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 [...]

I’m just back from an exploratory trip to Canada for lake trout. The trip was a success, providing not only a fun time but fodder for a story. This story, or versions thereof, will appear in three of our forthcoming books: Long Flies, The  Angler as Predator, and Fly Designing. Watch for the elements of [...]

I asked Terry what flies he was using for muskies and he told me that he was using the patterns of my old friend, Bill Sherer. Bill has long been on the forefront of designs that employ not only size and movement but also the use of the acoustic footprint as well. Predator fish that [...]

I am currently working on volume 3 in the Fly Fishing book series. This volume is entitled, Long Flies. By long flies I mean bucktails, streamers, strip flies, collared flies, buggers, muddlers and divers, tube flies, film flies like poppers and sliders, techno flies, and others. Their developmental history is not only fascinating but highly [...]

Book number three, “Long Flies”  in our Fly Fishing book series is coming together rather nicely. Like the other books, it is focused on the topic and the how-to information is developed around the underlying concepts. There are stories to illustrate the technical information as well as color photos and design sheets for the over [...]