Florida Sport Fishing Association at 7:30 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Center off State Road 520 on Merritt Island.

Besides editing Fly Tyer magazine, David Klausmeyer was winner of the inaugural Poul Jorgensen Golden Hook Award given by the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum last October. His fly photos also grace many pages on MidCurrent. John Holyoke ran into him goofing off with fly tying buddies at a Penobscot Fly Fishers advanced tying class in Maine, and writes that for Klausmeyer, tying is mostly about having fun. In the Bangor Daily News.

Selene Dumaine is widely regarded as one of the premiere tiers of classic fly patterns in the U.S. But she spends a lot of her time creating new custom designs for her customers, one of which, the aptly named Sure Bet, recently grabbed the attention of fly shop owners and anglers in Maine. ''I thought, "Well, pike like to eat yellow perch. I'll make something that looks like a little yellow perch," 'Dumaine said this week at Chandler Pond Outfitters, where she sets up a fly-tying operation for a couple of days each week to try and meet the quaint little store's surging demand." Travis Barrett in the Kennebec Journal.

If you're curious what tools this modern-day Carrie Stevens recommends for fellow tiers, read Dumaine's "The Fly Tier's Toolbox" on MidCurrent.

"A large stonefly that appears in late March on certain rivers of the northern Rockies, the skwala is a bug shrouded in considerable mystery. It receives little mention in angling literature and is even less known to most anglers outside the area." Charlie Meyers hints at being confounded by the skwala in the Denver Post. Then he writes about how skwala-mania strikes Montanans and others fishing the Bitterroot and nearby rivers. "'You've got to fish the skwala hatch,' Kerry Gubits had said. 'It drives trout crazy.'"

It's all about the wiggle, glug, and burble. This week we're happy to feature William Tapply's extensive look at the history of bass flies. "From Bobs to Bugs" is from his newest book, Trout Eyes, just out from Skyhorse Publishing (Tony Lyons's new company) and it traces the history of bass bug development from deer tails and cork to finely crafted works of art.

Trout Eyes on Amazon.

"The concept of exact imitation eventually caused Halford to abandon the Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear dry fly. He loved its effectiveness, but it worked with too many different hatches, therefore it wasn’t an exact imitation. Using the GRHE just wasn’t up to his high standards of sportsmanship." Some interesting history here surrounding one of the most popular "early" dry flies, the GRHE, which in the beginning of the 20th century served the same varied purposes as the Adams does today. George Grant on Tri-Cities.com.

"Pinned to a drawer above his fly-tying bench is a note that reads: 'Next month,' with a laundry list from one of his clients: a dozen and a half green drake parachutes, a dozen No. 16 Griffith gnats, a dozen No. 16 black gnats, a dozen No. 16 Adams." Sam Cook profiles Wisconsin's David Lucca, who before scaling back tied almost 15,000 flies a year, and whose sparse ties and Hexagenia flies have made him something of a fly tying celebrity. In Wisconsin's Pierce County Herald.

Yesterday the Seattle Times republished a column by trout bum Randall Sumner on artistic ownership of fly patterns. We caught it when it first appeared last January, but it's worth rereading, especially if you are a minimalist when it comes to tying. "When you're a little kid, do you dream of a fly with your name; like a bridge or an opera? What if Pablo Picasso had been born in Montana to a fly-fishing clan? He could have left us with the Picasso midge, instead of a world visually enriched beyond imagination."

"In its wet form the speckled feather is very similar in hue to the wings of many natural flies. However, anglers have a tendency to judge flies in their dry form whereas the elusive trout always judges them in their wet form." Moc Morgan talks partridge feathers, a tying component with a long history in Wales, on icWales.co.uk.

"It certainly comes as no surprise that the major spawning periods - spring and early summer for rainbow and cutthroat, fall for brook trout and brown trout - provide the best opportunity for this strategy. What many anglers don't realize is that some kind of fish egg is prominent in the drift almost any time of the year." Charlie Meyers sat down with Dr. Robert J. Behnke and Wendell Ozefovich (see our entry on Ozefovich's underwater trout studies) to talk about why eggs are such an important year-round source of food for salmonids. In the Denver Post.

