What are you doing..........

With all of the snow and brutal cold there's not much doing outdoors. We still take our daily walk, although limited it's still fresh air. Indoors is reserved to cleaning reels, eliminating flies from boxes, the kind that you haven't used, "why are they in there in the first place"...who knows. As you can see from my desk I have been tying and trying. I have to organize that desk. Last night I couldn't find room for my coffee cup.

Below are a couple of "light cahill" dry flies tied in the Catskill style. As you look at them you'll notice they do not have wings, innovative right, well maybe but I was not the first to try such a thing. While looking at several books about the Catskills I found several photos which show several of the well known tyers of that era tying flies without wings. In Mike Valla's book it shows several Rube Cross dry flies wingless as well as Art Flicks variant's. In the book "Land of Little Rivers" it shows a Walt Dette fly called the "Conover". This fly is also tied without wings.

I am sure there are many other patterns and tyers who also tied these delicate and crisp patterns without wings.

Though the two fies represent the "light cahill" they are a bit different. The shades of hackle are a light ginger, and a medium ginger. These are tied for the discriminating tastes of certain trout.

I just want to show you my latest piece of brook trout art. It's a line drawn male brook trout with a blue winged olive dry fly. The artist in Chase Bartee. He has several other outstanding art pieces for sale at his site. He and his friend Aimee, who is also an artist and is very good with a camera. They make some wonderful videos which you can view on their site http://tightloopsfly.com/home Tell them you saw it here.