Take a quick moment and think about what your top 5 euro nymphing flies are right now. If you could only have five flies to use on the water, what would they be?
Today’s guest picked his top flies straight from some of the best fly anglers around the world. And now, he’s sharing the stories behind them, how to fish them, and a few tips to help you step up your game on the water this year.
Tim Cammisa—fly fishing show celebrity, author, and all-around go-to guy—is back with his new book on Euro nymphing patterns. But it’s not just Euro nymphs. We’re getting into it all!
Have you ever tried fishing a super light nymph in the wind? Want to know the best pheasant tail material and what makes his selection stand out? Tim’s got answers. We’ll also hear about his top picks for pheasant tail material and breaking down five of the best flies in the game. Plus, discover why your dry fly should act like a soggy diaper.
In his book, Tim included 15 main euro nymphing fly patterns with 15 variations. The flies are grouped into different types:
The Perdigon is a must-have for fishing fast water because it sinks to the strike zone fast. Originally a Spanish fly, its name means “pellet,” which fits its quick descent. Many anglers, especially in competitions, fish perdigons in tiny sizes paired with large beads to help them sink even faster.
Gasolina, created by David Arcay, is a flashy fly with an oil-slick look that changes colors when wet. Some anglers use a special European material for its body, but in the U.S., Hends 233 is the closest match. Gasolina comes in light, medium, and dark shades, giving anglers more options to match conditions.
The Pheasant Tail Nymph is a must-have fly. Frank Sawyer first tied it using just wire and pheasant tail, making it one of the simplest and most effective patterns. Grégory Juglaret, a top French angler, swears by it as his go-to fly.
Tim highlights a variation—the Simple Pheasant Tail by Pat Weiss. It uses only pheasant tail, wire, and red thread. The key is the bleached ginger pheasant tail, which creates a natural light-to-dark effect.
The San Juan Worm and Squirmy Wormy are some of the most effective flies. But they’ve also stirred debate. Some anglers love them because they catch tons of fish. Others say they make things too easy.
Tim talked to David Highes, the creator of the Squirmy Wormy, and learned that the first one glowed in the dark. Some competitions even banned it because it worked too well. While many pros swear by worm flies, some European anglers refuse to use them.
The Jig Bugger is a simple but effective streamer that works great during high water events. It’s tied on a jig hook with a tungsten bead, a marabou tail, and a flashy body. Many anglers like it because it’s easy to tie and catches fish.
Start subtle, then get more aggressive. If nothing bites, try a bigger bead size or change colors. Black and white in sizes 10-12 are solid choices.
The fifth must-have fly is a dry fly. You might wonder why a dry fly is in a book about nymphing. Many top anglers, including Pete Erickson and Michael Bradley, use them in dry-dropper setups. A dry fly can help keep a nymph in the right drift.
Tim compares the perfect dry fly to a soggy diaper—one that barely stays afloat. The moment a fish even nudges the nymph, the dry fly reacts. Some top anglers even set the hook when they see ripples moving away from the fly! This level of precision helps detect subtle takes and land more fish.
Watch my summary of the top 5 Flies from the best fly anglers from all around the world!
Episode Transcript
Dave (2s):
Take a quick moment and think about what your top flies are right now. If you could only have five flies to use on the water tomorrow, what would they be? Today’s guest has his top flies, which come from direct communication with some of the best fly anglers from around the world. And today you’re gonna get the backstory on these flies, how to fish them, and some tips and tricks so we can prove your game on the water this year. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip And what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. Hey, I’m Dave host of the We Fly Swing podcast. I’ve been fly fishing since I was a kid, grew up around a fly shop and have created one of the largest fly fishing podcasts out there.
Dave (47s):
I’ve also interviewed more of the greatest fly anglers and fly tires than just about anyone in the world. Tim Camisa fly fishing show, celebrity author and a go-to guy for inspiration is here to shed some light on his new book on Euro nymph patterns. And it’s not just Euro nymphs. Today we’re gonna get into it all. You’re gonna find out how to fish a super light nymph in the wind. You’re gonna find out how to select the best pheasant tail material and what that variation looks like for Tim. And also what this CDC Blob fly is all about. We’re gonna find out about this fly. We’ve got, like we said, five of the best in the world. Plus you will find out why you want your dry fly to act like a soggy diaper in the water when fishing at dry dropper.
Dave (1m 32s):
We’re gonna talk about that as well. We’re gonna talk dry flies and I think we got a couple flies here that are gonna really surprise you. So let Tim take it away and explain the behind the scenes. Here we go. Tim Camisa from trout and feather.com. How’s it going Tim?
Tim (1m 49s):
Dave, it is wonderful to be back. How’s everything going on your end? It’s
Dave (1m 53s):
Going good man. It’s always good to talk to you. I think I, I think we’re up to three or four episodes now, which is great. I think the more chat with you, like I always say, you’ve always got a big smile on your face and I love smiles and all that. So how, how’s the year been going for you?
Tim (2m 6s):
Oh my gosh. I mean, I know we’re, we are recording this in early 2025, so the year is like just off to the start. But I mean, 2024 was a wonderful year, great year for fishing. Lots of stuff, you know, in the fly fishing world. I mean, yes, it was really good.
Dave (2m 19s):
Yeah, great, great. Well, yeah, as you speak, it’s January now. This episode will probably come out in about a month. It’ll be February, but you’ll be right in the middle of show season, which is, I know you’re always a, a big celebrity, right? I, I love it how bad, you know, sets his dad and it’s always a celebrities. I love it. I mean, you’re a, do you feel out there? Do you feel like a celebrity?
Tim (2m 38s):
No, I mean I’m still, like, whenever I walk around these shows, and I think you’re referencing like in 2025 I’ll be, you know, headlining and, and a featured presenter at the Fly Fishing Show in Denver, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania over in Edison, New Jersey. And I’ll be headlining the Midwest Fly fishing expo. And Dave, I mean I know I’ve said this so many times, but anytime I’m at these shows I still feel like I’m a little kid. ’cause I used to go to the shows whenever, you know, I was an early teen whenever I was 10, 11 years old. So I seriously will just like be walking past a sign and see my name on the sign and wanna like pinch myself to be like, I remember 30 years ago when I was that kid walking up to that sign, like reading it saying like, whose presentation do I want to go see? Like who’s gonna gimme all the secret flies or how to catch all the fish And now like to see my name on the other side.
Tim (3m 22s):
It’s just, it definitely is a very humbling site every time I see it.
Dave (3m 26s):
That is really cool. And I’ve seen out there on just following you on social a little bit, you’ve been connecting with, you know, you got some good stuff out there, some great na you know, and maybe talk about that. Who are some of the guys you’ve been connecting with over the last couple years? Some big names that we should know about?
Tim (3m 39s):
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess to kind of tell your audience a little bit about where I’ve come from. I mean, I’ve been invested in fly fishing for about 35 years, but a little bit over a decade ago or somewhere in that timeframe, I started a YouTube channel. And it just started with, I originally was doing a lot of fly tying, you know, presentations. I was tying a lot of patterns and then it kind of took off to the point where I was giving a lot of my fly fishing presentations online and, and just kind of, you know, filling in with a lot of niche videos that may relate to European nim finger or dry flies. And then somewhere along the way I realized, like, you know, going back to that little kid in me, I grew up just looking up to some of these legends of fly fishing. I mean, we’re talking about like the lefty craze, the Dave Whitlocks, the Joe Humphreys.
Tim (4m 21s):
And now here I am in a position, I’m going to these fly fishing shows and I’m fishing around the country and around the world and I’m fishing with these people, like the people that I look up to. And I said to myself like, here I am in this prime opportunity. Sure I can make, you know, YouTube videos and promotes my social media on, you know, little things like dry flies and you know, the best streamer flies and that stuff is wonderful, but why not just dedicate some time to interviewing some of these legends of fly fishing? So I, I come up with a list every year and I say to myself, I plan on interviewing, you know, three to five of these people in the next year. I make it a point to get out there and we’re talking about people like Tom Rosenbauer of Orvis, people like Joe Humphreys recently I interviewed Tom Bolts, he’s a really famous angler from central Pennsylvania that, you know, has been guiding for 50 years.
Tim (5m 7s):
I mean, the guy is just an absolute legend. He’s developed fly patterns that are just known around the country. So, you know, I’ve, I’m really just trying to take some of that time and really give back to, to fly fishing and just to make sure that we know that these are the legends that came before us. Let’s, let’s kind of, you know, look up to them a little bit longer. Yeah,
Dave (5m 25s):
That’s great. No, I love that. Well good. Well I think tonight we’re gonna bounce around a little bit here and, and I want to get caught up in things, but you have a new book out and I wanna start there because I think this book is, I just got off, I was just telling the story, recent episode Gilbert Rowley, and I’m not sure if he’s in the book ’cause I haven’t read the whole thing, but we just did episode with Gilbert last year and it was one of our most listened to episodes of the year and you know, and not just because of Euro nipping or comp, but I mean I think that there’s something there, right? I don’t know what it is about the European nipping, the, all that stuff, but you wrote a book basically focusing on the flies. Talk about that, that how does this book come to be? Why do you focus on this and not any of the other topics you could have touched on?
Tim (6m 2s):
Ooh, that’s a great question. I mean, well let, let’s start with the notion of, you know, European Ming. I mean it, it has definitely, it was one of those topics that when people first started hearing about it, whenever I say people I’m talking about, you know, mainly anglers in the United States, it was kind of this underground thing where you heard about this new style of fishing and you were dredging these Czech nims and they were really heavy, but whenever you would fish them you would just catch fish like you were using a vacuum cleaner. It was one of these deals and it was all kind of secretive because most of the information was coming out of Europe, it was still written in Europe. There weren’t a lot of videos at the time. And it was kind of that unknown where we, we were just kind of grasping at straws and trying to figure out how to put a system together. Then some of the key players, at least from my perspective, people like George Daniel who wrote just an, an enormous, you know, book about this and really just kind of broke the ice and kind of put himself out there as this is a person who’s willing to share information and not just hoard it to himself.
