I’ve been fly fishing since I was seven and have obsessively collected flies for just as long. The fly box my father used as a young man, and I appropriated, sits on my writing desk; I’m looking at it now.
After sixty years, I decided to organize and inventory all of my flies. I’ve been at it for 10 days, and it’s been a real treasure hunt.
I found a crudely tied muddler minnow, crafted in high school, and snuck it into the family camper along with my Shakespeare Wonder Rod to fish in the Great Smokey Mountains on our way to Myrtle Beach for a family vacation in 1972.
I rediscovered a long-lost box of wooly worms tied during the winter months of 1983, in anticipation of my first season in Alaska, at Golden Horn Lodge; wooly buggers had yet to be designed.
I came across my first attempt at tying a mouse pattern after watching a red-backed vole disappear in the mouth of a rainbow trout on the Agulukpak River that first season. The tail was cut from my bootlace.
That first summer in Alaska I guided Ed Eppinger, and while he chuckled when I tied my crude attempt at a mouse onto his leader, the laughter stopped when, just moments later, an enormous trout boiled on that fly. The trout measured 26 inches and made the day.
Ed was the nephew of Lou Eppinger, the creator of the venerable Daredevle fishing spoon we all grew up with. At the time, he was the company’s director. A few weeks after he left, a package arrived for me. It contained several dozen Devil Bugs, along with a kind note and wishes for continued success on the river.
I haven’t fished them in forty years… perhaps this summer.
