Displaying Flies

There are people in the fly fishing community that love to tie flies more than actually fish them.  An author (I forgot his name, sorry) once said that if all the fish in the world disappeared tomorrow, that some people would keep tying flies.  Maybe there is some part of our DNA left over from the cavemen that makes us want to build and construct things that will improve our quality of life.  I am a firm believer in this because I cannot tell you how many flies are in my collection that I have never fished, nor will I probably ever tie on the end of a line.  I either saw a challenge to tie a fly or had some grandiose idea about how I could catch every fish in a body of water with this new fly, even on a bad day.  Whatever the reason, there are a lot of flies in this world that will never touch a drop of water.

Another reason that some flies never get fished is because they look great to the fishermen and while they may hold a great deal of potential to the creator, the fish might not agree.  I have seen some ugly flies catch a lot of fish in my day.  I’ve even had some flies that caught a decent amount of fish but ended up catching even more fish as they fell apart and started to look ratty.  The fact that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder can be seen in other facets of mankind as well.  At some point within Ford Motor Company, a group of people actually designed, engineered, and o.k.'d the mass production of the Mustang II.  See my point.  This monstrosity might have looked good to some executives but you don’t see many being sold at Mecum or Barrett Jackson auctions.

While fly fishing is in very large part tied to science, fly tying is very much related to art.  It takes an acute eye and trained hand to take a bare hook and make it look close enough to a fish’s prey that even the fish cannot tell the difference.  That’s art!  Even Michelangelo would have to be impressed by such a feat.  So what do we do with works of art?  Well, in my humble opinion, we should put them on display for others to see.

Here are a couple of things that I have done with my flies that have either been given to me or flies that I have deemed worthy of display.  The first thing I did was to put my flies in a shadow box above some of my fishing equipment.  I included the name of the tier, the name of the fly, and the year that it was tied.  This actually serves a couple of different purposes.  The first is that it makes me laugh at how horrible of a tier I used to be.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t plan on being published in any books or getting asked to present at any expos anytime soon, but I am a heck of a lot better than I used to be.  The second purpose is to display flies that friends have given to me.  Some are really pretty while others are some of the first flies that I helped someone tie.  Regardless, they help add to the mosaic of a developing artist and fly tier.

Yep, those are spinning rods.  There will be a post in the future that details the royal treatment the wind sticks get.

My wife also asked me recently to put some flies in some shadow boxes.  These boxes were to be placed in our basement bathroom.  Now I’m not sure if they were coincidentally planned to appear here so they could be close to water or because they are …well let’s just call them crappy.  Anyway, she gave me a couple of shadow boxes and said, “Have at it tiger.”  I found that drilling really small holes and using incredibly thin wire to attach them to the backboard seemed to work best.  Yes, fishing line would have worked better and been symbolic but I thought about that after the fact and was too lazy to go back and redo half of the project.  Anyway, I made a top water box as well as a streamer box.  Now before anyone asks, no, these are not my best fish producers.  They looked pretty and some of them have never produced a strike let along touched water.  Please refer to the sherbet colored popper for an example of a fly that doesn’t catch jack or squat.

So any who, what do you think?  Should flies be put on display or strictly be kept in fly boxes?  Feel free to leave a comment and share what you think.