scrap materials and sticking eyes

SAVE THE PLANET THROW NOTHING AWAY
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so tying big gaudy predator flies is great but there is a down side you always seem to have bits left over that is not enough to make a big 6 inch fly or even a 4 inch fly but of course you always have the option of making a very small fly of a couple of inch's long that will catch you you no end of predatory species and its always worth bearing in mind that even a very big pike or predator will take a smaller fly my biggest pike a river fish of 25lb was taken on a fly of just a few inches long its probably the equivalent to us nipping in to the shop for a snickers bar just because we fancy it ........................:-)

so you can see just in the bottom right of this pcture that i had some scraps of spectrum fibre from www.pikeflyrod.com left over from some patterns i was doing , so rather than throw those scraps of material I'm going to do a small predator baitfish pattern , so a 2/0 gamakatsu sl hook goes in the vice

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being scrap material the lengths are sometimes a bit odd but this adds to the overall effect of the fly so on it goes to create the body and body length , I've used as i do in most of my ties a clear mono thread as once its varnished or epoxied it goes invisible , so I've tied the scrap lengths in right up to the hook eye
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scrap material and tie it in facing forward of the hook eye , this will be tied in hollow tie style , again don't worry if the lengths or odd this wont matter a jot when the fly is wet as it will all stick to the body when wet and not look odd at all
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coming together nicley

xt is add the back in , really whatever colour you have lying about or fancy the black spectrum flash above was around 5 inch's lone and all I've done is laid the spectrum on top so 3 inch's is running from the eye to the back of the fly and 2 inch's out the front so when you tie it back its gives you a nice back profile as you can see from the picture above
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s case a blue gator eyes from www.deercreek.com nick has a great range of eyes in various sizes and is well worth checking out , on the underside of the fly I've given it a spot of red permanent marker between the eyes , this is before i add the epoxy although adding any kind of epoxy head is purely up to the individual tier ...
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and most of these means i haven't got time to sit and add pressure to eyes while the glue drys , so my solution to this is to use some plastic non spring pegs yup they have just the right amount of pressure to hold eyes in place and apply just enough pressure to keep the eyes in place while the glue drys and when your doing a few of the same pattern it really does work well , in this case i had batches of 5 flies to do of one pattern so i tie 5 flies without eyes then glue the 5 sets of eyes on and rack them as in the picture above ......

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once I've done the 5 ill start on the next lot and when I've tied up the 5 flies the glue will be set on the first set , so they are replaced with the next ones and so you do this until all the flies are done perfect I've used the absolutely wonderful croc glue on the flies as its really the best I've ever come across for eyes so far croc glue can be bought from www.deercreek.co.uk

one of the many flies I've done over the last few days this is called the portmore ghost a fantastic slverywhite bait fish with an orange UV inner core a really tasty pike snack if you want to buy any of these flies head on over to predatorbite in the UK they also ship worldwide

ready to go

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if your on face book search out the pike fly fishing association and you'll find you'll be able to join the clubs open group , which we set up to provide information on pike fly fishing without having to join the club itself it more an information and discussion page , although a lot of the club members are also on there as well to add input , well as it happens there was a discussion popped up on a certain kind of wire leader , well me being be i decided to preach on about authanic wire on that thread , and turns out a few people hadn't heard of it so I've done a little video on this amazing leader so please feel free to watch it and share it if you like it will give you an idea just how easy this stuff is to use well tell you what ill let the video do the talking enjoy





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remember a fishing brother is for life a fly is only as good as its next fish

tight lines

mcfluffchucker

(a cave in Scotland)