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Post 11 Jan 2020, 09:37 • #1 
Master Guide
Joined: 11/18/18
Posts: 356
Location: US-TX
Even natural materials are better and more diverse than when I started flyfishing. I could never get natural material like what I can today. This fly is the perfect example. This fly could look like a juicy morsel depending on the retrieval rate. What do y'all think about the quality tying material and colors?



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Post 11 Jan 2020, 12:28 • #2 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 02/27/16
Posts: 2327
Location: US-IL
As a hobby ,the quality and variety of materials is kid in a candy store mentality.For tying to fish it actually messes with one's head,Too many choices,and too much of too much.It's the same across the whole fishing community.When teaching my kids to fish,i first taught them to fish with a night crawler hooked thru the nose on a kahle hook and a small shot a foot or so above,They learned to cast gently and fish by feel.No snoopy poles.You can catch any that swims in our waters,Even great lakes salmon and trout on this rig.Point is fishing is very simple.I catch most of my fish on a handful a flies even tho i tie dozens of different patterns which to me is it's own fun.


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 12:33 • #3 
Master Guide
Joined: 11/18/18
Posts: 356
Location: US-TX
In south Texas flyfishing has gotten more popular, you had to buy the flies they had or tie with the limited material they sold. Usually it was buck tail, chenille , flash , marabou , hackle and body feathers. There was just not a huge selection and color were limited. But today I like the hooks, synthetics and good quality of naturals.


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 12:54 • #4 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 11/06/17
Posts: 2498
Location: South of Joplin
Fully agree with the hersh. My barrel full of materials could easily be reduced to a hare's face, a grizzly hen cape, a grizzly cock cape, a and a partridge skin, with a dozen hook styles and sizes and a spool of thread in each white and black. oh, forgot the copper motor winding wire. Most of my useful and used materials were available in 1975 and most of the fly patterns that catch fish were old then.
I do keep getting caught up in the candy store thing and buying more "fly stuff" that will be used once and stored from now on. Pretty to see but a pain to work with and often as not never catch a fish for me, at least the Bonnie Braid will be useful in the garden.
The choice of purple for color is good, purple always seems to work some of the time. The shape is good. The marabou I think comes from Thanksgiving turkeys and is probably more abundant now with higher and higher production to feed a growing population; so more to sort the higher qualities from.


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 13:07 • #5 
Master Guide
Joined: 11/18/18
Posts: 356
Location: US-TX
I fish for bass and warm water species a lot and was a self taught fly fisherman. I also taught myself fly tying. Maybe my approach and opinion would be different if I was conventionally trained.


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 13:18 • #6 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 02/27/16
Posts: 2327
Location: US-IL
Me too FB.The only friend i have who flyfishes lives 65 miles away.I am using more and more local game bird feathers in my ties.I get pheasant duck goose parteidge and some wild turkey from friends and fam that still hunt,I mix rabbit i shave off of zonkers with ice dub for my dubbing,I try to have at least some natural materials even on foam flies.I would agree that the quality of feathers available is incredible compared to the late 80 when i started tying.Seems you are more up to date on current methods than i am.I am trying to do a few things well rather than a lot of things poorly.But i do get distracted,


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 13:25 • #7 
Guide
Joined: 12/20/19
Posts: 101
Location: Christchurch, NZ
Way more choices now and overall better quality.
Of course different qualities of a given material may be required for various patterns.
I have to admit l suffer from sensory overload when l go into some of the big fly shops and view all the materials.
For me personally l like to try to keep an open mind and imagination to try to create new patterns with all this choice we have.
I spend a lot of time wondering what the fish sees and what will trigger a take.
So far I’m no threat to the fishery!


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 13:30 • #8 
Master Guide
Joined: 11/18/18
Posts: 356
Location: US-TX
I appreciate blue, purple and the rust colors the most I think which weren't available to me in the 90s


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Post 11 Jan 2020, 14:18 • #9 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 11/06/17
Posts: 2498
Location: South of Joplin
Flybuddy wrote:
Trev wrote:
... Most of my useful and used materials were available in 1975 and most of the fly patterns that catch fish were old then.
....

I fish for bass and warm water species a lot and was a self taught fly fisherman. I also taught myself fly tying. Maybe my approach and opinion would be different if I was conventionally trained.

