I am not complaining here - I really, truly, don't understand the facination for posting soft hackle/spider flies and commenting on them. I am not picking on anyone, several tiers have done this over the past few years. Hans Wilhenman(sp), with whom I have communicated and respect, posted several on the Flyfisherman site before it became defunct.

What puzzles me is this: these flies have basically 4 parts: abdomen, thorax, hackle, thread-head. Of course there is skill in tying a neat one, but they are not as tough as Marino thorax flies, or some modest salmon flies. There are hundreds of materials with which to tie flies, and thus there are millions of variations of spider flies. Do we need to see them all?

In comparison we don't see hundreds of woolly bugger variations - without a rib this is also a 4 part fly - why if we changed the rib every time we could have hundreds of millions of variations - but we don't see them. We don't see hundreds of caddis variations - wings of cellophane, or organza or caribou skin. There are all kinds of flies on the 'net, just as there are in the Orvis and Cabela's catelogues. I just wonder why it is that on the forum wet flies predominate as opposed to other styles, and why they turn up on the forum and are not left to the fly box inventory (like mine are) or logged on the Hatches Magazine website - or on Hans' site.

How about a thread showing all the crazy Stimulator variations? - "sorry no traction for that one, it's only spiders we need to see variations for". I don't get it.