A warmly-dressed angler fishes on the North Platte River. Winter during a pandemic may be the perfect time to consider tying your own flies.
It’s winter. It’s a pandemic. Temperatures are hovering somewhere a bit above or well below zero. Vaccines for COVID-19 are being distributed, but most of us still don’t have them.
Instead of staring longingly at your fly rod, wondering if it’s worth casting when you know your eyelets will freeze in moments, consider a fly fishing-adjacent activity. Consider tying your own flies.
“For me, it’s the art of it. You can tweak any existing pattern, and you can come up with your own stuff,” said Justin Genther with the Ugly Bug Fly Shop in Casper. “But the main part is the art of it. It’s art as much as drawing or painting, it’s just a different medium.”
And he’s not wrong. Journalist Kirk Johnson once wrote about the dark underworld of Victorian salmon-fly tying, the world that ultimately ended up with a museum heist of hundreds of bird skins, many from species now extinct.
But that’s not why most people begin tying their own flies. Fly tying largely begins from either a place of necessity, boredom, interest or a combination of the three.
For Genther, it was necessity.
“I’ve been tying since I was 10. I started fly fishing and where I grew up there weren’t any fly shops, so I started tying to have flies to fish,” he said.
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