Drawing Flies 52 Brassie (gold beadhead). I grew up fishing Brassies, and they were a staple midge pattern for me in spring creeks all over the Rocky Mountain West. The flies I fished as a kid (well, the flies I still often fish) were/are simpler than this. They use the same skinny wire body, but [...]

I had to triple-check her name, nickname and e-mail address, but it appears that Deb Freele, who is an FF&W reader and E-List member, was the woman who survived the bear attack near Yellowstone earlier this week. Despite suffering some serious bites and a broken arm (I hope it wasn’t her casting arm), Deb played [...]

Just a quick note if you have ordered a Nature of Fly Casting book and have not yet received an e-invoice for it. All orders that I have received have been invoiced via PayPal’s system, which allows for payment with a major credit card or PayPal account. If your e-mail system has a highly aggressive [...]

At last, the final few drawings for Fishing the Film should be done today. I have been inserting the drawings into layout as I go (and doing captions at the same time), so that means that the book should be ready to go to the printers within a week or so. That pleases me to [...]

One of my famous archived “placeholder” pix while I think of something better to post (or at least more wordy—fish are always good, words or not). This was from a video-shoot at Tarpon Cay a couple of summers ago. This day was fantastic—with babies, juvies and bigger boys up to about 80 pounds—until we noticed “some [...]

Drawing Flies 52 Leadwing Coachman. This pattern caught my father his first trout back in the day (when GB was 11). A lot happened after that! Actually the Leadwing Coachman features prominently in the first story in the upcoming Fishing the Film book, and is the second illustration in Chapter One. I drew several Leadwings [...]

Yep, it’s late. We had to chop out about two dozen pages, and adjust content as a result. Once we got there, and I got my final marching orders on drawings (which I was behind on by at least four weeks anyway), we decided to just re-set the release date to end of summer. We [...]

A nicely matched set of a ‘bow and brown, courtesy of Kel. Just a little distraction while I work out a post with some real content….

Drawing Flies 52 Loop Wing Dun. One of my all-time favorite patterns for spring creek trout (or any trout looking for small mayflies, actually). This fly has done the trick all over the world for me, and it is a permanent resident of my boxes. Notes: It may be 11pm, but at least I wasn’t [...]

Drawing Flies 52 Chironomid (giant lake midge, in this case). Notes: Five minutes after 11 (pm). Asleep on the couch. Kel wakes me up with “Hey, did you do your fly for today?” So, here it is (at 11:31pm). Update: Went with what I know by heart—a big lake chironomid pupa. Got it done and [...]

This is mostly a re-post of what I sent over my friends at FlyTalk last week, but I will be making some updates to what’s here, so check back again in a few days. A little intro: There are several ways to go about making bendable bodies, but this technique allows the tying of fairly [...]

Just backed up the FF&W database, as well as the main theme, and then hit “upgrade.” The 3.0 version of WordPress is now running here and hopefully everything will continue without a hitch. I’ll have a look through things, but if something is really messed up for anyone, let me know. No water-time for me [...]

With the Tour de France starting tomorrow (live report), I thought I’d do a little post relating cycling to fly casting. When I was road racing (i.e. when I was younger and faster), I paid a lot of attention to the more “advanced” aspects of things like pedal/cleat interface, body position, gearing, and of course, [...]

Drawing Flies 52 Damsel Adult (in red, white and blue for the American Fourth of July holiday). I have been fortunate enough to have fished some of the most spectacular damselfly waters in the world. Seen hatches so thick that I can’t really describe the action, but a few epic emergences were enough to get [...]