We recently took a much-needed vacation to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan. We saw a lot of beautiful scenery, learned a bit about the local history, and may have found yet another new obsession.
Tag: fishing
Trying to catch, uh, rabbits? No, wait, it’s fish, isn’t it?
We had a good month off and are back on the blog again. And we did do some fishing. We spent a few days out in the Black Hills of South Dakota with a day trip into Wyoming.
I’ve posted about the tools, materials, and even the hooks used in fly tying. Today we’re going to tie it all together (sorry!) and make a fly.
We’re going to make a fly called a Blue Wing Olive. It’s intended to imitate mayflies of the genus Baetis. There’s thousands of species in the genus, but most of them have an olive green body, with grey wings, tail, and legs.
Despite rumors to the contrary, we don’t spend all of our time outdoors backpacking. We also go fishing!
In a previous post I talked about fly tying materials. And in another post I discussed the tools used to tie fishing flies. Today, I’d like to discuss the fish hooks used for fly fishing. Fly tiers use a wide variety of types of hooks. Let’s look into why they do that.
Michelle and I like to fly fish. “Flies” in this sense are fishhooks decorated with thread, fur, yarn, and feathers to resemble natural creatures that fish like to eat. That often means bugs of some sort, but it’s possible to tie flies that simulate minnows, worms, leeches, and even frogs and mice.
It turns out you need an awful lot of flies. There’s a huge variety of things that fish might be eating, and it’s important to use a fly that resembles the things the fish are eating at this moment. So you need a huge variety of flies.
I was looking through some pictures the other day and I noticed how many of them showed people fishing. It was a popular way to pass the time for Carl and Georgie and other members of their family.
