Two-Minute Drill

Ah, the two-minute drill. As a Giants fan, two words now come to mind: Eli Manning. That might not have been the case during the fall, but oh what a difference a Super Bowl makes.

The point is, it’s not such a bad thing to be known as a two-minute man anymore. It’s all about context, folks.

Anyway, back to fishing. Charlie Craven drinks a Red Bull and ties a parachute dry fly with impressive expediency over at flyfisherman.com. Their embedded video player link isn’t working right, but you can’t miss it on their main page and can view it there.

If I attempted to tie a parachute this quickly I would be left swearing with a crooked wingpost and broken hackle as a thin cloud of dubbing floated all around me.

The Cobbler’s Fly Box

It’s the classic case of the cobbler’s children going without shoes. You tie up a bunch of flies and pass them out to your non-tying (but hopefully grateful) friends, and when a hatch comes off or trout cosmically tune into that one particular fly, you realize that you shouldn’t have been handing them out like candy the week before because there are none in your box.

John Berry, outdoor columnist for the Baxter Bulletin in Arkansas, relays his own version of the cobbler in a caddis hatch:

I pulled out my fly box and discovered to my horror that I did not have any green butts in my box. What hurt so much was that I had been tying them during Sowbug and had given away around 80 of them.

Berry offers this lesson to fellow tyers and anglers:

First if you know that the major hatch of the year is about to come off, prepare for it. Finally, if you are going to give away 80 flies, keep a couple for your self.

Raising Hackle

Oregon’s Daily Astorian newspaper has a great profile on hackle guru Henry Hoffman, who turned his family’s egg business into a fly-tying institution that he sold in the late 1980s.

Hoffman is equal part fly-fisherman, entrepreneur and mad scientist and was the first person to raise chickens for the sole purpose of producing fly-tying feathers.

As reporter Cassandra Profita notes:

Hoffman, 73, is a meticulous fly fisherman who spent decades studying the science of fly-tying and breeding chickens to produce superior fly feathers.

The grueling effort, which required extensive research into the world of poultry and large expenditures on feed, drove off his first two wives and left him unable to pay child support by 1973.

He also benefited from fortuitous timing. Hoffman bought his first roosters in 1965 and nine years later the fly fishing industry took off.

After selling his business, Hoffman turned his attention to studying fly designs (he has the trademark on Chickabou flies) and he seems as avid today as he was raising chickens at the dawn of the modern fly-tying world in the late 1970s.

The Best

I can’t say that John Gierach books got me into fly-fishing, but I know those books got me into writing. And one of the best features in his writing was the dynamic between Gierach his fishing partner, A.K. Best.

I’ve read a couple of Best’s books on fly-tying and can appreciate the attention to realism and proportion (not to mention borderline fanatacism) that he practices in tying and selecting materials. He’s got an 0ld-school attitude about tying and fly-fishing and he’s a great foil to the headhunting, yuppie crowd.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s D’Arcy Egan caught up with Best recently ahead of an appearance in theMidwest. Here are a few nuggets:

“I do a lot of writing and photography, and tie about 500 dozen flies each year,” said Best.

Yes, that’s about 6,000 flies each year. It took me a week to tie six poppers.

So many fly fishers test their talent with light tackle. They cast wispy ought-weight fly rods and spider web leaders with teensy-tiny flies.

Best doesn’t carry anything lighter than a 5-weight fly rod. He wants to quickly land and release his trout, not tire them to death.

“You don’t go deer hunting with a .22 rifle,” he said. “Fish enough and some day you’re going to hook a trophy – and maybe land it, if you have the right equipment.”

Optimism, with a tinge of fogeyism.

“Fly tiers leave a lot of stuff out, trying to match an insect perfectly.

“But they don’t. Most every mayfly has a darker thorax than abdomen, but most flies don’t reflect that. And they don’t tie the wings long enough. Mayflies don’t read proportion charts. Their wings are going to be as long as nature wants them.”

His flies do look more realistic than, say, a classic Catskill pattern. His are also harder to tie and his penchant for quill bodies — which look great but are a royal pain to use and prepare — is downright evil to beginner and even intermediate tyers. That said, I learned a hell of a lot about organizing time and materials before I even put a hook in the vise from his Production Fly Tying book. His more recent tying book about his favorite flies is a classic that I am still learning from.

A.K. is a classic mad scientist fly-tyer.

Giving Poppers a Shot – Part I

I tied up some poppers last week for the first time in my 15+ years of fly-tying. I was never particularly motivated to take a stab at them until recently, although I can’t say why. Probably the thought of sanding, gluing, painting and then tying a fly was the big turn-off, as I imagine that’s the case with most who haven’t gone there. After all that effort in crafting the bug, losing the fly in an unforgiving limb or lily pad had just been unfathomable.

I’m not sure why I suddenly overcame those fears, but as the holiday season trickled in, so did an urge to tie some bass and panfish patterns. Maybe it was the gaudy lights and decorations that crop up every December in the name of holiday cheer, or shoppers clad in flowing scarves, bobbing hats, and bright shopping bags that reminded me of overdressed poppers.

I did some Internet research on what kind of paint to use — some swore by vinyl jig paint, others said they prefer acrylic. There’s even a branded popper paint, which I plan on trying down the road but seemed a little too professional for my rookie ties. I ordered some vinyl jig paint for no other reason than I like the way it looks on jigs. I got jars in black and white (to make eyes and because I like black poppers), green and yellow (for frogs), along with a jar of thinner. After I placed the order, I thought I should’ve ordered some red, but I figured there were enough colors to keep me busy.

For hooks I took the easy route and ordered the pre-formed hooks that come with closed-cell foam heads in various sizes. Sure, shaping and sanding down heads from a piece of buoyant wood is probably the purist route, but I didn’t need to make things more complicated. I feared frustration would lead me to give up, and I wanted this to stick.

So after all the parts arrived, I sat down on a cold Saturday afternoon and dutifully glued the popper heads to the special curved hooks with one of those adhesives that makes your fingers stick together if you’re not careful. After letting them dry for a few hours, I jammed a sewing needle in a wine cork and heated up the needle to poke holes through the foam bodies for rubber legs. This was a little tricky, but I only ruined one popper out of five or six so I consider it a victory.

After painstakingly poking the rubber legs through the tiny holes (by far, the most painful part of the entire process), I popped open a jar of yellow paint, opened the window after nearly passing out from the fumes, and started painting.

The vinyl paint coated the foam heads extremely well and dried with a nice, glossy finish in all the colors. I had some trouble forming eyes — they looked more like amoebas than eyeballs — but for the first go-’round, I was happy.

I knew tying poppers involved a few steps, but I was struck by the amount of work that went into each fly, even before a bobbin became involved.

Here are a few pics from stage 1: