I know some of you are old but I'm sure no one for gets the first fly they landed something on. Mine was a renegade And it was in idaho, I was 12 and had know idea what I was doing, though I thought I did, wait I still have that problem. Anyways it was just a little 10 rb but I was so happy. I will never forget that fly and I always keep some with me, though I haven't used one in I don't know how long. Maybe I will give that a try next time my luck isn't going good.
A royal couchman they were the most talk about fly in my day and looked buggy to me. It took me a long time to figure out that that fly wasent worth a shit. Ha ha, took me about 4 outings to relize this. Finally caught a small brook trout. It was a hard lesson, but I was ecstatic. I haven't used one since, ha ha.
Elk Hair Caddis. 10" Brown on the Gibbon in Yellowstone in 2010. Followed that up with a 14" Brown a few days later on a Zebra nymph dropper. That's it in my avatar.
I was eleven. I used a "Professor" at Soda Lake, rather than throw a yellow crappie jig for perch, crappie and bass. Productivity fell off a bit, but I was in seventh heaven!
My 7th Grade science teacher, Mr. Neidhart, offered to teach some of us to tie flies and make lures after school.
I went home and tied some kind of wooly worm looking thing and caught a fish on the Bitterroot R. with it using my Grampa's bamboo rod.
#12 or 10 Renegade, Deer Creek, Idaho outside Boise. First steelhead on a fly - Dragonfly, skated on the Green R. (that tells you how long ago...) between 18 and FG
Six Pack on Cottage lake. Missed 5 or 6 strikes before hooking up and then proceeded to catch dozens of fish before my arm got too tired to pull in another and I went home happier than a 6 year old in Disneyland with an unlimited supply of candy on his birthday....
A standard Royal Coachmen floating in the outlet of Sacheen Lake...taken by a big fat 15" doofus of a brooktrout (length and girth varies with credulity of audience). The fly was floating in a bird's nest tangle of leader and line. I tied the fly (oh, how I labored over those white feather upright wings....working to achieve perfect symmetry.....not then realizing that only flyfisherman, not fish, gave a shit about such things).
It was doubly satisfying....opening day, observed by luckless crowd of worm fisherman lining the nearby bridge, clouds just pissing rain, and the old man got skunked.
That was over 50 years ago, and sometimes my casts are occasionally just as crappy these days....and I agree...Coachmen really aren't that hot a fly....and Renegades are still the shiznit for catching fish. One of my grandsons taught me that word...and I like it a lot.
It's a little cliché, but it was a size 12 black woolley bugger. My math teacher brought his drift boat to work and asked my mom if he could take me out on Pine Lake for the afternoon. He rowed his ass off while I trolled that bugger from my brand new Orvis Clearwater fly rod. I haven't looked back since.
Dang! I can't remember! I still have some of the first wet flies that I tied back in 65 (a year before our family moved to Oahu and I took a 35 year hiatus from fly fishing), and I will occasionally pull one out and fish it for Coastal Cutts. The pattern still works just fine! Maybe it was one of those. (Or else a dry Royal Coachman, that I bought).
Most of the ones I tied back then were a generic wet cutthroat pattern, with red and yellow floss bodies, deer hair wing, and palmered grizzly. I think i was trying to copy some established cutthroat pattern I had seen.
My tying tools were cheap, primitive, and basic. I didn't even have a bobbin. I just held the thread between my finger tips and let the spool spin inside a coffee can. I'm pretty certain that I obtained the thread from my Mom's sewing kit. I had the cheapest stamped vice available at the time. I used 3 half-hitches to finish up my large, sloppy thread heads.
I didn't fly fish nor tie any flies between 1966 and 2002, though.
I've still got a Muddler Minnow that I picked up at Dan Baileys when we drove thru Livingston on our last trip to visit relatives in N Dakota, back in the summer of '65. Its still in its original plastic box, and has never been fished. I think its now the oldest fly I have, except maybe for the cutthroat flies I mentioned. I tied those around the same time.
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