Big witvis (Cape whitefish), an old nemesis, have plagued my thoughts for a long time. They seemed impossible to catch on fly, which simply didn't make sense to me, that was until I was introduced to micro-nymphing... It's amazing how aggressive small fish can be to large flies and then sometimes, how comparatively big fish [...]
How to amplify rattles in your flies. Now, embedding rattles into flies is nothing new. Borrowed from the booming clink-clank of art lures, tyers have been using rattles for years to target a variety of species. In the past decade some of the more hardened local salt fly-fishers turned to making their own from broken [...]
Catching carp on small white flies.
I usually have more than one reel to clean when im coming back from a trip, and although the line winder can take two lots of backing, thats usually not enough and I hate the dance of moving things on and off. The perforations do make it great for cleaning fly reel backing. In my [...]
A shadow cruised just under the turquoise surface. Could it be? The shape suggested a small Mangar. It accelerated towards the small white zonker that landed ahead of it... This trip to Iran showed the effectiveness of a simple white zonker over pearl body. Even carp ate it. Since then, this version of zonker has [...]
Glossy, durable, flexible and perfect for fly tying. In Pattex 100% Platon Trakoshis believes he has found the ultimate fly tying glue for building baitfish heads Glue. It’s always such a big question and discussion with fly tiers. “What did you glue the eyes on with? How did you make that head? What are you [...]
I have often wondered when the original art of fly tying will finally be replaced by its modern incarnation, as fuelled by social media and the fly fashion show: fanatically dressed lures for fishing on fly rods. Much as I admire modern ingenuity and engage in hours of toil behind the vice in order to [...]
So one of the upsides of lockdown has been a lot more spare time on one's hands to fuck around at the vice. I think since March I have tied enough flies for a dozen trips or more. Having the creative outlet at the vice has certainly done a lot to stave off the darkness [...]
I dig fishing big dry flies with long 'legs' or rubber appendages for extra movement. The bigger flies are more buoyant and therefore also highly visible, they float longer than tiny dries and they can work charmingly well as 'indicators' when a dropper nymph is attached (I prefer 'New Zealand style' for this). Big dry [...]
The idea to trim thick, palmered Cul de Canard (CDC) to shape a juicy abdomen was inspired by Tom Sutcliffe's DDD - simply pronounced as 'Triple D' (see previous post...). Tom made the 'DDDs' that he tied famous in South Africa - there are several forms (deerhair with hackle feathers, klipspringer hair with hackle feathers [...]
