As a kid I threw spinners and spoons, and didn’t bother to learn the impact of bugs in a salmon or trout’s life.
No. 5 Blue Fox spinners were not part of an ecosystem, unless I snagged a rock and my line snapped. Then it stayed there, a shiny flaw in the river.
I broadened my ecological knowledge in California where resident trout eat what’s available and whose migration might involve a lake but not the ocean. I could have used spinners, but the appeal of tricking trout with what looked like it belonged in the ecosystem was much greater. Many lessons were learned on the Sacramento River. After fishing from shore for a few years a buddy and I decided to get a guide and see what was possible from a drift boat. Fishing a river that typically flows between 5,000-8,000 cubic feet per second makes it difficult to keep a fly down along the bottom where the insect life cycle begins — or ends if it happens to be in the feeding lane.
We used tiny flies and fat ovals of coated tin split shot to catch big rainbow trout and a lot of them. This further distanced me from the bigger-is-better ideals I held as they pertain to catching fish.
The natural progression was to tie flies myself. I was often frustrated while attempting to learn from a book because steps 1-4 were typically simple but it seemed like every fly had to be tied in fewer than six steps, so more things happened in the last two steps than in the first four combined. I’d stare at the image and read abbreviated instructions that seemed incomplete. The image showed one thing happening, but in order to reach the starting point for the next step, a tremendous amount of crafting had to happen.
Videos helped, but it was obvious I was destined to be the type who tied the easy ones and bought the more sophisticated patterns.
I pumped out zebra midges (an incredibly productive pattern) in black and red with ease. This is not a brag, it doesn’t get much easier than a zebra midge. I tied pheasant tails and micro mayflies to go with larger stonefly patterns I bought at the fly shop when I went in to get the report.
I am back to an edited version of bigger-is-better for angling and tie things that only slightly resemble food because nasty, grumpy, fleshy and flashy are the way to go. Midges provoke non-stop action, but only with salmon fry or juvenile fish that are years from being ideal targets.
I miss the satisfaction of rotating the vice to inspect my work on a fly that looks like food, though I was never looking for “perfect.” I was fine with “that’ll fish.” But being mostly free from matching the hatch makes tying easier. The egg sucking leech, a desert island fly for many, doesn’t really look like a leech sucking on an egg, and who has seen an egg being sucked by a leech, but it works.
For those looking for mentors in the fly tying world, there are events in local communities, some of which even include materials.
Tying flies in front of someone else can be intimidating because while you’re wrapping up a beer-induced pattern that looks like it was dropped in a blender, if the person across from you whip-finishes art, it can make you never want to tie again.
But everyone who is good, was once terrible, and it beats sitting on the couch on a dark winter evening.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Alpha XR. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports and Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
