"Dave LaCourse" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 2 May 2006 13:07:17 -0700, "Tom Nakashima"
wrote:

I just received my order of flies for the McCloud River that are well
tied,
but not the greatest in aesthetics. I've paid 55 cents per fly, which I
thought was a pretty good price, and they do match the patterns I wanted.
I
recently saw some very nice tied patterns at $2.80 per fly, but they were
near perfect and very aesthetically pleasing. I've never fished with
beautiful flies before, but was wondering if they do make a difference in
appearance to trout?
-tom


A fly shop two towns over from me went out of business several years
ago. I knew the guy that ran it and jumped at the chance to buy some
of the "realistic" flies that he had for sale. I bought a bunch of
them for about $0.75 apiece, and some Water Wisp flies for about the
same amount. I was so very pleased in my purchase of these flies and
couldn't wait to try them on my favorite stream.

Long story short: The Water Wisp flies were absolutely useless.
Never had a rise to them *all season*. The realistic flies did not
perform any better that the hack jobs that *I* tie. So, I can say
from experience that it ain't what they look like necessarily.

I believe presentation is the key to successful fly fishing,
regardless the discipline (nymphing, wets, dries, streamers).

I once caught a 20 inch land locked salmon that had a fly in its jaw.
I removed it and put it on my patch. About an hour later I tied on
that fly and took fish after fish after fish. The fly was beat up
beyond recognition at the end of that day. It became my "lucky fly",
and I only used it when I was getting skunked. It *never* failed. I
eventually lost it to a fish that beat me, and I regret to this day
that I did not reverse engineer the fly to see how it was tied. I
have tied similar ones, but nothing that had the success of that fly.

Dave





There used to be an olde salmon and trout fisherman who lived next door to
me on Stanley Pond in Hiram, Maine when I was a kid. He would go out and buy
Mickey Fins and some other types of bucktail streamers ( I was only like 12
or 13 at the time), bring them home and start plucking out some of the
bucktail with tweezers, thinning them down and generally roughing them up.
He swore that flies needed to be weathered and a bit thinned to work
properly.

Maybe thats what happened to your lucky fly. After being chewed on a bit by
the fish and catching all those others... it was thinned enough to imitate
something the fish recognized.

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