More ties in waiting for Spring.

Greetings from a cold snowy southern Finland.Not much to tell you about,just waiting for some warmer weather to get out to practice some casting with my DH-rod,bought me a Matias Drugge DVD Scandinavian fly casting to learn some basics,have watched it over and over and now I´m burning for to do some real test casts but don´t dare to put any pressure on a rod while the temp is about -20 degrees celsius so I have killed some time by tying flies.
Because I have about 2000-3000 pike flies and I decided to some other flyfishing the forthcoming season I have tied mostly flies for salmon and trouts lately because I
don´t got too many.
Seatrout flies is also in my plans later on but with no further bullshit,here´s my latest ties:











Tying hasn´t always been easy,nice to find out at this moment that you have forgot to add a fuckin tail,well,this super bee have to get along without it.





It ain´t bad even without a tail either :)

Bought me some grizzly marabou here the other day and today I finally made something about it,one for salmon and seatrout and even if I got enough pikeflies I had to tie one more,this time on tube.





I have tied some flies now so next investment will be some new fly boxes.

Fly tying,lurebuilding and new stuff

This has been a short winter,really,two months to go before go expo fair.Three months to go before Finnish fly fishing fair,and hopefully we got some open water after that so I could go out testing all that stuff that has been bought or built this winter,have to say that I have built a lot of both lures and flies.
A big challenge has been to learn to tie other flies than for pikes,I mean,even the bigger tubeflies for Seatrouts are very small not to mention the flies for Trouts or Salmon.
Anyway,it has been refreshing to now and then try something new.

Talkin about something new I´ve also built some lures and repaint some old,it has been nice too after a long pause,not that I´m gonna use many of them except the spinner baits.

Anyway,here some lures.










There are many more,should update this blog more often,would probably remember more lures I have built.

And then some flies,not pike flies this time.











These are for Salmon and Sea Trout.Also tied some smaller flies #12 - #16 for trout.





Got also more flies tied up but let´s put them up on next post.
So,that´s lures and flies,still not enough,also bought me two new reels,Orvis Mach V and a Greys GTX 4.Both for 9-11 line class.



Gonna need some lines more for salmon fishing,think I will go for a skagit 510-550 grain with a floating or intermediate tip ?????
For pike fishing I am in a lucky position I don´t necessary need anything to be bought,just some new flies maybe ,got some visions of new patterns.
But salmon flies have to be tied a lot before spring,only issue is I´m really not sure if my flies that is tied will work,would be a disaster if I tie a whole army of flies that don´t work,would be nice to be able to test them,anyway,showed them to a friend who fish for salmon and he said they will,I trust him.

Spring-clean

Exactly the same situation as last year almost exactly at same time.My cosy little tying corner had slowly turned into a place I just flipped instead of relaxing.

All my stuff had changed place from last years spring-clean and I was in a situation when finding anything was impossible,it all has to do with my laziness and total lack of systematics but once again there came the day I just had enough and started to clean up a bit.



Here is a pic of the stuff I had on top of the table :



My idea was to just clean up the table but once I started so don`t continue with al my boxes too,and let me tell you it wasn`t an easy gig.
I sorted up everything I had and it took me several hours before I was ready with this job.











Also found some nice surprises while diggin in all boxes like two #1 Keough capes.



And after about six hours I was a bit drunk but who cares,had my tying materials organized and found a lot of stuff that I had forgot I even owned.







Now it´s funnier to tie flies again when you find all your materials when needed.
Still in need for some new ties before spring.

Musky style SBS

As many of you readers know I´m a guy who need some inspiration if I´m gonna tie any decent fly.
It´s not a secret that I have been very much inspired of Niklaus bauers and Simon Grahams ties but I have also found some new inspiration sources and one of them is Mr Brad Bohen from http://muskycountryoutfitters.com/  and his musky flies.

It all started with Simon Grahams Musky flies,I found pretty interesting  but the size was an obstacle for my casting skills,so I tried to copy them in a smaller size,I landed a fish now and then with them but pretty soon I forgot them in one of my many fly boxes,until this autumn when it was time to go out fishing with my floating tube,remember Simon said they are not intended to bang out 25-30 meters,10-12 meters will be enough to study all those small pots and pockets among the reed.
It worked pretty well but still found it hard to cast,even if I had tied them smaller they still had a size of a seagull and way too much materials which absorbed a lot of water.
Then one evening just surfing around on Youtube I noticed a video where Mr Bohen was tying a Hangtime optic minnow and some plans started to grow inside my head.
It was late autumn,pikes were feeding in shallow water so I wanted a fly that doesn´t sink too quickly,a fly that allowed me to have looooooong stops in line retrieving so my variation of this fly was to not add some eyes or UV-resin head,also used a tail copied from Simons Banger fly,spread the two first Bucktail bunches and tie them only on top of the shank,not around it as I used to do.

Winter with snow and ice came too soon so I hadn´t time to fish with this fly as much that I wanted but the few sessions I made was very promising,think this one will work fine in springtime too.

Want to tell you that I haven´t create anything new and revolutionary here,someone has surely create something like this before me,just wanted to tell you how I became to a solution like this which suite my kind of fishing.
Also made an SBS video of this tie,quality is shit but please forgive me,it´s my first attempt to do this kind of videos.Next one hopefully will be better.