|
When I got up for work last night, I found my
girlfriend had brought in the box containing the monster muddler Don
had sent as a prize for the Rope Dub swap. I sent him an email to
offer my sincere thanks, first of all for hosting the swap and spreading the
word about a technique that's revolutionized all of *my* fly tying, as well as
for furnishing the fly itself. I can't get over how perfect the fly
is with the scaled-up size. If you guys haven't checked out what he does,
its really worth a look because this is some seriously cool stuff. I hope
DonO and Byard don't mind me mentioning it, but http://www.fantasyflies.com is definitely
worth a look. The pictures are awesome, but they still don't do these
flies justice!
Sometime over the winter (its unusually difficult
right now to pin down times to anything less vague!) I intend to follow up
on Don's suggestion of putting together some good looking tying
instructions for the coffin fly I tied for the swap and to put a few of them
together in various sizes to show a few different ideas. I'm hoping that
someone can take what I figured out and make it work for their
purposes.
I'm really not kidding when I tell you that rope
dubbing has completely changed my approach to tying dry flies. Rope Dubbed
flies, IMHO, look better and certainly float better than anything I've ever
tried. I've found a number of fly configrations where simply changing
up the dubbing technique has yielded a fly you'd practically have to tie to a
rock to sink. Learning the technique, designing the fly I submitted and
following up by pulling ideas together from looking at everybody else's
flies and planning the writeup has been the single most rewarding experience and
absolutely the most useful thing I've done with a hook and materials since I
tied my first flies.
The flies I received in the swap were all awesome
and they all gave me lots of new ideas. In case you haven't noticed, I'm
100% sold on Don's technique and now I'm really trying to concentrate on ways to
use it on more and more of my dry flies. If anybody out there still hasn't
tried Rope Dubbing, *please* give it a shot! Otherwise you're missing out
on something incredibly useful that 30 of your VFB counterparts were able to
pick up and apply and do some really interesting, creative things
with.
Thanks a lot to all the participants and thanks a
million to DonO! Its been a great swap and I really appreciate all the new
ideas!
John Roth
Baltimore, MD
|
