salmobytes

RE> boat collaboration. I'm 70 and my eyes are shot to hell. Can barely tie. Use 5x jeweler's googles. The shop may be history. I can't tell when the screw gun is in the head of the Torx screw any more. So gouged fingers are common. I do have a new boat I want to see built. All wood. No glue. Everything screws together over built-in-place glue-lam strips. Over marine caulk, so if anything breaks you just replace it. And decked, like a white water boat. But low so you can step on step off. Still has hatches and dry storage below. Deck bolts down onto a 1" thick foam gasket, so the deck can come off (like everything else about this boat). No one has ever built it. And now I can't. I need to find a boat builder. This would be a bigger, blown-up wooden version of this one.....with a point up front instead of square ended. High sided drift boats are wind sails. The Oregon guys made them high sided so they could run big water. But if they're decked they aren't wind sails. And you can still run big water.

Portable so you can tie bugs in the Bahamas or so you can tie in the living room and take it down in between sessions (one would be more bigger than the other)? Seems like a hinged box that has a lip across the handle edge, with fold-down legs somehow, someway, might do the Bahamas scenario. There must be youtube vids on folding legs. You do nice work. I looked at your wood working website. I have a shop too but I'm a prototype hacker. And not a fine wood worker. Maybe you should...........build revolutionary new drift boat design. :=))

Ouch. I'm 70. I don't have Parkinson's but I do have CSS, which is related to CRS. It's so hard for me to see I don't tie much anymore. I tie some but not constantly anymore, like I did for 50 years or more. I do photography boat building and coding now. The boats are getting tough. I can't tell when the power screw driver is in the screw head anymore. So I end up with gouged fingers a lot. My current boat may be my last. Cameras keyboards and wet fly fishing will keep me busy for a while. Small flies are history for me now. Hang in there. You're tying well.

I'm not a Darwin scholar but I do believe some of the posts above are off base. Darwin's ideas were new in his time. He sat of them for over 20 years. His ideas were so unique he didn't think he had anything to worry about. Wallace (who was a self taught specimen collector but not a trained biologist) sent Darwin a synopsis of his (Wallace's) ideas asking for feedback. Darwin was now in trouble. Wallace had independently come up with some of the same ideas. The two were in agreement about the idea of "natural selection" being a prime driving force in evolution. Darwin rushed to publish his own ideas and did a gentleman's job of giving Wallace credit too. Darwin also believed in (and wrote about) the idea of "sexual selection." Sexual selection means evolution is also driven by mating preference choices made by both males and females. However female selection was, in Darwin's view, more important than male choice. Sexual selection would, for instance, explain why male Peacocks have ridiculously long colorful tails. That's what the ladies like, so those were the Peacock guys who got to have the most sex. So even though the Peacock tail makes the male easier prey, those genes survive because they get passed on in far greater numbers. Wallace rejected the idea of sexual selection--politely while Darwin was still alive. Wallace became arrogant and derisive about sexual selection after Darwin's death. Wallace argued sexual selection implied conscious choice on the part of thee (primarily) female animal. Largely because of lingering ideas about Christianity, Wallace knew (or thought he knew) animals couldn't think. So sexual selection had to be wrong. Sexual selection is now assumed to be an important evolutionary mechanism by (nearly) all evolutionary theorists. Darwin, in other words, had it right. From the getgo. Wallace was not the only doubter. For almost a century after Darwin's death it was common for biologists to say "Oh what a great genius Darwin was. But he was wrong about sexual selection!" Darwin is enjoying the last belly laugh on all his detractors. ============ RE> The feather theif The important part about the Feather Thief story was not about whether the young thief was a creep or not. He was and still is. Learning about a lively, still on-going and extremely lucrative trade is rare exotic tropical bird feathers is the important part. You can find Lovely Cotinga and Toucan feathers on sale at EBay any day of the week. Applogists like to say Macaw feathers come from captive birds, which may or may not be true. But there are no captive Cotingas and/or Toucans. Every one of those feathers comes from bird poaching--which pays a small fortune by Central American standards. Cotinga and Toucan numbers are dwindling fast and the illicit feather trade is--along with habitat loss--a big part of the story. Birding guides in Central America get so mad their faces turn red when talking about bird poachers. That's a fact. I been there. I heard'em tell it that way.

