I finished a fly order recently, tying very small flies which challenged my fly tying skills. The order was for flies in sizes 18 to 22. Tying small flies is difficult if you don’t tie a lot. You feel like you’re tying with two thumbs! Trust me, I’ve been there! I remember a statement I…
I’m back at the vise this week working to fill orders that have been stacking up during our fly fishing road trip. I started on an order of 324 flies that included several small BWO/Baetis fly imitations in sizes 16, 18, and 20. The fly order includes several of my favorite BWO imitations. I have…
This week’s post will highlight a few flies coming off my vise AND include a comment about how to fish them. I hope it will help you determine what flies to include in your fly box when we can start fishing again. I recognize not all readers of my RiverKeeper Flies weekly posts tie flies….
In mid-December, I wrote a post about Choosing a Fly Box. I still need to fill a fly box with BWO flies, so it’s timely for me to highlight a few important flies I plan to place in the fly box. I’ll provide some of my favorites to help you create your own BWO fly…
I wanted to highlight one of the Sparkle Dun deer hair patches I’ve been using. In the last week, I tied 6 dozen Green Drake Sparkle Duns and it reminded me how important finding and using the right deer hair is to successfully tie these flies. Half of the flies were for a customer and…
Thanksgiving is only a few days away, which means winter is right around the corner. Do you know what that means? Blue Wing Olives will be the mayflies I plan to imitate. Gone are the bigger mayflies. What will get me through the next few months are hatches of BWO’s. So are you ready for…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Mayfly Cripple. The Mayfly Cripple is another fly pattern from Blue Ribbon Flies in West Yellowstone, MT.
I’ve been busy tying flies lately. But I was able to get to the river a couple of times recently and reconciled to myself if I really wanted to catch fish, fishing with nymphs was the best solution. What a difference a year makes. Last year by this time, we had five feet of snow…
I returned to the river yesterday looking for rising fish, which didn’t happen. What I found were a variety of bugs floating down the river without fish eating them. Most of them were blue wing olives (BWO), a small mayfly that can hatch almost any month of the year. That got me thinking about my fly…
October fly fishing is a special time of year. It’s the last hurrah for both fly fishers AND fish. I’ve said before that fishing tapers off dramatically around November 1, so that means I have less than one month to get my fix for awhile. So I need to make sure I have the right…
