868 | Davie McPhail – Fly Tying Lessons from a True Master

WFS 868 Transcript 00:00:00 Dave: Fly tying doesn’t start on the vice. Fly tying is learned on the water by watching insects drift past your boots, noticing how light hits a wing, and paying special attention to what fish actually respond to. Today’s episode is about learning that way. I’m sitting down with Davey McPhail, one of the most influential fly tyers of our time, and a guy who quietly shaped how thousands of anglers around the world think about materials, proportions and simplicity at the vice. 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. Davey McPhail grew up fishing the rivers of Scotland. He started tying flies because he couldn’t buy what he needed and learn by observation. Long before his YouTube channel blew up, he was studying insects, copying what fish actually are eating and building patterns, and teaching himself along the way. By the end of this episode, you’ll discover when traditional spiders and wet flies still outperform modern patterns. Why wax, thread control and restraint matter more than fancy materials? How mixing natural and synthetic materials improves durability and confidence in flies, and what separates flies that look good from flies that keep catching fish all day long. All right, this is a big one. You can find Davie McPhail on YouTube. Here he is Davey McPhail. How are you doing, Davey? 00:01:28 Davie: Hi, Dave. Uh, it’s great to be here and hope you enjoy some of the information I’ll let you have. 00:01:35 Dave: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. No. We’re going to try to get some tips out of you today and talk fly tying and fly fishing. And, you know, it’s cool always when I do these podcasts. It’s been a few years. You know, I’ve been thinking about getting this together and, you know, some of the biggest names in fly fishing and fly tying. I mean, you’re definitely up there. And I remember the first time I met you, it was just your I struggle a lot with fly tying, but your dry flies, especially being able to tie those the way you do it. And I remember when I first watched you. So we’re going to talk about a little bit of that, of how you do it and maybe some secrets to your success. But I want to talk about just first how you got into it. Have you been fly fishing and fly tying most of your life? What’s your first memory there? 00:02:12 Davie: I know I started when I was nineteen, uh, tying the flies. Uh, I got married and when I was nineteen, and, uh, in the following year, I joined a local angling club. I’d never really fly, fished. I didn’t even touch when I was younger, didn’t have a proper fly rod. So a lot of the kids would just use spinning rods, spin bait, that type of thing. Uh, but what we would do when we were kids would we’d have a, a bubble in, in flies. So you’d be spinning by spinning rod. You could put a cast of flies on, and you’d have a clear bubble that you would half fill with water. So it sits quite low in the water, but it adds weight as well. So you could cast it when we were fishing the whole locks, not so much. The river. The hill locks. You remember? I was a kid. I remember being on the river from six because I fell in. So I remember it well. But when we were kids, we’d go up the locks and we’d just cast from the bank and fish the flies that way. And it was because I could get the odd fly for my uncle, my two uncles. Tide flies, though I’d never really seen them. Tide. I saw the flies on the windowsill. Because we would tie the flies. They’d put them along the windowsill and allow them to dry. Just to varnish. To dry. You see. And the first time I seen them was along the windowsill. But anyway, when I was nineteen, I started by. I bought a small wooden box from vineyards. It was a vineyard fly box. And the main reason I did it was when I started fishing. I was trying to get the local patterns and I was trying to get the flies. Anybody I met, they would give some information on flies to use. You couldn’t buy them half the time. You couldn’t get the right size. So. And I was advised, why don’t you tie as well as fly fish? And so I bought a kit. Not always the best thing sometimes to start, but it’s an introduction anyway. And it was a dry fly kit for tying dry flies with vineyards. This is a type of a wooden box like that. This is a salmon one. 00:04:13 Dave: Yeah. It’s just basically a little wooden lightweight wooden box. 00:04:17 Davie: And and I had the, had the small base in it had Parker pliers, had some tinsels and the small Indian Chinese necks for tying the dries. And we touch a dubbing and so on and peels those silk. It was silk threading when I first started. There was no uni threads and utcs and all the rest, so I learned to tie on those threads and wax obviously, and wax being the answer to most problems when people tie flies. This is when I was teaching. The answer is actually a thread. Most times that was it. So that’s how especially YouTube, it turned off. And the reason why I keep it on my finger is to keep it warm. And the other reason is to stop me losing it. There’s a red button of wax. They called it a button. So the shape of a button sits on your finger and you keep it warm and you use it when you’re ready. 00:05:08 Dave: Right. So you always have wax right there on your hand, ready to go. 00:05:11 Davie: It was always there. It was always there. David, that’s, uh, I don’t know. I’ve lost it. Yeah. 00:05:17 Dave: Right. 00:05:18 Davie: There’s hundreds of these buttons. Uh, wax. And I always the wife laughs at me because I lose them all the time. But it normally comes in a block like this. 00:05:28 Dave: Oh, okay. Yeah, like a little. Just plastic. Yeah. It comes in a little plastic bag or a little block. Yeah. 00:05:33 Davie: So basically I started tying the flies so I could get the flies that, that I personally wanted to use. And it was dry fly only dry only dry. 00:05:41 Dave: So you started out just dry flies. That was your thing. 00:05:43 Davie: I’ve been touring the river beginning of the season. I was sitting in the bank. I’d wait for the hatch. I would sit certain way to see the flies come down the river. Then they would start to see the fish rising. Then I would go in and I would fish the drys. 00:05:56 Dave: Did you grow up on, uh, near the river? The creek? 00:05:59 Davie: When I was a boy. I grew up in a small village. The nickname for the village is called The Black Hole because it’s a mining village, you see. So in the CB or the citizens band radio, if you said you were from the black hole, they knew you were from Dalmellington. Dalmellington is a small. It’s a black hole. So it’s a valley. But the top end of the the village. You’ve got locked in the mountains at five hundred feet above sea level, locked in about eight hundred feet. So another three hundred feet and you’d drop it locked in. But all you had to do was just walk over the hill and you’d been locked in to fish. Two main feeder burns run through dalmellington either side that run into the River Doon. So you either went along the road and fished the river or up the hill and fished the Loch Doon, and it was in the gallery house. That’s where it was famed for the Galloway House. And there’s a lot of hill locks up there. It’s all wild fish, wild brown trout. No, they’re not big, but they’re wild fish. 00:07:02 Dave: Yeah, they’re all wild. So wild. And is the loch. Can you spell that? How do you spell the reservoir? That water body, Loch Doon? 00:07:09 Davie: D o n. Well, the river is famous for the Brigadoon. There was the film Brigadoon. Uh, who was the actor? If you look it up, you’ll find it. The Brigadoon. The Brigadoon actually can fish under the Brigadoon. Whether I can personally fish because I was going to in America, Canada, as far as believe you can buy a state licence to fish. And it allows you as long as you get public access to the waters, you need the public access. It’s totally different here in Scotland and UK and even Ireland. You need to have a permit to fish a lot of the waters, right? Lockdown is different. You can actually you’re allowed to fish that because it’s just brown trout. As long as you’ve got access. 00:07:54 Dave: So as a public water. 00:07:56 Davie: Rights public eye you can basically fish that the river is a different kettle of fish is totally different. You basically go have a permit, permission to fish the water. And once you have a permit, you basically in some different stretches, like everybody’s got a like I’m in a small syndicate that that you’ve only got a short piece of the water to fish. I get one day a week and I’ll give you an idea that one day a week costs three hundred pounds, which is about four hundred and fifty dollars for one day a week. I got a Friday on that when the seasons open. 00:08:26 Dave: That seems like that’s one of the challenges for the different. And are you in Scotland now? 00:08:31 Davie: Yeah, yeah. 00:08:32 Dave: Seems like that’s always one of the challenges that you have over there for folks that don’t have the amount of money, especially kids, right. If they’re growing up, how do they, you know, if you pay or is there a. 00:08:41 Davie: Yeah, the club stretch is Stretches like further up. So where I was a kid, I fished in Dalmellington. The the club stretch up there is called Grange and Cares. So when I fished it was fifty pence a season. 00:08:55 Dave: Yeah. So there are some places that kids can actually go yeah, yeah okay. 00:08:59 Davie: And then there’s the stretches below there. It’s the same with the river here. There’s the river era fish, which is five minutes that way. So I can fish the river here. I’ve got two stretches I can fish there. Both are club. They cost me ninety pounds a year and I can fish all that every day a week when the seasons open anyway, whereas the river doing slightly different. There’s a lot of owners and you can get syndicate beats. You get I get annoyed day in the private beat. So it’s because I know, I know, I know the owner and he likes a fly. So yeah. So I gave him a fly and a two and then he gives me a I don’t I get one day one two days a year. I’m quite happy with that though. And, and the other stretch is you get the Stinger, which goes further down at Ballantrae. And that’s the the beats are used to fish down there owned by the Duke of Wellington. Actually, a letter for the Duke of Wellington, uh, because he used to write in the magazine and he wrote a letter to me saying I got the name of the fly wrong. So anyway, it’s another story. Yeah. Um, so, you know, not every day you get a letter from the Duke of Wellington. So anyway, you can get a day ticket to fish, mainly for salmon. The salmon’s the bigger. That’s the one. Mostly the most. The river is not famed for trout in the river, but there’s a lot of good trout in it. I mean, I was a galley underdone. 