Why a substitute? Is Senyo Laser Dub no longer available? I depend on that stuff for mayfly wings.

I have CSS (can't see s...). Had retina surgery that didn't go well. I don't tie much anymore. Not like I used to anyway. Don't know what to say. This old age business is overrated. Good luck to you.

Good photos too

I made wood/fiberglass drift boats for sale in the early 1980s. I made and sold about 30 boats before I realized I should just write a check for $500 dollars to every new customer who came into my shop. That way the financial transaction would stay about the same but I wouldn't have to actually build the boat. I suspect it's a similar deal in fly tying, especially so at the prices you mentioned. To make it at all as a fly tier I think you have to establish a reputation that allows you to charge more per fly instead of less, and to sell at retail only, directly to customers, rather than at wholesale to the shops. That's what Al Troth did. .........I'm 70. I started tying at 12. I missed a few years during the late 60s when I lived in a tipi, at 8200 feet in the Colorado mountains. But other than those 4 years I've tied every year, every week for almost 60 years now. The one thing I've learned about fly tying is this: any thought about tying in order to save money is...fake news. There are other very good reasons to tie. Lots of them. But saving money isn't one of them. :=))

I used to finish hardwood floors. Clear casting resin of any kind will give you a flat surface--over the carving area. Sand that with a random orbit sander. 100 grit then 220 then even finer. Then finish off with several coats of clear water based floor finish, sanding lightly in between with fine sandy paper. VOC floor finishes are more durable but they stink to high heaven and usually require 8 to 12 hours curing between coats. Water based floor finish can be recoated 3 hours later. And it's hard enough to walk on for 5 years, before needing a touch up. For a tying bench it would last forever.

White antelope is good stuff and hard to find. Unless you hunt, or know someone who does.

Molly's your aunt?

I made a movable stand by drilling a stem-width hole in a fat chunk of brass, then a 1/4" inch (tad less actually) hole at right angles to the stem hole, which I threaded with a 1/4 - 20 tap. The hardware store had a 1/4 - 20 bolt with a plastic knob. It doesn't have to be brass. I like a movable platform more better than a clamp.

Tom Morgan had two shadow boxes of flies in his house, which was also the Troutrods manufacturing shop. In the main hallway as you walked in there was a box of Syl Nemes soft hackle wet flies and this one. Side by side. Tom's gone now and I got lucky. And ended up with this box of weird, off-the-wall fly patterns. They were made.........5 or 6 years ago? This is just a cell phone photo. I'll make a better image at some point.

This is an aside of sorts. If you wind a dubbing loop loosely with just a few turns the loop has a different appearance than a tightly wound loop. But if you then wind that loosely-twisted loop on the hook the resulting fibers too often don't stay put. You can do two things to solve that dublemma. One you can wet the two thread legs of the loop with fabric cement prior to loading it with fuzz and two you can wet the shank with a thin layer of fabric cement prior to winding the loosely twisted loop. Now you get to work with loosely twisted dubbing loops, and still end up with a durable fly.

RE> all that (natural) contrast Shut my mouth. I've netted and photographed lots of bugs but not like those. Perhaps I need to look at them closer to hatch time?

I like the Lucian Vasies flies above. Very nice. Zebra Midges are interesting because they are not realistic. No real midge has that much high contrast banding. And yet Zebra Midges consistently out-fish duller, more mottled more realistic flies of the same size and shape. Someone needs to right write a new book called "Not Matching the Hatch."

Originality matters when fly manufacturers pay royalties for designs they produce, for instance when XYZ promoted the Dahlberg Diver. And wanted a share of the royalties.

