Time to get Crackin

 

I know, it doesn't look like much but this little guy can be deceiving. Plus, it's so easy to tie that I spend an hour at the vise and it feels like I really accomplished something. When I was in grad school I never really had to worry much about procrastinating because I was so busy. What's the old adage, the less time you have, the more you accomplish? It's something like that. Or you might throw a Yogism in there, "The busier you are the more you get done?" I was always trying to get my stuff done early because I knew I'd run out of time during finals week with all my teaching responsibilities that I wouldn't have time to finish my own papers. Now during the winter months, I'll pretty much make any excuse possible not to tie flies and here we are; the season is just around the corner and my fly box is pretty bare.

 

One of the things that motivates me to tie is looking at a pattern like this purple weight fly, or a zebra midge that literally takes 30 seconds to tie and about $.20 of materials and think about having to drop two bucks every time a client decides to employ the depth grip on a running rainbow and breaks them off. By tying your own, it's almost like making 40 or 50 bucks an hour.

 

But let's talk a little about the weight fly. You can tie it in any color you want to represent a lot of different things. It can be a midge pupa, a caddis or an egg if you so chose. Why purple? Who knows? I was told by an optometrist that he dissected the eye of a trout once and found that the number of cones in the eye would lend him to believe that a trout would see the purple or violet end of the spectrum of color better. Now I'm certainly not the first person to use purple flies but I did start incorporating purple flash into streamers and buggers and other patterns and did feel like I had significantly more takes. In the last five or six years, purple on the Missouri has absolutely blown up. But there is something about the weight fly that goes beyond color.

 

It's called a weight fly because it's heavy. It's tied with a tungsten bead and it's meant to get down fast and bounce along the bottom when incorporated with a long leader and a split shot. Used as a lead fly, it can put your bottom fly right where you need it but the main reason I use it is because when you go with the short leash, you can drop this fly a couple feet off a light indicator and get to the right depth to catch those fish that are starting to look up. It's kind of the perfect balance of having just enough weight without having to use a split shot.

 

In the future we'll talk a little more about the short leash and the advantages to different types of indicators but for now, I need to get back to the vise and make my 40 bucks.

 

Keep 'em where they live...