YEP !

Yesterday, I fished for about six hours, about evenly split between a section of the North Fork of the Big Lost and a section of the East Fork of the Big Lost.

This is what the fly box looked like last night.



Today, I fished a different section of the East Fork for a couple hours, a short section of the West Fork for about an hour, and another section of the North Fork for a couple hours, for a total of about five hours.

This is what the fly box looked like when I got home.



For whatever reason, I developed the habit of not putting used flies back in the rippled section, in this type of fly box, and always put them in the flat side to dry and to inspect before deciding to use them again, or rebuild them.

Yesterday, I lost three flies while catching something over thirty fish. One I lost when a 12" bow wiggled at the wrong time while I had the 5X tippet firmly in grasp. One I lost when I caught some streamside vegetation just as I was starting the backcast. The other one was kind of a fluke - I had a solid hit and when I set the hook, it released and the hook, tippet, leader and line came firing back at me. I didn't loose the fly, but it was stuck firmly in the mesh of my chest pack and was destroyed when I removed it. All three of these were lost at the best spot I fished, on the upper East Fork.

Today, I lost one fly while catching just shy of thirty fish. It also was kind of a fluke - I was just goofing off measuring some casts, not even fishing, and I shot a bit too much line across the East Fork into the brush on the far side of the river.

Out of the original two dozen, I brought back TWENTY. A few of them will probably be "rebuilt" but I think the rest of them can go back to the useable side of the box. The four that are gone, along with a number of the used ones, accounted for about sixty fish in just over eleven hours of fishing - mostly rainbows, several cutthroat and a few brookies.

Yep - WAY TOO MANY.