Tying with wire

I got these beaut new "Lucent" tungsten beads on the weekend. The motivation was that I lost most of the flies from the Flyshop.co.nz's member's forum "FlySwap - The Bling Bling Swap". A flyswap is quite a cool notion. You enter your name, there's a limit of up to 15 tiers, and if you're in you tie the same pattern of fly for each of the 15. Oh yeah, and a few extras for the bloke/blokess who handles the swap, coordinates it, photographs the flies, sorts and dispatches the final set out to the participants.

On the day (opening) "Bling-Bling" seemed very apt for the conditions. I wanted flies that the fish could see, and that carried enough weight. (Shoulda used a glo bug and a chunk of split shot like Milo did). Anyway, Jack Kos' fly was one that got away from me, hooked in a tree, or on a snag I, can't remember which.

I liked the effect of the wire on the abdomen, in this case a green/red combination. The legs and hairy thorax are good triggers too, but I felt it could be enhanced with a bead, and a bit of Masterbrite (type that into your spell checker and see what you get.... ok I'm not the first person to make that joke but still).

I ended up tying up some pretty weird stuff. I dropped the tail off, got a Partridge "Klinkhamer" hook as the base (beautiful hook but the sizes are like no other manufacturers sizes so my size 16 and 14 order arrived looking likes 10's & 8's). The central theme in each case was the wire abdomen. This style of tie is as old as the hills; flies like the Brassie have been around forever. I tied one of those when I was 11 or 12, and thought I'd invented a new fly.... then of course there's the very famous Copper John series from John Barr, etc etc. Like I said, nothing is new.

The beauty of these flies is:

1. Construction is slim and heavy - they beat surface film and water tension and sink well
2. Construction is heavy duty, they stand up well to trout teeth
3. The are visible
4. They are easy to manufacture (relatively)

Copper Johns

Anyway, it was a good exercise in refilling my depleted fly box. Hope the fish appreciate it!