Fly Tying Archive

Category: Salmon/Steelhead

  • Pitcroy Fancy

    Pitcroy Fancy

    Pitcroy Fancy (variant). An old photo I found when digging through the collection and thought it would be a good pattern to share. The Pitcroy Fancy is pretty simple yet elegant fly and a good alternative for a Silver Doctor when you are looking for something a bit more subtle. Looking back on this fly…

  • Raven from Brad Burden

    Raven from Brad Burden

    Raven with hackle wings Here’s a slight variation of Brad Burdens steelhead spey pattern developed for the Oregon rivers. Bob Veverkas book on spey flies has been a huge source of inspiration for me and many others and the plate featuring Burden patterns is one that I like to visit often. To me they are…

  • Hi-Vis Bomber

    Hi-Vis Bomber

    Hi-Vis Bomber Salmon dry flies were the last thing on my tying list at the moment but I visited the guys at Helsinki Spey Clave and they had dyed some premium Calf tails that I’ve wanted for a long time. And those beauties shine! It was difficult to even take a photograph of the fly…

  • Jock Scott from G.M. Kelson

    Jock Scott from G.M. Kelson

    Jock Scott Needs no introduction and we’ve even featured this pattern here before but a different Pryce-Tannatt version of it. Because the notes included with the pattern in Kelson’s book The Salmon Fly are so long on this one I will not bother you with my ramblings too much, just like to add that I…

  • Lion

    Lion

    The Lion Here’s the finished fly from our last post that dealt with the underwing construction. For the main wing I tied the bigger portion of it as a mixed wing but with sides and roof not mixed in. The pattern and notes per Land & Water as follows. The Lion         (James Wright.) Tag: Silver…

  • Lion Underwing Step by Step

    Step by step of tying an underwing on the Lion. There’s lots of ways to interpret a classic salmon fly pattern. Some have weird words used in them or things that seem not to make sense. If you have ever written anything you know that there’s also a big possibility for typing errors. Here I…

  • Kalkkisten Vaalea & Tumma

    Kalkkisten Vaalea & Tumma

    Kalkkisten Vaalea & Kalkkisten Tumma We are continuing with traditional Finnish trout flies. I have tied quite a lot of these because Kalkkisten Vaalea has been one of the flies I like to teach in my workshops. It’s pretty fast to tie and has many of the basic components of a classic strip winged salmon…

  • Huopana

    Huopana

    Huopana This is an interesting pattern from a Finnish perspective as it was designed in Great Britain based on insect samples from Huopanankoski (Huopana rapids), Finland in the early 1900’s. It is one of those early places in our fly fishing history where fly fishing and sport fishing in general started to play a major…