Tim (6m 56s):
And then, you know, one of my mentors, Devin Olson, he was a member of, still is a member of Fly fishing team, USA and you know, he put out blogs and videos and started a website and just was on podcasts talking about it. And somewhere in between George and Devin, you know, I heard about it, I got invested to it, I started fly fishing more with a friend of mine whose name is Josh Miller from my area of Pennsylvania. And I just went down that rabbit hole and, and just like, you know, it was advertised, you catch a heck of a lot more fish. I mean, I remember I came home from fishing one day and I remember telling my wife like, Hey, I caught this many fish at this spot and this many fish here. And she was looking at me, Dave, and she was like, are you lying to me? You’re lying.
Tim (7m 36s):
Like, she’s like, is this a fishing story? I’m like, what are you talking about? She’s like, you’re telling me like three times as many fish from last year. And I’m like, Heather, I’m not lying. It’s Euro nymphing. Yeah. So that was kinda like my introduction to the topic, if that makes sense.
Dave (7m 50s):
Yeah, yeah, I love that. No, and I love you mentioned Josh Moore because we’ve been chatting with him. We’re gonna have him on the podcast soon and he’s a huge reason why I think the youth team and team USA has won. I think last year they swept the whole podium and I feel like, oh my gosh, I’ve heard that he’s just the man. I mean, so Josh, you guys have a lot of history out there, right? Pennsylvania, that east part of the, the country is a mecca for
Tim (8m 10s):
All this. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I’m lucky to be out in this area and you know, Josh is a good friend of mine and he worked at a local fly shop And we kind of connected, ’cause we were both, you know, in this Pittsburgh area though, you know, he definitely was starting to make a name for himself in competitions and I was making a name for myself on YouTube and you know, content areas. And so, you know, we had a natural connection to each other. We’re we’re really good friends now, you know, our families hang out. So, you know, I went fishing with Josh, I think we were on our way to a show, maybe the International Fly Tying Symposium. And we stopped on this river and you know, we decided we’re gonna fish for a couple hours on our way out there. And I remember like, I’m leading, I’m going first, you know, up this river and I’m catching some fish here and there.
Tim (8m 51s):
And Josh is just smoking these fish. We’re talking like one after another and I’m watching Himm thinking, what the heck is he doing? And you know, eventually I say to him, Hey, what fly are you using? And he was using like a Frenchie. I’m like, well I got a Frenchie on too. And I’m like, well, how many split shot? And he’s like, well, I’m not using a split shot. I’m like, All right. And I’m, I make a few more casts and I’m like, alright, gimme your rig. Like, I’m not playing this game. Gimme your rod, you know, for friends, let me cast it. And I made this cast and it was like casting a piece of spaghetti. I mean, this thing just felt like it was all over the place. And you know, that was the beginning of the addiction of Euro nymphing. And you know, I just, I fell in love with it. I just, it was a challenge, you know, there’s a learning curve to it. Like there are in so many things, fly fishing and fly tying, but it just seemed like it wasn’t just about nymphing.
Tim (9m 37s):
You could also fish dry flies, you could fish streamers. You don’t have to just be fishing for trout or char. I mean, I’ve caught salmon using a Euro nymphing rig. I I’ve caught small mouth bass using a Euro nipping rig. So, you know, there’s lots of different things that you can do with that system. Yeah. Now I know you had asked me about the book and I guess somewhere, you know, after my first book had come out, it was called Fly Time for Everyone, which, you know, just blew me away that I’d been asked to write a book and I was like, I, this was, it was a really fun experience. I enjoyed it. It was an awesome project. And I was like, I think I can write another book, but you know, you gotta find that right topic. And somewhere in there I found out Josh was writing a book on Num Thing, and I’m like, oh, this is like awesome. It’s gonna be a killer book, which it is.
Tim (10m 18s):
And as he’s writing it, he’s, you know, he contacted me to tie some of the flies for the book. And I said to him, are you focusing on the Fliess? It really just, you know, tips, tactics and techniques. And he’s like, yeah, it’s just the latter. Yeah. And I was like, All right, cool. So I kind of planted this seed and I reached out to my publisher and I was like, Hey, I know where you are right now. You know, in the world of Euro NPH thing, I don’t think anyone’s done a book dedicated to the flies. And I think it’d be a really great thing. So I, you know, I had a call scheduled, Dave, I felt like, you know, I had this all lined up. I called Jay Nichols, I’m like, Hey, here’s my idea. And I was waiting for him to just say, yeah, Tim, you just hit it outta the park. And he was like, Tim, that’s a terrible idea. Like, I could have Devin write this book, right? I could have Josh, I could have Lance, I could have j he’s naming the names.
Tim (11m 1s):
And I’m like, and then, you know, as he goes on, he’s like, but the problem is, you know, George might use George’s flies and you know, Devin might just talk about Devin’s flies and he’s saying this, and though I’m thinking these are professionals, they’re not, they would do a great job. But as he’s kind of going through this, he starts to say to me, but Tim, what I need is somebody to kind of treat this book almost like they’re an editor where it’s still their book, but they have to go out, they have to interview these people, pull the information and put it all together. And you’re the only person that can do this. And I’m like, oh my gosh. Like we started off this phone call where like, I’m the worst person to write this book, and now I’m the only person to fly fishing that could do it. So he’s like, All right, just get started, you know, I’ll send you some contracts, let me know what you need.
Tim (11m 42s):
And it was literally just like that. I was like, off and running. So that was kind of the premise to the book where I reach out to some of the top anglers and top fly tires around the world and scheduled interviews and emails and just pick their brains about not just flies, because yeah, it started off as a book about flies, but you can’t talk to like the top five anglers in the world and just expect it to be about flies. I mean, it, it it was leaders and rods and reels and, and just so many other areas of fly fishing that we’ll get into. Yeah,
Dave (12m 14s):
Exactly. Yeah. So the book is, And we can, we can talk about that a little more in depth, but that’s a cool thing when I think about the Euro NPHs and just the whole thing is that it doesn’t have to be, you don’t even have to be euro nipping, right? You can use these flies for other situations. Is that the case? Do you find that people are using euro NPHs for all sorts of different things with a typical nine foot, you know, rods and all that stuff?
Tim (12m 33s):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think you really hit the nail on the head and you know, one of the people that wrote a little section for the book is Tom Rosenbauer of vus. And I really love to stress Tom’s section because he talks about, he’s like, what is a nymph? You know, I don’t even know what defines a num is just something really skinny that right sinks to the bottom and it, you know, it’s tied in the round, like, you know, and what if I don’t fish it on, you know, my euro infr, does that mean I’m outta the cool kids club? And, and so he did a really nice job of kind of teasing out what is a nu exactly, and do you have to fish it this way or else you’re not fishing it? Right? And, and the answer is no, no, these are, I mean, the flies that I have in this book, I, I really made it a point to say like, these aren’t just, you know, I don’t wanna say Euro nims, they’re not just Euro nims.
Tim (13m 16s):
They’re not just competition flies. I’m not a competition angler. Like, that’s not my area of expertise. The, the flies that I selected for this book are like, you know, 15 flies and 15 variations, and these are like 30 of the best flies being used today. A lot of them just happen to be used by some of the top anglers today who fish competitions too.
Dave (13m 34s):
Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe describe that a little bit. What did Tom say or what do you think, what is the definition of a Euro nph? What makes it a Euro nph?
Tim (13m 40s):
Oh gosh. I mean, I don’t know if there is one definition, and I think I’d get in trouble really trying to right, to narrow it or niche it down. I’ve heard a couple people talk about, let, let’s, let’s go to European Nim thing, because I think years ago it was really difficult for people to define it because you had all these different European teams and they all had their own little style. You had the French teams using long leaders, you had the checks using really heavy flies. And if people said, you know, are you Czech nim fing? Are you French nipping? Are you Spanish nim fing? That all meant something different. And it seems like over the last, you know, especially three or four years, there’s been this race to fish, you know, as light of a leader as possible. And that tends to be what we define as European nymphing now, where it’s just really light lines, light hooks, very sensitive rods, and you can really detect a lot of different strikes.
Tim (14m 29s):
That’s not the only style of euro nymphing, but that seems to be kind of the direction that everything’s heading that we can kind of cap everything under. So whenever I say to myself, All right, what are the flies that are being used in that situation? I mean, we’re talking about, you know, anglers like Howard Croton, he’s a national champion from the uk, anglers like Lubo Rosa, he’s a champion from the Czech Republic. We have an angler in the United States like Devin Olson. I mean, these are people that I, I interviewed for the book. And these are people who are fishing competitions still to this day. So you have these champions and all these medal winners, and these aren’t people that are gonna sit down and say, All right, I got, you know, three hours to tie some flies. I’m gonna take my time and tie a half a dozen. I mean, they have to be cranking these patterns out.
Tim (15m 10s):
So to me, you know, we’re looking at a, a pattern that’s gotta be tied in a really short amount of time, use few materials. It’s gonna be something that’s not gonna be so dialed in that it’s gonna be very specific for a hatch or as a certain bug. It’s gonna be something that fish can take as a generalistic style of pattern. The majority of nymphs in the book tend to be tied relatively slender with few appendages, you know, just so they sink a little bit faster. And I guess, you know, when I look at this, these are just general, you know, fish catching patterns. That’s how I’m gonna help to define all this stuff, right?
Dave (15m 45s):
Yeah, they’re just good patterns. I mean, they might be euro noms, but they’re just all around, you’re gonna find ’em in probably most people’s boxes or, or would you say most of them are pretty, people would know the names of most of these 15 flies?
Tim (15m 56s):
Yeah, I mean, yes and no. I think there’s a lot of different patterns out there that, that are being used today. And I tried my best to say, All right, if I was gonna really try to look at this as, let’s take a snapshot in time right now, and like this is 2025. Like if we say to ourselves what’s being used right now in 2025, I think I did a pretty good job of selecting those patterns. I also got kind of lucky at the beginning because, you know, I said to myself, I’m gonna be tying, you know, these 15 patterns, and for every 15 pattern there’s also a variation. So I have 15 patterns, 15 variations. So you got 30 patterns that are just given in their entirety in the book. You have like all this, you know, high res macro photography for those main 15, which by the way, they’re not just all nymphs.
Tim (16m 38s):
I have it broken down into nymphs. I have a section on paragons, I have a section on junk flies, I have a section on streamers, and I have a section on dry flies. So it’s called tying Euro nymphs, but it’s really a well-rounded selection. But then at some point I had asked, I think it was Devin Olson, you know, halfway through our interview, I said to him, Hey, if you could just carry five flies, it doesn’t matter where you’re fishing in the world, let’s just say you’re on a river medium gradient with, you know, trout or char, what are your five go-to patterns going to be? And Devin just, you know, rattled them off. So I just kind of tuck that information away and I added that question to my notes, and I got to the next angler, asked that person that question, got those five flies. And then, you know, by the end of this, I started to realize like, I have 30 confidence lists for 30 of the best anglers around the world.
