• Lee Clark’s Twisted Body Stone

    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…

  • Polly’s Muskrat Nymph

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Polly’s Muskrat Nymph. A couple of weeks ago, I presented Polly’s Fledermouse Nymph and thought since I had used muskrat, I’d highlight another nymph utilizing the same material. It’s a simple fly to tie with the most difficult aspect is locating the natural materials of muskrat and beaver. This…

  • Buz’s Old Gray Mare

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is Buz’s Old Gray Mare. This is another Buz Buszek fly pattern. If you are a regular here at RiverKeeper Flies, you’ve seen several TBT flies I’ve highlighted on these pages and you might be familiar with his story. If not, read on… Buz Buszek (1912 – 1965) opened…

  • Norm Wood Special Encore

    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…

  • McGinty Fly

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the McGinty fly. The McGinty is one of the images Wayne Luallen sent me of flies from Buz Buszek’s fly box. Some of the flies in his box were tied by Buz, while others were probably selected from bins in from his fly shop. It’s just a little…

  • Sierra Bright Dot Fly

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Sierra Bright Dot fly. This is an attractor-style “fore and aft” fly pattern developed sometime in the 1950’s for the eastern slopes of the Southern Sierra mountains for Golden Trout. I was asked to tie a few dozen Sierra Bright Dots for a customer in sizes ranging…

  • Black Forked Tail Nymph

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Black Forked Tail Nymph. Shortly after I posted the Prince Nymph encore, I received a note from my friend Wayne Luallen with additional information about the creator of both the Prince and Forked Tail nymphs, Doug Prince. Wayne received the following original fly pattern from Doug’s notebook…

  • Prince Nymph Encore

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is a Prince Nymph encore. I featured the Prince Nymph in October 2014, the first year of my blog. It was one of my first TBT flies. In case you missed it, here is the story I wrote: It originally was known as the Brown Forked Tail and created…

  • Dette Yellow Stonefly Nymph

    This week’s Throw Back Thursday Fly is the Dette Yellow Stonefly Nymph. I pulled out Mike Valla’s The Founding Flies and paged through to locate an interesting fly for this week’s post. The Dette Yellow Stonefly Nymph spoke to me. Walt and Winnie Dette are known for their beautiful Catskill dry flies. At least that’s…