00:10:20 Dave: Oh, you were a galley for a while. 00:10:21 Davie: I was a galley, yeah. Seven, seven years. I was a fishery manager at a trout fishery for fifteen years, which was just beside the Doon, uh, basically managed a private locks, and you could get day tickets on it. You could fly only. And then there was a lock for the bait fishing and fill it up. So you got a ticket on there. So I did that for a while as well. Uh, I’ve got the taco shop about four years in the Glasgow, England centre. Uh, I used to travel up and down to Glasgow to work in there for a few years. 00:10:56 Dave: So you started. That sounds like dry fly the tying early that you got going on that. When did YouTube and kind of the teaching come into it? Were you always doing a little bit of teaching? 00:11:05 Davie: Well, I did demonstrations, I was demos, I mean I’ve seen that. I’ve found the the first demonstration I did was in nineteen ninety four and it was a fly dressers guild. It was a local was the Ayrshire branch where I live is Ayrshire. I live in the town. This town is called The Air. 00:11:23 Dave: How do you spell that. 00:11:24 Davie: Air in Ayrshire is the the Shire. You’ve got North. 00:11:29 Dave: Ayrshire. Is that a s h s shire. 00:11:32 Davie: E y r s h I r e. 00:11:34 Dave: Oh. Gotcha. Yeah. Ayrshire. Okay. Perfect. 00:11:36 Davie: So this is basically I basically am living here now, but Dalmellington is East Ayrshire, which is fifteen miles from here, so that takes you towards the Galloway Hills. I basically started tying, just as I say, to full moon boxes, uh, to teach. Yeah. I mean, it’s like everything you get, you get pulled different ways. Somebody sees you catching fish and they ask you for a fly. You know, there’s a fly and someone goes to the shop and said, I got these flies from Davie down the river. Do you have any? And then next thing the shop would say, Davie, can I get some of those flies from our customers? You’re right. Okay. And then so you would do some flying slowly. You get drawn in. It happens all the time. 00:12:19 Dave: So slowly you kind of grew. And as people got aware of who you were and wanted your flies and. 00:12:25 Davie: Yeah. And early on, believe it or not, I started tying in eighty three, I started I’ve got letters there. There was a magazine called Trout and Fisherman and uh, what they the. That was, uh, over the winter months, they would have a fly tying competition. So I decided I’ll enter nineteen eighty five. So I entered it. So, uh, lastly, just a I know you can’t see it, but the Benson and Hedges was sponsored by a cigarette company. 00:12:53 Dave: Oh, wow. That’s funny. 00:12:55 Davie: You probably heard of the Benson and Hedges. So you had an open class, which you to enter first. So I won the open class. 00:13:05 Dave: Oh. No kidding. Oh, wow. 00:13:06 Davie: Then you won the. Then you had to the next part of the competition, you had to tie a fly in the advanced class. And then I won advanced class. And then I got into the masters. 00:13:19 Dave: There it is. We’re looking at it. Says Benson and Hedges fly tying competition master Benson and Hedges. Who was that? 00:13:25 Davie: I was, I say it was a huge sponsor. 00:13:28 Dave: Oh, just a sponsored event. 00:13:30 Davie: Yeah, well, they’re a cigarette company. Back then. They could do that. 00:13:33 Dave: Oh, Benson and Hedges was a cigarette company. That was the cigarette company. 00:13:36 Davie: They sponsored the internationals, the home international competitions as well. So back then it was it was okay. Now you don’t get any cigarette. 00:13:45 Dave: Now, back in the day, we’d be sitting here. We’d be smoking right here, right now, over the BBC. 00:13:50 Davie: Well, we’d be sitting having a fag. That’s what they call it here in the UK, a fag effigy. So, uh, I know it’s it’s, uh, it’s means something in different in America. I know that. 00:14:04 Dave: Yeah. Right. Yeah. 00:14:06 Davie: But anyway, that I slowly got into the competitions and I started winning. So you get a name. And I won a few over the years. But I was only happy. I was quite happy winning one. 00:14:17 Dave: Yeah. You weren’t thinking like, I’m going to be a competition master and enter every event from here to, uh. 00:14:21 Davie: I was just I wanted somebody else to have a go. I mean, I would win if I entered the competition once, and they changed the rules. Basically, I had entered four. So by the rules, I’d actually win the competition overall. But then they changed the rules. You had to enter six. 00:14:37 Dave: Oh, wow. 00:14:38 Davie: And because I didn’t I went. So I just let it go. So I came third I let it go. I mean you got fly tying materials. You got money to spend with vineyards, with the fly tying company. 00:14:49 Dave: Do you remember the, uh, the fly that you won with on the first on that competition? 00:14:53 Davie: On the first one was a partridge, an orange. And the next one was, uh, Alexander, which was the advanced version, which was basically peacock SOB for the wing. You had to get them nice and nice. I was over the moon like you got a fly box with the Benson Hedges on it signed and your name on it. So I had two, three boxes. 00:15:15 Dave: So how did you get. So you went. You were good enough to win this competition. How did you get to that level? Were you just tying every day all the time? How did you get good at fly tying? You must have been against some people that were really high level, that had been old guys that have been tying their whole lives and stuff like that. right? 00:15:30 Davie: I just spent a lot of time making sure it was right where I. According to me, it was right anyway. 00:15:36 Dave: And how’d you know it was right? How did you know? Because back then, you didn’t have videos to watch. How did you know what was right? Because I know you could look at. You were looking at the bugs in the stream flying around, right? And all that stuff. But what was your who was your mentor? Who was your teacher back then? 00:15:49 Davie: Just Ty I mean, your pictures. I mean, most of the books I buy, most of the stuff I have is, for reference, more than to read. I bought most of most of the books I have are so that I could tie the patterns for the my customers and our interest as well. And interesting. I mean, the first book I ever read when I started tying flies was this one here. 00:16:11 Dave: Yeah, let’s Fish the Clyde by Robert C sharp. What’s that? Is that just a fly? Shows fly. Pictures of flies. 00:16:19 Davie: Yeah. Had some stays step by steps. But mainly the thing about this book was it had the patterns, you see, and all I did was copy the pattern is to use the dry flies in this book is to start me off as a guide. The main thing when I was in the river, I basically looked at the fly the fish were feeding on and I copied it. I looked at the size, the color. I went back home and I saw it in a tight place, which I thought looked like that fly. So I’d have two versions. You would have your winged version. You remember the dry fly. So I’d either use duck so the different types of duck. If it was small, I would use Starling, which is a finer softer, but sometimes I’d use it in the bigger fly. So it was nice and light. It broke. I actually broke a lot of movement in it because it’s soft. Then you had the spider patterns now as the term sometimes in America’s spider being in soft tacos. 00:17:14 Dave: Oh no, not that pattern. 00:17:16 Davie: No, I know what it is. It’s just the spider is just like a nickname to a fly or a fly dressing, which it doesn’t have a wing that’s like a spider doesn’t see, the spider runs up the wall. They don’t have wings. 00:17:29 Dave: I see, so any wet fly? Any? Pretty much most wet flies out there. Well, not all of them, but wet spider is a wet fly. 00:17:36 Davie: Andres. 00:17:36 Dave: Oh, Andres. 00:17:37 Davie: You call a spider pattern. But it’s a dry fly. Yeah, we call it a spider pattern. Even if it was a wet fly, it was just a soft hackle and a stiff hackle. It’s just a wing. When you said you were fishing a spider, I knew you was fishing one without a wing. So it’s a spider pattern. I mean, I’d have to show you. It seems like it’s. It’s just a simple term. 00:18:00 Dave: Simple, yeah. And it’s not. You know, I think that we could follow up on some of this, but basically let me get. So I always think of traditional wet flies as, you know, the ones you said. I mean, the partridge and orange is a wet fly. Right. That’s a you’ve got those. Which is a body material. Typically they have some sort of a soft hackle. Right. Which makes the. So and those could be spiders. But you’re saying that there’s also what would be a dry fly. That would be a spider. 00:18:23 Davie: When you’re feeling That’s how. That’s how the name is. He’s so like a pathogen would be a spider, but a soft or a wet fly. But the spider pattern, being a dry fly, is just a fly without a wing. 00:18:34 Dave: Yeah I see. And you could float it. You can add floating to it to make that float and sit in the surface. Right. 00:18:39 Davie: Yeah. It’s just a cork. Cork will make it up. But it’s just a it’s just a term you could have mixed tackles like so if I give an impression of a wing on a spider fly, I’d put a gray hackle through a ginger hackle or a grizzle or something, and that would give the impression of the wing, but it would be tied as a spider spider pattern lets more light come through. It’s when you’re fishing certain flies, especially spinner patterns. You want it. You don’t want too much of an impression of a wing because it’s very translucent. So the light shines through. So you need a hackle more than a full wing. So you get a nice the light shines through it, but you still want to give the impression. So you can add like a you could have a mixed hackle, a soft hackle and a cork hackle together will give you the impression of the wing as well as the legs. The terms are slightly different from here in the UK and America. I know it’s soft. I mean, I didn’t know what soft hackle was at one time. I do obviously. 