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Welcome to the Casting Around Fly Fishing Blog a blog about Fly Fishing, Fly Tying and various interesting and related topics. This Blog is best viewed in Mozilla Firefox. I’ve been made aware that it may not appear correctly in Internet Explorer. I’ll look into fixing this – in the meantime, if you things look funny in IE, check it out in Firefox for the best results.
 Trout #2 by Anthony Naples, done on iPod Touch, post-processing in Photoscape This spring I took a trip to Yellow Creek in Bedford County, PA. I caught this one particular brown trout that had spectacular blue spots. I had never really noticed these before on brown trout. Since then, I notice this feature all the time – it seems relatively commonplace. Why did I notice these blue spots on that fish, when I’d probably seen them a hundred times before, on a hundred other fish? I don’t have the answer. I don’t know if it reflects only on me or on human nature in general. But, apparently my power to ignore what’s right in front of me can be impressive. What else haven’t I noticed?  Variations on the Casual Dress The Casual Dress may not be a pretty fly, but its creator Polly Rosborough knew what he was up to when he first tied up this ugly beauty. When I first started to tie flies, about 15 years ago, I was given Randall Kaufmann’s book The Fly Tyers Nymph Manual. Mr. Kaufmann includes tying instructions for this fly in his excellent book. He quotes Polly as saying that the Casual Dress was created to “simulate nothing more than just food”. I must admit that, at that time, I wasn’t impressed. I think that I wanted to tie flies that looked like something specific. Flies that at least had all the “right” parts. So I overlooked this fly for many years. However, in the intervening years my attitude has changed quite a bit. I have come to understand the appeal of flies like the Casual Dress. But the Casual Dress was off of my radar until recently. When the SwittersB & Fly Fishing blog featured the Casual Dress a little while back, it made me think “Oh yeah – I should tie some of these”. Well It took me some time to get around to it but I finally did. The Casual Dress is traditionally tied with just two materials; muskrat fur and black ostrich herl. It utilizes the noodle-dubbing technique for the body and a “fur-hackle” collar. In this age of post-modern fly tying where anything goes and nothing is off-limits for consideration as fly tying material, the spare economy of this materials list is refreshing.  Casual Dress Original Style The Casual Dress: Hook: Tiemco 300, size 4-10. This is a heavy wire, 6x long streamer hook. I didn’t tie all of mine on a 6x long hook, but the longer hook makes it easier to create a nicely proportioned fly. Tail: Bunch of muskrat with both the guard hairs and underfur. This needs to be cut directly from the pelt. Body: Muskrat fur, tied-in noodle style using a dubbing loop. Collar: Muskrat fur with both guard hairs and underfur, same as for tail. Head: Black ostrich herl. Well, as many of you can probably attest, fly tyers have trouble sticking to the recipe. We feel the urge to add a little bit of this, a little dash of that – it’s part of the fun. So I was bold enough to riff on the theme a little. I wouldn’t dare to make “improvements” on the original, merely variations. In the picture below I present a few of these variations. I stuck pretty closely to the original plan, but changed the body dubbing material and color, and in some cases the fur-hackle.  A few variations on the Casual Dress. Clockwise from top - Rust Rabbit Dubbing for body; All black bunny, bright-green rabbit dubbing body, all hare's-mask, all dark-olive hare's-mask The possible variations are endless. Are they necessary? Probably not. The original will catch lots of fish for you. But fly-tying is a a lot like the blues, and rock-and-roll. It’s the same three chords, endlessly tinkered with. And every once in a while a classic is born. So get the fingers loosened, practice some scales, learn a couple of chords and create your own classic. There are numerous Fly Fishing related blogs that I enjoy visiting. Many of them have inspiring photos of trout and flies, and fishing destinations. These images can be a nice escape from the suburbs, a brief journey to another locale, a small trip to Montana, Utah, Wales, Wisconsin or elsewhere. So I thought it would be fun to use some of these photos as a jumping-off point for some sketches. The first in this series, was inspired by a nice photo of some Soft-Hackle Brassies from the Winona Fly Factory blog. As a fly-tyer there is something so satisfying about looking at a neat row of newly tied flies, so full of hope and promise. Just what you need in the dead of winter.  Soft Hackle Brassies by Anthony Naples, inspired by photo from Winona Fly Factory Note: Sketch done with Sketchbook Mobile on an iPod touch, with some post-processing in Photoscape  Panfish #1 by Anthony Naples In the bleak midwinter with thoughts of more coming snow, I was inspired by a photo from this past summer. Many of us start our fishing lives with sunfish. Some of us never leave that warm and comfortable place – watching and waiting for a red and white bobber to momentarily disappear. My childhood is filled with sunfish. As a fisherman the small pond filled with willing sunfish is my spiritual home. I picture my grandfather, a WWII veteran sitting in a lawn chair catching sunnies. What did the Italian winters of 1943 and 1944 feel like to that young kid from Pittsburgh? Rain and mud, crossing mountains, the disaster of Anzio, the despair and loss, the uncertainty of life. Did he think of youthful, warm summers back home? How far away did they seem? He made it through the war, made it home to his local ponds. Made it home to pass it all on to my father and on to me and so then on to my children. The cycle continues. Days are getting longer, the sun is gradually getting higher in the sky and we are not forsaken. Don’t worry – I’m not going to turn into an all fly fishing art website. And I use the term “art” lightly in my case. But I am having fun with the iPod touch and SketchBook Mobile. So I figured that I might as well share. So here is another sketch.  Trout #1 by Anthony Naples  C&O by Franz Kline One of my new years resolutions in 2010 is to get back to making art. For various reasons, I haven’t made any art to speak of for about 10 years. It is hard for me to even look at certain paintings without the urge to break out the paint. Painting by Esteban Vicente I guess certain minds are on the same wavelength. When I look at the work of artists like Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Esteban Vicente and Jackson Pollock, I just get it. I feel it. Their art resonates with me and I understand it in a non-verbal way. It makes me want to paint.  Autumn Improvisation by Anthony Naples So I’ve pretty much avoided looking art by these folks for the last decade or so. I went through a phase when I took this inspiration and made my own art. I tried to communicate in the same visual vernacular established by these other artists. And I created some works that, I think were successful in a small way, at this same type of expression. Though, in no way do I claim to be an artist in the same way that those giants were. Well, lately the obsession has been fly fishing and fly tying. I have never done much to bring the art and the fly fishing together. I just never felt like I could do it in an honest way. I’m not a painter of bucolic landscapes or hyper-realistic fish (though I greatly respect and am in awe of some of those fish painters). When I saw Derek De Young’s fish paintings though something clicked. These were images that weren’t afraid to be full of saturated colors and painterly gesture. I found myself wishing that I had thought of this (and had the talent to actually pull it off). Check out his painting gallery at website canvasfish.com. Well that is a long intro to present the first piece of fly fishing related art that I’ve produced this year as a part of my New Years Resolution. Hopefully someday I’ll actually get real materials out, but for now I’m content sketching on the iPod touch using the app Autodesk SketchBook Mobile. It’s an awesome little app that’s actually a pretty powerful tool. I can recommend it to any iPod or iPhone users that want a drawing program. It is well worth the $2.99 that it costs. Check out the Flickr group to see some other work that people are doing with their iPod and SketchBook Mobile. Well here it is…  Dry Fly #1 by Anthony Naples |
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