All articles from section

Art Lingren's book on Syd Glasso and his flies pays well deserved homage to a very influential salmon fly tyer

The Mörrum fly has been named after the south Swedish river Mörrum, but is also sometimes referred to as The Grünewalder after its originator, Danish Jan Grünwald

To borrow from Jerry Maguire, you had me at 1700 patterns.

One thousand seven hundred patterns. Chew on that for awhile.

This book could have been printed with smeared blue ink on newsprint using a vintage 1970's mimeograph machine and it would be worth the cover price.

After two pages of introduction there 300 plus of patterns and photographs, those photographs taken by the author who has established his bona fides in such books as "Tying the Classic Salmon Fly", "Classic Salmon Fly Materials", and "Twenty Salmon Flies".

I have always been fascinated by Spey and Dee flies.
Sure, full dressed salmon flies are fascinating and beautiful, but the often lightly dressed Dee and Spey flies with their long and swung back hackles and low riding wings are just soooo fishy!
They all look like something, which could dig themselves perfectly into the jaw of a large Atlantic salmon.
At the same time they have the aura of the classics and you know that these patterns have fished all the great salmon waters of the world during all the great eras of salmon fishing.

Like many fly tyers, I've always had a fascination with spey style flies. Whether the slender classic dressings with their tented bronze mallard wings, or the bright featherwings of Syd Glasso, spey and spey style flies seem to bring out the best in fly tyers.

This book is titled Shrimp & Spey Flies for Salmon & Steelhead in the US

I had been looking forward to this book - not least because one of my fellow GFF partners, Steve Schweitzer, and I myself had been corresponding with one of authors, Chris Mann, and had supplied flies for the book.
Like most people I am a bit narcissistic. Most of us must admit that seeing our own name on print in a book does hold a certain degree of satisfaction.

A fly which is just a piece of imagination created one evenning in march. I have been fooling around with a plain type of steelhead or salmon flies this last year. These are all signified by simple feather wings and the use of classic materials like floss, tinsel and plain feathers

I've been fascinated with spey flies for a long time. The first I had ever seen was a Purple Spey tied by Tim Purvis, which arrived in a swap of steelhead flies a bunch of us FF@'ers exchanged several years ago. The next was an Olive Spey tied by Juro Mukai in a swap of atlantic salmon flies.

I came upon an idea. Actually I combined two incidents into one idea. First of all I was going through my heron feathers (yes, I have more than one) and found some butts that I had saved after having tied whole body hackles. I wanted to use these feathers, which still had a lot of useful and long barbs, but unfortunately a very thick stem.