I don’t want to get in trouble with the fly tying community. But fly tying is a potential road block to your fly fishing success. This isn’t news I reckon and it’s related to the age old argument about presentation vs. fly pattern.
“… an over-plethoric fly book in the possession of a stranger will, with the knowing, place the angling ability of the owner under suspicion. Better a thousand-fold, are the single half-dozen flies the uses and seasons of which are fully understood than a multitude of meaningless creations.”
Orange Perry Barnes, Fishing in Wonderland (1910)
What do I mean When I Say Fly Tying Can Ruin Your Fly Fishing?
I’ll speak to you of my personal experiences as an example.
#1 Clutter at home:
I went downstairs to the basement tying area to tie some Pass Lake Wet Flies for the upcoming spring season. The first step is of course to gather the materials—hooks (check), peacock herl (check), hackle (check), antron for the wing (check), golden pheasant tippets … golden pheasant tippets … !!! Where the frack are the golden pheasant tippets ?!!! Well that question remains. I know they’re somewhere in that mess of fly tying crap.
If you are a well organized person maybe this isn’t a problem, but if you’re like me it is a huge problem. The more patterns you tie, the more material you gather, the more confusing and cluttered your fly tying area becomes. It seems like maybe not such a big deal – but you’ll never get those minutes of your life back. Every once in a while I do a big reorganization and what a great feeling that is – to know where everything is located. It makes the whole experience that much more enjoyable, and that is the whole reason that I got into it in the first place – to enjoy it. Clutter reduces my joy in fly tying. Simplify your fly tying, declutter your life and get more joy out of the process of tying.
“From a pragmatic point of view having a boxful of vague suggestions equips you for a greater range of situations.
Bob Wyatt, What Trout Want
A boxful of highly specific imitations feeds the anxiety that you might not have the correct one for the job.”
#2 Clutter on the Stream:
This comes in two flavors: actual clutter in the way of multiple fly boxes with too many patterns (most of which I don’t use), and the resultant mental clutter, confusion, anxiety and indecision.
If I had to pick one thing that slowed my progress as a fly angler it is the idea of match the hatch and the subsequent plethora of fly patterns that I tied in an effort to do so. And the reason for that is simple. If you think that the answer to the question of “Why am I not catching fish?” is that you’re using the wrong fly pattern then you’ll spend time digging through fly boxes, changing flies and not fishing. You can’t catch fish if your fly is not in the water. But worse than that you will not be focusing on the fundamentals that will actually make you a better angler such as reading water, being stealthy, presenting flies properly and good strike detection.
How do I know this is true?
Well the answer is simple. I changed my approach and I got better at catching fish.
In my case it was my interest and tenkara and the emphasis on technique over fly patten that seems to come along with tenkara angling. But this is not tenkara specific, for example you can look to competition anglers and find an emphasis on fundamental skills over fly pattern too. But the more I got into tenkara the more I became interested in simplifying my fly selection. It did not happen all at once, but it happened in baby steps. The final and biggest step was my “one-fly” season. A few years back I found myself drawn to the idea, that was circulating in tenkara circles, of fishing one basic pattern all the time. It was an experiment and I didn’t really know what to expect. Well, turns out that I still caught lots of fish, and I learned an awful lot about reading water and fly control and manipulation along the way.
The short story of that season is that I caught fish all season long on one basic pattern and at those times when I wasn’t catching fish, instead of reaching for a new fly I tried casting to different areas, or manipulating the fly differently or paying more attention to my stealth. I learned more in that season than in most of my fly fishing years up to that point combined. And the big lesson was that fly pattern is not nearly as important as as I thought, and that my focus on fly tying and fly pattern, had actually stunted my growth as an angler. Were there times when a change of pattern may have been useful? Sure, but overall I came out way ahead regarding my improved skills.
I love fly tying and still tie all sorts of different flies. But now I do it for the fun of tying itself and for the joy of catching fish on different flies rather from a place of anxiety and pressure to “have the right fly”.
If you’re interested in a good read on this whole idea two books that really helped me out are Bob Wyatt’s book What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths (as of this writing I’ve still got a few in stock- and on sale- in my shop –> click here to go to the Three Rivers Tenkara store); the other book (which actually turned me onto to Bob Wyatt’s What Trout Want) is Morgan Lyle’s fly tying book Simple Flies: 52 easy to tie patterns that catch fish —> here’s a link to the Amazon page for it)
Casting Around 
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