"If you're a newcomer on a budget, instead of buying a $200 vise, I'd suggest spending $50 on a solid basic vise and putting the other $150 into a couple of pairs of high-quality scissors, three or four good tying bobbins and a selection of other tools like a hair stacker and whip finisher. For hackle and tail feathers, buy grade 3 necks for $10-$15 in gray, reddish brown, medium olive and black." Beyond not marrying a woman smarter than yourself, Eric Sharp advises those getting started in fly tying to spend money on the essentials and ignore the frou-frou. In the Detroit Free Press.

When we first came up with the notion of looking inside people's fly boxes, it was because we were tired of reading lists. After all, what does a list tell you, other than what someone thinks they're going to fish with? Reality is often much different.

We wanted to open our new monthly feature, "What's In Your Fly Box?," with a unique personality and with someone who wouldn't take the time to gussy up their collection. Fortunately, the idea appealed to Steve Huff, who by virtue of guiding fly fishers to dozens of world records on the flats of the Florida Keys pretty much proved that others' opinions of his fly choices didn't matter. Steve, for those who don't know, is the most famous guide you will never hear about. Despite being sought after for decades by anglers who want to learn from one of the sports icons, he shuns media and attention generally. "It's all about fishing," he says, "nothing else." We're lucky to have Steve talk about his personal fly choices for tarpon and snook in our first installment.

"Pott's favorite material for the hackles - fibers that extend from the woven body of the fly to keep it afloat - was hair from the Asiatic badger. He found that the hair is different, and more attractive to a trout, than that of the American badger. It sells for $398 a pound these days." Kim Briggeman writes about Franz Pott, a master of Montana tying, whose trademarked wet flies taught Montanans that a fly could be more effective than a worm. In The Missoulian.

In what could be seen as a counterpoint to a recent article on saving money by tying your own, Larry Myhre lends some cogent advice on the realities of fly tying. Plenty of humor here: "Obtain all the catalogs possible from vendors of fly tying equipment and materials. This will give you a good idea of what is out there. Unfortunately, the longer you look at the offerings, the more imperative it will be that you possess them. You will learn that the worst possible reason to begin to tie your own flies is to save money." In the Sioux City Journal.

Andrew Kumler recently discovered that coyote fur is dense with guard hairs and makes a mean streamer for Metiolus River bull trout and rainbows. His new pattern: the coyote ugly. "'Those bull trout on the Metolius are smart,' said Kumler, a 33-year-old Army veteran who lives in Springfield. He works in the maintenance department at The Register-Guard in Eugene and grew up fishing most of Oregon's waters. 'Guys up there are using articulated leeches made from rabbit fur, but the fish are wising up. I have to go bigger.'" Bill Monroe in The Oregonian.

"Conventional wisdom holds that midwinter is the time for midges, the smaller the better. Felt had other ideas. A three-nymph rig did include the standard election of tiny midges, but his blue-plate special was much bigger and bolder. To an angler accustomed to winter minutiae, the size 16 epoxy-back golden stone seemed like a battleship among rowboats." As Charlie Meyers reports about the recent opportunities between winter storms on the Arkansas and other Colorado rivers, successful cold-weather fly fishing is not always about micro-flies. In the Denver Post.

"From Ron Ahlers' Yellow Breeches Orange to Kathy Weigl's Herb's Zebra Shrimp, the 53 patterns were born of experience on some of trout fishing's most challenging and revered waters, such as Letort Spring Run, the Yellow Breeches, Big Spring Creek, Falling Springs and other midstate spring creeks and freestone streams." Marcus Schneck reports on PennLive.com that the Cumberland Valley (Pennsylvania) Chapter of Trout Unlimited has published a new 86-page, spiral-bound book of new and classic favorite member patterns. If you have thoughts of fishing central Pennsylvania's classic waters, CVTU's Favorite Flies - Fifty-three Productive Fly Patterns from Cumberland Valley Trout Unlimited is worth a look. The book is available for purchase via the CVTU Web site.

