Andy - you write just like you talk. I can actually hear your voice, your vocal inflections, your tone as I read your post. It's funny! LOL! <G>

I believe Poul Jorgensen said, (quoting someone else), "Fly tying is a school from which no one ever graduates."
A. K. Best in "Production Fly Tying" said something like, "You don't really know a pattern until you've tied at least 100 dozen of them." I admit I scoffed out loud when I first read that passage. It was around 1991 when that book was first released. I was tying commercially at the time, and in a three-year period I tied 2900 DOZEN flies. Feeling pretty cocky about my tying ability, my reply to A. K.'s statement was, "Any good tier can tie a few dozen of a pattern and then he's got it down.
Then a year or so later I did something during one of my commercial Comparadun runs. (Three minute per fly average if you're interested). I don't recall what it was, it was just some little thing, perhaps I did it the first time by accident. This was a minor step that ended up cutting my tying per fly so significantly that I was suddenly able to increase my hourly production by three flies. At that time, that was the equivalent of getting a raise of $1.80 per hour. At once I thought, "Holy S---!" AK was right."

Wet flies, you know I've tied literally thousands of them. I have probably tied over 200 Trout Fins alone. At least 100 Parmacheene Belles. (Both flies I can tie in less than six minutes, five if I'm on a roll). Andy - that's where your drumming of practice, practice, practice, practice comes in. The more you do this, (anybody)the better you get.

Yet recently I (discovered, created, invented, devised, you choose the term that makes you happy) two signficant steps that:
1) make preparation of married wings so much easier than the method I have been teaching and using for YEARS. I mean so much easier that it's practically "Moron proof." It's not in my DVD because I just thought it up a few weeks ago.
2) The other step involves a wet fly with a rib of floss. Difficult to keep it even without flattening out or fraying. I again, discovered (or whatever) a technique for doing this that makes it so-o-o-o-o simple. A mere child could do it.

These two developments all came about as a result of my doing two back-to-back weekend classes on wet flies. Dealing with the difficulties of some students - some guys could not recognize wing quill feathers as being right or left, let alone whether the "slips" of barbs are right or left once they have been cut from the feather.

Some fellows feather slips are headed for divorce court even before the wedding. <G> LOL.

One guy even had one left RED duck wing feather and one left YELLOW duck wing feather and wondered why he couldn't marry the barbs together for a set of wings. He insisted to me he had "a matched pair" but alas, he did not. I set him straight.

Five out of seven students in the class did not master the floss rib when the class was over. Yet I taught what I felt was the best known (at the time) technique in the class and in my DVD.

A few days after these classes, I was at home, tying classic wets. I guess I was thinking about the difficulties my students had been having, and lo and behold, ideas suddenly popped into my brain. I can not recall actually coming to a conclusion of these two new techniques, they were suddenly just there.

It was one of those life-enlightening moments you ask yourself, "Why didn't I think of that years ago?"

Floss rib: Simple - use hackle pliers to twist the floss and wind it - five evenly spaced turns - with the h. pliers.

And finally, the repeated and regular practice, even for an expert, WILL pay handsome dividends. The wet flies I'm tying these days are better by I'd say 30%, than the ones I tied for Forgotten Flies. Since 1999 when I finished those wets I have continued to tie them, by the hundreds and hundreds. You may be skeptical, but it's true. I can see the difference and improved quality with my own eyes.


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"Feed the good wolf."