Newbie

[Gig]

Hello all,

I'm a novice to fly fishing and also to tying flies. I haven't got any gear at all at the moment and I was wondering what would be the best method for me to learn. Reading books or video? I have no clubs available to me and I don't have any friends that tye their own. Is it best to buy a fly tying kit complete?

Any help appreciated.

Cheers

Double click the "Fly Tying" section on the left side of this page. Piles of info there. JC is totally right about kits...I bought one when I started a number of years ago and I still have 90% of the materials and have replaced all of the tools but the bodkin. Kits, in the long run, do not save you any money at all.

Another piece of advice, stay tuned to this site, you'll learn lots and lots from some very knowledgeable veterans of the sport.

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Snow on the roof with fire in the hearth

[Rick Z]

Another thing you might do is go to Yahoo and find the Aussiefly list. There might be some folks near you.

Rick

[Thwack]

Lots of good info on the subject can be found right here on FAOL's fly tying series:

[url=http://www.flyanglersonline.com/flytying/beginners/:c0aa7]http://www.flyanglersonline.com/flytying/beginners/[/url:c0aa7]

I started with a kit and was pretty disgusted with it...big name kit that had lame directions and patterns that called for materials that weren't in the kit!

How can you put together a kit that tells how to tie a Brassie and not include any wire of any kind in the kit? Would it really have broken the budget to include a few pennies worth of wire? If so, remove those directions and include something that matches the bundled materials.

I sent a detailed letter of complaint to the company behind that kit and they made a reasonable attempt the make amends. That doesn't help all the other paying customers who didn't speak up...

I've seen the contents of several different commercial kits and they all had blatant problems (most came from the same parent company so I guess that's not much of a surprise).

If JC recommends a specific one, I won't argue (because that one is NOT among the ones I've dealt with). If I had it to do over, I'd start with Al's articles...

Watching at least one video is a very good idea if you don't have any local tyers. You can learn all sorts of things from a video that just can't be captured well in a static medium like books, articles, text...you need motion...

Good luck!