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10-30-1998 Jazzno Festival - Zurich, Switzerland
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By Anthony Naples, on March 4th, 2010
Lately I’ve been messing around with tying “one-animal” flies. That is, all materials come from the same beast, excepting the thread and the hooks. The post that I did a while back on the Casual Dress, got me thinking about this topic. The Casual Dress almost makes the cut – but the ostrich herl head rules it out. The first animal that I attempted is Marmota monax; the lowly groundhog – or woodchuck as some of you may say.
I’ve seen groundhog guard hair mentioned as a tailing material from time to time – so I picked up a patch of hog a few years ago, but never really used it. The guard-hairs are great for tails, but I found that the banded coloration makes for nice looking wings as well. The underfur is quite unruly, it is not easily dubbed – and you really need to use a dubbing loop to make it work at all. That said, it seems to float well. My “extensive” testing ( in a glass of water) revealed that it produces a pretty buoyant fly.
I have to admit that these are some fairly ugly flies. But there’s something buggy about them – I think I like them. Please note that there has been no field testing of these flies. This is merely an experiment at the vise – I’ll update you on the results if and when these make it to the stream.
 Woodchuck Comparadun Woodchuck Comparadun:
Hook: Curved Shank, 3X-long hook
Body: Woodchuck underfur, tied in using a dubbing loop
Tail: Woodchuck guard hair
Wing: Woodchuck guard hair – I tied this in using a dubbing loop like a “fur-hackle”, then shaped it into the comparadun style “fan-wing”.
 Woodchuck Emerger Woodchuck Emerger:
Hook: Curved Shank, 3X-long hook
Body: Woodchuck underfur, tied in using a dubbing loop
Tail: Woodchuck guard hair
Wing: Woodchuck guard hair.
 Woodchuck Floating Nymph/Emerger Woodchuck Comparadun:
Hook: Curved Shank, 3X-long hook
Body: Woodchuck underfur, tied in using a dubbing loop
Tail: Woodchuck guard hair
“Legs”: Woodchuck guard hair – tied in using a dubbing loop like a “fur-hackle”.
By Anthony Naples, on January 22nd, 2010
 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
By Anthony Naples, on October 22nd, 2009
This latest installment of Angling Advise from Beyond is from Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (pub. 1886), the first book by Frederic M. Halford, (1844-1914).
We’ve all heard of Frederic Halford and our first thought is that he was a “Dry-Fly Snob”, this may be true, I don’t know. But after casually perusing the pages of this book – I am very impressed. I am no expert in fly fishing history, so maybe it’s just me but, I am very surprised by the state of fly fishing and fly tying in the late 1800’s as evidenced by Halford’s book. Basically – It’s all there. You could throw away all your modern and “innovative” books on fly tying and use this 120-yr old book and you would catch fish. I honestly don’t think you would be at a disadvantage if you stuck to the patterns outlined in Halford’s book.
It’s all in there; mayflies, caddis flies, midges, terrestrials (ants), quill body flies, thread-body flies, extended-body flies, down-wings, etc. Look at this pic below – this is a very serviceable caddis imitation.
The advice I’m presenting from this book is a bit humorous. It seems that good dry fly hackle has always been expensive and difficult to procure. In the following passage Halford discusses this and presents his solution. I have to think that he was laughing when he wrote this.
Of all feathers required for fly dressing, the hackle is the one to be placed first on the list, as being the most important, and, unfortunately, at the same time, the most difficult to procure. For floating flies cock hackles are so immeasurably superior, both as to their natural gloss and transparency, as well as the greater ease with which they are freed from moisture in fishing…
…Common barndoor fowls seldom produce such hackles as would please the critical eye of the connoisseur, and when it is remembered how few in number on any bird are sufficiently small to dress duns, some idea may be formed of the almost insuperable difficulty of accumulating a really serviceable stock : in fact, it is almost impossible to get cock hackles really fit for fly-making purposes, except by purchasing them at considerable cost from professional breeders, or from the fishing-tackle makers. I can only make one suggestion on the subject to amateur fly-dressers, resident in the metropolis, who do not care to pay the fancy prices asked in the shops, and that is to try and induce some of their country cousins to keep and breed fowls of the kind required, especially for the production of dun hackles.
So all you need to do to have a great supply of good-quality hackle is to convince your country relatives to breed them for you – good luck with that!
View or download Floating Flies and How to Dress Them in various formats at:
By Anthony Naples, on June 11th, 2009
 Size 24 BWO Traitor The Traitor: A Style for Small Parachute Flies
Well, I’m in the process of planning a fishing trip to Colorado. So I’m thinking back to the last trip to CO, and the flies that worked. Inevitably, I never seem to have enough of the flies that are working – so I want to avoid that situation this time around.
With that in mind, I find myself thinking about a small parachute style pattern that worked wonders last time. This fly is a small olive bodied parachute – it accounted for quite a few nice rainbows on the Yampa tailwater below Stagecoach Reservoir. The only problem was that most of these were not on the end of my line. The fly indeed fooled a bunch of fish – but more for my friend Larry, than for me. So I’ve named the fly The Traitor.
The Traitor is a fairly standard parachute fly. The major differentiating feature is the way that I form the body. The body is formed by twisting a strand of Uni-Stretch Floss into a “rope”. Dubbing a slim-body can be difficult on tiny flies – so I tried to find an alternative and came up with the idea of using the twisted Uni-Stretch body. In addition to allowing me to form a slim, smooth and tapered body, it makes for a nice segmented effect. As an alternative, you can achieve a similar effect with antron, instead of Uni-Stretch – but you’ll need to split the strand thickness in half for small flies.
I tie this style in sizes from 20 to 24. I’ve had luck with it primarily during hatches of tiny BWO’s and midges. Tie some up olive, gray and cream and you’ll have a good selection for tiny bugs that you might encounter. Below is an example of a Traitor Midge tied with a cream antron body and cream wing-post. Leave off the tails for the midge patterns.
Read the rest of the post for the recipe and illustrated step-by-step instructions.
Click here to read the rest… »
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