I’m putting together a few flies for a new fly fisher. The question is, which ones do I send him? There are so many effective fly patterns to choose from. I’ve thought about a list of flies for a while. The problem I have is it depends on where and when he plans to fish….
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is a Pray Optic Fly. This is another fly in a friend’s collection with a note on the fly stating it was tied by C. Jim Pray (1885 – 1952) of Eureka, CA in 1947. The Optic series of flies were some of the popular steelhead flies he tied….
Why do fish eat our fly imitations? I have a few observations I’d like to share today. I marvel when a trout rises to my fly. Sometimes you barely see a ring when the fish breaks the surface and slurps the fly underwater, like using a straw. Or all of a sudden, a fish head…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Silvius Gold Comet. This is a fly a friend of mine had in his collection. His notes state it was tied by Lloyd Silvius of Eureka, CA in 1970. While living in Eureka for many years, Silvius (1902 – 1973) was a baker, worked for Chicago Bridge…
Here we are back at the Madison River. We had some spectacular fishing in July (Fly Fishing the Madison River in 2020) during a caddis hatch and wanted to return for the legendary Baetis hatch, hoping for another wonderful experience. We’ve grown to love this Valley, not only for the fishing, but the beauty as…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Driscoll Midge TBT. It happens that we were driving through West Yellowstone, MT yesterday and I stopped at Blue Ribbon Flies. I remembered one of my RiverKeeper Flies followers suggested I use the Driscoll Midge as a Throw Back Thursday Fly. I had planned to tie one,…
We headed over Chief Joseph pass into the Bitterroot Valley after leaving Salmon, ID. As I mentioned in my last Fall Fly Fishing Road Trip post, this trip was spontaneous. We ended up fly fishing the Bitterroot, Big Hole, and Beaverhead rivers on our way east. Yellowstone National Park was a destination as well. We…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the McMurray Ant. Ed Sutryn invented the McMurray Ant in the early 1960’s while fishing on a stream in McMurray, Pennsylvania. He watched trout crazily feeding on ants. Sometime later, he found out they were timber ants and set about designing a fly using monofilament, cork, and black…
Our home waters, the Metolius River, had been closed below Allingham Bridge for a couple of weeks due to the wildfires ravaging Oregon. Smoke in Sisters had been unhealthy, much like a lot of Oregon cities and the rest of the West. The smoke cleared for a couple of days and my wife looked at…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Benn’s Black Prince TBT. Benn’s Black Prince was created by John Benn. It’s one of the flies listed in John Shewey’s book Classic Steelhead Flies (2015). Benn was a famous fly tyer and angler in the late 1800s. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and ventured to the Eel…
