Flicking feathers

Step by step instructions for the Vladi worm, or condom worm. This is a great pattern for trout and grayling and relatively easy to tie

Step by step instructions  for an excellent hair wing salmon fly with a Russian twist.  The Shumakov long range tube is a nice alternative to bottle tubes or Scandinavian style with heavy cones while still providing a nice compact weighted  fly. Materials Used Shumakov Long range tube Plastic lining tube Thread: Veevus 10/0 black Flash: angel hair 1 hot orange, 2 gold, 3 peacock 1st hackle: grizzly cock dyed orange 2nd hackle: Blue guinea fowl Wing : Yellow and black polar fox Cheeks: Jungle cock

This series showed up on my suggestions page and I gave it a look, quite well put together and good tips for anyone looking to start out with short line nymphing.  My only bugbear is that they only fished 2 flies, I'm not sure about regs in America, but back home in Scotland I always fished 3 which allows for more control of depth through switching flies and positions

Heading off to Mexico this coming winter, so I've been hitting the vice. First on the list is the McCrab deer hair crab McCrab

Continuing with my fly tying videos recently, I've been doing a bunch of bonefish flies to build my  YouTube Channel (click here to sub)    so I thought I'd add them here  in one go than add separate posts as I go along later. Martyn's mantis                                            Borski craft fur worm The slamaroo

Last Monday I took my buddy Hideto from  the Tokyo flyfishing blog   out to show him the ropes. He'd been carping before but like most he'd struggled and never really got in to it.  Eventually I convinced him that carp were worth chasing and he asked to come along. I took him to a small river near my apartment, it doesn't have many big fish but it has a lot of fish so I was confident he'd get a fish or two.  After a quick coffee and explanation about the river, flies and presentation we headed up to the water. It took Hide a little while to get to grips with the presentation and reading the fish, although identifying takers is going to take more than one session to pin down. Any way we eventually got him a small fish about 20 inches or so after which his confidence started to grow along side a healthy respect for the carp as a fly fishing target. As the day wore on he picked up a few fish finishing with 5 or 6 nice little commons.  I didn't fish that hard as I

There's a lot written all over the internet about leaders and connections and some of it is good, some of it on the other hand is rubbish.  Anyway I thought I'd add add my tuppen'worth.  Today I changed over to my summer line on the carp set up. I use a WF 8 Rio Smallmouth Bass, in the summer here as it's just too hot for a cold water formula line.  Since I was changing back, I replaced the connections. I start by attaching  a length of 30lb fluorocarbon to make the butt section.  I use a modified Albright Knot for this.  Basically I tie an Albright, but leave the waste end of the fluorocarbon the same length as the end you would normally leave.  If you don't know the Albright you can find out how to tie it   here , just remember don't trim the waste like the standard knot. The next thing I do is furl the two ends together to make a single butt piece.  To avoid putting a ton of twist in the fly line I tighten the drag on the reel and pick up the whole ri