Tim (17m 25s):
I better take a look at these lists and see to myself like, is there, you know, some commonality, commonality right? Amongst, you know, from Devin to Lance to Pat Weiss, which by the way, there were very few flies that were on every single list. There was a little bit of overlap, but looking at those lists, it caused me to kind of rethink my own and say, All right, well here is my original 15, I’m cutting these five and I’m gonna add these five in instead. And that’s kind of how my selection process came to be.
Dave (17m 50s):
Gotcha. That’s interesting because yeah, you, you would think that, yeah, maybe the Frenchie or whatever, the top five you would think, but there was, it sounds like a good mix of flies, like from all these guys. And, and how, how did you go into that? That’s a must be a tough thing too. You mentioned a few names, but there’s more than just 15 people out there that probably could have made the book. Right. How did you end up choosing the, the, you know, these people
Tim (18m 10s):
And who,
Dave (18m 11s):
And that was, and who’s mad at you now? Right?
Tim (18m 13s):
I mean, I, well, no one’s reached out to me saying they’re mad if it, I haven’t seen if anyone’s unfollowed me on social media, right? Yeah. I mean, to select the people I started off with Devin Olson. Yeah, he was the first, just because he and I, you know, we’ve made some videos together for YouTube, you know, we’ve connected at some of the shows And we have a very good relationship. You know, we text, we call, he’s somebody, you know, I’ll be out in the river, you’re an phi, and run into a problem. And I’ll text him, say, Hey, here’s what’s going on. What do you think’s happen? And he’ll tell me, he’s like, oh, here’s what you’re doing nice. And I’m like, how does he know this? Wow, he’s really good. So, you know, I started with Devvin and at the end of that phone call, kind of like you would with the podcast, I said to him, Hey, who else do I need to be talking to? Right? And he might rattle off four names and I, you know, maybe I had three of them written down, but I didn’t have that fourth.
Tim (18m 54s):
So I added them to the list, or it was somebody I’d never heard of. I think one of the questions I asked somebody was, who’s someone that I’ve never heard of that’s just, you know, out there and is somebody that we need to know for the future. And then somebody else’s name would come up and, you know, then I would just say the obvious, Hey, can you connect me? You know, can you share an email address or, you know, give them a call from me just so to see if they’re even interested in doing it. And I think like every single person I asked for my first round of people, they all said yes. For the second round of people, they all said yes. I think there were only like two or three people that said no. One of them, they were a European angler. I won’t say their name. There’s somebody there that always finishes in the top five. And I just think that they’re just so ultra competitive.
Tim (19m 36s):
They just thought maybe they would say something that would slip and they would lose their standing. I mean, when you get to the top three or four people, there’s a reason they’re, those names are repeated pretty frequently.
Dave (19m 47s):
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Tim (20m 49s):
Yeah, well listen, I’m opening the book right now. Let me, I have, let’s see, 1, 2, 3. That’s perfect, Dave, because I have five, like, I have a bunch of chapters, but I have five that are on my main headings of flies. Okay. And so I’ll pick one from each of those headings. How about the first one would be, I’m a paragon. Yep. That’s without a doubt. I mean, paragons are really exceptional patterns. Just to give a little background on it, it’s a Spanish fly. I believe Paragon stands for pellet because it sinks like a rock. I mean, they just get to the bottom in a hurry. My original experience with a paragon was, you know, it’s something tied with a, a relatively straight tail, maybe Coke daily on a flashy body, a hotspot behind a bead, maybe a s slotted tungsten bead on a jig hook.
Tim (21m 31s):
And, you know, it was meant to fish in really fast water when I first started fishing with them. Anytime I would come to a relatively, you know, high gradient section of a river, that would be a fly that I would tie on just to get to the bottom in a hurry, because there’s just nothing sticking out, nothing to slow. Its descent through the water. What I kind of, whenever I, I first said to myself, All right, you know, when am I gonna be using these on a regular basis? I said to myself, and I kind of put myself in this box. It’s only going to be in a section where it’s really, really fast water. ’cause that’s what I knew about them. And, and in fact in my first book, my publisher said to me, Hey, you can use any flies you want in that first book. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m the, the first book to ever feature the mop fly that was in fly tying for everyone.
Tim (22m 12s):
’cause I’m like, I don’t think anyone has a featured, I’ll be the first person whether that’s good or bad. But my publisher did, did say out of every pattern out there, he wanted a perigon in that first book. And I said to myself at first, I wonder why he’s stressing that so much. And, and now I realize why. I mean, nearly every one of these anglers, not all, but nearly every one of them said that a perigon really belongs, you know, easily in, in the top five, almost every list, or for sure a top 10 just because of its ability to get down. What I learned from my new book is that a lot of these anglers are fishing really small paragons. Like I would say to myself, you know, sixteens, eighteens maybe twenties, but most of the anglers that I talked about, again, a lot of these competitive anglers, they were fishing eighteens twenties and 20 twos, really small paragons because they could put a larger bead on a size 22 jig or a Downey mfo.
Tim (23m 3s):
And that thing just sinks to the bottom in a hurry. I feature a few different paragons and a few different variations. I’d say probably the most interesting one is one that’s called a gasoline and a gasoline. It’s a really cool looking pattern. And I’d heard about it from a fly time perspective because it features this material for the body. And I guess the closest material that we have to it in the United States is called hens 2 33. You can have as a crystal flash or a little tinsel. So this gasoline, it has this crazy color, Dave, it’s, it almost looks like an oil slick. That’s why they call it a gasoline. So whenever it’s wet, it just takes on a bunch of different colors. So it just looks like a lot of stuff. It’s a flashy Pentagon.
Tim (23m 43s):
You know, I interviewed David rk, he’s the creator of this. He’s from Europe. In fact, he sells what you would consider to be the original gasoline material. And he sells it in multiple shades, which I kind of found interesting because, you know, in in the United States, we mainly just fish hens 2 33, and that’s the gasoline. Yet you talk to David and he’s like, oh, I got a, a, you know, a bunch of different shades of this. So there’s a light version, a medium version and a dark version. But to me, kind of the standing thing with this gasoline is, you know, these people are fishing it in very small sizes, but they’re also pairing this gasoline and they’re pairing these small paragons with larger nips, something like a mop fly, and they’re putting the mop fly on the point they’re putting, you know, this little paragon as a dropper, and they’re just letting that mop or that egg just kind of slither along the bottom and just really slow down that paragon.
Tim (24m 31s):
So these fish are sink something really small in the water column and just coming up and attacking it.
Dave (24m 36s):
Wow, that’s awesome. Yeah. And the gasoline is, it’s kind of got a flashy as it have kind of like a floss flashy body. Is that what it is?
Tim (24m 43s):
Yeah, it’s imagine like a body with just crystal flash. Yeah, that’s really what it is. But it has all these different hus to it. And for these paragons, you cover all them in a, in a UV resin. So they take on this, this sheen anyway, but you know, you have this sheen that’s kind of over this green, and I dunno, blues and browns, there’s all these different shades depending on how you look at it. Now, let’s be honest, if a fish is chasing down a size 20 paragon, are they gonna see all those shades? Like I, I don’t think so, but at least whenever I look at it in my box, it gives me confidence to say, All right, this thing looks pretty cool. I’m, I’m gonna get some fish on it. That’s it.
Dave (25m 15s):
That is awesome. Yeah. And then the, the, the paragon is more of a, what’s the body material on the paragon? Typically
Tim (25m 21s):
Paragon, you know, from at least my interviews with these anglers, they were two main body materials that they looked at. One of them, a lot of anglers said, Hey, we want something really flashy. So think about crystal flash or a tinsel. That would be one body material. And then another body material that I feature in the book is using thread. So saying to yourself, All right, I’m gonna use this, you know, light olive color thread, knowing that whenever it gets wet it’s gonna darken a little bit. So, you know, that would kind of be the direction I would point to your listeners if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna tie some paragons, have some flashy ones, and have some more muted or dull ones tied thread body.
Dave (25m 56s):
Perfect. And when do you, I mean, just from what you’ve learned, when does the flashier, do you kinda use the flashier versus the more dull type flies? When would you use one over the other?
Tim (26m 7s):
Oh gosh. I’d love to tell you that. Like, if it’s a cloudy day, sometimes like, you know, dark day, dark fly, bright day, bright fly, I definitely at least lean down that setting. But, you know, I, I don’t look at it like that. It’s kind of like one of those things where, you know, first of all, if I’m coming to some fast water, a paragon might be one of my first flies simply because it gets down in a hurry. But I guess to tell another story, Dave, I remember I was fishing with my wife. We were fishing on this beautiful little stream in central Pennsylvania, and we’re out there and we’re on this really slow section, just slow moving water. There was some Cass on the water, and at one point, you know, my son and my daughter were out with us and I was showing my son how to pick apart, you know, a Cais case. And we dug out the larva and I took a picture of it in his hand.
Tim (26m 48s):
It was this really bright green cas larvae, it was a Gran Cadis. So a little bit later he was telling my wife about it, and I said, oh, why? Let’s show mom the picture. And we showed her the picture and you know, just kind of moved on from that. And about 15 minutes after that, she hooked a really nice brown trout. This was this just big wild brown trout. So, you know, she’s fighting it. She’s been, you know, fly fishing for a number of years. She did a great job with this fish. And she lands it. And you know, as it slides into the net, you know, the first thing I’m thinking is like, what fly did she use? And I look in the fish’s mouth and it’s a paragon. I’m like, well, that was a dumb idea. Like, why would you fish a paragon in slow moving water? And she’s like, well, you know, it had this green body. I saw that green fly. I figured that’d be a good idea.
Tim (27m 29s):
And I’m like, Heather, you don’t use paragons in slow moving water. And now, like, fast forward to this book, I’m having like an interview with Pat Weiss, this, you know, an incredible angler from Central Pennsylvania, and he’s telling me all about his paragons. And I’m like, so Pat, you just fished these in fast water, right? And he’s like, absolutely not like slow water paragons sleigh. And I’m like, oh my gosh. Like my wife definitely had me beat there.
