Our friend Theo Baakelar sent a photo of a striper that ate his Eel Skin imitation of a Sand Eel while we were fishing in the fall of 2011. There is no doubt that big fish want to eat big bait. And eat they do. The striper definitely has the fly well in its mouth [...]

Theo Baakelar, a good friend from Holland, has been using his winter hours to tie flies for next season. Here are a couple of great looking stonefly  nymphs made with flexie body or thin skin material. They look good enough to eat, don’t they? He says they are particularly tasty with a little garlic. Notice the [...]

I asked Theo to please send along some shots of the long flies that they use for pike in Holland. He was kind enough to send them right back to me, along with some more pike photos. Note that these flies are big, as in really big, and have to be tied with plenty of [...]

This is the imitation that I find particularly effective for cranefly adults. It’s n elk hair skater. There’s not much to it, but then again, there’s not much to a cranefly adult, either. The chief design element is the super-sized hackle made from very stiff elk hair. It’s a quick fly to tie, and it [...]

Bunyan Bugs aren’t just for movies anymore (A River Runs Through It). My old friend, John Beth, has breathed new life into this nearly century old imitation, using the basic design of a balsa body and hair wing as the foundation for a series of terrestrial imitations. They not only look tasty, but the fish [...]

Fly tying is the mechanical application of materials to the hook. It can be done by any skilled craftsman, whether that person fishes or not. Fly designing is the process of combining the mechanical skills of fly tying with a knowledge of materials, the physical characteristics and life habits of the fish’s food organisms, the [...]

The Wet/Dry fly is an “accidental” discovery design. I had tied some of them as wet flies to fish during a hatch of Blue winged Olived (Ephemerella rotunda/invaria), and on the first cast the fly floated. The little brown rose and confidently sucked in the rumpled-looking wet fly that was riding the film. I tried [...]

This imitation apes Stage 2 in the emergence process. It is meant t suggest the nymph as the wings are just beginning to emerge from the case. The insect is riding in the surface film, its legs extended its body simply trapped by the surface tension, and its wings pushing up and out. This is [...]

In Fishing the Film, there’s discussion of the various stages of emergence and the files that imitate them. Several people asked me to post the tying steps for these imitations, so here’s the first one, the Low Rider Emerging Nymph. Jason developed it a couple of decades ago, when he was fishing Montana’s DePuy’s spring [...]

I’ve had a request to show the tying steps for the Hen Saddle Matuka. This fly is a nod to the original Matuka, developed in New Zealand in the early 1900s and used to fish for the absolutely monster rainbows on the North Island, and well as the huge browns on the South Island. The [...]