• Mike Mercer’s Profile Spinner – PMD

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Mike Mercer’s Profile Spinner – PMD. I found this fly pattern in Mike Mercer’s Creative Fly Tying (2005) book. He relays a problem he had fishing spinner patterns on California’s Fall River where thousands and thousands of natural PMD Spinners were floating downstream with trout gorging themselves on these insects….

  • PMD Time

    It’s PMD time again! I always look forward to this hatch. It begins in late May and will continue through September. Many hatches are in full swing now on my local waters in Central Oregon. Besides PMDs, there are Salmonflies, Green Drakes, and Caddis. It’s a wonderful time of year! PMDs, otherwise known as Pale…

  • PMD Spinner Fly Patterns

    I hope you read a recent post where I talked about going Back to the River and all the mayflies we’ve seen on the water. PMD fishing has been good for us on some days and that made me think, I need to restock my fly box with PMD spinner fly patterns. The spinner phase…

  • Sparkle Dun Deer Hair

    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…

  • Quigley Cripple PMD

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Quigley Cripple PMD version. The Quigley Cripple was developed by Bob Quigley in the late 1970’s for Northern California’s Fall River. As the story goes, Bob was fishing a Humpy and catching fish with it. The wing got chewed up and he caught many more fish with…

  • Mayfly Cripple

    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 found this fly pattern in Fly Patterns of Yellowstone – Volume 2 (2008) by Craig Mathews and John Juracek several years ago. Rowen Nyman created the Mayfly Cripple in the spring…

  • October Fly Fishing

    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…

  • Parachute Flies

    I was thinking the other day about the dry flies I use most of the time and the fact they don’t include parachute flies. Sure, I’ll use parachute flies on some rivers and perhaps tie on a Purple Haze in the evening at the spring creek I fish. And sometimes it works. I gave away a…