Last week I talked about several flies in my Filling Customer Fly Orders post including the Heindl and detailed images of the Hemingway Caddis.. I hope you saw them. Tying customer flies is about all I’m doing while waiting to get back out on the water. This week I continued to tie a variety of flies for a customer. Some of them I haven’t tied in quite a while. It brought back some good memories. I thought I’d share them with you today.
This is an image of the Pheasant Rump Muddler streamer. I shared a few step-by-step images for tying the Hemingway Caddis last week. You’ll see another example of this new-to-me fly below.
If you have been with me from the beginning of RiverKeeper Flies six years ago, I hope you have noticed an improvement of the fly images used for my fly pattern sheets. I owe much of that to a “gentle” push from my friend Al Beatty. He helped tremendously with the right cameras, lenses, and software to use for post processing.
Practicing my photography skills is something I haven’t done in quite a while. I took some time this week to learn more about my Olympus TG-6 camera. It replaced the TG-4 I dropped along the Madison River last year. I wrote about it in the Road Trip Final Thoughts post. Not only did I break the viewing panel, but also the windshield of our van. It was a tough trip! The camera still worked, although I didn’t want to place it in the water. I upgraded to the TG-6 late last year and didn’t really take the time to learn the camera. There were several major changes and I decided this week was the time to dig in.
It also allowed me to try a little video. I’ve been asked on numerous occasions if I have fly tying videos. The answer has always been “no, it takes quite a bit of time to research and write my weekly posts”. And there are already some great fly tyers with videos on Youtube. I still believe that, but had an opportunity this week to give it a try. I’ll let you know how that works out. It might end up on my RiverKeeper Flies Youtube channel where I have a handfull of videos.
Now back to fly tying.
Here are a few flies I tied last week. The new images will replace those from the early days and get a much needed update for the fly pattern sheets.
Chernobyl Ant – one of my variants I tie.
Even a chironomid my friend Mike Telford developed for East Lake, MT’s Crystal Chironomid.
Have you ever heard of the Pheasant Rump Muddler? Neither have I. A customer asked me to tie some for him.
This is one of the flies I experimented with step-by-step images of the fly tying process. Here are two images you’ll find in the fly pattern sheet.
Lastly, an image of the Plan B – Purple. It’s a fly my customer introduced me to. He stated it killed the fish last year on his Montana trip. The fly is basically a Chubby Chernobyl with extra material for the tail and different color combination than others I’ve seen. You’ll find all the details in the fly pattern sheet.
Oh, I did get a little casting practice recently…
Perhaps you already saw this image on my social media pages. Here are the links to:
Instagram – @riverkeeperflies
Facebook – @riverkeeperflies
That’s all for today. I need to get back to the vise and finish an order.
Enjoy…be safe!