Dave (27m 52s):
Nice. That is so good. Yeah. That’s awesome. You got the, and you got the, the kids too, right? You are, you are the kids into, you have two kids, right?
Tim (27m 59s):
Yeah, yeah. I have a son who just turned nine and my daughter’s four. And listen, all of our vacations, all of our trips are built around fishing. So those, those kids, they have to come, you know, no matter what I mean, they have waiters, rods sometimes. My son, he prefers to throw a spinning rod over a fly rod this year. He really wants to throw a fly rod again. So it, they just go back and forth. We had them steal head fishing a few weeks ago on one of the tributaries of Lake Erie. Oh, cool. And you know, my son landed a couple fish. He would, he loved it. And my daughter, for some reason, she didn’t want to catch one because they were just so big and she was afraid she was gonna get pulled in. But, you know, eventually, you know, I hooked one, handed her the rod and she did a great job with
Dave (28m 34s):
It. Amazing. That’s so good. Nice. Well this is great. Well, and talk about this a little bit. Let’s just stick with the paragon for a little bit. How is it, you know, in the book, maybe you could break down just overall so people know what to expect. Are you breaking down? Talk about how you break down that book. Do you have kind of some conversations with people that tied this fly? You know, talk about that. How is each chapter broke down?
Tim (28m 52s):
Oh gosh. I guess, lemme take a step back. So whenever I was writing this book, imagine like, hey, every morning, you know, I’m waking up around five o’clock and I’m writing x amount of words for the book. So I’m creating a skeleton of the book. I had an idea of my sections, I had an idea of the flies, but I’m, I’m like, I, I have to, you know, get some words down on, you know, in my, in my laptop. And then aside from that, I’m scheduling these, you know, one to two hour zoom interviews. I’m sending out emails with questionnaires to these, you know, 30, you know, 30 some anglers and tires. And at some point those two have to mesh. And, you know, once I had the flies finalized and I said, All right, these are the flies. I’m gonna do a step by step of pictures. I decided, you know, how I was gonna do that.
Tim (29m 34s):
So, you know, macro photography came out for all that. And then the trickiest part of this whole project was saying to myself, I have all these interviews that I like typed up. I probably should have used ai, but you know, I just, I said to myself, I’m just gonna re-listen to every single interview just so I can make sure, you know, I have it written down the right way. Just because, you know, you know, just like with a podcast, it’s one thing whenever you’re in the moment, but it’s another thing when you’re kind of watching as an observer. Yep. So I, I went through and I categorized them. So say for instance, I was talking with Lance Egan about bead colors, which bead color to use on which type of a day. You know, I wanted to be able to say, All right, Lance said you use silver on this day, copper and gold on this day. And I would put those into section under beads.
Tim (30m 15s):
And then, you know, I would have another section on thread color, and I’d have a section on, you know, pheasant tails. And anytime, you know, somebody said something about a new topic, I would, you know, write that section down in that heading. So it kind of, at the end, the, the final component was saying to myself, alright, how do I integrate all of their quotes with my writing and, and finding, you know, just that, right? I don’t wanna say jigsaw, but that’s really what it was. Because every morning as I’m also writing that skeleton, I’m thinking about the previous interview and about what they said and, and all the other ones. So I was able to still kind of build around all of their thoughts and ideas, but then back it up with their actual quotes throughout. So whenever you look at a section like the gasoline, like let’s just say to ourself, we’re gonna first see a really beautiful picture of that fly.
Tim (30m 60s):
Something like, I call it one of my mirror shots. So I have a reflection picture of the fly with the recipe. Then there’s going to be a few paragraphs about the gasoline, just to give a little bit of history. There’s gonna be some quotes from the individual that developed that fly or created the fly. There’s gonna be, you know, anywhere from 15 to 20, you know, pictures of it. Each picture is gonna have a description of what’s going on. As you go through the tying procedures. You’re also gonna have a section on something that I might call like fly tying tips. So there’s a section that we’ll talk about, like, here’s something that maybe I did and I really wanna just, you know, just tease that out a little bit and go into more detail as to this fly tying technique for it. Then one of the most important ones is, you know, fishing suggestions.
Tim (31m 40s):
So I talk about how would you fish this fly? And I, that’s where I pulled in a lot of quotes from those anglers to say, All right, if I’m fishing with a paragon, here’s what I’m gonna do. I mean, for the Paragon, for instance, I mean, you know, one of the best fishing ideas came from Devin Olson for that one. And I remember Devon saying, you know, like, you know, he really values paragons, but it’s tough to fish a paragon on a windy day because they do sink to the bottom in a hurry. But if the wind is blowing on your leader, it can lift that fly right back up. So he’s like, you have to say to yourself, how can you get it down there and keep it down there? And he paired it with a mop fly because he’s like, Hey, those mop flies. You know, they sink like a parachute. They take forever to get to the bottom. But then let’s use that thinking and say, All right, once they’re there, it’s gonna take that much more to lift them up.
Tim (32m 23s):
Oh, right. So let’s fish a mop, fly on a windy day, then, you know, pair it with a something small like that paragon. And you know, that’s kind of one of his go-to rigs in the wind. So there you go. You know, getting that type of information and then finding its home in the book, that was the tricky part. That’s where it really caused me to, to do a lot of thinking,
Dave (32m 40s):
Finding like where that, that’s really interesting. I remember when, you know, I asked the John Roc, you know, RID Yeah. You know, and I, he has on the podcast and, and I always ask him about his process in writing books, you know, obviously John Giro, and he said a similar thing. It was like, you don’t want your book to be like your watching your, your uncle’s slideshow from Hawaii vacation, right? Where it’s like, here’s the start, here’s the start, then here’s a fish. It sounds like you, is that part of the beauty of writing books? You kind of find that mix where it’s not about start to end, it’s just you find your own mix.
Tim (33m 11s):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I, Dave, I don’t think I’ve told this to anybody. I wrote the introduction to this book three times. I wrote it three separate times, not realizing I had written it those other times. And at the very end, whenever I went to put all my sections together, I’m like, oh my gosh. Like, I wrote my intro three times and it was written three different ways. One of the three I did not like, it may have been my first one. I was like, All right, that one’s trash, but I’m looking at these next two and I’m like, oh my gosh, like, these are both really good. Like I, you know, when you’re kind of taking a step back, I’m like, I did a nice job with these intros and it was like, which 1:00 AM I gonna pick? And that’s kind of one of the struggles of being a writer is that, you know, once you start getting that stuff down and you do have to remove some of that, it’s like, you know, you, you, you’re throwing a piece of you away in a sense.
Tim (33m 56s):
So no, no, John, you know, he’s definitely at another level from, from any of us. Right. At least from me.
Dave (34m 2s):
Right, right, right. Well this is good. So we started off with the paragon. Let’s keep this rolling here. What would be a second pattern you’d say if we had to have four or five patterns in our box? Everybody should have these. What’s the number two?
Tim (34m 11s):
Oh gosh, I think I’ll go with an easy one, and I don’t wanna take the easy way out, but my second section is considered nymphs with dubbing and soft tackle. Oh, nice. So if we say to ourselves, Perigon sink fast, now let’s start building some stuff. So maybe like a, a thorax that’s, that’s a dubbed thorax or something with a little bit of c, DC for the hackle. And I have, I don’t know, I have four or five of like my top flies of all time in that section. So it’s really tricky. But I think the pattern that I’ll kind of point to is going to be a pheasant tail. And the reason I say that is because, you know, out of all those confidence flies, there was really one fly that kind of just has stood the test of time that nearly every angler said, this is one of my go-tos.
Tim (34m 51s):
In fact, Gregory jut, he’s a French angler, whenever I asked him about his five, he was, he kinda laughed and he’s like, Tim, there’s only one, it’s the pheasant tail, right? Like that’s it. Like this is a top three angler in the world and he’s fishing like one fly the majority of the time.
Dave (35m 5s):
Wow. One of the oldest, right? Like, but what, you know, the history probably a little about one of the oldest flies that’s out there, right?
Tim (35m 10s):
Yeah. I mean this, it’s a Frank Sawyer. Yeah, franker creation. It was originally tied with just wire and pheasant tail. I mean, it was a nothing fly. I mean, he developed this, I believe, for chalk streams over in England. So, you know, kind of knowing that, that it has that, that history, it’s a basic fly that could just represent so many different, you know, forms of food for fish. Just knowing that, like it’s out there. Now, I did say to myself, I can’t just tie like the typical pheasant tale because, and I’ll, I’ll point back to something that my publisher told me in my first book. He was like, Tim, I don’t want you to have the parachute atoms in your book. Like it’s been done. It’s in many books, you can find it everywhere. Like there’s no reason to try to recreate the wheel. So I said to myself like, you know, I have to have versions of the SSO tail in this book.
Tim (35m 52s):
And of course I’m gonna talk about the main version, but can I also just kind of highlight a new one that maybe not everyone knows about? And the pattern that I share is this pattern called the simple pheasant Tail. And this is a pattern that was developed from Pat Weiss, you know, the central Pennsylvania angler. And Pat is somebody that your listeners probably don’t know too much about now if they follow fooling mill at all on social media. Fooling Mills mentions his name quite frequently because they carry a ton of his patterns. He’s just got a bunch of flies to catch fish. He’s one of these competition anglers that, you know, as I like to say about him, if he’s in a room with other comp anglers and he starts talking, everyone gets quiet because they wanna know what he has to say.
Tim (36m 32s):
He’s just one of those people that he’s gonna catch fish wherever he goes. He’s a hunter, he’s gonna be successful whenever he’s in the woods. He’s just that guy. So there’s a couple flies that he’s kind of really known for, especially in the Pennsylvania area. But the one that, you know, I gravitated to this simple pheasant tail. It’s tied with like one material, it’s just tied with pheasant tail. But the tricky part is it’s a bleached ginger pheasant tail. And it kind of threw me off because, you know, Pat’s a really secretive dude. He’s one of those guys that like, you’ll ask him a question and he won’t lie to you. He just won’t tell you everything. And he kind of gotta put it, put the rest together. So, you know, sure enough, like I was talking to him about this fly and he gave me a little bit, but I felt like there was more.
