It happens all the time, at least to me. I get a great idea for a fly, tie a few up and hit the river. The first opportunity I get to try the fly—as in, the second I hit the water, regardless of what is/isn’t coming off or what the fish are/aren’t rising to—I fling it on the water for a test run. Trouble is, sometimes occasionally usually, the experiment is a complete bust.
How often do you check your fly box(es)? Do you ever see little gobs of fur huddling in the dark recesses of that box? Did that killer palmered-hackled-bead-headed-foam-bodied-articulated emerger become so rusted gnarled that even the fish won’t touch it any more? Has that chartreuse and hot pink streamer expended its usefulness already?
Have you ever wondered what the half-life is of the flies in your box? Of course, the beauty is, half-lifing your flies never actually gets you to zero—you can justify keeping your flies forever because there will always be "usefulness" left in them.
I was recently digging through my mayfly box wondering whatever happened to the usually ubiquitous parachute adams patterns. A mayfly box without an adams is like moldy chum sans mold, singlebarbed without brownlining or underground trout above the ground.
But I digress. What was equally as startling as my lack of adams was the unused items collecting rust lint (my fly boxes never get wet when I fall cool off in the water). So I figured it was time to clear out the linted, experimental, chewed up and slightly gaudy flies. But what to do with them? Being the tightwad green conservationist I am, I couldn’t see just tossing them as the solution.
"Reduce, reuse and recycle." The tightwad green in me thought of these words, and there you have it:
Watch those fingers!
That’s the cheapest friggin’ a Class 1, nickel-plated, APA (American Painter’s Association) approved paint scraper.
Careful with that blade, Eugene!
Saving a few shekels and keeping the world a better place. Just chuck all of the removed items into your coffee blender (the special one for dubbing, not your wife’s special one for beans), let her rip, and you have some great material for a bass bug:
Bass bug fodder.
What’s your favorite method for deconstructing the fly, rescuing hooks and being green?
Haha! I haven’t razored a fly for a while but I will admit to doing it. I’m an experimenter, and have tied hundreds of flies that just didn’t turn out the way I’d dreamed in my mind. You know the ones, patterns that were going to be the killers. Anyway, I used to strip them down and reuse the hooks. I then got lazy, and after a few hundred attempts of coming up with a “new” fly, I gather them up and take them to my ex-bro-in-law who is a wannabe fly fisher, but doesn’t put in the time to be good at it. He loves the mis-fit bugs (mainly because he doesn’t know they are mis-fits) and uses them on the rare outings once or twice a year. I get rid of the garbage flies and he thinks I’m the nicest guy in the world. Of course, with the price of gas, I may go back to the razor technique.
You could also take that pile of trimmed material and make a Garbage Can Caddis. Jack Dennis used to make them after a fly tying demo. Place all the materials in a dubbing loop, twist up tight, wrap around the hook, tie a soft hackle in front, and then go catch a fish!
Robert,
Excellent idea, donate all those worthless unique flies to a sucker novice and you win twice: get rid of your junk and you look good doing it.
Garbage Can Caddis. Very nice idea, I’ll have to give that a try. I’ve tied up a few ugly looking things (that, believe it or not, actually have worked) and I just call it The Big Ugly.
I do this everyday. Hooks are expensive.
Mic, Then you’re one up on me. Any idea how much you save?