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…
We’re back home after spending almost two weeks in Montana and fishing the Bitterroot River Skwala hatch for six of those days. We did find a few naturals along the riverbanks, but spring weather was out in force. “Spring weather” means temperatures up to seventy degrees and below freezing. Remember the image of snow on…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is a Prince Nymph encore. I featured the Prince Nymph in October 2014, the first year of my blog. It was one of my first TBT flies. In case you missed it, here is the story I wrote: It originally was known as the Brown Forked Tail and created…
We’re in the Montana this week, searching for Skwala stoneflies on the Bitterroot River. I’d read the fishing report from the Grizzly Hackle Fly Shop in Missoula that the Skwala stoneflies were hatching along with a few BWO’s and March Brown mayflies. In fact, the report stated the fishing was 4 out of 5! The…
