Recycled Flies: You can recycle flies, which have been chewed, or otherwise look a little ratty. A great fly fishing tip
and money saver would be to razor blade off old material then just re-tie new flies. Now if I can just find a way to
retrieve flies from trees without having to cut down the forest, and it makes fly tying a new art form.
Floating fly boxes however much they are a good idea, beware on fast moving rivers. To my cost on opening day 2002,
my box fell out of my pocket while crossing the river, all I could do was watch it float away!!
Always Cast to a Target! When practicing your cast, don't just blindly cast into the air. Pick a target, use a small piece
of yarn on the end of your leader, and try to get your yarn to land in the target each time you cast. The target can be the
classic hula-hoop, a rock in the pond, a bucket in the garden, a hat, or just about anything. This will help you develop the
eye/hand coordination necessary to get your fly on target consistently. Another good exercise is to practice opening your
loop up at various heights by casting at a tree. Try to tap your yarn on branches at the bottom, mid, and top of the tree.
Mix it up. You'll be surprised at how little movement it takes to accomplish this and how quickly you will become proficient
at it. If you let the cast fall to the ground, you'll also notice that casts to different heights result in different amounts
of slack in the leader when it falls to the ground.
Having difficulty tying your fly to the tippet? The next time you're on the water with the light failing, the fish rising,
and having trouble fly tying, try holding the fly up against a light single-colored background. A good candidate for this
is the sky overhead. It is one of the last things to go dark if it is not a terribly cloudy day. Even if it is cloudy, you
can usually find a cloud big enough to use as a solid color. Sometimes the solid glare from the low light on the water does
the trick. Look around. It might be solid color leaf that does the trick. Using any of these backgrounds makes it much easier
than trying to see and tie on a fly against the multi-colored, multi-edged background of streamside vegetation. This is not
a cure-all, but it helps and it sure beats not fishing!
Fly tying Finishes: The secret: when you're done tying the fly and tie it off by your personal preference
is to place a thick piece of fishing line through the eye, then use your head varnish, even if you do cover up the eye,
you can pull the line out. Alternatively use a spare hackle and pass this through the eye.
Top tip
when the fish are smutting freely, they tend to slip into an
almost trance like state and rise to a set pattern. This will vary from fish to fish. Some might be every 8 secs, some might
be every 20 secs etc. When they get like this they will tend to ignore anything that passes during the interval between rises.
So if you see this happening, time your presentation to coincide with the rise
pattern.
My flies are tied on either 18's or 20's. Going any bigger than
18 greatly reduces the chances of success. I have even tied the same pattern as small as 24, but at this size apart from being
buggers to tie, the hooking to rise ratio falls to about 1:6. Still I keep a couple in the box as they will sometimes tempt
a bigger fish when all else fails.
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