Drawing Flies 52 Brassie (gold beadhead). I grew up fishing Brassies, and they were a staple midge pattern for me in spring creeks all over the Rocky Mountain West.

The flies I fished as a kid (well, the flies I still often fish) were/are simpler than this. They use the same skinny wire body, but are tied with only a pheasant-tail fiber throat and a head of red thread. I wanted to go a bit beyond that for this fly, so kept the dull copper-wire body, but added a herl collar and gold beadhead.

I also went with a straight-shank hook, versus a curved, larva-style bend. The old Mustads I used to tie on were straight, so I kept that going here. I also remember one day when I was I down to my last worn-out Brassie, and had to keep re-bending the hook after each fish. Eventually the hook could take no more, but a fair number of fish came to hand before it failed. The re-bent hook can be seen in the drawing, too.

Notes: This fly was drawn with a loose hand using my #005 Pigma pen on an old Academie sketch pad. And by old, I mean a pad that I have had for close to 30 years and only recently found in a box. It still works just fine.

The pen drawing went really fast—just a few minutes. Most of the paint went fast, too, except that I got muddy on the copper wire and had to rescue it. There is still some mud visible, but a bit of careful water-work got the structure more-or-less back in place. Tossed on some blue and purple for a contrasting background and done.

Tech info: Pen on paper with watercolor.

Jeff’s Brassie is here. Some more really nice work with that bamboo pen (I need to get one of those!), the blocky background, and Jeff’s always-gleaming reflections.

I had to triple-check her name, nickname and e-mail address, but it appears that Deb Freele, who is an FF&W reader and E-List member, was the woman who survived the bear attack near Yellowstone earlier this week. Despite suffering some serious bites and a broken arm (I hope it wasn’t her casting arm), Deb played dead (talk about tough) and managed to avoid more extensive injury. One other person was also bitten in the attack, and sadly, another camper—who was apparently also a fly fisher—was killed.

Best wishes to Deb for a quick and thorough recovery from her injuries.

Just a quick note if you have ordered a Nature of Fly Casting book and have not yet received an e-invoice for it. All orders that I have received have been invoiced via PayPal’s system, which allows for payment with a major credit card or PayPal account. If your e-mail system has a highly aggressive SPAM filter, the invoice may have been intercepted in route. So, if you have ordered a book, but haven’t gotten an e-invoice within 48 hours of placing your order, contact me again, and we can arrange to have the invoice re-sent, or if you are in the U.S., we can do a personal check. Sorry for any issues, and this problem has been on-going, albeit affecting only a small number of orders.

Thanks!

If you still want one, you’ve got until September 1, 2010, to order. After that date (assuming that I don’t run out of copies before then), the book will no longer be available from me (though there will likely still be a few copies lurking out there in shops and so forth). The book will not be re-printed, but it will have a second, updated edition (and no, the second edition will not available on September 2). So, that’s the end off the run, and a sincere thanks to all who have supported the book since I first released it back in 2001.

At last, the final few drawings for Fishing the Film should be done today. I have been inserting the drawings into layout as I go (and doing captions at the same time), so that means that the book should be ready to go to the printers within a week or so. That pleases me to no end. Then I only have 19 more books (plus the second edition of Nature of Fly Casting) to get a handle on. It’s going to be a long five years….

One of my famous archived “placeholder” pix while I think of something better to post (or at least more wordy—fish are always good, words or not).

This was from a video-shoot at Tarpon Cay a couple of summers ago. This day was fantastic—with babies, juvies and bigger boys up to about 80 pounds—until we noticed “some clouds” between us and town. Within an hour or so of this photo being taken, we were heading back through a savage series of storms. We were in an open boat, on open water, lighting striking the ocean on either side, and with rain so heavy that all visual and GPS references vanished. It got a little spooky at that point.

A couple of very close lightning strikes as we sat in an idling boat (no directional references, so we were all stuck) made it even spookier. Then, the rain slowed just enough for our guide to see a beacon light on a nearby island, and he went for it full throttle. Got back just in time for another wave of storms that dumped more rain than I have ever seen come down in the space of an hour. That’s what we get for pushing the filming a little too long. Not going to push it like that ever again!

Next morning, all had cleared and the fishing was hot all over—but a hurricane changed its course, and we had to get out of Dodge (well, the Yucatan) 48 hours later.

In case you want to see the end results (we missed out on a day and a half, but still got good footage overall), here you go:

Spent most of Friday at North Fork Composites doing CCS and flex-board testing of rod blanks, while paging through patterns and doing some mix-and-match. The goal was to get three specific sets of blanks: 905-4, 906-4 and 864-4 for one of North Fork’s European clients. Got quite close on 5 of the 6 total blanks, so will hopefully be testing refined versions of those next week.

Been great to be working with Brad Loomis on this project. His technical know-how and ability to build great rod blanks is exceptional. This project, among a couple others, has lead to some pretty slick efficiencies in patterning, ferruling and so forth. I’ve also gotten to play with some of the latest, greatest resin technology. These projects have been pretty intense in terms of getting all of the building tech up to speed, but it’s great seeing it come together.

So here’s to 12322-13′s future, as well a few other 123xx series blanks that will be making their way into stores and onto streams this year.

Drawing Flies 52 Leadwing Coachman. This pattern caught my father his first trout back in the day (when GB was 11). A lot happened after that! Actually the Leadwing Coachman features prominently in the first story in the upcoming Fishing the Film book, and is the second illustration in Chapter One.

I drew several Leadwings for the book, and all took me less than 30 minutes to complete. When Jeff said “Let’s do a Leadwing,” I flipped back through my collection of FtF illustrations and found this one. It was my first attempt and it was fast (just a few minutes). I liked it, but it ended up being too “heavy” in terms of line for the text. So, I decided to use it here.

