wrote in message
oups.com...
I wrote this for a blog entry a few days ago. I've never heard anyone
else
make this point, so I thought it was worth posting.

=====
Why make flies and lures?

Like a lot of fly tyers I started when I was about 12 or so. I had to
tie flies in order to fish. Good flies were hard to find and too
expensive to buy back then. But I'm almost 60 now and good high-quality
flies are cheap to buy and easy to find. Rather than a threat to
creative fly tying, however, I see that as a great benefit. I don't
need to tie any more Elk Hair Caddis, Woolly Buggers or Royal Wulffs,
because I can buy those flies for not too much more than it would cost
to buy the materials.

That means I can spend all my time fiddling with new designs--tying
odd-ball specialty flies I can't buy at any price. It also means I
don't have to worry about tying time efficiency. Because I buy most of
the flies I actually fish with, it suddenly becomes perfectly sensible
to tie flies that take a half an hour or more each to make.

Now that I think about it, worrying about production efficiency can
take the fun out of almost anything. I used to work think and fret
about new and ever faster ways to build driftboats. Now I pride myself
in taking longer than some of the first time boat builders I sell my
boat blueprints to.

Time is money. The more time it takes the more valuable it is. And my
fly boxes are filled with powerful, valuable, good-looking flies nobody
else has.


Why do I tie flies ? .... I started tying flies about a day and a half
after taking up fly fishing.

My casting skills were non-existent in those early days, flies were about
$1.25 each (steep for
the wages a rural Montana boy could make in those days), and my fishing
spots surrounded by fly shredding sagebrush and other brush.



Additionally, I tied flies to fill my boxes with the sort of fish catching
patterns that were more suited for the rough and tumble water I fished,
instead of the lightly weighted, generic patterns available for sale in my
area.



Having little knowledge of what made a good fish catching fly, I read a lot
of fly fishing "literature" after about the hundredth time reading something
along the lines of: "Never weight your hook, a nymph with lead on the hook
acts like a feathered sinker", a little light went off !!! A feathered
sinker !!! that's exactly what I need.



Along about the same time, some guide, turned boat builder started
publishing articles in Fly Tyer magazine the reinforced by revelation, these
were flies of the utmost in simplicity, and a liberal use of lead.



And while I was never brave enough to copy these patterns exactly, (one
material list comprised only four items; a jig hook, a split shot, a hank of
grizzly hen, and a Zap a Gap glue gun !), it did influence my tying so that
I created patterns for the fish and the water, and not to slavishly follow
some tradition that may or may not apply to how and where I fished.



So why do I still tie flies, I learned how to cast (some would disagreee), I
don't have lots of free time any more, and, as it has been pointed out, from
an efficiency standpoint, it's much cheaper to just buy them, I tie because
no one can tie a fly, for how and where I fish, like I can.



And sometimes when I am removing a soaked and chewed up fly from a fishes
mouth, a little voice in my head says; "I made that."