• LaFontaine’s Diving Egg Laying Midge

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Gary LaFontaine’s Diving Egg Laying Midge. LaFontaine’s Diving Egg Laying Midge is one of the flies highlighted in LaFontaine’s Legacy, by Al and Gretchen Beatty. In the book, Al relayed his story about Gary’s underwater research and how he observed adult midges crawling underwater to lay their eggs. Trout…

  • Parmacheene Belle

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Parmacheene Belle. This fly is from the collection of Al and Gretchen Beatty. The Parmacheene Belle was invented by Henry P. Wells in the late 1870’s and was named for Parmacheene Lake in Maine. I found the Parmacheene Belle listed on Plate I in Mary Orvis Marbury’s…

  • T. E. Pritt’s Greentail

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Pritt’s Greentail. This soft hackle fly is another old fly pattern found in T.E. Pritt’s Yorkshire Trout Flies (1885) book. It’s listed as No. 33 on page 32. The second edition changed the title to North Country Flies (1886) to be more inclusive. Materials Wings Hackled from a feather from…

  • Royal Charlie

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Royal Charlie. The Royal Charlie is another old fly pattern listed in The North Country Fly – Yorkshire’s Soft Hackle Tradition (2015) by Robert L. Smith. Many of these older soft hackle fly patterns come from the Yorkshire Dales in northern England. Wharfedale is a small area of…

  • Red Clock or Pheasant

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Red Clock or Pheasant. I decided to tie an old soft hackle fly since I’ve been tying so many of my RiverKeeper Soft Hackle Cripples lately. I love the simplicity of these flies and am fascinated by older soft hackle fly patterns…or they would have called them…

  • Lee Wulff’s Hitch Specials

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Lee Wulff’s Hitch Specials. Four flies make up Lee Wulff’s Hitch Specials – Silver Blue, Red Squirrel, Haggis, and Blue Squirrel. These are very interesting flies, built with a molded, plastic body. A friend loaned the flies to me for my Throw Back Thursday Fly posts. Lee Wulff’s…

  • Lee Wulff’s Surface Stone Fly

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Lee Wulff’s Surface Stone Fly. This is a very interesting fly, one built with a molded, plastic body. It’s one of several plastic body flies a friend loaned to me for my Throw Back Thursday Fly posts. In Lee Wulff’s Trout on a Fly (1986), he states he came…

  • Stewart’s Black Spider

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Stewart’s Black Spider. Stewart’s Black Spider is from his book entitled The Practical Angler (1857). Copyright laws no longer apply and you can download the book by clicking HERE. Be sure to check out my Links to Free Old Fly Fishing and Fly Tying Books. One of my readers…