First Tuesday Tips

Tip 4: Don't Forget the Oldies

(This is Tip 232 in Skip's book, 365 Fly Fishing Tips for Trout, Bass, and Panfish)

This First Tuesday Tips: Tip 4 applies to Trout in Streams, Trout in Lakes, Largemouth Bass in Lakes, Smallmouth Bass in Streams, Smallmouth Bass in Lakes, Panfish in Lakes.

First Tuesday Tips: Tip 4, Don't Forget the Oldies'Atop that very old Leonard reel, the Renegade.
Lower left, Dave's Eelworm Streamer. Lower right, the Carey Special.
(photo ©Carol Ann Morris)

The top flies of earlier eras keep coming back around and that’s a good thing—they are, after all, proven fish catchers. Check out the flies in a print-and-paper or on-line catalog and you might find, among all sorts of snazzy new patterns with trendy or catchy (sometimes lewd) names, the Carrie Special nymph from the 1920s, or the old Renegade dry sporting a hackle-collar at each end. As fly-tying and fly-design theories evolve and cycle, and fly patterns rise to prominence then sink to obscurity, some good stuff gets forgotten.

The fish we seek have, if not truly evolved, certainly wised up on the whole. Catch-and-release has educated trout, largemouths, smallmouths, bluegills, and maybe even crappies to the fly fisher’s deceptions. (No, on second thought, not crappies, those poor, speckled, lovely brain-numb slabs. . .) All this, and yet that Carrie Special, a fly from a time when tippets were of silk and all fly rods had metal ferrules, catches trout in lakes today. I still fish the Eelworm Streamer, a largemouth-bass fly that first appeared in The Fly Tyer’s Almanac (yes, “tyer”—some fly fishers like to spell it that way), published in 1975, and still catch bass on it. Trust me: there’s nothing about the Eelworm that largemouths have stopped liking.

So if someone tells you he really nailed the rainbows on such-and-such lake or the smallies on such-and-such river with some ancient fly pattern, don’t smile all smug as he walks away, shaking your head in pity for this Neanderthal stuck in fly fishing’s Pleistocene epoch. Instead, consider fishing the pattern he mentioned.

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*Announcements*



Skip has an essay in Big Sky Journal's annual Fly Fishing issue, called "Montana Hoppers: the Princess and the Brute" released February 1, 2023. Skip rewrote it a bit; I painted and illustrated it here, on our website. Here's the link on our web page to check it out:


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Top 12 Dry Flies for Trout Streams: How, When, and Where to Fish Them, is now available on Amazon as an ebook...check it out! Click on the links below to go to the information page on Top 12 Dry Flies (the link to Amazon is at the bottom of the page...)


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Top 12 Dry Flies for Trout Streams: How, When, and Where to Fish Them (the link to Amazon is at the bottom of the page)...

Top 12 Nymphs for Trout Streams: How, When, and Where to Fish Them, 2nd Edition, originally published as an e-book only, is now available on Amazon as a paperback...check it out! Click on the links below to go to the information page on Top 12 Nymphs (the link to Amazon is at the bottom of the page...)

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Top 12 Nymphs for Trout Streams: How, When, and Where to Fish Them (2nd Edition). . .



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500 Trout Streams...

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365 Tips for Trout, Bass, and Panfish...



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Skip's ultra-popular Predator—a hit fly for bluegills and other panfishes and largemouth bass (also catches smallmouth bass and trout)—is being tied commercially by the Solitude Fly Company.

Skip Morris's Predator

The Predator


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Skip Morris's Predator

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