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IMPORTANT
SITE UPDATE:
Visit the relaunched
Fish & Fly at fishandfly.com
The British Fly Fair 2004
The second British Fly Tying Fair was held on Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 November, with Fish & Fly one of the sponsors for an increasingly popular event. It was a great weekend for everyone interested in fly tying and fly fishing.
The second British Fly Fair, held at Trentham Gardens, Stoke-on-Trent, saw a 30 percent increase in visitor numbers. While the weather on the Saturday was grey and drizzly and not very encouraging for the outside fly casting demonstrators, inside the hall there was a great atmosphere with all the visitors eager to learn new tying techniques – or how to tie old techniques properly – from the line-up of international fly tiers.
Dutch fly tier and inventor of the superb CDC and Elk fly, Hans Weilenmann, was showing visitors how to tie this fly and others using CDC feathers. For those who thought that the natural oil in these flies was the reason for their natural buoyancy and have wondered how they could be dyed (the dying process requires feathers to be de-greased first) he explained that it is the structure of the feather that gives it its floatability. So dyed CDC feathers should float just as well as un-dyed ones. Charles Jardine, during the course of his talk with Simon Kidd in the Fish and Fly sponsored destination theatre, made the point that his early CDC flies did not float as well as he hoped and that he overcame this problem by using more feathers – four or five instead of just two or three.
Another pointer that might help intermediate fly tiers was the tremendous care that most demonstrators took to find just the right hackle for a particular application. There was no ‘that’ll do, it’s about the right size’. No, time and care was taken to select the best hackle.
Another Dutchman, Martin Westbeek (pictured right), was making tying Wally wings look ridiculously easy. It’s unfair! While looking at Skuli Kristinsson’s boxes of Icelandic salmon flies, one visitor described them as having been cloned. His standard of tying is so exceptional that each and every fly of the same pattern is to all intents identical. Truly and frighteningly impressive. Johan Klingberg, from Sweden, had a cased caddis with an Antron body which he had attacked with a cigarette lighter to good effect.
The Dutch fly tying equipment and materials company Efftcom had two of the most amazing fly tying ‘machines’ on its stand. To call them fly tying vices does not do justice the complexity of its custom tying system. For those who want something simpler there is the device 2 which is a high quality vice with either a table clamp or pedestal base. Efftcom has a website at www.efftcom.com but it is still under construction.
Demonstrations in the featured fly tier theatre were all very well attended. The use of a video camera focused on the tier’s hands and vice with the image shown on a big screen works very well. Featured tiers included Hans Weilenmann, Mike Martinek, Paul Whillock, Tim Trexler and Kim Boal (pictured right).
All the usual fly tying materials and equipment companies were doing good business. And this year they were joined by companies from Ireland, France and Sweden. There were also visitors from overseas including Sweden and at least one Frenchman.
The winner of the prize for the trade stand holder who had travelled the furthest was won by Norm Crisp who flew in from Kansas City to promote his streamside adventure fishing holidays. He provides fishing for brook, brown, rainbow and cutthroat trout on the smaller free-flowing, less heavily fished rivers including the Missouri and rivers in Wyoming.
He has access to over 150 miles of water. He takes his parties onto rivers in working ranch land where the cowboys still use horses. Accommodation is usually bed and breakfast. The season starts towards the end of June – once the snow melt has finished – through to the end of July.
There is a break while the ranchers irrigate their meadows for the hay crop and fishing starts again in September until mid-October when the snow comes, although the rivers are open for fishing all year round. You can find out more at www.streamsideadventures.com
There were some new interesting items of tackle on show, some for the first time in the UK. Sshoot Sportfishing was showing the Norwegian backwinder fly reels.
These reels are stunning to look at, light and very well-designed with some innovative features. For example the inside of the spool has three contoured projections. On a cold day when your hands are too cold to urn a small drag knob, all you do is push your fingers into the centre of the spool and turn it in the required direction. An impressive and practical solution. The trout-size reel, for #3 to #6 weight lines, is claimed to weight just 110 grams and the sea trout model, #6 to #9 lines, just 145 grams.
Greys were showing a very smart new seven-pieced Missionary travel rod and case with space for spare line, reel and small items of tackle. Very nice it looked too.