My first salmon fly

So I have decided to take the leap into salmon flies. At present I do not have all the right material, but this is my first attempt. A close copy of the rusty rat tied by Davie McPhail (youtube). I was pretty happy with how it came out; even though I did not have right length hackle, or squirrel for the underwing which I just used calf tail for, and the peacock was not correct. Also as the head was drying I hit it with something and caused the superglue to deform so it has a slight bump in it. Now I need to start writing a list for materials I need once I decide on a pattern to tie.

Streamers

I have decided to start tying up New Zealand flies and to get started I tied up three types of streamers, Kilwell, Fuzzy Wuzzy, and Smelt fly (need to find the proper name).

Dying Feathers

A friend of mine has recently got a bunch of barred feathered hens and he sent me a pile of feathers from their last roast. I ended up tying up a bunch of flies to send to him to say thank you, but I also tied up some foam poppers for bass for myself with the barred feathers. For the body of these poppers I glued sheets of foam together to get the stripped patterns and then hand cut the foam with a razor.



When I brought my first cape I got a grey colour so that in the future I could dying pieces of the cape as grey would allow me to use any colour without having to bleach the feathers first. My first try at dying was black, basically the easy way out. The patch that I dyed came out really nice and I have started to tie a bunch of black gnats and small black stone flies which I will put some more photos up later.

Fort Collins

Well I spent all of Saturday in Fort Collins working on a paper, but that did mean I could get around to the local fly fishing shop (http://www.stpetes.com/). It was an old house that has all the rooms filled with fly fishing and tying supplies, also they had an upstairs room for fly tying demos. I did pick up some supplies, nothing special; but I wanted to try out some CDC puffs for mayflies which turned out pretty nice actually.


While I was taking some photos of the CDC mayfly flies I found the BWOs from the paflyfish.com fly swap which I have also included here


This is outside of the realm of fly fishing, but I also found a really nice spice store and went and offloaded some cash on a set of spices for curries. Nothing like a hot curry to kill the cold, if it every gets going in Colorado this year.

Paflyfish - Holiday Fly Swap - 2011

Just got my flies back yesterday and they all look great. All I have to do now is wait for the snow and ice to melt to see how well they work in the mountains of Colorado.

What I sent out

What was returned

Back to the vise

I finally had sometime to brake out the vise and tie some flies for what I hope will be an excellent dry fly year. I tied up some size 20 midges and parachutes, as well as a foam hopper. I am not really into foam flies, but I have had the supplies around for ages so I gave it a go.



I also went down to my new local fly fishing shop, the Laughing Grizzly (http://www.laughinggrizzlyflyshop.net/index.html). The guy there seemed really nice and the place was full of supplies; additionally he said he was from PA. I picked up some books to start learning the water and hopefully the rivers will be full of cutthroats when I get the chance to go out. There is some open water around the place, but the weekends snow might put a stop to me going out this weekend. Something that I might have to look into is at the Laughing Grizzly they do build your own bamboo fly rod, which sounds pretty amazing; even though I have already seen a pile of glass rods and a couple of bamboo rods (~$150 - $500) for sale at a giant garage sell here in Longmont.


For the evening read I decided on a nice wheat ale with a name that I hope to replicate this season.

Florida

Well it has been ages since I got on my blog, which I can explain. Firstly, I was in Florida without any fly fishing gear, but did end up buying a hand line and ended up collecting a few permit off the rocks; my personal best was ~8" long. I also got the chance to try my hand at net casting, which was piles of fun if I had more time and something to throw at.


The second reason for no posts is after Florida I drove 1600 miles from PA to CO to set up my new base in Longmont, CO. Hopefully, the weather will allow me to get out soon and get some images of the CO trout up. 5 min walk from my apartment is a lake and it has fish in it so summer better be coming soon.