Helsinki Spey Clave’s traditional spring demoday.
Wasn’t working yesterday but managed to sneak couple hours to my day to go and take some photos at Helsinki Spey Clave. They had Håkan Norling, Tuomas Rytkönen and Heikki Turunen tying flies at the shop during the day and in the evening moved to the close by river to test out new rods and lines for the coming season. They had a quite good turnout but there was of course room for even more guys to come and cast the rods. I don’t even want to try and guess how many rods were available to test but they had pretty much the entire lineup from Vision, Guideline and C.F. Burkheimer plus some rods from Scott and G. Loomis as well. Plenty to choose from.
The most interesting stuff for me and possibly the readers of this site happened however indoors at the shop during the day. Håkan doesn’t need much of an introduction to guys familiar with tubeflies but he’s the guy who brought the Templedog style to fly tying which his friend Mikael Frödin helped to popularize. He’s very inventive tyer and not as much of a showman as Micke which explains why he has never reached the worldwide fame of his friend, but I think he prefers it that way. I’ve seen Håkan tie numerous times but it has been many years since last time and it was nice to see how he used the new SSS materials on his latest flies.
Heikki and Tuomas are probably better known only in Finland but both have been working in the industry for a long time. Tuomas works at Vision as a product manager and was preparing for the pike season which fully starts any day now. He tied some Hollow Deceivers with a fairly large head formed from Tuffleye UV-resins. Heikki is also known as an innovative fly tier and was showing Letrajet Airmarker, an airbush for Promarker pens, to make stripes and coloring on his flies. Interesting stuff and even intrigued Håkan to tie a white fly which was then painted with olive and blue stripes and little pink glow under the wing. Take a look at the photos to see some of the flies.
More of my photos from the day can be found at Helsinki Spey Clave’s Facebook Page.
