Thursday tying

The last few winters I've got together with a few of my friends to tie on Thursday nights.  I thought I'd start posting a few pics with some comments to keep to a little more consistent posting schedule until something more interesting comes up or the time comes where I can flyfish without feeling like I'm just trying to survive the conditions.  I also like to ice fish a lot which I don't post much about.  A big pile of crappies and white perch on the ice doesn't seem to fit that well on a flyfishing focused blog.

Last night we had our first get together for this winter.  We planned on tying last week but we got our first decent snow and I spent the evening shoveling instead.  This week we got some more snow but it held off until late in the night.

Lately I've been fooling around with making heads on pike flies using kinky fiber instead of deer hair.  The result is very similar to deer hair but without the buoyancy plus you get the consistency of material and color out of using a synthetic.  I'm not crazy about the way the flies have come out so far but I'm liking working with the material so far and I'm starting to get the hang of it.  John has been catching fish on similar patterns and I plan on using them more for pike and stripers especially this summer.

Last winter we tied up some steelhead patterns.  One of them was a pattern by Jeff Hubbard called the Trespasser.  Alan doesn't normally fish for steelhead but the fly ended up being his most consistent pattern for lake trout last year and he was out.  We ended up tying some more of them for this year and I hope to catch a few lake trout on them myself.

We all seem to have an interest in tying and fishing soft hackled wet flies and Chad had some exceptional results swinging and nymphing them for trout and salmon so we tied up some of them too.  I didn't fish much for trout and salmon last year and I found I missed tying trout flies.  I started filling up a brand new special flybox I got for Father's Day with some freshly tied soft hackles.

Overall I thought we had a great time catching up, telling fish stories and talking about future fishing plans.