Tim (37m 14s):
So I, you know, I was texting him and he gave me a little bit more, and I’m looking at pictures of this fly and I just, it’s something just wasn’t right to me. And it’s because, you know, they’ll find a, a true bleached ginger pheasant tail. It’s tough to do. So for anyone out there who gets this book, and I’m, I’m sure I say this in the book as well, like, I had ordered bleached ginger pheasant tails from fly shops from around the country. I think I ordered like six or seven sets. And I even went to a couple of local fly shops, and I’m the person that when I go, I will remove every single one from the bid and look them over. And it was really tough to find a true one because what you’re looking for, whenever you’re looking at the back of a pheasant tail, a bleached one, you want the tips of it to be relatively light, and it should be darker by the center, darker by that stem.
Tim (37m 59s):
And the reason that, that pat looks for them, that color, imagine this like you’re tying in the pheasant tail, the tips is the tail. Yeah. And it’s really bleached and it’s lighter by the tail. So as you start winding that forward, it’s gonna give you a relatively lighter abdomen for the fly. But if the center of that pheasant tail, if it’s darker, and as you continue winding it up, it starts to darken as the fly moves forward. So by the time you get to the thorax, it’s a dark thorax kind of like, you know, natural insects out there. So Pat found a way to take one material, a pheasant tail, create something that’s different than everyone else’s pheasant tail, but also find a way to have it replicate all the natural insects out there. And this is a fly that works for cadi, it works for like may flies, like the light cahill like sulfur.
Tim (38m 43s):
I mean, it’s just a fly that will catch fish in a lot of different situations. So I think he originally called it like the stupid simple pheasant tail. And I think fooling those said, All right, get the word stupid out of, right. We’re just gonna call the simple pheasant tail. Yeah. And it’s stuck. There’s no, no material for the thorax, there’s no dubbing or anything like that. There’s no CDC, it’s just like, I don’t know, pheasant tail wire and red thread. And that’s really it.
Dave (39m 7s):
It’s pheasant tail. I mean, it’s literally the original even simpler than the original, right? Yeah, the original was pretty simple because it had the, the only difference it had the thorax and the peacock, which is one big thing I always said, I love peacock. Yeah. I feel like peacock is one of those natural materials that’s just amazing. But it just shows you this fly works just as effective it sounds like, without the peacock. And it’s amazing. Do you think, I mean, and of course there are flies that are just floss bodies too. So it, what is it about these flies? What, what would you tell somebody who isn’t a master of the fly or the etymology, the tying, why do these super simple? Is it just about getting down weight? Is that a big part of it?
Tim (39m 40s):
I don’t know. I don’t wanna say that because I, I think a lot of these anglers, the more I talk to ’em about the notion of nymphing, they’re not dredging the bottom. They’re, they’re not really just bouncing these flies along the bottom. A lot of ’em are fishing them a lot higher up in the water column than, than people like me originally thought. And so knowing that they’re really trying their best to have the fish, you know, take them as they’re in the drift. So it’s not just about dredging the bottom and doing that, you know, with flies like that, I mean, I’d love to tell you a fish looks at a pheasant tail and a pheasant tail fiber has all these es all these little fibers on it that should move and should breathe in the water. But again, I don’t know if the fish can see that Well, when they were, they’re far away. Yeah. To me, i, i, I just wonder, does it look like something buggy?
Tim (40m 21s):
Does it look like something they see on a regular basis? Or in that flies case, does it look like something they don’t see on a regular basis and they say, Hey, let’s try this out. You know, I, I think, you know, any of us would just be kidding if we think we could figure out exactly why a fish eats. But there is something about that pheasant tail that’s just, is it natural? Is it something that just looks like so many of their, their food sources? I mean, I think you can make an argument that if you have a traditional pheasant tail, you could look at that and say to yourself, that kinda looks like a case for a case cadis. Like they could eat that as a CADs. That’s true. Could eat that as a may fly. Like they could eat that as in a merger. I mean, you know, with some of these pheasant tails, if you add just one or two turns of C, d, C and you take off the bead, that’s like one of my favorite dry flies of all time now.
Tim (41m 4s):
So, you know, there’s just so many different things you can do with that pattern. It, it just really seemed to attract the fish.
Dave (41m 12s):
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Dave (42m 4s):
Well, I think we’re, we got a good start here. Let, let’s keep this rolling. Let’s go to number three. What do you, if you had to say number three, everybody should have the fly in, in, in your box. And, and again, we’re not going deep on all of this, but I think it’s a taster. Give people, you know, wet their whistle a little bit.
Tim (42m 18s):
Ah, cool. Let’s get onto the next section. So the next section, I call this one slow sinkers. And I kind of looked at this as, All right, what are some patterns that take a little bit longer to get to the bottom? We’re talking about flies like the mop. And in this case, I think the one that I’ll probably share, gosh, this is a tricky one. Let’s go with the notion of fishing a worm. Yeah. ’cause I think that was a fly, and I think this will be a good talking point that caused a little bit of a riff in my book. We’ll say that now. Let’s take a step back. Yeah. Whenever I say a worm, I mean, in the book I feature a couple different worm patterns.
Dave (42m 51s):
Yeah. When you say worm to me, I always think, yeah. First thing I think of a San Juan worm. You know, that’s always like, All right, San Juan worm. Absolutely.
Tim (42m 57s):
And I have a picture of the original one in my book. ’cause you know what? I’ve been doing this since I was 10, that’s 35 years ago. Like, that was my first one. Yep. David, it’s like, that was the one, it was like, you had to find that right size chail. And you know, I remember like, I think it was Veril and you had, I, I remember burning the ends with the burners. Sometimes I would slide them through a bead. I, you know, that was my go-to fly for so many years. And then when the squirmy worm came out, it kind of exploded onto the fly fishing scene. Right. And I wanted to feature that because there’s just something that’s, I don’t know, the squirmy worm is just one of those flies that it just catches fish for so many different species. So I said to myself, All right, who’s the guy that created the squirmy worm? His name’s David Highes. I’m gonna interview David.
Tim (43m 38s):
So I reached out, had a great interview with him, which was super cool to be able to say, like, my book features the guy that created and invented the squirmy Warby. So that was like, that was awesome. So I have a whole section on that, which by the way, the first one was Glow in the Dark. You hit it with a UV torch and it glows. Wow. And that was the, the first one that he saw. I think he was in like a, a craft store or a party store with his kids. And he saw that material and he was like, Ooh, that’d make a good fly. And he was in line, and he was about to check out, and he was like, I think I should go back and get this just in case. And he did. And you know, everything’s changed since. But then in the competition world flies, like the squirmy whammy or that fly specifically, it’s gotten banned in a lot of competitions. Oh,
Dave (44m 16s):
Wow.
Tim (44m 17s):
So like now you’re, you’re talking about like art. You have a fly that, like people were saying it catches too many fish, which, which is so crazy to even believe that. But I, so for everyone out there like know that there are competitions that you’re not allowed to fish that fly, where they, they literally changed the regulations just so you can’t use a squirmy Warby. Wow. So, which, which should tell everyone if you’re not fishing competitions, it works like, yeah, know that number one. But I also wanted to make sure I was looking at this from a well-rounded perspective, and I’m like, All right, well the squirmy works, but a lot of these anglers aren’t using the squirmy, so what’s their go-to fly now? And so many of them, I, And we we’re wonderful. And the fly they’re using is kind of a, a Chanel version. And there are many different anglers that I talked to.
Tim (44m 59s):
But now let’s go back to our original San Juan Dave. Like that’s what we’re talking about. Like this micro Chanel stuff that’s even finer than the ones that we used. I mean, these were super fine down to, I can’t even remember how, how small, I think the, the Sue Shail that I used for one of the flies. It’s a, it’s a semper fly material. And it was one millimeter. I mean, it just, it’s just a really tiny diameter of stuff. And some of the anglers that I talked to about the worms were people like Noah Shapiro, and Noah is a member of the youth team. Because I said to myself, I don’t want just like all the adults, why don’t I find some members of the youth team out there and talk to them as well? So I did. So I interviewed a number of the youth team members and, and I remember Noah’s interview specifically because, you know, he really loved talking about the worm.
Tim (45m 41s):
And he, you know, he kept telling me about all these fish. And I was like, well, Noah, tell me how do you tie this worm? And he got a little sheepish and he’s like, Tim, it’s literally like a hook a bead, and then you jam the material right against the hook. Yeah. And you tie in like 10 strands of thread and then that’s it. That’s the whole fly. And I’m like, no, there’s gotta be like something to prevent it from fouling. He’s like, no, Tim, like, that’s literally it. This is like 10 terms of thread, maybe a little super glue. Wow. And you’re done. And I was like, oh my gosh. Which, you know, other anglers had other versions of that fly that are also shared in the worm section. I think I have multiple flies. That’s one of the few that has a couple different patterns that I share. But then, you know, after having that interview, I remember talking to a few other anglers and I realized that a lot of anglers, especially some of the European anglers, they are really opposed to worm fishing and to them, because it’s almost too easy.
Tim (46m 33s):
Oh, wow. And a lot of them said, you know, something along the lines of if you, you know, you could have a really poor fishing technique and still catch fish on a worm. And they said that, and, and you know, as the writer of this book now, I, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m rolling into a dilemma like, alright, I have like 15 people that say like, this is one of their ride or die flies. And I have 15 other anglers that are saying like, if you use this, I’ll never talk to you again for the rest of your life. And I’m like, oh shoot. Like what do I do here? And you know, as the person writing this book, I thought, listen, again, this is a snapshot of today. Like this is right now. Like, I want this to be as accurate as possible. I used everyone’s quotes. So for the people that said like, Hey, this is not for me.
Tim (47m 13s):
There’s a section on, you know, for them that’s talking about why they’re opposed to the worm. And I think it’s important to, to have that out there to say like, this is why this person who happens to be a top 10 angler doesn’t use worms and doesn’t think you should either. And, and here’s another section on, you know, people like, I dunno, Cody Bergdorf from the United States team, or public tro Pinos from Spain. And about saying like, here’s how you select the right material when you do tie a worm. And so I wanted to have kind of both perspectives in there.
Dave (47m 40s):
Nice. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what is the, I guess on the, an, you mentioned one of ’em, it’s too easy, but what would be another objection to using the worm? Is it, other than it’s too, is there any other good objections that came up?
