Cabin Fever and Flies
This time of year I start to look forward to shaking off the cabin fever and that usually includes going through fly boxes and making sure all my favorites are there. It’s pretty therapeutic actually. You should try it. I’m not much of a fan of puzzle games and stuff like that but for some reason I really enjoy looking through my fly boxes and rearranging them. They still seem to be disorganized afterwards and I’ll forget where I put what fly when I’m actually fishing but that doesn’t seem to matter this time of year.
We all seem to have favorite go-to flies. Even if they are ugly and disproportionate, they’ll catch a fish when everything else seemingly won’t. At least they’re fun to cast and look nice on or in the water. Over the past few years I’ve put together a reliable early spring mixture of flies that I’m comfortable with using after winter starts to lose it’s grip. Truthfully I’ll used these flies for most of the year and will always have many of them with me - especially on my little mountain streams. But a fun little secret I have is that early spawn pond bluegill love emergers and soft hackles fished just under the surface. It’s a thrill to see a dinner plate sized prespawn bluegill boil the water in the general vicinity of your fly and then see your line go tight. Oh man, I really need to do more warmwater fishing this year.
These are flies I’ve bought in bulk and have a bunch of extra so I decided to offer the surplus for sale. The quality is pretty good, not Brandon Bailes quality but you won’t cry too much when you catch more trees than fish. But that brings up a good point that I learned as a kid fishing for bass. If you don’t cast to the structure where fish are and risk getting stuck on something, then you probably won’t catch many fish. So, lose more flies and catch more fish. Maybe that’d be a good slogan? Back to the Bailes flies - I use those too and quite often but they’re like gold to me and I am not going to let those go - that’s when you’ll see me climbing trees to get my fly back.
They are listed on my Store page. 4 different assortments that include everything I use in early spring: Hippy Stompers, Royal Wulffs, Caddis, Ants, Caddisants (that’s what I call them at least) Emergers, Chubby Chernobyls, Soft Hackles, Beetles and more. Pretty good foam slit minimal fly box included.
