False Start

Too many flies and at
the same time not enough

The fly boxes are assembled and inventoried. It's late in the winter season to be doing this; figuring out what needs to be tied. I should have done this in November and then got some tying out of the way during the dark, cold months. The problem was I was still mourning the close of the good days of fishing and plotting some cold weather trips. There was no time to be tying flies for "next" season.

There are three patterns that I fish regularly and I expected that I'd find lots of gaps in my fly boxes where those patterns should be. The boxes were pretty sparse but the built in "fly boxes" in my vest had plenty of samples. And then I dug out the "warehouse" box that I keep in the car and discovered last season's stash of flies. There were more than enough emergers, cripples and bugs stored there. So, no need for an emergency tying session though I was secretly disappointed.

So, I spent an hour or so sifting and sorting. Because I've been pursuing a minimal approach to fishing, carrying as little equipment as possible, I filled a small box with a variety of nymphs and dries. I found a few that needed to be sorted into the circular file. But I also put one or two of those well chewed flies into the box. Heck, if fish thought enough of them to chew them apart then perhaps they'd work again. Perhaps even better. And if nothing else, they have good mojo.

Too ugly to fish or
just ugly enough to fish?

With the sorting complete I felt better though not sated. In the absence of "needing" to tie some flies I've decided that I'll get artistic. At last week's fly tying class we tied some wet flies that had paired duck wings and that got me in the mood to tie married wings even though I've never fished them. So, I'll troll around the site that has a bunch of Bergman patterns and tie something pretty in the couple of days.

I look forward to sharing them with you.