Though a slightly specious argument, most of us need all the logical underpinnings we can find for our habit of tying flies. John McCoy takes on the math in the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette-Times. "Let’s say a Woolly Bugger -- a simple, universal wet fly/streamer that catches trout, bass and other gamefish with equal success -- costs $1.50 at a store. I can tie that fly for 18 cents." Now how many flies could John have tied while he was figuring all that out?

Unless you are lucky enough to be chasing trout in New Zealand or Argentina or shuffling across sand ripples in Belize right now, you might be doing what we're doing: thinking about how many flies need to be tied before the weather turns the corner.

You might even be digging out the vise for the first time in a while. If so, do yourself a favor and read Al and Gretchen Beatty's "10 Tying Tips of the Pros." These good folks -- self-confessed "stream people" -- share some very helpful advice about tying smooth dry fly bodies, rough-and-tumble one-feather hackles, and finishing flies with aplomb. New on MidCurrent.

Discover midges and you'll also discover that fly fishing doesn't end with the last Baetis hatch in November. "What got me interested in midges was the book, Midge Magic by Don Holbrook and Ed Koch (Stackpole Books, 2001). That, and watching Trout Babe (not her real name) land a fat 15-inch rainbow on a #22 midge tied to a 7X tippet on the Farmington River one afternoon." Nick Mills describes the source of his fascination with tiny flies: they are easy to tie, and they almost always catch fish. On MaineToday.com.

Midge Magic on Amazon.

Moc Morgan raises an interesting question for fly tiers: Do fish spit out flies with wire or hard fiber bodies faster than they do soft flies? Morgan, who brings the belief from watching trout spit out matchsticks as a boy, says there is no doubt. On ICWales.co.uk.

Tongariro River Hydro Pool angler Harvey Clark slams the rainbows with a "wee wet," which can best be described as any dry pattern tied with softer, shorter wings so that it can be fished wet. "I set up a light No 4 rod and tied on a large dry fly - an elk-hair caddis - mainly to use as a strikemarker and tied two wee wets on 5lb fluorocarbon 20cm apart 20cm behind the dry. The hits started within a few casts and they hardly stopped, 95 per cent on the wee wets. Only tiddlers took the caddis off the surface." In the New Zealand Herald.

Moc Morgan describes the action that makes the Booby fly -- adorned with large foam eyes -- such an effective pattern on Welsh and English lakes and reservoirs. "When an angler casts a line that will sink very deep in the water the booby will also be pulled down deep. Then its buoyant foam eyes will move it upwards until it is floating on top. When a very fast sinking line is retrieved the booby will be pulled down and then it will move upwards in the water when the line is slack." On ICWales.com.

Chester Allen says he is only a competent smallmouth bass fisherman. That's why when he catches lots of smallmouth, he knows that its more than just media buzz. "I believe in the alien creature theory of bass flies, but the smallmouth probably take the fly as a crawdad. The marabou feathers and rubber legs give this fly a lifelike twitch and shiver as it sinks toward the bottom. I saw a big metallic flash under the water and set the hook." In the San Francisco Chronicle.

Forget about drag-free drifts. The current rage among Pere Marquette trout anglers -- especially those looking for big trout after dark -- are big hairy flies that leave wakes. "Mice, once the weapon of choice of a few hard-core, tight-lipped, after-dark fly fishermen, are mainstream now. More and more anglers are becoming acquainted with the big bushy bugs that are known to draw the attention of a class of trout that many anglers never even see." Bob Gwidz on MLive.com.

Nick Mills uncovers the macabre humor behind the naming of the Sweeney Todd and goes on to explore the personalities behind many famous fly names, among them the Hendrickson, Adams and Hornberg. "Sweeney Todd, the man, was apparently fictional, and first appeared in English literature in the 19th century as a throat-cutting killer who met his end dangling from the Old Bailey's gibbet." On MaineToday.com.