My training was trial and error and dissecting bought flies and 80% of my fishing is for smallmouth bass or rock bass, my point is I can make it harder than it needs to be, simple flies will catch the same fish as flies made with magic miracle material and the stupid fish I catch seem to be color blind if a big soft lure is dragged across their dinner window. These Ozark fish can still be fooled by a nightcrawler.
Yes there are many more and higher quality materials available than even two years ago and there will more and improved materials next year. They are all wonderful. But they just ain't necessary, imo.
Maybe if I had grown up with scads of expendable income and been you tube trained I would have a different view. I have bought into enough fad fly patterns that "must have this material in this shade" that I have probably thrown away a bushel basket of "this very special material" ...
There simply is no comparison between the genetic hackle today and the best hackle money could buy even in the '90s and the best money could buy in the '70s wasn't much above barnyard feathers. But we caught a lot of fish on those junk feathers. All the plastics that I have seen or tried seen to my untrained eye to be the same old nylon/polyester/etc that was around in some form since the '70s, or before.
I don't mean that you should do what I do or that your use of the latest and greatest is in anyway wrong, I just mean it is not for me at this time, my comments falling under the "What do y'all think " umbrella.
The more I fish; the fewer patterns I use and they are all basic, suggestive, unimaginative and in drab colors.
Have fun with what you're doing, that is what it is about.
T


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Post 12 Jan 2020, 08:16 • #10 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 02/12/16
Posts: 4094
Location: USA-CO
Quote:
...Have fun with what you're doing, that is what it is about.


[LIKE]


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Post 15 Jan 2020, 09:04 • #11 
Piscator
Joined: 08/10/05
Posts: 19078
Location: downtown Bulverde, Texas
there's a major apples and oranges factor.

Fly tying has evolved to buying bags and bags of materials, searching the internet and filling fly boxes.

Fly tying had its origin, not as trying different fly patterns, but taking advantage of materials game sportsmen naturally accumulated.


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Post 15 Jan 2020, 12:48 • #12 
Guide
Joined: 08/19/16
Posts: 314
Location: Brazil
How many of you still tie nymphs or even wet flies with no bead heads?


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Post 15 Jan 2020, 13:10 • #13 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 11/06/17
Posts: 2498
Location: South of Joplin
PampasPete wrote:
How many of you still tie nymphs or even wet flies with no bead heads?

I do, I have about a box full of those bead head things, jigs, that I don't know how to catch a fish on. Observation makes me think they have to be coupled with a cork? Other wise they descend head first and lay on the bottom til moved.


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Post 15 Jan 2020, 14:14 • #14 
Master Guide
Joined: 06/10/13
Posts: 624
Location: US-MO
For me it's also apples and oranges albeit of a different variety. I'm a fly tying junkie with no intent of recovering. At 57 years young I really dig what YouTube and Instagram has brought to the hobby. The quality and availability of new materials is mind blowing! My latest fix is centered around "euro nymph" patterns tied on jig hooks. As things warm up and spring approached I'll head back to newest, latest and greatest articulated patterns I find out on the internet for warm water species.

Now, when it comes to fishing things change. My boxes may be loaded and who knows what I pack for a day, but you can be sure I'm most likely going to pick one of my "confidence" patterns and they are all tried and true. Pheasant Tail variant, Hares Ear variant, Rainbow Warrior, Wooly Bugger, Pats Rubber Leg, Zebra Midge, RS2, simple soft hackle.... Adams, X-Caddis, Stimulator and a simple foam hopper if and when it gets hot again.

If I tied to fish only I'd probably limit myself on materials, but since tying for me is more than re-stocking my box I'll play along experimenting with the latest and greatest materials, which by the way have ultimately found their way into my classic patterns. I treat my simple soft hackle bodies with UV resin to add durability on a simple thread body.


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Post 15 Jan 2020, 16:01 • #15 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 06/21/06
Posts: 3081
Location: Orygun
Despite the prevalence of synthetics, I have found myself going back to more natural materials (minus the flash) with my musky tying...well, and virtually all of my streamer tying, which is mostly what I tie these days. Fur, feathers, flash.

Don't get me wrong, I do still use synthetics plenty (especially in saltwater flies) & for trout, I don't tie, I buy...just because they're not as fun to tie as the bigger stuff.


