I did an inventory to the materials I have and found that I have more mink fur on the skin that I will ever need. I’d like to swap with other tyers who might have too much of a material and would find very nice mink fur usefull. All this mink is soft tanned and is comes from fur wraps and collars. Please PM me if you’re interested in any mink fur as I have several different colors. I also have an abundance of VERY nice Silver Fox fur and some Arctic Fox as well. Please let me know if you are interested.
Jim - I don’t need any mink since I, like you, have more than a lifetime supply left over from an old mink coat that belonged to my wife’s mother or grandmother. However, I would like to add a comment to your offer. That is that the guard hairs from mink, used in a dubbing loop, can be used to make some very effective nymph patterns. John
John, Thank you for the information. I use lots of dubbing loops and will give this a try. I’m working on “designing” some patterns that will coax the big Tilapia in the lake I live on to take flies. Most of the time, people catch them on bread on a hook or sometimes a worm. These guys are like JUMBO sized Bluegill, growing upto 10 lbs. Big, flat bodies that they use well in the water during the fight, just like a bluegill. I’ll let you know how I do.
Jim, why not a larger egg pattern that would look like a doughball? I have a phobia about the Tilapia because the first time I heard of them was in Progressive Farmer magazine and a state of the art pig farm was using them to process the waste washed out of the pig parlor. And then Mike Rowe did a show in AZ where they were being used to process waste from a striped bass farm.
Darn, hated reading that as I had Tilapia for supper last night. But, on the bright side, I think what I had came from Bangladesh. Probably from some crystal clear spring fed creek!
The lake I live on has wild Tilapia which are raised in clean water and only eat natural foods from the environment. That said, I don’t keep fish to eat, so they’re safe from me.
Across SE Asia they have restaurants where you fish for your meal… usually freshwater shrimp in the highest pond… the water from each pond runs downhill to another restaurant “pond” with slightly lesser fish… the tilapia restaurant is at the very bottom of the hill and they do not have to feed them!
