its all in the thickness

OK so after a busy weekend at work and only being able to tie a few patterns after id fallen into orvis on the way i got to thinking you know materials are expensive and really you want to get as much out of a pack as possible , so how doe you go about it , well i remember e.p fibre was still a rare find in the UK and there was only a few places stocking it those days were the forefront of fishing with the fly for other species this country was still very much trout and salmon and only a few crazy people were pike fly fishing and yes i was one of those people and many years before others had even seen a fly rod , decent materials were hard to get especially in pike sizes

-------------

so with that in mind when i was looking to the American bill fish fly market a lot of them were using ep fiber so this was a good starting point , when i got my first 2 packets of it (white and olive) i had to sit there and work out what to do with stuff there was no step by steps and the e.p site was very basic so with two packs i was getting 3 flies out of it bloody expensive way to go

------------

the eureka moment came maybe 6 months after i got my first packs of the stuff when quite randomly i was watching a video on you tube of a guy fishing for some fast American saltwater species he turned to his Friend and said just look at that fly in the water there it was an ep fly well his mate said great movement in that and this guy says well its a mistake a lot of people make with ep fiber they put way to much on the hook with this stuff less is more , let me tell you its taken me a lot of years and a lot of experimenting to get to the stage I'm at now with synthetics and indeed less is more with this stuff

--------------

the fly below is from a few months back simply done with the hollow tie method , a great profile light weight and done with half a pencil thickness materials

so a great looking lightweight fly but as id bought some sf and slink and flash at the weekend and with Christmas coming i needed to get the most out of a pack and maximise the amount of flies i get from it so how low could i go well best thing to do was try it and see so i set to work

--------------

below is a cocktail stick with some flash and slinky next to it,this piece is for the front side sections of the bait fish further down .

here is 2 sections of the fibre tied in ready to be done hollow style if your interested in the hollow tie method check out Steve farrah videos here theres a lot of people out there who claim this method as there own but check out all the pdf files on this site and you'll see that Steve has been doing it fort a while and some fantastic step by steps as well , you can also notice that you can see my hand through the materials that's how much less I'm using , if you were to up this to a pencil thickness you wouldn't see through it

-------------

so having built up a few layers hollow style and adding a purple lateral line to it i then just need to add the olive sf for the back but you can already see i have a fly pretty much the same as the fly at the start of this post but using half the materials therefore getting double the flies out of a packet but not losing the quality of the tie and still have a great looking fly in the water
--------

so the finished result below is a dam fine bait fish worthy of any hungry pike and made with half the materials and the flies below this little rainbow trout pattern are done using the same method you really cant go wrong

just makes you want to go fishing doesn't it I'm pretty sure smaller versions of the flys below would do really well for Pollock and other sea species that swim around the UK coast line but that i think is for another day .......


so armed with this new knowledge ill be tying a bucket load of new stuff this week yes I'm tying again this week because my trip this week looks like its up the Swanee due to ice oh well that's winter for ya .........

Dave mcfluffchucker
(a cave in Scotland)