Some Flies You Have to Tie Yourself

There are some flies that you simply can’t buy. (I won’t use a commercially tied Merkin, for example, unless it’s on bonefish.) It has to do with confidence, with discriminating taste, or, as Mark Littleton points out, with the fact that some very effective ties would never convince a fly fisher to part with cash. “I have a caddis emerger pattern that looks something the cat coughed up. My theory is that birth is not a pretty process and emergers should be tied accordingly.” In the Seattle Times.