00:19:35 Dave: Yeah. I grew up tying. We just called them soft tackles. You know. I mean we tied a you know like we’re saying these flies, they had a little, um, uh, whatever the wing was, it could have been Partridge. It could have been, you know, whatever the soft hackle was. And we’d tie a really basic pattern. We’d swing them. We used to swing when I was a kid. A lot of fly, that sort of stuff. But I think what you’re talking about is a whole nother level of fly fishing. You know, you’re going into it in deep detail. 00:19:57 Davie: I mean, a lot of people see me when I’m on the river. I’m trying to catch fish, obviously for the camera as well, but I’m trying to explain if I use a dry dropper, say a dropper, a dry fly, a dropper, I’m trying to find fish and if a fish start rising, I take the dry, drop it off and I concentrate on the dry, you see. So basically I’ll fish like that. Um, there’s other ways of fishing If you go really far back and people I used to know fishing the river, they would fish with quite a few flies because remember they were catching fish to actually eat. It was a, it was part, it was a sport obviously, but excuse me, the fish were there to feed the family, but some they would used to use as a sighter. They fished the wet flies upstream more than they’d fish below them. They’d fish a lot upstream, three and four or five flies. But as I say, they used to use the simple thing. They could be some wool they find on a bush or on the on the fence, barbed wire off the sheep. So we just put that in the top and use that as a sighter. So they cast the flies up and they would use that so they could see the takes. It just depends on how the fish want to feed. There’s times they like them swimming across, times they like them dead drifted. You have to work them out. I mean, there’s nothing better than sitting down as a fish rising in the tests Really tests you out. You can see the fly coming and you can’t put your fly over. You think it would just come straight out and take it? And there’s quite a few times that you struggle to get that first fly. You still keep feeding it. Completely ignore your fly. So I like to sit down and try and work out why I watch the flights coming down. Watch how it moves, how it reacts to it. Where it’s. You can. You can see even the simplest thing, like the wing of the flies shines, catches the light. A straight in from a spider pattern. Go for the hackled. Fly straight away. Normally that’s what I’d go for. Even if it’s a done normally the light. The light in the wing. When it’s quite sunny. They don’t see it just as it is, but they don’t see it as much. So when it touches the light, you do see a sparkle. So you add a spider pattern on, you see. But on a dull day I’ve definitely put a wing fly on because the this I see that gray, that they see that mark. Can they really see the shadow? The shadow is there. 00:22:21 Dave: So on a cloudy day, you might use more of a winged fly. 00:22:24 Davie: I mean, I’ll changes this season. The beginning of the season. More winged flies as the season goes on. Mid-season. More spider patterns or hackle dry flies, and then they’ll revert back to the ones more with the wings. I’ll mix and match a lot of modern flies. Now there’s a lot of stuff. My videos are named modern and traditional fly tying methods, so I’ll use modern stuff as much as old stuff. Traditional. I like to mix and I’m open when it comes to that. I’m not stuck to materials. So I mean, like the one of the most popular flies on my channel was the dynamit-harry flies. It’s not my pattern like there is no dressing from forgot the gentleman’s name, but he came up with a fly called the Dynamit-harry. And so I did variants of that flight and all the patterns that I personally fish. So I use the color combinations and then added retouches to the flies with micardis, whether it be mayfly and these things were out fishing my old flies. 00:23:24 Dave: Oh no kidding. 00:23:25 Davie: There were, there was. I couldn’t believe how well they were working and I could. The way they were sitting, I could see the way they were acting and the way they were sitting on the water where the fish came on to them were a lot of confidence, you see. So just come out. Look straight away. There you go. But there is times you’ve got to go back to your old patterns. There’s a lot of pedigree and they catch your fish. So when things get tough going and I always fall back in blow flies. 00:23:52 Dave: Yeah, I’m looking at it now. I just pulled it up. I’ve got a, uh. The dynamite. Harry. Fly dynamite. Harry, it’s just a little. Yeah, that’s an interesting fly. It’s kind of a parachute style pattern. Right. And but it’s really sparse. It’s really sparse. And the hook you’re using is kind of the. What’s that hook you’re using for that fly? 00:24:10 Davie: It’s a nymph. It’s called the nymph. It’s actually meant for them. So obviously you get them. You get a medium weight one and a heavy weight version. I use it, obviously use the lighter one. 00:24:21 Dave: Those are that’s a box of dynamite Harry’s. Yeah, yeah. And it’s got a wide gap hook. Right. 00:24:26 Davie: The reason I like the wide gap is, uh, because it’s a Bible hook. It hooks better. I catch more than a standard hook. They’ve tied them in both standard style hook, and I’ve tied them in and checking them and knowing that style, I find it hooks far better. And as well, it’s very good for doing the dry dropper. And so you can put a small nymph or a wet fly off the bend because it’s a wide gape. It’s you can actually hook in the dry fly. So when they first come onto the dry, at least you’re going to have a chance to hook them up. I mean, there’s a lot I mean, you have no idea the patterns of when I designed flies for the fly tying companies, there was two things was, uh, obviously they’ve got to work, got to be robust, was the main thing. And there’s another reason as well. They’re going to be durable. They’ve got to be got to stay together. So when I was showing him how to tie the fly, they’d be quick and good. Nice part. That one there. I’m going to see a lot of the designs as well. I designed I tied flies for people at fish competitions. Nobody knew this, right? Friends of mine fished in the internationals, Europeans and world championships. So when I was tying for these guys, you were basically tying for the Ferrari drivers of the fly tying fly fishing world, right? 00:25:42 Dave: The best. Yeah. The competition. We’ve talked a lot with a lot of people in the US about that. 00:25:46 Davie: When you’ve got competition, these guys are the one flies that are durable. Last, keep going. Don’t want to change all the time. The dynamite Harry does that. 00:25:55 Dave: How do you make the dynamite Harry. How do you make that durable? Because it’s essentially it’s a dry fly. 00:26:01 Davie: Ice. The synthetic fibers. 00:26:03 Dave: Oh it is. It’s all synthetic. 00:26:04 Davie: Oh, yeah, I can I’ve actually got a fly in there. I don’t know how many fish I’ve had on it, but the thing about it is that if a competition anglers fishing and he’s casting hook fish and I blows, it pings it does what he likes. Straight back out, straight into another fly. The traditional fly starts to wear out. CDC flies unless they’re really picky. CDC is good for fish. It’s looking twice. You see, when you’ve got a good hatch of flies coming off, fish are feeding. You need a fly. It keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. But that that fly will still take fish when they’re hard going as well. So you’ve got all these things piling up. So if I was tying international flies for fishing the home internationals, for instance, the other style of flies, if they came to me and I said, look, if you’re looking for a an olive pattern or a done something that represents a lake, olives, that’s coming up, I’d give that that’s the fly because that’s more durable. It lasts longer. 00:27:05 Dave: Yeah, that that olive Dynamite. Harry is the perfect bluing doll of pattern. And how would you fish? How would you fish that? Would you fish it just like a typical dry fly? Or do you fish it differently? 00:27:17 Davie: Just the same? Just the same? I mean it the good thing. I’ll tell you the first time I fished it. When what happened? Right. The. I got a request on YouTube and David Dynamite Harry and I went, gosh, what’s a dynamite Harry? 00:27:31 Dave: Right. 00:27:31 Davie: So I typed in on the internet. 00:27:33 Dave: And was this a long time ago? Was this early when you started your channel? 00:27:37 Davie: No, no, that was just two thousand and sixteen. Seventeen. 00:27:42 Dave: Okay. Yeah. So almost almost ten years ago. Yeah. 00:27:44 Davie: So it’s a it’s a new it’s a modern fly, you see. So I typed it in I saw the gentleman tying the fly. He, he basically had an upper wing. The wing was a type of poly yarn. There’s lots of para posts that type of stuff. There’s a few you could use, but the trail that you left there. So the length to represent the body, It’s a very simple flight. So basically between the thorax and they tied off. Now it’s a parachute fly. Parachute flies are the best dry flies you could probably tie and you put in your box. They’ll can more consistent than many of the old flies. 00:28:19 Dave: Because they sit they sit down in the film. 00:28:22 Davie: Yeah, yeah. So basically um, Clint Connors and all these type of partners out fish many patterns. But what I did was I’ve added a wee bit extra to the fly. Now, I put the line under the the body. The cork de Leon is a very it’s a translucent fiber. It’s shiny, it’s speckled. I use a medium powder or I use a fiery ginger which gives a brown side. These are the whiting. 00:28:50 Dave: This is the the coke de Leon. 00:28:52 Davie: Yeah, it’s a white and one I use. So I’ll buy the saddles. They’re the best. Well, I personally think they’re the best because you get a lot of fiber out it. They’ve got them here. 00:29:01 Dave: Oh yeah. There you go. What you’ve got. You’re showing a whiting hackle a Cooke de Leon Whiting hackle. 