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Post 28 Jan 2020, 06:22 • #16 
New Member
Joined: 12/21/15
Posts: 19
Location: US-PA
I tye and fish modern streamers almost exclusively now. The stuff that comes off my vise should be considered a lure. Things are so far removed from traditional fly tying its not even funny.


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Post 28 Jan 2020, 09:39 • #17 
Master Guide
Joined: 02/23/08
Posts: 944
Location: US-MT
I've had a bad case of CSS since a retina surgery that went badly. I can still tie itty bitty trout flies with 4x goggles but i can't fish them. I can't see the dry flies and can't get them tied on anyway.

So mostly streamers now. Simple catches fish. Complex is fun to tie. Deep-diving wiggler's are the final frontier (that sink slowly at rest but dive deeply and wiggle vigorously when retrieved).

And so are channel catfish. On the flyrod. Unscented flies do catch catfish, even in brown water. Scented flies even better.

Get a frozen pork skin from a local slaughter operation. Cut it into long strips. Make a Texas worm rigs. Cast it all day long.

You get to fish alone. Ainobody else doing it. Want to go off the deep end? Use a vacuum food bagger. Put pork skin strips in a vacuum jar with salmon egg juice. Suck out the air. Let it sit for 24 hours. Make the worm rigs.

A 24" inch channel cat can break an 8 at fly rod. You'll want a good fillet knife too.


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Post 28 Jan 2020, 09:57 • #18 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 02/12/16
Posts: 4094
Location: USA-CO
Sorry that your eye surgery didn't come out well, and hope you will get good vision soon. I remember reading about fishing with pork rinds when I was a kid. I cut some into long triangular strips and fished them for perch. I don't remember how much success I had, but they might have worked.

Get well, Sir. I look forward to seeing more of your great and creative flies.


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Post 29 Jan 2020, 15:13 • #19 
Master Guide
Joined: 01/25/18
Posts: 553
Location: Brazoria County, TX
I tied a few patterns back as a teen in the 1970’s from my Orvis kit, still have a couple of those flies, and I just completely skipped over the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s. Back in the 1970’s, I learned to tie from the book that came with the kit and materials that also came with the kit. Kit had a neck or two, maybe a little saddle, a hare’s mask, some marabou, a few other odds and ends. I still have a little of it. The white marabou was and is great, but it’s about exhausted. Some moths ate up the hare’s mask.

Now, there’s 32,000 brands, eighty million patterns and variations, with 44,000 places to get materials. Then, it was Orvis and the seemingly very limited types of flies and scant materials, all of it rather mysterious and mostly out of reach.

When did UV cure come along? How about Youtube? Online shopping? Now there are many websites and YouTube videos dedicated to tying flies. I think it’s a lot harder learning from a written manual than a video and that applies to about anything requiring hands on work with tools.

Thank God the fish are still mysterious. I’m not so sure about the materials anymore. Sure are a lot of crazy synthetics and I use them, but it’s harder for me to get all excited about a fly made possible by Exxon-Mobil than one spun up with the help of the deer or the duck. Every material we buy and move we make now comes with the possibility of a healthy dose of self awareness, judgement and the like and that’s a burden. All these materials and choices are liberating on one hand and also a curse.


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Post 29 Jan 2020, 19:41 • #20 
Guide
Joined: 01/09/20
Posts: 113
Location: Killeen Texas
karstopo wrote:
Now, there’s 32,000 brands, eighty million patterns and variations, with 44,000 places to get materials. Then, it was Orvis and the seemingly very limited types of flies and scant materials, all of it rather mysterious and mostly out of reach.

I will chime in here. I think with materials these days if you can conjure it in your head somebody makes it and there is usually a youtube video to teach its "correct" application.

Speaking of which does anyone know if a clear rubber hackle is maybe kinda like that superfine rubber hackle seen in a few modern bugger interpretations. I have shrimp pattern in mind that it would look great on.


