Cleaning Out a Fly Box

It won’t be long now before Green Drake mayflies are hatching on my favorite river. I pulled out my Green Drake fly box and noticed it needed a little help. In today’s post, I’m cleaning out a fly box and getting ready for the upcoming hatch. I’ll share the process I use to refresh, sort, and fill my fly box.

If you need a friendly reminder, these are the insects we’re imitating.

The image above shows my messy fly box I use for the Green Drake hatch. There are several flies not even secured in a slot. In fact, there are flies that found their way in this box that aren’t drakes! It’s such a mess. I need to rearange the flies so I know the sizes are there I’ll need in the near future.

Do you have similar looking fly boxes?

Here’s the process I use to clean it up.

The first thing I did was to remove all of the flies from the box and sort them into types of fly patterns. It’s quite a collection.

Next, I took them to the kitchen and steamed the flies. Don’t know what that is? Here is a link to my RiverKeeper Flies YouTube channel where I demonstrate how to steam flies. You’ll see a little magic if you watch it!

Here is a pile of flies ready for steaming. Notice how the deer hair is noticibly smashed and scrunched?

I steamed the flies and placed them on paper towels to dry.

Here is a close up of the Sparkle Duns. Steaming has refreshed the deer hair and they look like new flies!

Next, I sort the flies by pattern, size, and color in the following three images.

Here are a few left overs…

Flies on the top row and right side will find themselves back in the provider box beacuse they are extras. Bottom left flies need a little TLC or I’ll cut off the materials and reuse the hook.

And the final result after placing all the flies back in the fly box. Similar flies are next to each other, sorted by size.

The last step was to pull out the provider box and fill the empty slots in this fly box. Here is the finished product.

What process do you use to clean up your fly box for the upcoming season?

Lastly, here is a link to my RiverKeeper Flies YouTube channel where I demonstrate the #20 Mighty Midget Emerger. It’s my latest video I posted today.

Enjoy…go fish!