00:29:05 Davie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s one. The two main ones I use is the, the medium pardo, which is a kind of speckly white one. Uh, it throws a gray color and the other one is a bronze grade. The fiery ginger is the other one. But these are natural colors. What you do is with those two colors, you can obviously tie in like a march brown. I use the fiery ginger. And that blends into the depends on the fiber you’re using. It could be powder post. It could be the ultra dry yarn, which I use a lot, but I mix the powder post and the ultra dry yarn because one straight and one crinkly. So I put a strand of each and I brush a brush them together so it gives you a nice mix. So it opens the fiber up. It keeps it in a nice shape. So when you tie it on you have a trailing part of it, and you trim that into a taper over the top of the tail. You’ll see if you follow the look at the video, you’ll see. 00:29:59 Dave: Yeah, yeah. 00:30:00 Davie: So when it’s in the water you’ve got the fiber mixes up into the the para post or whatever you use. 00:30:07 Dave: And is this on? What fly is this you’re describing? What fly can we watch this on? 00:30:10 Davie: I do, I do them all. All of them. 00:30:12 Dave: All of them. Yeah. So pretty much all the parachute style. You can watch this. 00:30:15 Davie: Yeah. Even the cowardice I do that, I do an underwing of the Cote de Leone. So that throws the natural. So you’re mixing natural with synthetic and they float and they keep fishing and they keep catching and they there’s times I see I’ll put it on as a dry dropper. Right. To fish the dropper to search and fish come out of nowhere and take the dry. You just there’s no fish rising and they’ll just come straight onto it. 00:30:41 Dave: Yeah. They’re right. They’ll still do it. 00:30:42 Davie: They’ll still come on to it. Like, and I can honestly say, if you tie a box of them up and then fish them in your waters, different sizes, pick your favorite part and color combination a bit tight and that style, you’ll be surprised how many fish you catch. Don’t overdress it. 00:30:57 Dave: Yeah that’s okay, I was going to ask you about that. How do you? Because I think proportions are a big struggle for a lot of people. What’s your how do you think of proportions or what’s your advice on trying to get the right proportions for a fly? Because the dirty Harry, if you look at the dynamite, Harry, that one is a pretty sparse little body fly, right? There’s not much to it. 00:31:16 Davie: Nobody’s ever done it that many times. I can I can pick a hackle up and I can. I know exactly the type of size of fly I can tie with it. I don’t need a gauge. I don’t need any of these because I’ve tied that many over the years seeing a tie in a parachute. You can exaggerate that hackle. Don’t make it too short. You’re looking for that imprint. You’re looking for that. See the dimple? The dimples is as important as the fly. The fish. See that? Marking the surface? 00:31:43 Dave: Oh, right. The dimple of the. Their body hitting the surface. 00:31:46 Davie: The. See that mark the footprint. They see the footprint of the fly. Now there’s times I’ll encourage that even on standard flies. When I put a floating on the left, the hackle up into the wing so that I get a better presentation. But then there’s other times I don’t do it because I talk about the long hackle dries. If you look that up, the long hackle dries. I want the fly off the water, including the hook. I want the hackles that big. It lifts the whole fly off the water. Because especially there’s one fly that you may call it a sulphur dun or the yellow may. 00:32:22 Dave: Oh sulphur dun. 00:32:23 Davie: Yeah. I mean, they’re very bright, they’re very mobile. And especially when they’re hatching. A lot all flies are they bounce. They come off boink, boink, boink. And then the fish just go grab. If you’ve got a fly, it moves. Get a movement in it. That’s the trigger. 00:32:38 Dave: Yeah. And we talk a lot over here because we I go back to because it’s kind of interesting. The Catskills style dry flies right back in the eastern part of the US. You had these really beautiful. Right. You’ve been there. Yeah. So those beautiful. But you hear from a lot of people that don’t fish them anymore because they don’t maybe they have other dry flies that work better. Like what’s your what’s your take on the Catskills? And are those similar to old traditional Dave Brown? 00:33:03 Davie: I’ve got flies. I met Dave once. I don’t know if you know Dave Brant. 00:33:07 Dave: How do you spell his last name? 00:33:08 Davie: B r a n t is it t? 00:33:10 Dave: Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Brent. Okay. 00:33:12 Davie: Yeah. Years ago I met Dave at the. You’re talking. Oh. He gave me flies the Catskill patterns I’ve got in there and the bee boxes. 00:33:21 Dave: What would you say if somebody new to you if they haven’t followed you. Do they just go to your channel? What’s the first step they do in your channel? Just start watching the first video or what do they do because you got how many how many videos do you think you have? Do you have any idea how many you have out there? 00:33:34 Davie: It’s a very messy. It’s all over the place. I’ve got a playlist, but they’re so badly put together I should really look at it. And there’s over fifteen hundred videos. 00:33:43 Dave: Wow, fifteen hundred crazy. 00:33:45 Davie: And gateways on them. I forget what I’ve done and I really should go in and organize it a bit better. I mean, watch people should really do it. Just watch. Watch me. Tying the bobbin hold is important. As much. Uh, all the movement is smooth. Should be nice and smooth. Nothing jerky. Um, my bobbin holders. I mean, I’ll give you an idea. I have mine all set up, ready to go. So I just grabbed the color I want, and so I just grabbed the bobbin and the bobbins are all adjusted so they run nice and smooth. So when I’m wiping the thread, the thread, the bobbin doesn’t get any, doesn’t get any closer to the fly, doesn’t get any further away. 00:34:25 Dave: Mhm. Right. It’s the same exact distance. 00:34:28 Davie: And it runs maybe an inch and a half or so. Two inches. I don’t know if further away the longer it takes to get around. 00:34:34 Dave: Oh so is that why is that important. So you’re talking about getting your tying thread the same distance. So when you’re wrapping it it’s never getting longer or shorter. 00:34:41 Davie: Uh, you’ll see me speeding along a bit. It’s always the same distance away. Very rarely I’ll let it come in because what’s happening is if you do allow it spin on the same piece of thread, you’ll break it. It’s gotta run nice and smooth. No jerks. You control the pressure with your palm. You have your hard skin with the bobbin holder sits in the palm so I can control it. So you just get into a nice rhythm. Everything should be done. The rice should be set at a height that you don’t lift your elbows. 00:35:10 Dave: Right. You want to keep the elbows lower? 00:35:12 Davie: Right. And if you can’t see it, you need glasses. So whenever you lift your elbows, you put pain in your neck and your back. You imagine if you wanna hold your arms out like this, you’re going to be sore. So if you get your arms on the side and they’re sitting in your side and you’re tying away good light, good background, light blue, blue shirt. 00:35:31 Dave: Oh, there you go. There you go. Yeah. You got your fulling mill shirt on. Let’s see that. You got your. There you go. Nice. 00:35:36 Davie: You gave me a free shot every year. 00:35:38 Dave: Oh good. There you go. There you go. Awesome. 00:35:40 Davie: The thing is, because I’ve started on this keto diet and I’ve lost an awful weight. Huge amount of weight. 00:35:47 Dave: Yeah, we were talking about that off air. You’ve lost. You’ve lost almost twenty five pounds. 00:35:52 Davie: Twenty five pounds? Yeah, just in a year. And it’s only. All I did was stop eating sweeties. Really? Sugar. 00:36:00 Dave: Oh, sugar. So you did that. You did the keto because you were having some issues with your hands. 00:36:04 Davie: I had pains in my fingers, my knuckles. And so I was doing a wee bit of search on. YouTube is a great place, but there’s a lot of a lot of things all over the place as well. And inflammation in your fingers and your bones. And especially if you’ve got arthritis is sugar really goes for these. 00:36:20 Dave: So you cut out sugar out of. So no nothing was sugar including like, you know like whatever all sorts of stuff has sugar. 00:36:27 Davie: But I carbs, I mean carbs, a lot of carbs like bread and stuff. I don’t really bother with that anymore. But so basically I stick to the main things. Fish, eggs, meat. 00:36:38 Dave: Yeah. And no alcohol. Right? No alcohol that has sugar in it. 00:36:41 Davie: Unfortunately, I’ve got the bottles of whiskey up there. I just don’t I mean, I used to because when I was going, I got a bottle of whiskey every week. Two. Three bottles. 00:36:50 Dave: You know what I feel like on the. And I’m the same way. I think we all are. As you get older, your body tells you. You know, it lets you know, like. And if you don’t listen to it, it’s not. It’s. You know what I mean? So I feel like I’m the same way. There are certain things like, you know, beer, for example. You know what I mean? For me, it kind of caused heartburn and stuff like that. So I just realized, like, you know what? That’s something my body’s telling me I probably shouldn’t be doing. It’s just part of the. That’s part of, you know. 00:37:12 Davie: Dave, I don’t want to be like, uh, one of these type of people. I don’t, I don’t I don’t tell anyone to do stuff. No. Like, flight time is a good is a learning process. Right. And it’s enjoy that learning the materials will learn you how to tie the fly, the twist and turn you certain ways. Right. You’ve got to you’ve got to work with them as well as understand how the feather will sit if you put it in a certain way right now, depending how you take it off the feather as well, depending that depends that encourages to sit as well. So there’s lots of techniques and these are things you learn by using the materials you’ve got. Like if you if I was saying to anyone buying see you want it to tie space. Soft taco webs even rise to a point by the skin and look at the skin and say, right, I could use that feather, I could use that feather. Use it. Even if it’s not in the books. You don’t have to get the skin and say, well, like that, that will go with this fly, get that, that’ll go with that fly. 00:38:11 Dave: And learn that skin. Right. Yeah. 00:38:13 Davie: Yeah. So basically I mean it’s like I used to buy a lot of taxidermy birds. Victorian. 