Fly Tying - Truttablog

Feathers: buying decent marabou

The other evening, I was tying up a few flies for still-water, and I was getting to the end of a pack of marabou. When I remarked to the family that I was running out of feathers, I got some funny looks. That’s because as I said that there were wisps drifting about me in the air, there was some getting in my nose, and there were black feathers all over the place. But they were the wrong feathers you see. Those who use marabou, will know what what I am talking about, feathers with thin, sharp ends. No fluff

27 August 2013

Knotted legs

In a previous posting I showed a fly pattern that uses knotted pheasant tail legs, and I promised a posting to help readers tie these. Tying knots in short pieces of feather fibre is difficult, so don’t beat yourself up if you end up with bits of knotless feather on the floor, and a foul temper. That would be entirely normal, and part of the process. In fact, if I haven’t tied these in a while, I forget all my own learning and do the same for a good 20 minutes before the synapses fire, and I remember this method:

9 August 2013

Tying a cripple: a step by step

This represents a half hatched nymph. A crippled and hopeless morsel for the Trout to take at will. The idea is to hang the fly in the surface film, with the tail end of the nymph shuck still attached and hanging in the water. The front end of the fly represents the half hatched winged insect, it’s looped body stuck in the top of the shuck, and its legs trailing beneath its thorax and partially opened wings. The materials you will need:

21 July 2013

Tying the woolly bugger

19 July 2013

Keepers

My friend Roy sent this to me the other day: “I grew up with parents who kept everything & used them time & time again! A mother, God love her, who washed aluminium foil after she cooked in it, then reused it. She was the original recycle queen before they had a name for it. A father who was happier getting old shoes fixed than buying new ones. Their marriage was good, their dreams focused. Their best friends lived barely a wave away. I can see them now, Dad in trousers, tee shirt and a hat and Mom in

9 July 2013

Big “Nasties”

As the weather gets bitingly cold, and the landscape loses the soft warm comforts of summer, one’s demeanour as a fisherman probably changes. By that I am suggesting that when you are out there in a cold wind, with waves coming in at you across a large stretch of cold water bounded by drab dry grass, and no sign of anything moving, you are less likely to fish a #18 emerger. Well I certainly am less likely to do so! Less likely that is, than when it is spring, and a soft breeze brushes a water surface occasionally disturbed by

31 May 2013

Gill bodied nymph revisited

I recently wrote about a new technique for created in a nymph body with breathing gills along the sides. In more recent weeks, I have been working up a few more variants and exploring the concept further.Fly tiers will know that such experimentation is a frustrating thing in many respects. You end up with several disasters before you get anything worthwhile. Materials are not as fine as you thought they would be, or not quite subtle enough, or too slippery to bond against, and so it goes; and you end up with little film canisters of tangled cast offs, of

29 March 2013

The FMD

Also known as “Fowlers Magic Dragon”, “Puff the Magic Dragon”, or just “the Puff”, but most likely not known at all. I suppose I have done very little to spread the news about this fly, but that was borne out of a desire not to be pretentious about the thing, rather than any motivation to keep the pattern to myself. This fly is a catcher of fish in stillwaters in South Africa. And a catcher of some large fish too.

24 March 2013

Fly boxes

Once you own a collection of boxes, as one inevitably does after a few decades of fly-fishing, it becomes quite difficult to justify buying a new one. I drool over boxes in shops regularly. I turn them over in my hands. I stand there in the shop, thinking that if I bought this one, I would use it for my Caddis & Midges, or my general purpose river nymphs, or some such thing. Then I put them back, and move on. Because you see, at home I have whole collection of perfectly good ones.

17 March 2013

The Haberdashery Caddis

I strolled into a haberdashery yesterday while my son had his hair cut. The woman behind the counter viewed me with suspicion over the top of her bifocals. I was an uncommon sight for her I suppose. She seemed happy enough when I bought a few things however. One of those things was a small reel of glistening green material, with no name on it. While she was ringing it up I converted it into a Caddis pupa in my minds eye. After dinner I converted it into a Caddis pupa in my vice.

6 March 2013