Updated (see below). Jason is slaving away over not only hot pixels, but hot photos as well. There’s a great deal that goes into making a page look as nice as the ones below. This is the first page of flies in Chapter 10 in our soon-to-be-released book, Long Flies. I think it’s absolutely top [...]

Jason reshot Ulf Hagstrom’s “Still Got the Blues for You” at a different angle to better show the tail configuration. It’s well worth seeing. Thanks Jas!

Our new book, Long Flies, is getting closer. Watch for announcements about its release date and any special offers. Long Flies is a solid look at the developmental history of bucktails, streamers, leeches, buggers, muddlers, divers, collard flies, tube flies, and more, with special attention to design parameters. In addition, it contains an in-depth look [...]

After the International Fly Tying Symposium, Chuck and Ben Furinsky, and our friend from Holland, Theo Bakelaar, went searching for blues and stripers. They fished all day and finally found three large flocks of birds diving over bait. The fish were there and all of them were into both blues a stripers for they couple [...]

Long Flies is coming soon. Watch here and on Jason’s blog for further announcements. Jason and I have settled on the cover art for Long Flies. It has the perfect look and feel to it, and I think it’s a great visual to introduce the reader to this wonderful facet of fly fishing.  Long Flies [...]

My friend, Chuck Furimsky, founder and manager of The Fly Fishing Shows, is also the developer of Bugskin. It’s a thin leather product used in fly tying. Well, Chuck was cleaning a striper and found 3 baby flounders in its stomach. So what else could he do but tie a baby flounder fly? He found [...]

Jason has been giving the smallies a hard time in recent days. Not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just that I wish I was there havin at ‘em, too. In our forthcoming book, Long Flies, I discuss a tactic called the jigging Swing that is one of the most deadly tactics for smallies, trout, [...]

Another excerpt from our upcoming book Long Flies. This story is “hot off the press” because it’s a story about a fishing experience I had last week in Alaska. Some anglers have difficulty considering these actual fly fishing tactics, and that’s okay as long as they don’t try to make others stop using these tactics. [...]

This story is from last week’s Alaska trip and will appear in our forthcoming book, Long Flies. The week was cold, rainy and very windy. We had one afternoon of sun, and that happened to be the day the chums were on the shallow bars.It was fishing extraordinaire, as the story tells.   Alaska’s Alagnak [...]

In my last post on the Gray Ghost, I showed the labor that I undertook in the days before I knew Carrie Stevens’ tying tactics. She greatly reduced the efforts that are required to tie the fly well, and also to increase its durability. Here’s another paragraph from Long Flies that explains her tying strategies [...]

As I continue to tie flies for our third book, Long Flies, I am amazed at the richness of all the long fly designs. Probably, no not probably, simply the most brilliant early development of streamers (long flies with feather wings) came from the vise of Ms. Carrie Stevens. Here’s a two paragraph excerpt from [...]

My apologies for abandoning all of you for the last 10 days or so. Jason and I have been working rather intensely to get book # 2 press ready. Reading Waters will be going to the printer this week. As soon as we have a release date we will, of course, post that on our [...]

Volume 3, Long Flies, in our series, Fly Fishing, is reaching its final writing destination. Here’s a short excerpt from Long Flies on a design I call the Hen Matuka, It harkens back to the original fly tied with the feathers of the matuku bittern. The Matuka, a New Zealand imitation, solves the wing/hook-bend tangling [...]

Book Three in the Fly Fishing series is entitled Long Flies. It is a look back and a look forward of the design of flies to imitate minnows, leeches, salamanders, eels, squid, and other elongate food prey of our sport fishes. The look back is to glean what we can from the thinking of long [...]