00:38:19 Dave: Oh really Victorian like, uh, like classical. 00:38:22 Davie: I bought them so I could use the feathers. I’d only buy them to sit in the shelf. I mean, I’ll give you an I. I know you can’t see this. Believe it or not, I get. I bought this off of eBay. On eBay I never looked the guy was selling a curlew. Right, a stuffed curlew. Now you can’t buy the birds, obviously. So I wanted the feathers to tie certain flies. 00:38:43 Dave: Yeah. And how do you spell that bird? Cutler. 00:38:45 Davie: Curlew. Q r l e w. 00:38:48 Dave: Okay. 00:38:48 Davie: I never looked at the listing properly. Right. I never looked at the bird. I just looked at what the guy said. Curlew. And it was. It was thirty pounds, right. That’s about forty dollars. But he sent me this bird. 00:39:01 Dave: Oh, wow. Is that a curlew? So you’re showing a bird that’s about the size of your hand. A little bigger. 00:39:06 Davie: Thus a snipe. 00:39:07 Dave: Oh, that’s a Snape. Yeah, that’s a Snape. 00:39:09 Davie: It’s a Snape. It’s a Snape. So I emailed the guy. I said, look, that’s not curlew. And he says, well, I don’t know what curlew is. 00:39:17 Dave: Oh, that’s funny. 00:39:18 Davie: But you sold me. I says, look, I says, it’s I’ll keep it. It’s a nice read, Bob, but if you look at the actual bird itself. Right. 00:39:26 Dave: Yep. You got the hard, stiff feathers on the main. 00:39:28 Davie: There’s the wing. Most people will buy the wings. But see the the body feathers, right? 00:39:34 Dave: The soft, the soft stuff. 00:39:36 Davie: These are the ones for the soft tacos, right. 00:39:38 Dave: Those are the soft tackle ones. Yeah. 00:39:40 Davie: You want to be able to use the the other feathers on the head and such like. You can use them in soft tacos, wet flies, but you can also use it in a dry fly by mixing the hackle through a cock hackle so it gives you a softer hen or a soft hen kind of mix. And it’s lovely. They make beautiful flies. So I mean, and I bought a lot of feathers over the years like that. These are taxidermy birds that are badly damaged. This was damaged. That squashed. 00:40:09 Dave: Sure. Like see it. Yeah. It’s squashed. 00:40:11 Davie: Yeah. And like I bought an owl. These are birds that are now they’re protected. But the only way to buy them is to get the old taxidermy. You want to buy the rough feathers, the rough birds. They’re usually cheaper because you’re not going to set it on the shelf and look at it. You’re going to take the feathers off it so it doesn’t have to. And it makes a lovely, a lovely fly, a lovely soft tacos. Because same as CDC, everybody thinks CDC should be for just dry flies, but see for soft tacos are they’ve got the same movement as. Oh so they have so a few cast upstream. The fly is fishing for you. It’s got all the movement, natural movement, any tiny twist and turn in the river, the flies pulsating. And that’s what you get with these soft tacos. And it gives you the option. The option. What do you call it? Tying all these different patterns with your own eye and not with someone else’s. I mean, like this book here. This is a book. This is the tenth edition. 00:41:10 Dave: Oh, what’s that one called? 00:41:11 Davie: It’s called the best Art of angling. This one is dated eighteen fourteen. 00:41:16 Dave: Yeah, yeah. Art of angling. So that that book’s from eighteen fourteen. 00:41:19 Davie: Yeah. And this is the tenth edition. 00:41:21 Dave: Wow. And who’s the author? Who’s the author of that book? 00:41:24 Davie: References. Uh, I’ll send you a link to it. 00:41:27 Dave: Okay. It’s great. We’ll get a link to that. So, the best art of angling. And what does that book describe? Why do you love that book? 00:41:33 Davie: The reason I like this book. Well, what I like to do is dressing the fly fluorescence under and describe the fly in the materials. You should use a set and tie the flies to get an idea of these these patterns and the the thought behind these flies and this is was first published in seventeen ninety. Something like that. 00:41:54 Dave: Wow. Seventeen ninety. 00:41:56 Davie: The flies in there are as good and better than the ones we tied today sometimes. And you’d be surprised how good this is. It’s like somebody wrote this book other than some of the terms they use. You think it was just published today? 00:42:08 Dave: Yeah, right. You never know it. 00:42:10 Davie: You would never know because the it’s surprising how tying. I mean, I’ve got a couple of other books eighteen fourteen the salmon flies. Uh, I mean, the again, there’s patterns in there, the detached bodied mayflies and what they would use for the body, for the detached body would use the quill of the feather. So if they get a feather and they would just tie that on as the they give the impression of the body. They didn’t have ether foam or stuff like that back then. So they used the feather. 00:42:38 Dave: That’s awesome. 00:42:39 Davie: The thought was there. The flies are there. 00:42:41 Dave: Yeah, well, I feel like you’re you’re kind of bridging both worlds. You’ve got this amazing connection to that history. What you probably know, you know as well as, you know, many in the world, right, of tying those flies. But then you also bridge the world of the new because you’re working with some of these companies, like we mentioned it, fulling mill and others out there that have a lot of new synthetic materials. How do you you know, it sounds like you bring those together. When you tie, you bring the two worlds together. 00:43:07 Davie: When I see a material, I think of the kind of there was a material design normally, say for dry flies. I’ll try and think of something else I can use it for before I would use it straight on the dry fly. I mean, the dry wing. I mean there’s other uses for it. I mean, there’s the Dobbins, I use the hooks. I use the Czech nymph hook. It’s not a dry fly hook. I use it for dry flies because they do to the medium weight and the heavy weight. I like a wide gate when I’m using Barbless, I prefer the point to be slightly curls up. And so basically, I mean, I like I remember when flexi floss came out the first time and it was Orvis that brought it out. And you’re talking back in mid nineties and it was just a rubbery rubber legs kind of thing. And it was like the shape of a moustache when it came the rubber band. I remember Robin that worked for Orvis at the time, and I’d met him once and he said, David, I’ve got a new material called Flexi Floss. I’ll send you some. And I said, that’s fine. And I worked because I work at the trout fishery. I was tying a lot of midge with it. I did an article on trout and salmon at the time, because I’ve written a few articles for the magazine. I did forty two articles in a row. Wow. So that’ll give you an idea, because it was mostly YouTube. Every time somebody asked me a question that gives me an idea for another video, another fly or something, because a lot of these flies I’ve never fished before. Never saw. So I was sitting tight. And there we are. Using the methods I’ve learned over many years. So that’s how it’s worked. Same with the magazines. I just kept tying and tying and coming up with some good ideas. Some bad. 00:44:48 Dave: Yeah. Is that the way you still do it to this day? If you for your next YouTube video you have coming, how do you choose your next your next video? Is it the same way. 00:44:56 Davie: I look at all the comments, look at all the suggestions? I’m trying. I mean, I’d love to tie every single one, but I’m trying to tie flies that are different for the ones I’ve got on and different ideas. So if there’s a pattern or two that I’d like to tie with the ideas I’ve been asked, like the mayfly. So I’ll tie the mayflies, but I’ll blend the dubbins, I’ll show them the dubbins I’d prefer, and the reason why I try and make it easier. A lot of times I’ll just try and show them different methods. The only thing that’s different in Flies patterns nowadays is the materials. It’s used in the methods to suit the materials. Everything else has been learnt. There’s very few flies that I don’t like naming a fly after myself because you couldn’t name them. 00:45:40 Dave: It’s all been done. 00:45:42 Davie: It’s been done before. When I went to America, I bought two books. I was in New York State. I was in a small town called Pawling. Uh, so that’s when I went to. I was in the winter time, so I did a demonstration there. And then I went up to Roscoe to the and up to the Catskill. 00:46:00 Dave: Sure. 00:46:00 Davie: The Catskill. So I seen the date’s house. Uh, Paul Jorgensen went into some of the shops, and, uh, I bought the this book here. 00:46:10 Dave: Oh, yeah. Yeah. A hatch guide for New England streams. Okay. And who’s the author on that book? 00:46:15 Davie: Thomas Ames, uh, junior. 00:46:17 Dave: Yeah. Thomas haynes. Yeah, because he’s Thomas Ames junior. Did, uh, did those books for all he did the West Coast, I think he did those all over the country, the US. 00:46:24 Davie: The other book I bought was I thought it was a great book. This one to France. Better? 00:46:29 Dave: Yeah, Fran. Better? Yeah, definitely. I’ve heard of that name for sure. 00:46:32 Davie: Well, he’s a big, big name. He’s a just a he’s a good tired. I’ve seen him I’ve seen him on, on the internet. I mean, he’s I don’t think he’s with us anymore in America I thought was like I’d love to have stayed there. 00:46:44 Dave: Right, right. How was it different? How was it different than Scotland? I mean, you’re you’re a visiting, so it’s a little bit different. But what stuck out to you for your first time coming to New York? 00:46:54 Davie: I went into the house. I was on the river, the house Housatonic. And then there was the Housatonic Outfitters. I think they were called right beside the river. And that’s where I got these books I got I could have got lost in books, but my fly tying materials was endless rods. There was a cast with a a garrison, a pain. These were cane rods, and there were ten thousand dollars each. Wow. Kind of serious money. And I was casting one of these in the car park. 00:47:24 Dave: How’d that feel? Did you notice the ten thousand dollar difference. 