I may be “cheating” a bit with this (not my intent), but the drawing does technically adhere to the 30 minute rule, and I thought that it was something special considering all that surrounds it. Hope you all don’t mind me using it for the DF52 project.

Notes: This fly was drawn with my #1 and brush tip Pigma pens. I went at it fast, loose and with the idea that it would end up in a book. Two out of three isn’t bad. The fly took only a few minutes of pen-time, and another 20 or so to scan and clean up into this form in Adobe Illustrator. Its companion drawing—the one that is now in a book layout—took a bit longer, but would have also met the 30-minute deadline (at least in terms of pen-time).

Tech info: Pen on paper. Scanned and finished as vector art in Adobe Illustrator.

Jeff’s Leadwing is here. Looks good! I really like the whole approach to the fly and the background. Especially liking that wing and the subtle blocks of background color. Nice work, my friend!

Yep, it’s late. We had to chop out about two dozen pages, and adjust content as a result. Once we got there, and I got my final marching orders on drawings (which I was behind on by at least four weeks anyway), we decided to just re-set the release date to end of summer. We had originally intended for an early summer release, but now will have a release date targeted around the time of the Fly Fishing Retailer show in Denver (second week of September). No point in killing myself to get it done for a mid-summer release when no one is interested in books during that time anyway.

So, I am now in the final week of drawings and layout. It looks good, hopefully won’t require much tweaking prior to print, and is still on-track for US$24.95 and 192 pages of goodness.

Thanks for your patience, and now that GB and I have the kinks worked out of this whole process, I will be digging into the next book (details soon) immediately after I hand over the print files for this one.

In the meantime, here’s another excerpt to whet your appetite (we hope). GB’s voice here:

Like basically all fly fishers of my day, I largely learned on my own by reading and struggling—often more struggling than not. At first it was only magazine articles. The local, town library had no books on fly fishing. True, the magazine pieces were very good—people like Joe Brooks, Ted Trueblood, Al McClane, the young Ernest Schwiebert, and others—wrote very well, but in the multiplicity of the various magazine pieces, there was not the cohesiveness of coverage that books afford.

None-the-less, it didn’t take long to figure out the “dries up and wets down” mantra.  And I blithely went along, not having any other source of information to counter the accepted norm. Besides, the whole dry-fly-up-and-across thing was still rather new—Frederick Halford’s book, Modern Development of the Dry Fly, had been published only 45 years before I took up fly fishing. It was still a very fresh idea, resonating very powerfully throughout the entire world of fly fishing. And to my young mind, if I was to be a fly fisher, I had to do what fly fisher’s did. So up with the dry, it was.

But then, in 1968, just as I was completing my M.S. degree at Penn State, Richard Alden Knight published his little volume, Successful Trout Fishing. It was an eye opener. He seriously proposed fishing the dry fly across or down-and-across and moving it, a technique he called the “Live Fly.” Wow! It was my first taste of the iconoclastic, and it was delicious. Here was real logic and practical advise, not codified, regimented information that prohibited any deviation from the path. I’ve renamed Knight’s tactic the “Live Dry” because other fly styles can also be, and often are, fished in a “live” manner.

Nancy and I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, that summer, where I began my Ph.D. work. Or should I say, I began my adventure with the Live Dry tactic. The fish of Black Earth and Mount Vernon creeks laughed at my crude, initial attempts, but at the end of the summer, I was the one laughing. The tactic is not hard to conceptualize, but there are some subtleties that need to be developed in order to achieve what Knight was able to do.

The fly is presented exactly as one would with a Down-and-Across Dead Drift (Parachute Mend and all). After the fly is slotted in the fish’s feeding lane, it is allowed to drift drag free, and then moved only the slightest bit when it approaches the edge of the fish’s window. You have to develop a very subtle twitch or movement of the fly. This is the hardest part of the whole presentation, but there are a couple of tactics that are easy to learn and that work quite well….

A nicely matched set of a ‘bow and brown, courtesy of Kel. Just a little distraction while I work out a post with some real content….

Drawing Flies 52 Loop Wing Dun. One of my all-time favorite patterns for spring creek trout (or any trout looking for small mayflies, actually). This fly has done the trick all over the world for me, and it is a permanent resident of my boxes.

Notes: It may be 11pm, but at least I wasn’t asleep on the couch this week! This one went fast. So fast, actually, that I got the brilliant idea of adding a cooler hue to the background—actually not so brilliant! Ended up with murk, but caught it before I did any more damage. Rest of the fly worked out pretty well, considering the speed.

This one is similar to the Connemara in approach, but I wanted to try a mechanical pencil instead of a grade-school number 2. Kinda like the grade-school approach better, but the mechanical allows finer detail work, as expected. Added more color overall than I had anticipated, but the hot orange seems to flow well with the paper. I’ll do some more like this, I think, just keeping as much to pure pencil and white watercolor as I can.

Tech info: Mechanical pencil and watercolor on brown craft paper.

Jeff’s Loop Wing is here. More subtle scribble work like last week—nice choice on technique, I think. PMD hatch, anyone?

Drawing Flies 52 Chironomid (giant lake midge, in this case).

Notes: Five minutes after 11 (pm). Asleep on the couch. Kel wakes me up with “Hey, did you do your fly for today?” So, here it is (at 11:31pm). Update: Went with what I know by heart—a big lake chironomid pupa. Got it done and felt bored. So, went with the comic-book-style “energy blast,” also know as the “pow!” Though the fly was okay, but the “pow” added something interesting. I’ll have to try another like this before the project is over.

Tech Info: Pen and watercolor on Canson paper.

Jeff’s Chironomid is here. I like the way Jeff approached his fly. It’s familiar “Jeff,” but has perhaps a more scribbled hand than usual. Nice work.