tie it, then fish it in your head

Tying for the Way You Actually Fish

Lesson: Tie It, Then Fish It in Your Head

okay. this is the last lesson before the notebook one, and it's kind of a weird one to teach because there's no new skill in it. no new material, no new technique. what this lesson is, is a habit — a way of looking at a fly you just finished before you ever get to the stream with it.

here's the idea. you've tied the fly. it's sitting in your hand or clamped in the vise, done. before you toss it in the box with the others, you fish it in your head. you walk through where you'd actually use it and what it has to survive to work.

that sounds a little abstract so let me make it concrete.

what "fishing it in your head" actually means

you're not daydreaming about a nice day on the river. you're asking specific questions, in order:

where does this fly go in the water? floating on top, riding in the film, drifting just under the surface, or bumping along the bottom. if you don't know the answer for a fly you just tied, that's a problem, because the answer changes what "correct" even means for that fly.

what does it have to survive to get there? a nymph that's going to get pounded through a riffle needs to hold together different than a dry fly sitting pretty on slow water. we've talked about this — fast freestone water doesn't give a trout much time to inspect your fly, so it doesn't have to be pretty, but it does have to survive getting slammed through rocks and current without falling apart. if your fly looks great on the vise but you can already tell a good take is going to shred it, that's worth knowing now, not after you've lost three of them in an hour.

what's the retrieve or drift actually going to do to it? a fly sitting still in your hand looks nothing like a fly getting dragged, twitched, or dead-drifted. picture the motion. does the material collapse weird? does the wing fold flat? does the body spin?

you're basically doing a pre-flight check using your memory of the water instead of the water itself. it takes maybe fifteen seconds once you're used to it. it saves you from tying a whole dozen of something that was never going to hold up.

why i actually do this

i'll be honest, i didn't used to. i just tied the fly, moved to the next one, and let the stream sort out the good from the bad. and the stream does sort it out — that's kind of the whole appeal of tying, the feedback is honest — but losing a fly to bad tying costs you a fish, sometimes a whole morning if you don't have a backup. fishing it in your head first is just moving that feedback earlier, into the tying room, where it's free.

it also keeps me from a habit i had early on, which was fixing problems that weren't problems. my first dozen flies ever, i kept adding thread wraps at the head because in my mind more wraps meant more secure. every one of them ended up with this fat, bulky head, way out of proportion, thread piled on thread because i didn't trust it was done. brittney found one of those in the junk drawer two years later and asked me flat out if it was a cat toy. it kind of was, by then. that's what happens when you tie without picturing the fish's side of things — you solve for "feels finished to me" instead of "works in the water." fishing it in your head forces you to ask the second question.

how to actually do this at home

1. finish the fly, take it out of the vise, hold it at eye level.
2. name where it fishes — surface, film, subsurface, bottom.
3. picture the actual water you'd use it in. for most of us that's a specific run up the canyon or a stretch of the provo you know well. not generic water. your water.
4. picture the fly getting hit, dragged, or bounced through current, and watch for anything that looks like it'll fold, spin, or come apart.
5. if something looks wrong, decide right then if it's a proportion problem or a durability problem, because those get fixed differently — one's about measurement, one's about materials and how you secured them.

that's it. no new stitch, no new pattern. just a habit of checking your own work against the place you're actually going to use it, instead of against a photo in a book or how it looks sitting still on the vise.

one opinion i'll repeat here because it's relevant: proportions matter more than materials. when you're doing this mental fish-test, most of what trips people up isn't the thread color or the dubbing — it's a hook gap that's wrong, or a body that's too fat for the size fly it's supposed to be. cheap materials tied in the right proportions beat gorgeous materials tied wrong, every time i've tested it.

before next time: pick three flies out of your box, actual ones you already fish, and run them through this in your head before you fish them next. see if anything surprises you.