Kelly Creek Flycasters has for some time been using the Fly of the Month feature from the Federation of Fly Fishers website.  This is an excellent source, which encourages such use with proper credit, but it has seemed to me a little silly to simply copy and condense their offering. You can just as easily visit their site directly at http://www.fedflyfishers.org in its entirety. If you have not previously visited their site, I encourage you to do so. It is a treasure of tying instruction and patterns. 

This also ignores the fact that our club has our own core of excellent, accomplished fly tying artists.  We all know LeRoy Hyatt’s work from his television program. Most of us have seen the beautiful steelhead flies that Dave Clark brings for the club drawings, and Will Godfrey’s fly box is a splendid example of organization and detail.  Those are just a few that come to mind at this moment. 

We also need to remember that a national publication’s fly du jour might not be the best use of our publication for our region this month.  With that in mind, I will try with this edition to start a tradition of featuring local tiers with locally relevant flies. In order that all who come after will not be self conscious, I am starting with our least accomplished tier. That way we can’t help but improve as we go along. 

It is certainly steelhead season, so here is one of my recent patterns.  I’ve heard it said, often enough to repeat here, that choice of fly doesn’t matter – that if almost any fly passes correctly in front of a willing steelhead, it will hit.  We tie elaborate flies more out of respect for the fish or to satisfy our own esthetics, rather than in expectation that a particular pattern or nuance will attract more fish.  With that in mind, I had a yen for something blue, and went looking for material. I found a really nice Silver Doctor blue Spey feather cape at The Red Shed .  There was a $500 price tag on it, but that’s a funny story for another day. Poppy suggested that black and blue look good together, hence the name, Black and Blue, with apologies to the truly battered. I tried to call it Domestic Violence, but apparently that is already taken. I tied a few and caught my first steelhead of the year on my first cast with it, which proves absolutely nothing.

1. Pinch the barb and dress the hook with Uni-stretch back to the bend.
2. Dress a tag of flat silver tinsel.
3. Wrap the Uni-stretch forward to the mid-point of the hook, taking care that it lays flat.
4. Tie in a sparse small bunch of blue marabou which reaches back barely past the bend of the hook. Tie down the cut ends and progress the Uni-stretch slightly forward.
5. Tie in three or four more similar bunches of blue marabou in a similar fashion, each slightly longer, so that they all terminate at the same distance, barely behind the bend of the hook. (This is flagrant plagiarism of John Shewey’s Spawning Purple technique.)
6. Change to 8/0 black tying thread, and tie in the Spey hackle by its tip. Make three or four turns of hackle and tie it off.
7. Add another small bunch of Marabou in front of the Spey hackle.
8. If you really want to be elaborate, tie in Jungle Cock nails here.
9. Tie in the guinea by its tip, fold the feather and take two or three wraps.
10. Tie off, make a small neat head, and apply head cement.
11. Touch up the hook point with a sharpener.

 

Jim Lowther
Asotin, WA