00:47:27 Davie: I was trying to cast them because if they broke, I mean, it’d be ten thousand dollars worth, right? Yeah, because of my collectors. But they were quite happy for me to try. I mean, I like cane rods. I don’t have any, to be honest with you. I did have one when I was younger, when I first started. And the cane rod is where it came from. Is America where they were first made? I love the the garrison, the pain. I liked I tried them all. There was a gentleman that I met, and he had a pile of these rods that he’d collected over many years. And I always remember, he says he gave me the rod. He said, this rod to cast. I’m casting it in the car park. I said, that’s not very good, rod, that this is a bit kind of rough. Then he turned it off me. He gave me the the crappy rod first because he wanted to see if I could cast it first before he gave me the the expensive rods to cast. And that’s when I was trying out the these the other ones. Thomas and Thomas. did some lovely roads that made candy cane roads. They are a piece of art. I mean, I love watching people making these things. It’s much like a knot tying flies. It’s. That’s where it can. You can have the dirty side. You can have the the practical side. 00:48:41 Dave: Yeah. How do you do that with your flies? If you get a fly. How do you. Let’s say you get a pattern and you want to tweak it a little bit. How do you do that? What’s your mindset when you think about taking a trout fly and maybe a dry fly and tweaking it? 00:48:53 Davie: The first thing I look is the color combination and the style colors and such. The hook. Uh, look at me. If you don’t want some of the old patterns, they don’t need improved. All they need is something you want to have a different style of that fly because they still work. You don’t want to see that. That doesn’t work. You want to try? If I want to tie a march. Brown, who was tied many years ago. A basic March Brown dry fly. Uh, then to the modern one. Like the dynamite version, you’re just within the cut. You’re within the size and the color combinations. You’ll just get two different styles and they still work. I mean, that fly the Max Brown, even though it’s nothing like the the original mouse brown rather than color. It works well. Like it just keeps fishing and catching. You don’t want to get too far away from the original dressings. You still want to use them because the tried and tested and even the materials. Sometimes I’ve still got these hairs here on the body. Uh, the tail. I mean, I’ve used the if I was dynamite hair, I would use the fiery ginger to give that brown like tail the yellow mix and blend. I would put a wee bit yellow underneath the thorax just to finish it off, and that blends into it. But you can mix a bit of yellow if you’re mixing the wing. You can put that in so you can, like if I’ve got a dubbing, I’d prefer to blend a color to it. 00:50:19 Dave: Oh, okay. Yeah. How do you do that with the dying? dubbing, because I think that’s something where you can get dubbing out of a package or you can blend it. Are you always blending materials to make them? 00:50:27 Davie: Always blending? 00:50:28 Dave: You always blend. And how do you go about that blending like because how do you know when you got the right. Yeah. There you go. You got you got your coffee blender. That’s right. It’s always it’s always right there. And what are you looking for when you blend in. Are you blending synthetics or. Well, I guess it’s mostly synthetic, but are you blending both synthetic and natural or modern? 00:50:46 Davie: Both. You want both the best of both worlds. Uh, you want to try and mix them? I mean, I’ll have, uh, hairs here or adding a bit of sea ultra dry yarn, and I’ll add them in a bit of that synthetic a the sea, a flash, a UV. 00:51:02 Dave: Yeah, a little flash, right? 00:51:03 Davie: UV and I might even take some CDC fiber and blend that in as well. It just it’s amazing. We touch these. They’ll kick in at a certain point. The flash will be there when you need it. The softness will be there. We need the movement. The color will be there with the other materials can, and they’ll give the impression of what you’re looking for. So like, I mean, that’s why I’m happy to tell you is more than traditional and mix and make them work. Pure synthetic. Basically, if it’s a dubbing, like it needs something to make it work because it’s got. No, it’s I used to years ago for a guy, you know, Davy Wooten. 00:51:40 Dave: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Dave. Yeah. He’s been on the podcast a couple times. 00:51:43 Davie: Well, I know David, right? I’ve known David for a long, long time. 00:51:46 Dave: Did he grow up in your around your same area? 00:51:48 Davie: No, he’s he’s from Wales. He’s Quinn Brian he was from. 00:51:53 Dave: And Wales is Wales is south south of where you’re at. 00:51:56 Davie: Are you safe? I am yeah I’m thirty miles south of Glasgow on the west coast. 00:52:01 Dave: Oh, wow. Okay. You’re only thirty miles south of Glasgow. 00:52:03 Davie: Yeah. On rates, to give you an idea, a lot of golf courses where I live. 00:52:08 Dave: Oh, right. Yeah. Are you. Yeah. That’s right. There’s some famous golf courses there. 00:52:12 Davie: I Tonbridge just down the road and then Royal Troon is just there. Royal Troon is three miles. Tom Watson won the one hundred and eleventh open. I was working in the executive tent. I served drinks to. 00:52:26 Dave: Tom Watson. 00:52:26 Davie: Tom Watson. Uh, what’s the other guy? Um. Telly Savalas. 00:52:31 Dave: Okay. Telly Savalas. Right? Right, right. Yeah. 00:52:33 Davie: I kind of enjoyed Kojak. Game was Kojak. The lollipop, whoever you call. Anyway, I mean, all these guys, I was serving them beer. 00:52:42 Dave: So the Royal Troon Golf Club is right on the the ocean. Yeah, the west coast. So that’s close. That’s not too far from where you’re at. 00:52:49 Davie: Three miles away. 00:52:50 Dave: Three miles away. Okay, so now we see where you’re at. So you’re kind of right in the middle. You’re at the, the Isle of Arran. 00:52:56 Davie: The island that’s just there. That’s just over there. West is this way. So that’s straight in front of me. 00:53:01 Dave: Yeah. So you’re kind of right in between. You’re right in between Scotland, Northern Ireland, the lower UK, you’re kind of upper north. Yeah. You’re right there. 00:53:09 Davie: Yeah. Well the West Coast, it’s one of the nicest areas. If you ever want to play golf definitely come to Ayrshire. 00:53:14 Dave: Okay. We will. 00:53:16 Davie: Tonbridge just down the road. The Donald Trump Trump Turnberry it’s called now. 00:53:20 Dave: Oh okay. 00:53:21 Davie: ABS stunningly you went to see it. I’ve never seen it shine. Oh he’s made the place look amazing. Like. And if the flag I’ve never seen a flag is big, big flag. 00:53:32 Dave: It’s got, of course. 00:53:36 Davie: A huge flag. I’ve never seen a flag like it in my life. But the actual course is amazing. Like you’ve no idea. I’m not a golfer. Like. 00:53:43 Dave: Oh, you’re not. You’re not a golfer. 00:53:45 Davie: No. I’m just. I’ve played golf a couple of times, uh, with the. I’ve walked there. I know a lot of people play golf. 00:53:53 Dave: We just had a, um. We just had a professional PGA tour golfer on the podcast, and he was talking about, um, you know, flycasting and golf, right? There’s a lot of similarities. 00:54:03 Davie: Yeah. He’s the I think I don’t know if I heard it. I seen the thing on it. I had one of the girls that played for America. I can’t find her name in the caddie. She came down to see us. They were in the women’s open. The they open up at, I think it was Saint Andrew’s and they were in this area and they, they, they gave me a shout out. Could be coming to see you. 00:54:23 Dave: Oh no. 00:54:23 Davie: Kidding. To the fishing. And the caddy came. And the Lassie. I can’t mind her name. She was a lovely Lassie. The American people just appeared at the door. 00:54:33 Dave: Oh, really? No kidding. So you just have people that come up to your door and be like, hey, I’m here randomly. That’s hilarious. Oh, wow. And so, so you’ll literally have somebody that’s traveling and they they track you down, they know where you live, and they’ll just knock on your door and say, hey, Davie, how you doing? 00:54:47 Davie: And then they come in and they sit in a cup of tea. 00:54:49 Dave: That’s so that’s so classic. Wow. 00:54:52 Davie: Like I gave them a flyer to or. So I’ve always got a flag. 00:54:55 Dave: Well, you’ve got I mean yeah, you’ve built a channel that has I mean, you know, whatever it is, fifty million views. You know, you have this massive channel that’s out there, you’re up there with pretty much if you look at the YouTube when you got started, did you think this was going to be where you’re at now? 00:55:12 Davie: I know my first channel was called Pittman p e a t y o. 00:55:17 Dave: Okay. 00:55:18 Davie: And then it’s m a n. It’s actually the name of a fly fishing in colored water, a pity water. 00:55:25 Dave: Okay, Petey. Right? Right. Petey. Right. 00:55:27 Davie: So that was my nickname. But everybody knew me as Petey Man because of the forum. I used to be in a forum called. It was in early two thousand. It was, uh, the Fly Forum. It was famous for the classic flies. It was the classic fly forum, if I remember right, just at the time I knew Edwin Ritz. 00:55:46 Dave: I was going to say I didn’t mention that before, but we had, um, that episode on it was really interesting. Yeah. So you knew him? The guy that the feather thief. 00:55:53 Davie: I knew him only by. I spoke to him a couple of times on Facebook. He wanted some hooks I had. It was a long time ago and I sent him some hooks. I knew long ago his name was on the on the channel. I knew these guys at the time, just talking on the internet, it was you didn’t have your right name. You used that kind of made up name. So I didn’t know their names personally, but I knew after it, like, and, uh, Edmund was, uh, in his brother was. There were two nice boys, but obviously what happened? 00:56:27 Dave: Yeah. Obviously extreme. 00:56:29 Davie: I was a big artist. I left, I went. 00:56:32 Dave: Yeah, that was quite a story. Yeah. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Episode seven sixty two. We had Kirk Johnson on who talked about the whole he wrote the book The Feather Thief, and it. 00:56:40 Davie: Was crazy, like, to be honest with you, it was a shame because it’s like, I, I always remember when it happened and I spoke to this one guy and all I said, I says, look, I says, if it were all angels, we’d have wings, right? 00:56:56 Dave: We’ve all done stuff. 