Rawfish,

If you're like most of us you'll probably want to get all of everything eventually, but since you're interested in building up an inventory of hooks in a range of sizes, you want to keep initial costs down. I suggest you consider buying the Mustad 94840 standard dry fly hook in 100 packs of the sizes you're looking to tie (maybe 12,14,16 and 18 ?) use them for:

dries (primary use)

emergers (primary use) but also use them to satisfy your Jones for some:

soft hackles, and wets (the proportions will be off since the dry fly hooks will be longer than the 3906B, but you can size down-- if you want to tie a 14 size soft hackle, use a 16 dry fly hook)

flymphs and unweighted nymphs (

weighted nymphs with a couple of wraps of lead wire(or lead subsitute)

beadhead nymphs

If you want to keep proportions right, just remember to compare the size and shank length of the recommended hook for the nymph or wet to the shank length of the 94840 and size down or up accordingly.

Add a 100 pack of size 10 Mustad streamer hooks for:

hair, feather, marabou, and matuka streamers

zonkers

weighted and bullet head wooly buggers
muddlers

Stone fly nymphs

Grass hoppers (using foam or spun deer body hair to float the heavy hook)

As I remember, you're on LI, so if you plan on fishing the Connequot a lot you'll want to pinch your barbs down before you tie (so if you break a hook point it'll be on a bare hook, not one you've spent 3 hours tying).

And if you do plan on fishing the Conny, I would add a 25 pack of streamer hooks in size 6 for big ugly black zonkers and black marabou muddlers especially for the pond and beats 8 and 9.

Another way to keep initial costs down is to consider limiting your initial purchase of dry fly hackle and buy Coastal Deer Hair to tie compara duns and or sparkle duns (they don't use hackle). You can get a light, medium and dark patches for around $3 each and you'll probably get well over 100 flies from each patch). With a good color range of dubbing for bodies you can mix wing and body color to imitate all the 12-18 size mayflies. Recipes and detailed instructions are on the FAOL fly archive.

Since you seem to have been bitten pretty badly by the fly tying bug you may want to consider checking out some of the LI fly fishing organizations, if you haven't already like Long Island Fly Fishers and LI TU chapters (or the NYC TU if you work in the city). And there are a couple Salty Fly Rodders chapters on LI too, but that is a whole nuther set of hooks....

Good luck!

peregrines