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Fly tying: Cleaning a Dubbing Needle
For those of us who tie flies and work with various resins, from head cement to full-on UV materials, a dubbing needle is likely our tool of choice for applying the goo. For years, I used a square of craft foam to clean the needle after each use—I'd just poke the needle through the foam…
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Fly tying: Wood Duck Heron
As a utilitarian fly tier, if I can find a fly that's both simple to tie and effective on the water, I'm in a pretty good place. I like flies that I can a dozen of at a single sitting and not feel like I've been hunched over the vise for hours. Video of Wood…
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Fly tying: The hobby knife
Back in my early newspaper days, when we actually used flats to lay pages out on lightboards, I never went anywhere without my trusty X-Acto knife. I used it to trim border tape, surgically slice columns to fit the allotted space and do all sorts of trimming once the actual journalism was done and producing…
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Fly tying: The Palomino Midge
Normally, when I hear Tim Flagler say that he's tying a fly in a size 20, "but feel free to go smaller," I just throw up my hands and resign myself to the fact that the pattern he's demonstrated is for fingers smaller and more dextrous than mine. Video of Palomino MidgeBut, as you'll see…
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Fly tying: Working thread length
One of the most basic skill fly tiers must learn when getting into the craft is how to manage the thread as it comes off the bobbin. It seems simple, but I can't count the times I've watched brand-new tiers trying to figure out just how much thread they need to work with as they…
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Fly tying: The RS2
I was in Denver a couple of weeks for a family thing, and I got to spend some time with my aunt and uncle in the city's suburbs. My uncle is an avid fly fisher—he and I went to northern Saskatchewan this past summer and spent four days on a boat together chasing pike. We…
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Fly tying: Black Bear Green Butt
It's tough for me to get really excited about steelhead flies this fall--Idaho's steelhead run as been dismal, so much so, that I haven't bothered to make the trip to Salmon to swing flies. The last thing the few fish that made it home need is another angler harassing them. Video of Black Bear Green…
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