I've been a member for a long time but haven't posted much and never did introduce myself. I'm Colin (Sandy) Pittendrigh of Montana Riverboats https://montana-riverboats.com Now retired. Former software engineer, building contractor, boat builder and fishing guide. Montana Rubber Boats is just a hobby. It's not a real business. I'm also a fly tier. 99% of the time (or more) I make posts about odd-ball flies I've been working on. I'm posting this introduction now because I occasionally (not very often) also post links to outside articles about controversial environmental issues with unfortunate culture war side associations, like the recent New York Times article about a world-wide decline in insect populations. That article basically said "insects are declining rapidly but no one knows why. Loss of habitat, pesticides and global warming are possible causes." I posted that link on the Classic Flyrod Forum a week ago and all hell broke out. Holy cow. It's an interesting piece of writing. Everyone is free to interpret it however they want. That thread ended up "locked" over there I decided to take a powder from that forum. The same thing happened to me 5 years ago at faol. I do not post links like that often but I do occasionally. Construction workers like me do have a tendency to say what ever it is I'm thinking about without worrying about being politically correct. What's it like here in this neck of the woods? Am I free to be me or should I take a powder now? :=))

I attach hackle pliers to the bottom thread-only part of the loop and spin those, twisting at the jaws of the hackle pliers hard and fast like snapping your thumb. I have two or three loop twisting tools and they all piss me off.

My flies are the only ones tied by me. The rest are all actually tied by the attributed author. I own a few of those flies but not many. A large portion were from Tom Morgan's personal collection. I maintained Tom's website for almost a decade and got to know him pretty well. And I photographed all his flies. And then it grew from there. People visit my website and then (occasionally) offer to send me flies they've collected, from well-known tiers. I photograph the flies and then send the flies back. Of the flies I do actually own (Frans Pott, Jack Beohme, Pat Barnes and a few others) they are all neatly packed away in small boxes and I only get to actually see them once a year or so. The online images I see all the time.

A lot of these are original, by any reasonable standard or definition of original. Some of them are good flies too! https://montana-riverboats.com/?robopage=Flies/Sandy-Pittendrigh/&layout=slideshow

Yes that my pattern. I've been at this a long time. There was a May 1986 article in Fly Fisherman called Flies or Lures written by John Gierach that featured my flures along with others by AK Best and John Betts and maybe one or two others. None of us knew each other way back then. So we came up with what we did in a vacuum, on our own, not in any way influenced by the others in that group. I used to work hard at publishing in the magazines. I've had a good 20 publications in glossy fly fishing magazines over the years, mostly back in the 1980s. I never did succeed in getting any wiggler articles published. Well that's not true. I did have a early-to-mid-1980s wiggler piece in Salmon Trout Steelheader. Does that magazine still exist? They targeted a more not-so-purist crowd. The easiest way to get a fly tying article published in a glossy fly fishing magazine used to be by making it all about Mayflies. I'm not sure that's still the case but it used to be. At least if it was about a cold water context. Anything goes in the big Salt. Even then. But if it was trout fishing it had to be done in certain hermetically sealed ways. Wigglers tend to make magazine editors nervous. One such editor told me "I'm afraid the readers would rebel," when he summarily rejected my wiggler article. It's not clear why but they get nervous but they do. Actually it is clear why. Wigglers remind people of spin fishing and spin fishing is on the other side of the fly fishing culture wars. It's all about tribal loyalty. I just like to fish. I like hand line fishing too. And tickling. I have tickled quite a few trout over the years. I've never tried catfish noodling but I'd like to.

Double sided carpet tape? No not sure what that is or how I would use it. I use closed-cell buoyant foam snipped to shape with a diving bill glued to the foam with CA glue. Small diving bills come from a Costco tomato container. Bigger diving bills come from soaking a small rectangular patch of fiberglass fabric with thin 20 minute epoxy or ZapAGap. I glue feathers to the foam with fabric cement. Or sew fronds of fuzz using a wide-eyed sewing needle.

It's important to balance buoyancy at the rear with weight underneath. All crankbaits are made that way. The opposing forces of weight below the bill fighting against buoyancy higher up and behind help to keep the flure from flipping over. I do use a barrel swivel 12" inches up the leader. I live in cold water country in Montana. I wish I didn't have to travel so far to fish for Smallmouth Bass. Wigglers are special purpose flures. But they are deadly. The wiggler in the following vid is a good diver--scraping the bottom of the bathtub in 3" inches of water. https://montana-riverboats.com/?robopage=Flies/Sandy-Pittendrigh/Wigglers/wiggler-vid.htm

https://montana-riverboats.com/?robopage=Flies/Sandy-Pittendrigh/Wigglers/Riffle-dart-howto/&layout=slideshow