Flies

The Mardi-Craw is a fly that grabs your attention and will surprise you on the water. In this tutorial, Chris walks us through one of his most productive signature patterns step-by-step.

My Rinse & Repeat is one of my favourite subsurface backswimmer patterns. It fishes best on one of my RIO Ambassador Series lines, such as the Stillwater Floater, Midge Tip, or Aqualux.

Welcome to the first episode of Tie & Fish, a new fly-tying series where I demonstrate useful trout flies and explain how I fish them. To begin the series, I’m tying three of the most-watched fly patterns on my channel: The Unsinkable Sedge, The Competition Special Cormorant, and The Basic Quill Buzzer.

Davie McPhail ties his Suspender Parachute Hopper Midge, leaving out the hackle and incorporating high-density foam.

The Powder Puff FAB is a straightforward take on a material most stillwater anglers already know well. By taking the time to thoroughly puff out the Eggstasy yarn, you get a much fuller, higher-profile bug on the hook without unnecessary weight or bulk.

Peacock herl catches fish, and the Zug Bug is mostly peacock herl. That iridescent green-bronze body does the heavy lifting - it reads as a caddis larva, a mayfly nymph, or a small dragonfly nymph depending on where you swim it, which is why it has held a spot in fly boxes for the better part of a century without much argument.

This week's flies head from trout water out to the salt and back again. First up is Charlie Craven's Jigged Pheasant Tail Nymph, a durable olive version of the classic, tied heavy and built around pheasant fibers that usually go unused. After that it's Ben's Weedless Fire Tiger Minnow from Fly Fish Food, a three-material baitfish made to get down into thick...

A good crab fly for redfish is built around three things before it is built around realism: it rides with the hook point up so it stays out of oyster and grass, it lands soft so it doesn't spook a tailing fish in inches of water, and it's tied from synthetic materials tough enough to survive being crushed and dragged all day. Where you lash the weight sets...

The best flies for the fall mullet run are wide-bodied, water-pushing patterns three to five inches long on No. 1 to 3/0 hooks: an EP Mullet, Chicone's Five-Minute Finger Mullet, a Sea-Ducer, a Half 'n' Half to get down, and a hollow-tied profile for adult-mullet feeds. But the pattern matters less than where you put it. Predators track the mullet's wide...

A deer-hair diver is a spun-and-packed floating bass bug trimmed to a tapered face and a swept-back collar, so it ducks a few inches under the surface on the strip and floats back up on the pause. A slider is a slimmer cousin with a V or bullet face that wakes quietly across the top. Tying either one well comes down to three things: strong thread, coarse...