Other than loving to tie exquisite salmon flies from rare materials but hating to fish, Edwin and Anton Rist of Taghkanic, New York are perfectly normal boys. "'I've been tying flies for longer than the two of them have been alive and I don't come close to them,' said John McLain, a retired policeman who runs a salmon fly Web site from his home in Michigan. 'They have a flow and balance you don't often see. Their work is beyond beautiful.'" Rick Clemenson in the Albany Times-Union.

"Loose feathers and strung hackle — feathers that are plucked and sewn back together — are still allowed into the United States after they’ve been certified clean (steamed at high enough temperatures to kill the virus )." But feathers from China and other east Asian companies are banned if they are attached to skin. John Marshall of the Associated Press gives the straight scoop on the effect of the threat of bird flu on the importation of lly tying materials.

When it comes to fly fishing Web sites, "buggy" is a good thing, if TroutNut.com has anything to say about it. They just launched their newly redesigned Web site, hatching a bunch of new features for the insect-minded:

-- 2,000+ new close-up pictures of mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, and other trout foods.
-- Hatch-matching details about hundreds of fly species, from the popular Hex hatch and Hendrickson hatch to obscure gems like the armored Baetisca mayflies.
-- Completely integrated common names and illustrated, clickable definitions make the scientific subject easy to follow.
-- Combining the fly fishing forum with the hatch guide to create a library of user knowledge and stories about each hatch.

With more than two dozen books to his name -- from titles on upland game and bass bug fishing to his Brady Coyne mystery series -- William Tapply is one of the most prolific fly fishing authors alive. He is also one of the few fishing writers with the ability to weave technical detail into storytelling. As he once said about writing, "The aim is simple. You're always writing to be understood."

This week on MidCurrent Tapply tracks the development of ten flies that are regional classics in the U.S. northeast. "New England Natives" combines fly pattern history with some predictable New England snobbery that Tapply manages to vindicate in the details. It's also an excellent intro to brook trout and landlocked salmon patterns that prove themselves again and again.

There are some flies that you simply can't buy. (I won't use a commercially tied Merkin, for example, unless it's on bonefish.) It has to do with confidence, with discriminating taste, or, as Mark Littleton points out, with the fact that some very effective ties would never convince a fly fisher to part with cash. "I have a caddis emerger pattern that looks something the cat coughed up. My theory is that birth is not a pretty process and emergers should be tied accordingly." In the Seattle Times.

One of the best bits of advice given to me as I was learning to fly fish for trout came in the form of a question: "Why don't you use a fly you can see?" Mind you, this was on what was known as a "technical" stream, where the fish were feeding on a specific (dark) insect. It certainly didn't occur to me that there was more to hooking these fish than presenting them with their food du jour. That much, I thought, I knew. But the casts were long, the wading deep, and I wasn't really able to see my tiny fly at all -- I just thought I knew where it was.

Turns out I didn't. Tying on a pattern with a small white post showed me that the fly was taking on drag much earlier than I had imagined. The change was made, the fish began biting, and I had absorbed an important lesson in dry fly selection.

This week on MidCurrent Rick Kustich writes about Hi-Viz patterns and why they work in "Eyes on the Drys." As Kustich, author of Fly Fishing for Great Lakes Steelhead and other books notes, "The challenge is to produce flies you can see from a distance, but without compromising their realistic appearance."

"Commonly referred to as the mahogany dun, this fly officially lives only in a half-dozen places. Yet from the heavily-fished waters of the Au Sable and Manistee to my favorite little secret stream in the western Upper Peninsula, I've found a No. 10 mahogany to be a reliable fish catcher starting about the first week in July and often continuing through the first frost in September." Eric Sharp writes about the under-recognized Isonchia and the often-misidentified green drake in the Detroit Free Press.

Canadian National Flyfishing Championships competitor Mark Anderson writes about his somewhat accidental achievements and inevitable return to reality in the Ottawa Citizen. His storyline includes mention of the Coral Booby, which achieves secret killer fly status during the tourneys -- deservedly so, from the looks of the picture.

