The days when fish don’t seem eager to commit suicide (ok… they probably would be released anyway:0) – are the days when you really have to experiment with your fishing techniques. It can be inspiring, frustrating and educating… depending on your mindset on the actual day. Well… I had a pretty frustrating day on the […]
Here is one for the squirrel tail theme. Do you remember Callgirl, Streamtease, Pin-up and Playboy. Well if you grew up in the sixties and seventies you probably do. My first rod and reel was a spinning outfit, and at that time spinning tackle didn’t get any better than the products made in Svängsta, Sweden. […]
This fall I’ve been fishing a large lake with a healthy population of brown trout. Since these trout primarily are predatory, large streamers are the order of the day. I’ve had some success with my Rusty Strip Minnow but wanted a fly with a touch of even more provocative colours. Being a sucker for traditional […]
When I started fly tying more than 3 decades ago, squirrel tails were used in a lot of the fly patterns that first caught my eye. I tied some quill-winged wet flies as well – but, lacking tying experience, these pretty much sucked. The hair-winged flies, however, turned out right most times. I used a […]
If you do a Google search for the Woolly Worm you are going to find a lot of links with hackled flies that are relatively true to the origin of this fly, but you will also find some flies that has only a very slight resemblance to the original. I like to experiment as much […]
September traditionally offers lots of fly fishing opportunities around here, but this year… well the start of the autumn kind of sucks. We’ve had a warm and dry summer, and the rivers are running low, clear and warm. That means a delay in the run of sea trout. I’ve spent several late evenings and some […]
Firetail Booby I invented this pattern more than a decade ago. I was inspired by flies like Jack Gartside’s Soft Hackle Streamer and a lot of the colourful steelhead flies. What I wanted was hot colours and flash, but I also wanted it to be a little bit subdued. The solution was to hide the […]
Meet the Booby Fly – Top producing outlaw with a catchy name It has a funky name, it is kind of goofy looking – but it is one of the most efficient and consistently top producing flies for trout… and pretty much anything else that swims. So effective, actually, that it has been banned from […]
Yesterday the weather was grey, rainy and pretty windy, so I decided to have a go at the sea trout in one of my local rivers. I fished a giant Muddler fly on an intermediate line. The buoyancy of the spun deerhair head made the fly bulge, and created a hefty V-shaped wake on the […]
I’m pretty much into classic British stuff at the moment. You know tweed, classic Hardy reels and even more classic wet flies. Last night I was doing a bit of research in John Veniards book Reservoir and Lake Flies. On one of the color plates the beautiful Freeman’s Fancy caught my eye. Both Veniard and […]
