Here's a bit of a twist on the whole 'new fly' concept...
Has anyone noticed that many of the what I like to call 'standard' flies tend to evolve into more complcated versions?
Many flies used to use yarn for the bodies, now 'dubbing' is the norm for a lot of them.
Simple tailing of just a straight small bunch of fibers or hair is being replaced by divided tails...
Stonefly nymphs, normally fished along the bottom in waters where snags are prevalent, have gotten more and more complicated...I've seen some with thirty or forty 'steps' in the tying process for a fly intended to be 'fished'...
Things like that..
One fly that I've sort of 'followed' because I have it in several books spanning a course of well over thirty years is the Bitch Creek Nymph...it's also one that I like to fish a lot.
What started out, as far as I can tell, as very simple stonefly imitator, something that took only a few minutes to tie and was very effective in that guise.
The way it's tied 'now' barely resembles the first simple tie I saw (even though the finished fly looks just about the same...certainly close enough not to matter to the fish). It's turned into something with a woven body, a wide range of materials used in it, now something that takes quite a bit longer to tie.
I still use the 'simple' tie for my flies...I know how to 'weave' but find it not required for a fly such as this...I fish this fly heavily weighted in boulder and rock strewn fast waters...tend to lose a few of them to the bottom every day...can't see doing that with a fly that takes ten to twenty minutes to tie when the five minute one is just as effective on the fish.
Are the flies geting more complicated because the fish demand it? Or are we just showing off? (Nothing wrong with that, I make my living doing that...but does it explain why we have more and more 'complicated' ties?)
Buddy