One of the enjoyable subsets of fly fishing is fly tying. Learning to tie and fish your own creations…and that attract fish. There are, it seems, a gazillion fly patterns out there. Really there are a few hundred patterns and many derivations of a single pattern. It is part of the exploratory/creative process of fly tying to change up patterns and to adapt patterns to new materials and successful experimentations.

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Here a simple wet fly pattern (wound partridge wing and dubbed body) is jazzed up with the addition of a gold bead head, white goose biots wings, orangish goose biots tail, copper ribbing over the addition of synthetic flash into the dubbing mix. All these materials flex, compress, pulse, twitch, flash as the fly drifts and tumbles through the riffles of a stream. It attracts, hopefully, by suggesting life.
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This macro image of the abdomen/thorax of the fly gives a glimpse of the fibers protruding from the dubbed (wrapped) material on the hook. Each protruding fiber will move, collect bubbles, all suggesting a living insect below the surface of the water….hopefully. A Busy Body as it were.