This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is George Harvey’s Spruce Creek Dry Fly. George Harvey (1911-2008) was born in DuBois, PA and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in ornamental horticulture from Penn State University in 1935. As an undergraduate student in 1934, he organized and taught Penn State’s angling and fly tying class, the first…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday fly is Lee Clark’s Big Yellow Mayfly. Last week, I posted the Twisted Body Stone as a different technique of using 100% polypropylene to create a body to imitate larger flies. While the fly above was tied by Lee, I decided to tie up a Green Drake version and try…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Lee Clark’s Twisted Body Stone. The Twisted Body Stone is a different technique of using 100% polypropylene to create a body to imitate larger flies. Lee is better known for his original Clark’s Golden Stone shown below using the same material to imitate a body with it combed…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is a Norm Wood Special encore. If you read this week’s post, Water is Life on the Deschutes River, you’ll recall we used the Norm Wood Special as one of our successful flies. Here is what I wrote about the Norm Wood Special back in 2020. Norm Wood was…
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…
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 Buz’s Float N Fool Multi-Color. The Float N Fool Multi-Color (AKA – Flot’N Fool Multi-Color, Float-n-Fool, Float N Fool, even Flot-N-Fool) is a parachute fly tied with calf tail for the tail and wing post, a peacock herl body, and a hackle that varied in color from Adams…
This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Swisher and Richards Floating Nymph. I was searching my fly fishing and fly tying library for a little inspiration on what fly to feature this week. I decided to pull out Mike Lawson’s Spring Creeks (2003) book and thumbed through it. After several chapters, I thought I…
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…
If you’ve followed RiverKeeper Flies for a while, it won’t come as a surprise I might be a little obsessed with Green Drakes, from tying effective imitations, fishing the flies during a hatch, and creating images through my photography. In fact, I’ve been thinking about them all week. I taught a Zoom fly tying class…
