I have had very good luck on highly pressured fish by using a simple size 20 pheasant tail during a trico spinner fall. One fiber for the body + couple turns of blue dun or cream hackle. The hatches in PA start in early July and continue until the first hard frost. At first, the fish will take the s...

I was a bit surprised a few weeks ago to find out that Mr. Jacobsen was also an accomplished bamboo rod maker. I got an email from my friend Dr. Wolfram Schott in Germany asking me to review a technical article he wrote for an online magazine describing a very clever device for setting accurate dept...

Don't overlook this as a midge pattern in size 20-22 fished just under the surface. It will fool some tough fish sometimes.

There is a humorous anecdote about Vincent Marinaro in Harms and Whittle's book "Split and Glued by Vincent Marinaro". The book is about rod building, but Vince was also well known as an innovative fly tyer. It seems he became interested in the Tups pattern, and wanted to experiment with t...

Also a favorite with me. I tend to tie it on a size 8 hook with a fuller wing and hackle, fishing it as a sculpin type streamer. The underfur and webby hackle make the fly look much chunkier than it is when wet, but it does not cast bulky when lifted from the water. It's well worth a try with an oli...

To what has been said, I can only add that during an actual emergence, the fish will be chasing the nymphs into the shallows where they crawl onto rocks and hatch into duns. At that point, it's useful to have an unweighted fly and fish it just under the film like a streamer, twitching it across the ...

There is an interesting discussion of fishing the wet fly with active twitches in Ray Ovington's 1974 book "How to take Trout on Wet Flies and Nymphs". One of the techniques is identical to a common Tenkara technique, in which the angler dead drifts the fly down the center of a current for...

Hi William - There is just no telling what a fish will go for sometimes. I think most of us must have had the experience of hooking a fish on a two fly cast. While you are playing the fish, the other fly dances wildly around him like no natural insect ever could. But you will often see one or more o...

I will take a look at the loop turner next time in a fabric store. I am not familiar with those. I did think about seam rippers or a nitpicker, but the needle seemed like it might be more effective on the really tiny hooks, which is where I have the trouble. Sometimes a midge pheasant tail will work...

Hi Hank - The clip does grab the needle pretty tight, but I would be afraid of losing the device if walking through brush. I thought about putting foam inserts into the jaws to improve the grip more, and thought of some kind of a pen cap covering the whole tip. My vest has a deep, skinny pocket on t...