I buy almost all of my nymphs. You lose so many of them on the bottom that it just doesn’t make sense to me to tie them when I can buy them for less than a dollar apiece from on-line discounters (like www.hillsdiscountflies.com). It takes me between five and ten minutes to tie a fly. My time may not be very valuable to anyone else but it’s all I’ve got. The commercial flies I buy are tied better than the ones I tie myself - they are perfect. Those people in the third world must have tremendous dexterity.

If I could buy all of the different patterns I need, I probably would. The problem is that some of the flies I want don’t look so perfect. Some of the patterns I need have bodies that are too fat or hackle that is too sparse. Flies like this are unmarketable, no human would buy something that ugly and the fish don’t have any money. For example, Randal invented a pattern for pale morning dun hatches that is way too big, the wrong color and tied with this awful ratty furnace hackle. No one in their right mind would buy this fly, or even take it if you gave it to them, but it can work like magic at certain times of the year. I have a caddis emerger pattern that looks something the cat coughed up. My theory is that birth is not a pretty process and emergers should be tied accordingly.

I also tie almost all of my dry stonefly patterns, they are much uglier than the store-bought ones but the fish seem to like them better. I tie them fat and sparsely hackled, and sometimes I tie them in unusual colors and extra large sizes. I also mess up the wing before I start casting, it may be my imagination, but they seem to work far better this way (this idea came from the observation that the more chewed this pattern is the better it works). I am working on a pattern that has a permanently messed up wing, I’ll have to tie that too because you couldn’t even pass something like that off as a factory second.

Even though there aren’t that many special flies that I need to tie myself, I almost never have enough of them when I need them. When I was more gung-ho, I wouldn’t leave the house without at least six of the pattern I thought I would need. Now I am much more likely to tie two right before I go fishing and think to myself “I better be careful not to break any off” on my way out the door.

As long as the trout have this quirky preference for ugly flies, I guess I am stuck tying at least some of my own; the absolute minimum required.