Tim (47m 52s):
I think there was a section on there. I talked a little bit about an interview whenever I talked with Lance Egan. And I wouldn’t say that he did not object to the worm. He really loves using worms. I shouldn’t say really loves, I I, I don’t wanna put that word in his mouth. Yeah,
Dave (48m 5s):
But he’s not against him. No,
Tim (48m 6s):
He’s not against them for sure. But he works in a fly shop called Fly Fish food. You know, you, I’m sure you know that, you know, you know, you know our boys out there. Yep. And Lance is, he was, he was telling me during our, during our interview that, you know, he gets a lot of customers that come in, they’re opposed to using worms. And he said to them, why? And they’re like, well, we prefer to match the hatch. Right. And he’s like, well, let’s talk about this. Like, we’re not talking about like a garden worm, we’re talking about an analy. And during high water events, you know, the water rushes through, you know, through the sides of the bank and it washes lys into the water. So you’re telling me like, you wanna match the hatch. Like, wouldn’t you want to after a high water event, fish these worms to match the hatch?
Dave (48m 46s):
Exactly. How’s that different than fishing a grasshopper? Right.
Tim (48m 49s):
It’s not. No, it’s not. So I, which, you know, my favorite quote about fly fishing is like, the wonderful thing about fly fishing and tying is we each get to choose our own path. Mm. Yeah. Like that’s the beauty of this. And you know, and, and again, like when I had that angler that said, don’t use it, you know, it’s gonna ruin your technique versus the other angler that says, you know, use this, you can catch striped bass, you can catch Atlantic salmon, you can catch all these fish on, on squirmy whammies. You have to pick your own path and say to yourself, what are you trying to get out of this? Yeah.
Dave (49m 17s):
Perfect. No, and just to clarify the third pattern you’re going with here, is it the squirmy or is it the San Juan style?
Tim (49m 24s):
Gosh, let’s just say a worm style. We’ll just say a worm. Why
Dave (49m 26s):
Just go worm. That’ll make it better. Yeah, I like that. Yeah,
Tim (49m 29s):
We’ll say worms. Why?
Dave (49m 30s):
I like that we have a worm in here. This is so good. Love it. So let, let
Tim (49m 33s):
Dirty Dave. It is
Dave (49m 34s):
Getting bad. It’s good. So let’s go number four. What do you have here? You got two more left to throw to this list. What would you go through your fourth? Alright,
Tim (49m 40s):
Well we’ll start to kind of slide a little bit away from NIMS and junk flies. I had a section on streamers as well because, you know, at at one point during these interviews, the notion of high water events definitely came up and, you know, during high water events, a lot of the anglers would use either darker flies or larger flies. That seemed to be one of the, the main things. But another fly that people really gravitate to is one that, you know, I’m sure you and I both love the wooly bugger and there’s just something about a, you know, a pattern that you look at that just you say to yourself, you know, what does this represent? It could be, I dunno, caterpillar, A bait fish could be a, a ide stone fall. I mean, it could be so many different things and they catch fish.
Tim (50m 21s):
And you know, as I was working on this book, you know, there’s kind of this buzz going in the fly fishing world about jig streamers. So we have these streamers that are tied on jig hooks, and they’re kind of like the poor man’s wooly bugger. That’s what I’ll call them. So a jig bugger. And that’s, it’s, it’s as simple as it sounds. Imagine you have a, a jig hook around a, a three to a four millimeter slotted tungsten bead, you know, bu tail, some type of flashy body, like a chail body, and that’s it. No hackle, no, you know, CDC or saddle hackle or anything like that. Just a really, really simple tie. That would be the next fly that I share because, you know, whenever it got down to this, these anglers all really do fish streamers, but they pick their spots when they’re fishing them.
Tim (51m 8s):
And they also wanna have some streamers that, you know, they can tie in a really short amount of time. So this book does feature, I think, four streamers, but out of the four that jig bugger is just the simplest one to tie and it catches fish. I mean, if someone’s out there listening and saying, All right, what should I tie? What colors, what sizes? It’s like, go the size, you know, 10 or 12, do some, you know, all whites, all blacks, and you are good to go.
Dave (51m 30s):
Good to go. And how do you typically, is there just a ton of ways to fish that? Or what’s your most common way you’re fishing that jig? Bugger.
Tim (51m 35s):
Ooh, I’m so glad you asked that because, you know, with these streamers, I wanna see if I can turn to the section on that as I’m, I’m going, I’m not gonna read the section Sure. To to everybody out there. But what I realized about these fishing suggestions is that, you know, first of all, you have to figure out what type of water are you fishing in. And say to yourself, how heavy of a bead do I want? Because if are you gonna fish it, you know, dead drift, that would be like the main thing to start. Like maybe we’re just gonna drift this through a dead drift and just see what happens. And we have to make sure we don’t have too heavy of a bead. Because if you’re on really skinny water, you might be fishing something like a three or a three and a half millimeter versus if you get to really big water, you might bounce it up to like a five and a half millimeter tungsten bead to really get down to hurry.
Tim (52m 16s):
So we’re gonna say, All right, what kind of bead size are we gonna select? Once we get to that bead size, we gotta say to ourselves, All right, let’s kind of go through the motion of streamers. Like, let’s start with we’re just gonna do our dead drift. Then the next time through maybe we’re gonna jig it. And by jig it, I mean we’re just gonna raise our raw tip, you know, a couple centimeters as it’s going down every three feet or every two and a half feet, just to give it a little bit of jigging motion, maybe to have a fish chase and eat. Maybe we’re gonna strip it back once it swings around and see if we have a fish that chases there. There’s another technique that people were talking about. They would cast it out and as it would start to go down, they would just do a gentle retrieve across the currents. So they would do that as well.
Tim (52m 56s):
And I kind of looked at this as it seemed like every fishing technique that I mentioned was a little bit more intrusive than the previous one. So it’s kind of like you start, you say to yourself, which of these techniques is going to disturb the least amount of fish till the end where maybe you’re just ripping this fly across the current to really just draw a strike. Gotcha.
Dave (53m 16s):
Yeah, it makes sense. So it’s, yeah, it’s diverse and, and you could, you said it, so I love how you started that questions they asked. First of all, when you’re thinking about it, like how are you gonna fish? Is that how you go into all your flies when you’re creating something? Is you’re always thinking like, okay, how am I gonna fish this? Exactly. How’s it gonna, whether I’m gonna be deep water, fast water, you know, kind of wind all that stuff. How, how do you, do you, what do you factor in when you’re tying these flies? It sounds like you’re thinking of a lot of things.
Tim (53m 39s):
Yeah, I mean, for, for sure. And I guess that would be a major takeaway that I had for a lot of these anglers. And I think for a lot of fly tires who say to themselves, like, I’m, I’m trying to tie a fly to hit not just this one situation, but a number of situations. You know, a lot of these comp anglers, they’re very intentional and precise in what they do, and they’re very thoughtful and constantly questioning why, you know, why should I make the tail this size? And let’s talk about this fly specifically this jig bugger, a lot of anglers looked at this fly and, and a lot of them fished this fly though. This is not a fly that’s just like a, oh, here’s a fly that Tim’s throwing out there. Like, this is a fly that, that they’re fishing. But one of the struggles that I had was selecting the one that I thought would benefit the readers the most.
Tim (54m 21s):
And the issue that I had was with the length of the tail, because a lot of the anglers said to themselves like, alright, number one, you wanna find quality maroo, which it’s not as easy to find quality maroo today as it was 10 or 15 years ago. So, you know, I really reached, and I found a lot of different maroos, I bought a ton of different maroos. I think there was one that was called, like, it was a fulling mill, maybe extra select that was probably the best maroo that I could find that that really made a nice tail, that really had nice fluffy fibers the whole way out to the tips. Had a bunch of bar mules, like that was the best maroo that I, that I could find at least everyone had access to. You could talk to a few independent people, but that would be the one that, that, you know, people could buy.
Tim (55m 1s):
But then it was like, All right, I got this baraboo, it’s awesome. I’m gonna get a, a giant pump of it and really just push it all together. So, you know, I have a, a ton of maroo and therefore a ton of movement, but how long do I make the tail? Yeah. And you talked to some anglers and they wanted that tail as long as possible. They wanted it super long because the longer the tail, the more movement, the more fish were attracted.
Dave (55m 22s):
Oh, wow. You mean like how long, like twice the body length or how long?
Tim (55m 25s):
Oh, more than that. We’re talking like four times the length. Oh, wow. I mean, oh really crazy Dave. Yeah, like to the point where people are holding up flies as we’re having these interviews on their cameras. And I’m like, there’s no way I would fish that. They’re like, you have no idea Tim. Like, but that’s, they’re like, that’s how you get the movement. Like if you’re not fishing, something articulated, how else can you get movement in a fly like that again, like they’re saying to themselves, how can I do this? You know, why am I gonna catch more fish than you? And it’s because of that movement. But then I had a couple anglers as well who kind of argued back and they’re like, yeah, you get all this movement, but whenever the fish eat you get a lot of, you know, short strikes or they’re eating that tail and you’re not hooking them. And from a competitive angler perspective, you know, they have to hook that fish, they have to land that fish.
Tim (56m 7s):
And I believe the fly still has to be in their mouth whenever they come over to score it. So they had to get those fish in the net. Yeah. So just looking at just like one pattern, there was a lot of thought that goes into this just when you’re, you’re saying, All right, well we’re gonna tie in the tail of a wooly butter. ’cause you don’t have to tie this jig bugger, but just, just if you’re like, I’m gonna tie the tail on my woolly bugger, like, yeah, do you just follow a recipe that says tie it, you know, one times the shank, but then we’re using jig hooks and some of these are like extra short shanks. So if I say like three times the shank, that still may not be that long compared to a traditional woolly bugger. Like, there, there are so many factors at play with some of these patterns.
Dave (56m 43s):
Wow, this is cool. Yeah, I think this, the cool thing about this is that people, yeah, I can grab your book and they know that these patterns are, have already been vetted, you know? Yeah. But at the same time, we should all be thinking like, hey, okay, I got this pattern on, you know what, just because Pat Weiss tied this pattern, or whoever it was, doesn’t mean I can’t tweak it a little bit. Right. Along along the way is that, do you think that’s good advice that we can even make it customize it to our own, our own fit along the way?
Tim (57m 5s):
Oh, without a doubt. And I think what I did with the streamers, I actually have, you know, a couple of these streamers and like, that was the most basic one. And the next streamer kind of builds upon that flying. And it’s another pattern that you kind of add a couple more materials just to kind of do what you’re saying, like customize it, maybe add a little bit more movement in behind the bead. So I said to myself, you know, I wanna make this book and have patterns that are easy to tie, but also some intermediates that people may not know so much about yet. So I tried my best to kind of build those throughout. Gotcha.