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Post 29 Jan 2020, 22:52 • #21 
Sport
Joined: 12/04/11
Posts: 72
Location: US-MI
I use to think I was the odd man out until reading the above posts. I started to tie flys in the 1950s as a teenager. Talk about crude! No vice, no bobbin, just squirrel tails, and a few odd feathers from the neighbor’s Leghorns.. but I was proud of them and the few that are still laying around here bring a smile to my face. The heck of it is, they caught fish. When I fished for trout in Montana starting in 1956 I simply grabbed the nearest available grasshopper threaded him on a hook and hauled in the trout with an ancient 3-piece Montague someone gave me. Back home in Ohio, it was strictly warm water fishing and reading Jason Lucas in High School convinced me that I needed to fish the fly rod to be a complete angler. A 7ft 9in Shakespeare started my career with the fly rod for bass with poppers both homemade and store-bought. When I returned from Vietnam in 1969 I was stationed at West Point and really got into flyfishing for Bass and huge sunfish on the Military reservation. Drove to Reed Tackle in New Jersey several times to get fly tying supplies. I was on my own as I knew no one who tied flys. My guide was George Leonard Herter. I attacked it with a vengeance. Got to be a decent fly tier but slowly it dawned on me that Bluegills, rock bass, and largemouths simply shredded my finest efforts in short order. It was particularly upsetting when I put the time in to tie a good deer hair bodied “Irresistible” pattern dry fly only to have it be shredded by a couple of dozen large bluegills.
After moving to southern Michigan in 1971 I experienced what for me up to then was unbelievable Bass and Bluegill fishing. I quickly learned that very simple flys were not only effective but easy to tye and could be made very sturdy to withstand the onslaughts of dozens of fish and still be in one piece. In 1974 I kept count in the spring and caught and released (and ate a few) 830 large bluegills by actual count. I was fishing shallow extremely clear water with an Orvis midge rod I had assembled from a kit. I noticed that when I pulled a rubber spider under the surface I caught far more fish. I tied up slow sinking spiders using chenille for the bodies but those big bluegills would constantly nip off the very fine rubber legs that I had rescued from early bungee cords. The fish still took the flys but I could no longer see the fly just under the surface. I tried wings of yellow calf tail or sold black. I finally settled of the silver tips of grey squirrel tails. I could now see the fly just under the surface out at the end of a cast. It had become what more and more resembled a standard wet fly pattern and the fish have lined up for them ever since. For Crappies and Largemouth Bass, black marabou streamers were hard to beat along with typical cork poppers. I no longer tie anything fancy, just what catches fish for me. I did keep a couple of flys in a small jar that I tied 51 years ago. I’d be hard-pressed to duplicate them today, I actually gave away most of my fly-tying materials recently but kept the things I need to turn out the few that I fish with. A couple of 51-year-old efforts are shown below just to remind myself that I once was capable of doing this. Over time I have come to realize that fish don’t care -- LOL
Image


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Post 29 Jan 2020, 23:09 • #22 
Guide
Joined: 04/04/13
Posts: 197
Location: Central Maryland
PampasPete wrote:
How many of you still tie nymphs or even wet flies with no bead heads?


I certainly do, and I fish wet flies at least 75% of the time. It's easy enough to add shot if I really wanted to fish the flies deeper, but it's much harder to get a fly to stay in the film if it's got a bead.

Nothing I tie has a bead -- ever.


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Post 30 Jan 2020, 06:32 • #23 
Master Guide
Joined: 11/18/18
Posts: 356
Location: US-TX
This topic has taken off


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Post 30 Jan 2020, 08:25 • #24 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 02/12/16
Posts: 4094
Location: USA-CO
Great story, Bill Sonnett, and very nice work on those old flies.


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Post 30 Jan 2020, 08:25 • #25 
Master Guide
Joined: 01/25/18
Posts: 553
Location: Brazoria County, TX
I know some people hate this age of the internet. They might have preferred the time before the World Wide Web. The 1990’s might have been the end of days where printed catalogs, periodicals, books and the fishing clubs and local shops had the fly fishing information monopolies.

I think the web is liberating. No longer is it just a relative handful of journalists and writers dominating the discussion. We are no longer bound by the limitations of their imaginations or confined to the peculiarities of their tastes. People have taken fishing into their own hands and busted free, fly fishing where people once never did, for fish that never got any attention and with patterns that weren’t in any books. The people are sharing all of these things on various forums and on social media. Fishermen aren’t indentured to club hierarchies anymore if they don’t choose to be or bound by the paltry inventories of their local fly fishing store, should there even be one, for supplies.

Anything you want can be found quickly with a simple search engine search. There’s no attitude, no “know thy place”, no high priests of fishing to worship and bow to unless you want that. It’s pick and choose the materials and information you want from the web and move on, no extra charge.


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