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.
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