Dave (57m 33s):
Okay. Well let’s, let’s, you want to add one more here before we get outta here? A fifth fly of the people gonna have their must have five in their box for everybody listening. Yes.
Tim (57m 42s):
All right, let’s do that. Let’s get to the fifth one. I’ll, I’ll kind of follow the order that I’m setting as precedent and, and I’ll go through my sections. Yeah. The last section’s on dry flies. And it, you know, first if you’re like, wait, this is a book on nims, like where do dry flies fit in so many of these anglers, so many of the, the, the top anglers we’re talking about people like Pete Erickson, Michael Bradley, I mean, I interviewed some individuals who are on the, the, the adult, like the ex what do, what do they call
Dave (58m 5s):
That? Yeah, I always get confused too, because it’s not like the golf, it’s the opposite of the golf. Yeah.
Tim (58m 9s):
It’s kinda like, it is kinda like the masters though. I think it might be the masters.
Dave (58m 12s):
I think it’s the ma I think the seniors or the younger, yeah, the masters or the older guys.
Tim (58m 16s):
Yeah. I think that’s how it goes. And I could probably look up in the bio section, ’cause I have a bio in all these, but you know, I, I interviewed like Pete Erickson, he, you know, he was a, a gold medalist for the United States and we’ll call it the masters competition. So, and, and especially Josh Miller, I’ll kind of lean on Josh for this one. A lot of these anglers are fishing dry droppers. And at first, you know, I kind of said to them, All right, tell me a little bit about this, because you know, most people, if you say, All right, I fish a dry dropper, it’s like, well, what does that mean? It’s like, well, I’m fishing the big chubby Chernobyl with the hairs ear underneath, and whenever that chubby goes down, I set the hook. And it’s like the precision involved in these dry droppers is just, you know, it just seems light years ahead of where my thinking would’ve been because we’re talking about fishing a size, I don’t know, 16 or size 14 dryly with maybe a, you know, a nymph that has a two millimeter tungsten bead and they’re fishing this on a liter, a micro thin liter, maybe the entire is five x, and it goes down to a tippet that could be six x or seven x.
Tim (59m 14s):
So just saying to yourself, how are they even throwing these things 30 feet, 40 feet, sometimes 50 feet, right? Like, there’s just a lot that goes into that. So they couldn’t pick dry flies that ha that were super bushy that are going to have a lot of air resistance. So that’s like, right now, you just gotta eliminate a lot of flies that you would think, oh, this is something that I would use as a dry fly to support my nymph. But you also wanna make sure you’re selecting a dry fly where you also have a chance to catch a fish if they’re eating on top. Like in some cases, some of the dry flies are just kind of sacrificial. They’re out there to maybe keep a nymph in a certain drift or in a certain run. Because if you’re trying to nymph and you have a straight line to that fly, there’s going to be some sagging your system and it’s gonna kind of pull your fly across those currents.
Tim (59m 57s):
So at times, you know, these anglers are selecting dry flies in a dry dropper, which means a dry fly may be coming off a dropper tag and then a nymph on the point. And they want that because then they know that dry fly will kind of help to keep that nymph in a certain line. But you know, at times, yeah, sure it’s a sacrificial dry fly, but at other times they’re like, All right, we’re fishing for maybe brown trout. We know brown trout love to eat dryly. So we also wanna make sure we’re throwing a dryly that has a chance of getting eaten that the fish are gonna say yes to. But then probably my, the biggest takeaway I have before I share a fly is that whenever you’re selecting that dry fly to pair with the nymph, you don’t just go with any dry fly, you go with one that’s just going to suspend the nm.
Tim (1h 0m 37s):
I mean, I’m talking about Dave like, yeah, imagine like somebody in like a soggy diaper floating down the river, where if you would just like touch their toe, they would go underwater. And that’s the dry fly you wanna select for this. Because the moment anything happens, it could be a fish that’s, you know, six inches long or 16 inches long, even if they just touch that little nph for just a 10th of a second. You want your dry fly to react. And this is the level these anglers were on. Geez. You know, I’m thinking to myself, All right, it’s a dry drop, but you’re looking for that dry fly to go down. It wasn’t always going down. Sometimes these anglers are talking about they saw their dry fly turn 90 degrees during the drift. Oh wow. They set the hook At one point somebody said like, they’re like, Tim, imagine like whenever you pull down on a, like a volleyball or a beach ball in the water, how like the water ripples away.
Tim (1h 1m 21s):
Oh yeah. And they’re like, sometimes my dry fly would be floating down and I would see like ripples moving away from it. And I set the hook and sure enough, there was a fish there, like the fly wouldn’t even show anything. They were just, they just saw ripples moving away from it. And that indicated an E. So, you know, we’re talking like, some of these guys are next level, but it’s not that they’re next level, it’s just, you know, they have the ability to think at that level. But remember, like, they’re also sharing these levels with us. So for all, all of you listeners out there, if they’re thinking, oh my gosh, this sounds so advanced. It’s not like, remember my background? I’m an elementary school teacher, I teach sixth graders and I wrote the book so you can read this. I’m not saying, you know, sixth graders going to understand everything I wrote, but like, I’m putting all these concepts and these ideas in this book for all of us.
Tim (1h 2m 4s):
Like, this is for us to get better as anglers. Not just to get a peek inside this world, but, you know, I wanna be in that world. I think many of us could be fishing at this style, at this pace, at this level. We just have to know what the level is. Like. I think for so many of us, it’s like We don’t even know what, what we don’t know. And now I think this gives us a peek inside that world.
Dave (1h 2m 23s):
Yeah, it does. It, it, it pulls back the curtain a little bit, right? From these Yeah. Top of the game people who have really, and they’re fished. I mean, especially these competition, I mean, they, these guys are fishing in all sorts of streams all around the world. So there’s a good argument to say, these guys are kind of the best, right? Because they’ve fished Oh, sure. In every, every stream. So it makes sense. But no, this is great. So we got, and, and so your dry fly, so let’s go back to that. And I love this soggy diaper, right? Basically what you’re saying is like that analogy, you don’t wanna have some fluffy giant dry fly that takes a ton of power to pull down. You wanna really, the the subtlest little thing, the smallest. And that’s why maybe a lot of these dry flies too, you see some of these things are kind of almost in the surface film, right? What, what would you call those dry flies that are more down in, almost in the surface?
Tim (1h 3m 5s):
Well, I mean, it depends on the style of the fly. I mean, you could make an argument that if it’s in the film, it could be more of an merger, which could be an insect that’s, you know, making its emergence from a nymph or from a larva into an, an adult. So it could be representative of that. In many cases, these flies, they just happen to be low riders. I mean, it’s, it’s nothing more than that. They’re just, it’s, it’s a fly that’s just kind of being pulled down into the film a little bit. So I wouldn’t overthink exactly where it’s sitting there. Okay. Then again, maybe you should, you know, Dave, you’re, you’re thinking on another level now. I love
Dave (1h 3m 34s):
That you can, yeah. I, I’ve taken off to the next level. So, and then what would do you have and then the fly there, what would be the dry
Tim (1h 3m 39s):
Fly? Yeah, let’s go with somebody. Let’s go with Lubo Rosa Lubo is one of three people i, i I feature from the Czech Republic. One of the individuals I interviewed is Franta Hanock, he’s the owner of Hanuk Competition. F is a good friend of mine, I think, you know, like I, you know, I fly fishing in Iceland quite frequently. Oh yeah. And I host trips there, and Franta came on my trip this summer to, to fish for Atlantic salmon and trophy brown trout. We had a great time. And you know, I interviewed Fran about his hooks because the Hornet competition hooks are, you know, they tend to be known as the kind of like the Ferraris of, of the Flyting world for hooks. So I, you know, I interviewed him, got his confidence flies for this. And one of the, the, the really, I don’t wanna say an up and comer fly tire, ’cause he’s an incredible tire.
Tim (1h 4m 21s):
His name’s John. I’m, I’m that butcher’s last name, but it’s like Vitm or Whitman with a W And you know, I have him, he did a little section on fly tying for me, shared his confidence flies, and, and, and sent in a bunch of images to use. He was wonderful. And then the third person from the check is somebody whose name is Lubo Rosa, and Lubo is a world champion. He’s won the, I believe the gold medal. Just a phenomenal angler. And he developed this fly, and I’m not, I don’t wanna say this is necessarily his, but it was kind of revealed to me in this book that Lubo wrote, and it’s called Fly Fishing World. And this is a book that, you know, it’s tough to get your hands on the United States. In fact, I wanna say Franta sent me a copy of it, and I’m going through this book, and I remember seeing this fly that just was like, I, I don’t know even how to describe it.
Tim (1h 5m 5s):
Imagine like a blob of CDC. That’s what it looked like. And it kind of drew my attention. But I kind of like, I looked at it, but I kind of forgot about it. One of those deals where I’m just, you know, just, it was in my brain, but I wasn’t quite sure about it yet. And it was in a section on lakes. So I said to myself, All right, you know, maybe this is like, you know, the blob or the fab or you know, the booby or one of those flies. So, you know, fast forward now into this book, and I’m interviewing some of these anglers and I’m interviewing people like that. Noah Shapiro from the youth team, Ollie Bassett from New Zealand. I get to people like, oh gosh, Pete Erickson. I get to somebody, another person whose name is David Sch Chomsky, and all of them start talking about this fly, this Work care cup pattern.
Tim (1h 5m 46s):
I’m like, alright. I heard it once and I wrote it down and, and somebody didn’t know the name, but I wrote kind of this description of it. And then, you know, I get to Pete and, and David, they’re like, oh, you know, Lubo Roses Kuka. And I’m like, what the heck is the Kuka? And then I kind of put all the pieces together. I’m like, oh, it’s this fly. I like run to my library. I find my book and I see the fly and I’m like, this is the fly. So I immediately, you know, contact Lubo. So I’m like, All right, tell me about this fly. I need to know about, about this. I think this is going to be the one. And imagine this fly’s tied with like red thread. You have a tail of a handful of crystal flash fibers sticking out. Something like a flashy tail. Some people use floss and they change the color, maybe orange or pink or purple tails.