00:56:57 Davie: I said, so people don’t know. I never he didn’t I didn’t know, everybody didn’t know. 00:57:02 Dave: Yeah. You don’t know everything about him. 00:57:04 Davie: No, it’s it’s and it’s like, uh, I don’t know what it felt like when he was maybe ten, and he’d just seen it and went, oh, it was like a fox in a chicken hut. And a chicken just killed everything. Just like got crazy. Instead of thinking what he was doing. 00:57:22 Dave: Well, I think that’s what happens to can happen to people. It’s a slippery slope. You hear that thing said a lot. But you. You get into something so deep and the fly tying is it just shows the passion, the fact that this kid is willing to go for a heist to get flight time materials. It’s so bizarre. But if you’re into the flight, which you are right, we’re all into this thing. We understand that the passion of, you know, trying to it’s a how do you explain that? How would you explain your passion? Because you’ve got a similar passion, right? You’ve done this your whole life. 00:57:51 Davie: When I was tying Classic Fly, I’ve tied quite a few over the years and mainly tied them for collectors. And how it happened was somebody would come to me, David, I want to say a joke, Scott. I want it tied as the original one. Now. It’s quite it’s reasonably simple. The hardest failure to get with token okay. And it’s used in the middle of the body. So type a villain in the middle. The rest of the feathers are straight. Really straightforward. Other than that, you’ve got to try and find. To get a good fly, you need good materials. Very. You can’t get away. You can manage bad materials sometimes, but to get a good big fly, you really need to have the good material. Makes it easier, especially when you’re tying really big flies. 00:58:32 Dave: Big stuff, right? 00:58:33 Davie: I mean, I knew like Megan Boyd, I didn’t know her personally, but I knew her because when I was flying and she stopped tying flies, she basically her customers were contacting me to get flies tied. They would say, David, this is Megan Boyd’s jock Scott, for instance. Or not so much Scott, but say a Stewart’s tail, for instance, a simple hair wing. Could you tie that like Megan? And that’s how I got to know her name, because this is a Megan Boyd fly. This is so tying Megan’s flies without realizing who she really was, because I wasn’t really into it because I didn’t know her. I mean, I’ve got a big collection of Megan Boyd Mobilia, I’ve got all I’ve got books I’ve got. I’ve got three vices that belong to her. Because what happened there was a famous writer called Jimmy Younger. Now, I’ve got letters there from New York Flyers club. They wrote to Megan. I’ve got all the letters that they wrote to. 00:59:31 Dave: Was this the Catskill Fly Tyer Guild? 00:59:33 Davie: Yeah, I mean, it was the Anglers Club Bulletin. They would write to Megan quite regular. Uh, it was the the Anglers Club of New York. This one is dated nineteen seventy seven. I was actually I can’t remember the American gentleman, but he basically met Megan. He used to come over quite regular. And Joseph Bates. I mean, I’ve got the letters for Joseph Bates as well as lots of stuff in there. I’ve got a rice. If you ever see a rice. This is one of the rices she’s photographed here. 01:00:03 Dave: Okay. Yeah, yeah. So we’re looking at a vice, which is, uh. Yeah, it looks different. It’s got a different. I don’t know what you’d call that style. 01:00:10 Davie: She was on the National Geographic magazine, and this is the vice she was using. 01:00:13 Dave: Oh. No kidding. What era was Megan? When was she tying? 01:00:17 Davie: I think she started around about the nineteen, late thirties. Forties all the way up to. She actually started going blind. She stopped tying about the mid eighties. She stopped to be there. She died and I think two thousand and three. But she was huge in America. 01:00:35 Dave: Yeah. No, I know the name. We’ll get a link in the notes here to on some history there. 01:00:40 Davie: Yeah. There was a documentary called Kiss the Water. 01:00:43 Dave: Oh kiss. Yeah, yeah. Kiss the water. Yeah, yeah. 01:00:45 Davie: See when you, when you’re casting. Right. You left off and then you. The line kisses the water before you cast forward. And that acts as the anchor point. So when it kisses the water. 01:00:56 Dave: And I’m looking at it now, we’ll put a link. There’s an IMDb kiss the water twenty thirteen A self-taught craftswoman, Scotland’s Megan Boyd makes the fishing flies their prize. So good. Okay, well, I got a good movie I can watch here later. We can all watch. 01:01:08 Davie: I watched I mean, it’s really interesting. The Jimmy Youngers in there, the Jimmy. What happened? Megan when she died, basically Jimmy got all all the fly tying stuff and what have you. But the problem was Megan tied in a in a kind of like a garage, a hut. So because she hadn’t tied for years, it got really destroyed by the weather, so there wasn’t much left. 01:01:32 Dave: Oh, right. Dang. 01:01:34 Davie: They sold a lot. It basically it was went to auction and it went away. I, I bought a lot of stuff off her. Um, it needs to go in a museum. So if there’s an American museum in America that needs to go somewhere. 01:01:48 Dave: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So where could where is most of her stuff now, do you think. 01:01:52 Davie: Certain. 01:01:53 Dave: You’ve got some of it. 01:01:54 Davie: In the box? Yeah, I’ve got lots of, I’ve got other books I’ve got letters from Prince Charles. 01:02:00 Dave: Oh, wow. Okay. This is crazy. Okay. Yeah. You got all this stuff? 01:02:05 Davie: Oh. It flies. 01:02:06 Dave: Uh, is she the most famous fly tyer other than you from Scotland, do you think? 01:02:11 Davie: She wasn’t. She was born in England. She moved up to, uh, Brora when she was three, as far as I believe. And she tied. She learnt to tie herself. She never fished that. She was, uh, she worked with Jimmy at one time as well. Jimmy Younger, the Jimmy Younger, well known as. 01:02:29 Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah we know. Yeah. 01:02:30 Davie: There was the Helmsdale Fly Company. I think they were called at one time. Jimmy moved to Hong Kong, set up a fly tying company over there. He was over there for about seven years and then he came back. But I knew Jimmy because I fished and I was in a fly. Uh, basically, I was a small club. It was called the Traveller’s Fly Club. And once a month we would go somewhere all over Scotland And we used to go down to Dumfries, where Jimmy was living at the time, and Jimmy, we fished against their club in a competition. Just a lot of fun. So I knew Jimmy because of that as well as through the magazine. And before Jimmy died, I was actually in LA at the time, uh, and I was doing a demonstration in LA in twenty seventeen, and he died when I was over there. And it was the way back when I was in the airport. I got a ping on my phone. It was to say that Jimmy had died, and he was only in for a. It was sudden. It was. But he was actually putting together a there was a book he did, but he didn’t like it. It was me, Megan Boyd because it wasn’t one hundred percent. It was a bit rushed. And he thought he didn’t, he didn’t like it. But anyway, so he was going to do something else. But before we could do it, he died. And so I bought I had bought a lot of this stuff from Jimmy over the years. It was over about ten years. I bought bits and pieces. And so the collections there, there’s a couple of letters for Joseph Bates there, back and forward from Megan and the Joseph Bates fly that she died. I’ll send you. I’ll send you some photographs. 01:04:10 Dave: Yeah. I think what we can do is follow up with you on this, because I want to get more into the history, you know, as we go. So maybe, maybe we can start to take it out of here with our little segment. And then we’ll follow up with you on some of these other details. The the question I was going to have for you to kind of start to take it away is going back to your twenty five year old self. I always love to think about this like advice you would give yourself, so take it back. I’m not sure where you’re at when you were twenty five, but if you could go back to that twenty five year old and give him some advice about fly tying or really life or anything, what would that be? What would you tell yourself? 01:04:42 Davie: Jeez, I would move to America, right? 01:04:45 Dave: Do you remember that pretty well when you were twenty five? You just had been tying, right? You just started tying. You’d been tying for about six years by then, right? 01:04:52 Davie: Yeah. Really? Yeah. Round about that. I’ll tell you the reason it sounds bad saying that. I mean, Scotland’s a great place. 01:04:58 Dave: That we had that question earlier. The difference between, you know, the US and Scotland. 01:05:02 Davie: Well, I’d like to be able to, to go to different countries. If I had the money, obviously I’d ever done that. Do you have a guiding round the world, stuff like that. If I was twenty five, that’s how I’d be doing. 01:05:14 Dave: Yeah, do more traveling. 01:05:15 Davie: I would probably be this time of the year. I’d be down in Argentina, down in Surrey. I down that way. I’d be fishing on the sea trout or I’d be guiding down that area. I just follow the seasons. I would go round about now, I would do that type of stuff. 01:05:30 Dave: Yeah. So do more, do more fishing. Make sure you do more traveling, especially. 01:05:34 Davie: I was twenty five. That’s what I’d be doing. 01:05:36 Dave: And I think that would be my advice to, to myself is I’d want to, you know, get because I remember when I was twenty five, I was doing some stuff, probably wasn’t as productive as I could have been, you know, and I think that, you know, and I think the travel it’s funny because one, one of our places that we really want to go to top on the list is Scotland, you know. So I think it’s always the grass is greener, you know what I mean? I feel like you always want to go to that other place. 01:05:57 Davie: I mean, Scotland’s a lot. Most of Scotland’s actually open. I mean, the main question I get asked a lot is why am I on the river myself? And I go, well, it’s only a small stretch, but there are a couple of reasons why it’s myself. 01:06:12 Dave: You mean why? Why are you fishing by yourself? 