Last weekend, I had the pleasure to be a River Helper at the 2022 Casting for Recovery Oregon South Retreat. Casting for Recovery (CfR) is a retreat designed to help women in various stages of breast cancer enrich their lives through fly fishing. It was the first retreat after a 2-year break due to wildfires…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is a Henry’s Fork Yellow Sally Stonefly. I was looking for a fly to highlight today and decided to look in my library to see if I could locate a Yellow Sally stonefly imitation. Why a Yellow Sally fly, you ask? I’m headed to the Deschutes River next week…
I was invited to speak about my home waters, the Metolius River on the Destination Angler podcast hosted by Steve Haigh recently. I thought I should create a post here on RiverKeeper Flies to share much of the information, especially my favorite images of the river, the fish, the bugs, and the flies. I’ll even…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday post is a Richard Wheatley Silver Seal Fly Box. This box is filled with 55 steelhead flies donated to Southern Oregon Casting for Recovery several years ago. I don’t know who tied these flies. When I first started fly fishing, I saw a Wheatley fly box and dreamt of the…
My life these days is centered around fish and flies. Just how I like it! I continue to tie customer flies when I’m not fishing. I was working on a fairly time-consuming post about the Metolius River being my home waters. Yes, I finally decided to share a little bit more about the river. It’s…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Sierra Bright Dot fly. This is an attractor-style “fore and aft” fly pattern developed sometime in the 1950’s for the eastern slopes of the Southern Sierra mountains for Golden Trout. I was asked to tie a few dozen Sierra Bright Dots for a customer in sizes ranging…
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time at the vise recently, tying a variety of flies for customers. Fishing will pick up soon and I’ll be off on this year’s fly fishing road trips, so I need to get as many flies tied as possible in the next month or less. If you read…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Black Forked Tail Nymph. Shortly after I posted the Prince Nymph encore, I received a note from my friend Wayne Luallen with additional information about the creator of both the Prince and Forked Tail nymphs, Doug Prince. Wayne received the following original fly pattern from Doug’s notebook…
Spring is here, the middle of April. What that tells me is some of my favorite insects will begin hatching in less than a month. We went to the river recently, once with fly rods in hand and another day to enjoy the river on a 5 mile hike. Both days were enjoyable and perhaps…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is a Frank Johnson CDC fly I found in a fly box Frank donated and I was fortunate to select during a Fly Tyer’s Rendezvous fly swap at the 50th Anniversary of the International Federation of Fly Fishers Fair in Bend, Oregon (2015). (Note: the IFFF has since changed its…
