Overly complicated?

[Buddy Sanders]

I realize that many of us, myself certainly included, tie flies for fun. It's relaxing. It's related to our fishing habit. It can allow us to be creative. Most of us could buy flies much cheaper, given all the tools and materials we accumulate.

But, at what point do we stop adding stuff to our flies? I know much of this comes from a percieved need. The fly is too dull, the fly doesn't float, the fly doesn't really 'look' like the real insect....whatever the reason.

So we add legs. We add flash. We add an extra hackle. We try different things. We experiment.

I like all of that.

Still.... When you get a nymph that takes twenty three steps to tie. AND you are going to fish it deep along the stream bottom in the rocks where you will lose quite a few if you want to catch fish with it. Or a dry fly that takes ten minutes to tie. AND you plan to fish it on a fast mountian stream overhung along most of it's length with trees and bushes...

I recently looked in a new pattern book. All nymphs and midges....hundreds of them. Amazing stuff. About five to ten actual 'ties' with just different materials and colors...ALL of these flies catch fish. From what I can detect, though, the simple ones work as well as the more complicated ones, often better, and no one thinks you have to 'have' all of them to be successful.

Does adding a small tuft of yarn behind the bead on a midge make it a 'new' fly? Does it make it more effective? If you overlay the abdomen with clear mono it sure looks cool, but does it catch more fish? Using a two layer wing case looks great, but again, it's an extra step and does it really matter on a size 20?

A dry fly with two hackles may land upright and give a wider footprint on the water. But my parachute dries all land upright, and if I want it wider can't I just use a wider hackle? Is the extra hackle and the extra step really needed, or is it just because it's fun to do? Heck, if you use a standard wound hackle on a dry fly and ELIMINATE the wings, it doesn't matter HOW it lands on the water, as it looks the same regardless...taking out a couple of steps to achieve the goal seems okay to me.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find myself looking at fly recipes and seeing what I can leave out and still get the same fish (I don't care if it's not the same 'fly', that's not the reason for the effort. As long as it catches the fish in the same conditions, I'll leave off what I feel are the 'irrelevant' steps).

More and more I'm going with simple ties that I find effective on the fish. I'll still tie a few of each 'new' fly pattern I see that intrigues me, I almost always tie the Fly of the Week here,....but few of these actually see water.

As our lives get more and more complicated, it seems our flies are following suit. I'm not sure it's a bad thing, perhaps it was inevitable.

I do know I'm not going to follow along with it.

I know it's a rant, but I wanted to say something about this...YMMV.

Buddy