There's a moment, standing in a river, when you open your box and choose a fly you tied yourself, a fly you wrapped at the vise on a Tuesday night while the dog slept and the kettle whistled, and you knot it on and cast it to a fish you can see. That moment is different. It's not buying a fish. It's making one.
We tie because it slows us down. Because a dubbing loop and a hackle pliers and a spool of 8/0 thread ask for the kind of attention that nothing else in the day asks for. Because the vise is the one place where your hands have to be exactly where your eyes are.
The fly is the lie you tell the fish. Tying it yourself is the part of the lie you get to keep.
We tie because it's cheaper, eventually, if you don't count the hours. We tie because the fly shop an hour away doesn't always have the size 22 you need at seven in the morning. We tie because a fly you lost in a tree hurts less when you know you can make another one in twelve minutes.
Where to start
Start with three flies: the woolly bugger, the pheasant tail nymph, and the elk hair caddis. They cover ninety percent of what you'll ever need to put in front of a fish, and they teach you every technique you'll use for the rest of your life at the vise. We have step-by-step videos for all three over on the Vise page.
You don't need much. A vise, a bobbin, a pair of hackle pliers, some scissors, a whip-finisher (or your fingers), and a handful of materials. The whole kit fits in a shoebox. The flies you tie in your first month will be ugly and they will still catch fish. This is the secret nobody tells you at the start.
