Fly Tying
You can catch salt or fresh water fish with a drop line or a reel-less bamboo pole and several different kinds of bait—and youngsters usually do their first fishing with such elementary equipment. But to the Fisherman—with a capital F—such fishing is neither sporting nor skillful. He prefers the difficult challenge of fly-casting. He practices and practices until he can drop a fly on a dime-sized target area without so much as causing a ripple on the surface of the water.Then after he has mastered this skill, he still has a problem, for no one has made just the right fly. This is quite understandable, for there are almost as many differences of opinion about flys (and even about the spelling of flies versus flys and tiers versus tyers) as there are fishermen. He tries commercial flys, one after another, with varying degrees of success, but somehow there is something not quite right about any of them.
When he becomes convinced of this, he has been hooked, himself, and he becomes a fly-tyer. Sports shops and other stores that sell fishing tackle sell flys and also the tools and materials for making them. Flys may be made of just about anything: metals, feathers, fur, thread wire, wood, cork, and so on.
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August 20, 2008