"Asproth will tie them purposely with bent wings. He'll bend a perfectly good hook and tie a Hex with one wing dragging so it looks injured. He'll trim off some of its hackle so it lies on its side. He'll tie a Hex spinner fly with an egg sac attached to it." Sam Cook profiles well-known fly tier Dave Asproth -- a man whose larger-than-life flies match his personality in the eyes of many anglers. In the Duluth News Tribune.

"You’ve tied on a dry fly that resembles these critters but aren’t getting any results. That’s because the activity you see associated with Mayfly hatches is often, not always, caused by fish feeding on nymphs. Remember: Prey that is still in the water is easier to catch." Bill Barker gives a long overview of the difference between insect types and how to mimic them in the Corvallis, Oregon Gazette-Times.

"'That one rises up off the bottom and opens its mouth just under the surface, so it's taking emerging caddis,' [Dennis McKinney] said. Then he proved it with a small beadhead emerger pattern. He declared the emergence of the insects 'a classic microcaddis hatch.'" Ed Dentry and friend hunt the elusive salmonfly hatch but find success on the Rio Grande comes with tiny caddis flies. In the Rocky Mountain News.

"It's that Shaquille O'Neal of mayflies, that Andre the Giant of Ephemerids, that behemoth of bugs, the Hexagenia limbata, which is starting to make its annual appearance on streams." Eric Sharp notes that the recent cool weather will prove a temporary interruption to the annual explosion of big bugs in Michigan. In the Detroit Free Press.

Wrestling with monster flies is part of fish and bird culture this time of year on the Gunnison and other Colorado rivers. "To hear the frenzied chatter in fly shops, you would think Pteronarcys californica - salmonfly, great black stonefly, big stone - drives monster trout so crazy they throw themselves into anglers' arms." Ed Dentry notes that although it's tempting to throw huge dry flies, nymphs still catch most of the fish in a "willow fly" hatch. In the Rocky Mountain News.

Carl Richards, who died on Memorial Day, is remembered by Dick Pobst and other fishing buddies in this piece by Howard Myerson. "'Fly fishing wasn't even popular back then,' Pobst said. 'What Carl got us to do was pay attention to the superhatches; to realize that fly hatches occur at the pleasant time of day and to tie lifelike imitations.' Selective Trout was one of 14 books Richards wrote on assorted and related topics during his life." In the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press.

Author Charles Meck talks about charting the timing of insect hatches and notes that most insects in the U.S. northeast are appearing earlier and earlier each spring. The article also gives away one of Meck's small secrets: that you can match insect hatches to flowering plant activity. "I walk the same streams I did as a kid, and they're not nearly as high," he said. "I watch rainwater roll off blacktop where there didn't used to be any. That water's way too warm for trout streams." Deborah Weisberg in The New York Times.

As something of a relief to novice fly tiers, ratty flies do work. It's not until we become accomplished at wrapping feathers and fur around hooks that we realize our ever-growing commitment to immaculate ties isn't necessarily helping us catching more fish. In fact, at least in the case of trout flies, it might even hurt our cause. On MidCurrent this week Paul Schullery shares his and other well-known authors' wisdom on the subject of less-than-impeccable flies. As he suggests in "The Mystery of the Ratty Fly," embracing the rat might be the smartest thing you do this season.

"What's a biot?" you may ask. Well, Ben Spinks has taken the time to deliver a thorough explanation, along with a recipe for tying an attractive no-hackle biot emerger. "Biots are the sturdy barbs found along the back edge of this feather. The narrow set of barbs in other words. All birds have biots, they are compulsory, flight simply couldn't happen without them." On SexyLoops.com.

Here's another example of biots used in a pattern, Rene Harrop's CDC Biot Parachute. On Danica.com.

Roger Wheaton gives a thorough look at insect species, patterns to match and riverine hatch events in this piece on Colorado's bugs of 2006.