IGNORED OLD FRIENDS
The water is too hard to try to fly fish. It takes way too long to make a trench long enough to fly cast in. I decided that it was time to clean out the fly vest and get the fly boxes rearranged.
Flies do not always go back into the box they came out of when I am out fishing. When I am changing flies they all seem to go into the same box, and by the end of the season there are flies all over the place.
I take all the boxes out and open them up. I take all the flies that don’t belong in a box out and lay them on the table. I then look in all the other open boxes and look for the flies that belong in this box. I move any that need to be switched and then put that box back in the vest.
Depending on how many flies are on the table I may put some in the boxes they go in. I keep doing this with each box until I have gone through all of them. When the year starts I know the boxes are in order.
I realized as I was reorganizing boxes that some of the patterns never made it into the water this year. These are flies that I have used before and had success with. I used other flies that I got in swaps and that other folks sent me. But some of the flies that have worked for me did not get wet.
This caused me to change a few boxes around. Moved some flies so that I had a mix of flies that I had used and some of those that I had ignored in the same box. Hopefully this will help me to get them wet next year.
This was the easy task. Washing the lines and cleaning the reels is yet to be done. It will get done as I think it helps keep the equipment working better.
The boa yarn box got changed to include some flies with bead chain eyes and some with the bead tied on the shank over the hook point. Both of these ideas came on a thread on this site. They sounded interesting so the flies were tied up.
Hope you can get out on the water, with some of your old friends.
Rick