Fly Tying Bench Therapy

 Well its dark and cold and time to start the struggle against my usual winter blues.

 I’ve been thinking a lot about salmon flies lately, so will get set-up to tie a handful of Blue charms. This is one of my favorite flies to tie, probably because it is one of my favorites to fish.

In the last couple of years I’ve been tying it in all sizes from # 16 to # 4 but the one that works best for me on any given day is a sparse #12 with a couple of strands of crystal flash in the wing.

I first saw the flash added to conventional flies during a trip Gander a few years ago.

 It changed our trip from average to outstanding. Since then, if I’m tying up a handful of whatever pattern I’ll always add a bit of flash to two or three of them.

I did some research on the Blue Charm out of curiosity, to see where it came from and who originated it but so far am no wiser.

 It is one of those patterns that just seems to have always been around in one form or another.

 I did an experiment last year where I tied a couple of Blue Charms in every colour of floss I had in my kit. I followed the recipe exactly but changed the body colour.

Another variation is tying the classic pattern but with different coloured tags. The resultant flies are very pretty but I have not used them enough to announce a new killer Salmon pattern.

I can say with confidence that a Blue Charm tied with a red body and two strands of crystal flash in the wing is a phenomenal trout fly for fast water. That aside, the idea behind changing the body colour was simple.

 I was fishing not long ago on a local river when a fellow hollered across the stream to his buddy, who was fast into a grilse, “ What are they taking?” The reply was, “Anything yellow”.

I could digress into a great fishing story here but I’ll stick to the point. Part of the lore of salmon fishing is the colour preference different runs on different rivers have. It is part of the precious local knowledge that strangers usually have to learn the hard way.

They don’t call salmon, “ The Fish of a Thousand Casts” for nothing.

I have in the back of my mind the rivers and their colours and can rhyme off an ever-increasing list: The Medway - orange, the St Mary’s – green, the Phillip –yellow and so on. The colours sometimes change from spring to fall, from year to year and even from grilse to salmon. Heck, it may not even be true but I try to match the preferred colour for the river, run and season when putting my first fly through a pool.

 Now, with that in mind, another thing I think is that certain fly patterns work better than others just because of the way they are designed and built. The Blue Charm is one of these.

Putting these separate trains of thought together, it makes sense to me that a fly design that is proven but tied in the particular, preferred colours of the run you are fishing should have a pretty good chance.

In my mind there will come a day when a fresh run of fish has just hit the pool. Nothing seems to work until one of us remembers that the fish on this river prefer a particular shade of chartreuse that I just happen to have because of this wacky experiment. Well, one can dream.

The reality is, I’ll have to tie a few more this winter because even though I have not had the chance to try many over salmon, salmon fishermen really seem to go for them.