01:06:14 Davie: Well, basically the reason. Fishing. There’s not as many people around as there is in America. If you go into some of the main parts in the Madison or somewhere or Kenya, the houses, you’re going to obviously get people coming out of New York fishing certain areas. So for the Farmington and stuff like that, I mean, I’ve seen some of these rivers, beautiful rivers, absolutely amazing. Like, I mean, I’d love to fish some of the waters. Kelly Gallup, uh, I listened to Kelly Times on, uh, on YouTube, that area, where is it? 01:06:50 Dave: Yeah, he’s kind of right on the Madison. So it’s kind of Montana. Yeah. Idaho in that area. 01:06:55 Davie: I that’s what I would that area I love. 01:06:57 Dave: Yeah it’s all the same. Well now it’s all similar right. Western US yeah. 01:07:01 Davie: Yeah that would suit me fine. So I mean the fishing would be the thing I would prefer is just to point me onto the river and then I would. I don’t mind company, but I like to just disappear. 01:07:14 Dave: Yeah. Disappear. 01:07:15 Davie: As long as there’s no bears about. We don’t have any bears in Scotland. Like. 01:07:19 Dave: No, no bears. 01:07:20 Davie: So there’s really be quite happy. Don’t have anything that bites or tries to attack. Not yet anyway. So so I would I would be certainly I would look at that as a bit of fun. When I was twenty five, I knew I’d loved it one time. 01:07:36 Dave: And now I know me too. That’s good. Well, tell me this about, um, we mentioned Foley Mill a couple times. What is your, um, connection to fulling mill? 01:07:44 Davie: Fulling mill have known for many, many years. I knew when I was demonstrating flight time, the filling agent was standing watching me die. 01:07:52 Dave: Right. So this goes back a long time, and you’re tying. 01:07:55 Davie: I so they’d be watching me tying or asking me this and that. And I gave the the companies that I used to demonstrate. I would go down to a show and I would design flies, a set of flies that would probably tie. I mean, I would get a small royalty. It was ticker shorts, like a short run, not many flies. So I would design a set of flies for a promotion or something. So I would do that and we’d normally there’d be the company would tie these flies. So there was a very long time ago and I knew them over many years. I got offered a job to work in a fly tying company in Thailand. At the same time, I wish I took the job in fooling now. 01:08:36 Dave: Oh really? 01:08:37 Davie: Yeah, Thailand was great, I enjoyed it. I was there for three or four years. The girls get paid first in everything. That was a priority. So when money was short, I get no money for showers. That’s the way it worked. So I could try and try and catch up and get some money for the house. So when thing there was, it was always trying to catch up. It was like, I don’t know. 01:08:59 Dave: So you were just tying flies in Thailand or what? What was your job? 01:09:02 Davie: No, I was teaching I was teaching them how to tie. 01:09:04 Dave: Yeah. You’re teaching. Teaching how to tie. Right. 01:09:07 Davie: The biggest problem was that the money wasn’t coming in quick enough. They were tying the flies. Flies were all going out, and the money wasn’t coming in for a long period, and. And I just felt bad. I was like, and they knew that anyway, so I was always last in the queue. So when it came to getting my wages, it was like I was at the bottom of the list. That was fine. So I just then I, I kept trying to make up the wages so I would, I would still have my customers that I had. You see I just put more pressure. It was it was a long story. Anyway, eventually I left and I just went full time at tying. So I was tying. And that was in twenty fourteen because up until that point, All I did flight time was only a hobby. It was only part of my. It was part of my job because when I was working at the trout fishery, I’d make sure there was flies in the cabinet that people could buy. But I did that through the work, so I was getting paid through my work that way. But when I went full time, then I realized I couldn’t. There was very little money in it. You have no idea how. It’s amazing. You’ve got you tying up a lot of flies. 01:10:07 Dave: You mean tying flies? Like people will call you and they’ll want to order you tie out ten dozen flies or something like that? 01:10:12 Davie: I it was, like, underestimated what you needed to tie. A lot of people think I can tie a hundred. I can tie a thousand flies a week. Well that’s rubbish. 01:10:22 Dave: No, I think when I used to tie, I used to tie. My dad had a little fly shop back in the day when I was a kid and I tied. I felt like if I tied ten dozen flies in a day, that was a that was Max. Max, that was a lot. 01:10:34 Davie: I mean, I tied for a time. Time is you’re ten hours, but you would probably only have six hours of time because you’d be preparing materials. 01:10:42 Dave: Yeah. That’s right. So what was for you? What was a busy day for you back when you were tying a lot? 01:10:47 Davie: Well, if I was salmon flies, I got more money for them. But I’ll tell you again, when I first started dying, I get five pence per fly for trout. Five pence, ten cents. 01:10:56 Dave: Oh, ten cents per fly. 01:10:58 Davie: Yeah. But I got I got the materials to tie them. 01:11:00 Dave: Oh right. And you got tutorials for free. 01:11:01 Davie: So I well I saw well they gave me the hooks and I tied them so I could that’s how I got it. And then I got fifteen pence for a salmon fly. So you had to tie a lot of flies. That was a way, way back. But when I was tying, the hardest thing is to try and work out how much. I mean, your time is how much the materials are. And I was never charging enough because it’s just the way it worked. So my main job is YouTube. 01:11:27 Dave: Oh, you work with YouTube or you get paid for their what’s it called, their YouTube Creators Program. 01:11:32 Davie: They call the partners. Partners. So it’s the adverts. And that’s why they’re important on your videos. Because you get a wage out of that. Not a huge wage, but you get some money out of it. 01:11:43 Dave: Yeah, you get money for advertising. Basically, when YouTube advertises on one of your videos, you get a certain. 01:11:47 Davie: So I concentrate on just doing the film and doing stuff at this time of year is quite quiet because a lot of people obviously Christmas time, you still get views, but you don’t get many. The most views you get are like the beginning of the year, so it goes up a wee bit. So it’s just the way it works. But we’re feeling well. What happens is that the the banner, I get a sponsor, but she’s putting a banner up. That’s all. I’m not. 01:12:10 Dave: Yeah, yeah. You got the banner on your channel fulling mill. 01:12:13 Davie: I still buying the materials when I need them. Like anybody else from them. Uh, still buying materials wherever I want, but I’m not obligated to them. 01:12:21 Dave: Yeah, you don’t have to use just their stuff. You can use whatever you want. 01:12:24 Davie: I don’t have to use it because I can’t. Because it’s not so much. I don’t want to do it. I want to be able to be honest with everyone. If I’m using a product or using a hook or using a thread or using this is because I like it. It’s not because somebody paid me to use it, even though it looks like that. A lot of people think that, but it’s not. It’s not that. It’s because I like it. It’s simple. And because I believe if they use it, they’ll be happy with it. So simple as that. I should be honest with you. A lot of people say I should take more sponsorship. I’m not a businessman. I just flies, right. 01:12:59 Dave: Do what you enjoy. I think that’s good advice for anybody. 01:13:02 Davie: When you go fishing, you go fishing to suit yourself. So I go fishing to enjoy it. And just everyone round about, I mean, the birds singing, the weather, just getting out for two or three hours. 01:13:13 Dave: That’s it. Well, well, Davey, I think we’ll leave it there. As hard as this is for me, because I want to keep talking. I think I’m going to respect your time here, and maybe we’ll get you back on for another. Another little, um, either podcast or something like that down the line, but we’ll send everybody out to, uh, Davey McPhail on YouTube. That’s the main place. That’s the only place where they can find you, and they can track and follow and subscribe to your channel. And we’ll be doing that. And yeah, thanks for all your time today. This has been amazing. 01:13:36 Davie: You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Diva. I’m enjoyed it. 01:13:40 Dave: Before you head out, I want to give a quick note. Uh, hope you enjoyed that one. You can go to. If you’re interested in our wet fly swing pro community. Uh, we are now doing monthly challenges all month long, all year long, and you can jump in there and see what we have going. We’re working on some fly casting right now. If you’re interested in upping your game there or joining us on a trip or connecting with members, you can do that right now. Sign up there and we’ll let you know when we open the doors back up. I want to give you a heads up a couple things before we get out of here. Uh, one thing tomorrow we have a great episode, uh, with the winner of the on Denmark Lodge dry fly school trip. Eric’s going to be here. It’s really it’s going to be our first time actually hearing from a winner of one of our events that we’ve done. So you’re going to hear it from the guy who who won the trip, what it feels like. So catch that tomorrow. And also want to give a shout out to our Montana Spring Creek School, which is going right now. Uh, the Montana Fly Fishing lodge. We’re doing it right now. It just opened up. If you’re interested in entering that giveaway, you can do it right now. Fly! Com slash giveaway. This is your best chance for a shot. And if you want to get access to this trip, we do have a few slots. We’re opening up as paid slots. You can reach out to me Dave at com. Uh, we’ve got a special place in Montana. We’ve been talking a little bit about it. So if you want to get involved in this, check into it now and we’ll give Dave a huge thanks again for the great episode. Hope to get him back on soon. I hope you have a great, uh, great morning, great afternoon or evening wherever you are in the world. And I appreciate you for stopping in today. Have a good one. 01:15:10 Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to the Wet Fly Swing Fly Fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit Wet Fly com.