Tim (1h 6m 30s):
And then you have nothing but c, d, C for the entire body. Oh wow. But it’s not just like you’re tying it in. You’re, you’re taking your CDC, you’re putting it into a c, DC block, then you’re eventually cutting the fibers away from their stems, and then you put the fibers into a dubbing loop and you spin it. So you’re kind of making a c, DC hackle without the stems, and you get as many of them as possible. I mean, you really wanna find super long c, d, c if you can. Some of these will take upwards of 12 to 15 CDC fibers to make one fly. So this is a fly, like if you, if you snag it in a tree, you wanna climb the tree to get this one down, you get it. And I mean, you get to the end and, and you have this fly and it just is like this blob of C, DC and the fibers are going all over the place.
Tim (1h 7m 13s):
And I’m saying to them, All right, so I got this fly tide, like how do I fish this? And it’s like, there are so many different ways. I mean, most of them said they wanted it really, really dry. So, you know, whenever I tie my dry flies, as soon as they come off of vice, I put them in some type of a pretreatment. The brand that I kind of prefer is called high and dry. They’re actually just are releasing this pretreatment right now for fly tires where you put the fly in it, you let it soak for, you know, X amount of hours. I tend to let mine overnight. You dab it away with a paper towel, then they float like a cork for a while. So you wanna keep this super dry, keep it dried off, put it in a desiccant while you’re fishing it, you obviously can fish it, you know, dead drift. You could fish it dry dropper, so you’re fishing a nim underneath it.
Tim (1h 7m 55s):
But other things that I noticed with this fly, like Lubo was telling me, like he would cast it and he would strip it almost like a streamer on the surface. And he would see fish that would chase it, and they get really mad at the fly. But he would know, like when they started chasing it and say, All right, now I know it started chasing it right there by that rock. That’s where there’s a fish. I’m gonna give that fish a minute and then just make a cast and let it dead drift over it and that fish is going eat. And sure enough, it would. So, you know, I found like there were, there were again, like different fishing techniques to entice fish to eat this fly.
Dave (1h 8m 25s):
Amazing. Yeah. Rose’s rocka. I love the name. The name is awesome too. Rocka, this is so good. Nice, Tim. Well I think we’ve nailed this one. I think five killer flies. I love the five flies we’ve chosen. And obviously these are just five flies that are amazing. But your book is gonna go into more detail. Anything else you wanna shed on light on before we get outta here? I know I, I wanna talk Iceland, maybe we’ll have to talk about that again on the next one. But anything for you coming up other than the show season? You wanna give a shout out before we get outta here?
Tim (1h 8m 54s):
Sure, sure. I mean, number one, yeah. For, for anyone listening, I hope, you know, I, I get to connect with many of you at the fishing shows. I mean, you know, again, I have a pretty tight schedule because my day job is as an elementary school teacher, so I don’t get too many days off from my principal or superintendent to travel around the country talking fly fishing. But you know, without a doubt, like that’s kind of number one is that that will be kind of my winner. And then I tend to take off the spring and I, I prefer to fish with my family as much as possible. This summer, I have a number of like super fun trips coming up. I’ll be going to Iceland. I’m hosting a couple trips to Iceland, looking forward to ’em. I think one is already sold out, one has some openings. I’ll be going back to Alaska. I’ve been adding Alaska into kind of my, my hosted trips just because Alaska’s so much fun.
Tim (1h 9m 37s):
Yeah. And then, you know, I’m kind of dabbling with a couple more locations. I was invited to another European country, so I might have a chance to fish out there and maybe go out west in the United States. You know, we tend to fish for striped bass in the summertime and also go to the outer bank. So it’s just, you know, we tend to build the summer just around like fishing destinations and different species and, and hosting some trips to get out with, you know, anglers as well.
Dave (1h 9m 58s):
That’s perfect. And what, on the Iceland trips, so you guys, did you have some Atlantic salmon action when you’re up there?
Tim (1h 10m 3s):
Oh my gosh, we can have a whole podcast on that. Yeah, I mean, Atlantic salmon is, you know, it’s, it’s something that’s newer for me. I remember, you know, growing up and seeing those beautiful salmon flies and I was like, that, that’s not for me. Like that’s, I don’t need to catch Atlantic salmon. There’s, it’s just a fish. Even though Lee Wolf considered them like, you know, one of the greatest game fish of all time, I’m like, eh, you know, whatever. And you know, so I, I heard that Iceland was kind of known for them and you know, just, you know, for your listeners, I’ve been fishing in Iceland for a number of years. I, I, you know, I tend to go there two or three times a season to fish. Love it. You know, I’ve been hosting trips there because, you know, if if somebody’s gonna fish in Wyoming, I don’t think they need to go to Wyoming with me. I think they could figure it out. Yeah. But when you’re going to a place like Iceland, you know, the water’s private.
Tim (1h 10m 46s):
So you, you know, if you get there and you’re trying to book the day you get there, you know, more than likely they might tell you the river’s really good, but it’s probably not like the good spots are already, they’ve been reserved for a year already. So, you know, I heard about this one river in northern Iceland, the rist, and you know, I kind of heard that it was a little less of a, you know, a nuisance for casting. So you could get away with fishing a single hand rod and eight weight. And, you know, I was like, All right, that’s cool. Like, I, I don’t wanna be bringing people that, that have to bring a spay rod for Atlantic salmon, but I was like, All right, so you don’t have to cast as far but keep going. And they’re like, well, the beauty is there’s a lot of Atlantic salmon and I was able to book the peak week. So whenever I say a lot, like, you know, you fish two sessions a day, so you would fish a morning session and an evening session, and the expectation is that you’re gonna hook a fish every session you go out.
Tim (1h 11m 31s):
So, you know, I split the trip into, you know, half of the trip is targeting Atlantic salmon, then the other half of the time we’re targeting trophy brown trout. So we tend to fish around six sessions for Atlantic salmon. And I think this year I landed six or seven Atlantic salmon. Wow. Like nearly one every session. And every angler that came on my trip this summer and summer 2024 landed multiple Atlantic salmon, which is like unheard of. Like, you know, for some destinations you go there, Dave, and you like fish the whole weekend you had a bump and you’re like, oh, that bump was incredible. Right? I can’t wait till I come back next year. And it’s like every time you go out, you get a bump in, in, in, you know, on this river in Iceland. So that’s amazing for any of the people out there that are either who are into Atlantic salmon fishing and you know, wanna have a little bit more experience with it, I would say check out Iceland, but also know, like you have these trophy brown trout in your back pocket.
Tim (1h 12m 21s):
Like the first time I fished this river up there, I, my first fish was a 20 inch brown trout. And I remember, like, I went to get my camera out and the guy is like, what are you doing Tim? I’m like, I’m taking a picture. And he like, laughs. He’s like, but this is a small one. He’s like, why do you want a picture? And, and I, I thought he was just joking around and nope, he wasn’t like, that was one of the smallest fish of the week on that river. So it’s just, it’s one of those places where you go and, you know, not every day is like, like that where you’re catching, you know, 24 inch brown trout, but you’re fishing a river where every day you have an opportunity to catch multiple, you know, you know, mid 20 brown trouts.
Dave (1h 12m 55s):
That’s so good. Nice. Well, we’ll, we’ll put some links in the show notes to your website and if people wanna follow up with you on Yeah, definitely that trip availability. It sounds like you do have some openings there. That’s awesome. And I’d love to follow up with you more on all this. But yeah, Tim, I appreciate you coming back on today and shed some light on your new book and giving some nuggets here on some flies. Really appreciate that And we’ll definitely look forward to keeping in touch with you as we go.
Tim (1h 13m 17s):
All right, well thanks David. As I love to say at the end of these podcasts with you, especially, you are doing a ton of work for the fly fishing community and, and I had, I don’t think anyone has any idea like what you’re doing behind the scenes. So thanks for all the time and you know, thanks for all this content you’re giving all of us.
Dave (1h 13m 33s):
All right, quick CTA for you, your call to action today is to check in with Tim and let him know you heard this podcast and you want to get that book. I’ve got it right here in my hand right now. As always, it’s a great book. It’s got some great photos, great history, always love the history, the tips and tricks. He’s got a little bit of it all going here and we’re gonna be doing some more stuff with Tim this year. So stay tuned and check in on that. If you haven’t already, check in with us on YouTube, wetly swing.com/youtube. We’re gonna be posting some more video content as we go. This might be some podcast episodes and it might be some shorter stuff, but it’ll be a good way to follow up. And we’re also gonna be posting some from Tim and our guests.
Dave (1h 14m 13s):
What we’re gonna be doing is following up here and we’re gonna be having some video content along with this podcast. So 2025. If it’s 2025, oh, I’m sure it’s either 2025 or later, you’re gonna be seeing more of that out there. So please follow that, click that subscribe button, that would be amazing. And before we get out here, just wanna give you a heads up Argentina, golden Rado, if you’re interested in going down there, we’re trying to figure out how many people wanna do this trip. And if you can send me an email, Dave, at we fly swing.com, I’ll let you know on availability and what we have going there. We’ve got a big trip planned, so let me know if you’re interested and we’ll go take it from there. All right, we’ve got a lot to do tonight. Tonight. It’s getting late. It’s not super late yet, but if it’s late in the night where you are, I’d love to hear from you.
Dave (1h 14m 57s):
If you are in the southeast, are you interested in streamers? We’ve got some stuff coming here. Let me know. We’ve got a new sneak peek on you, a new podcast series coming up here this year that you’re gonna hear about and it’s gonna be focused on streamers. And so if you’re interested in that, let me know. This is gonna be pretty huge for us. I’m excited to share later this year, but I’m giving you a little sneak peek just because you’ve lasted all the way to the very end of this episode. Sneak peek. We got it coming here. And I’d love to hear what you think would be your favorite streamer content to share on this episode, on this podcast, anytime. All right. I’m gonna leave it at that for the night. We’re almost outta time here, so I hope you have a great evening.
Dave (1h 15m 37s):
Hope you have a great morning or a fantastic afternoon wherever you are in the world. And I appreciate you for staying in all the way till the very end. We’ll talk to you soon.
If you enjoyed this episode, check in with Tim and let him know you’re interested in his book—it’s packed with great photos, history, and expert tips. We’ve got more coming with Tim this year, so stay tuned! Also, don’t forget to follow us on YouTube for more video content, including podcast episodes and exclusive clips from our guests.
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