Small, Thin, and Simple Flys

As a guide, one of the things that I dread to do the most is to come home late after guiding all day and have to tie flys!  So, I have learned to make them simple and fast… something that I like to call “guide patterns.”  This might be something as easy as using thread to tie the bodies of my midges or smaller drys.  Another ‘fast’ tip is to keep the glitz and glitter down in order to speed things up a bit.  One of the first things that I notice while looking into other peoples’ fly boxes is that they have a lot of over-sized and over-dressed flys.  There are usually nymphs that are too fat, streamers, buggers, caddis, and so on.  Whatever they are, the flys look like they came from the day spa salon before heading to some beauty pageant!   One of the flys that I frequently use on the Pit River is a Black  AP.  I tie it with a very thin body.  A good client of mine who was, at the time, taking a tying class from the originator, Andy Poyuns, once told me that I was tying it wrong.  When I turned a rock over and challenged him to find me something that looked like the one he had tied, he couldn’t find anything!   He did, however, find several nymphs with the same body shape and size as what then became dubbed the “Anorexic AP“.  Well,  this bit of info made its way back to my good friend Andy Poyuns, who promptly gave me a call on the newly-named “Anorexic AP“.  After explaining my two reasons for tying them in that manner – for speed and for actually matching what Mother Nature had already provided us with – he laughed and said, “Art, if it works for you then that’s all that counts!”  So just remember that when the glitz and glitter aren’t working, it may be time to get back to basics.