Cicadas are coming to Central PA this year! The Brood XIV emergence is going to be happening in the coming weeks, which will make for some great dry fly action this summer! If you need some patterns, check out TCO Fly Shop for your cicada needs. The Hoov’s Cicada is a favorite pattern – Caleb tied 25 dozen of them for TCO, and you can order them online at the provided link.
Continue readingFly Tying
TCO Fly Shop – Fall Tying Classes
There are a number of educational opportunities coming up this fall at TCO State College! A full list can be viewed on the website here. Two that I wanted to highlight are some fly tying classes happening on September 15 and October 20.
Continue readingFrom the Vise: September-Mid October
Chowtime Sculpin Pattern Recipe
Back in the fall of 2016, I was working on a sculpin pattern that took a few different ideas from other patterns and blended them together. As Gunnar Brammer says in one of his streamer videos: “I don’t have a lot of original ideas… almost all of my bugs in general… are original compositions… different materials, different ways to build bulk, different silhouettes. It uses unique techniques or features or materials to make it different… it’s all from the people who came before me… I just take things that I like, things that I know to be successful, and then I base a composition that hasn’t been done kind of around that.”
Continue readingFly Feature: Chocklett’s Game Changer
If you’ve been following the fly-fishing world over the past few years, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of Blane Chocklett’s Game Changer-style of flies. There’s a reason for this: the patterns are effective imitations of a number of different baitfish, and you can tie them with a number of different materials. It’s a platform that you can use to tie the pattern a number of ways (another popular platform, for example, is the Clouser Minnow).
Continue readingFrom the Vice: Fall 2018
Hello there, it’s been awhile! Here’s what’s been coming “From the Vice” over the past few months – it’s not been a whole lot because of life happening (and a great new job beginning!).
From the Vice: April-June 2018
The past few months have been a bit of a whirlwind, but here are some flies that have been coming From the Vice. Enjoy!
From the Vice: March 2018
March came in like a lion, and isn’t quite going out like a lamb. Maybe “out like a lion cub” is more appropriate? Anyway, it was a fun month at the vice to be tying up some new and old patterns for the boxes. Read on!
From the Vice: February 2018
After the long trudge of January, February always seems to move pretty quickly. The deer hair experiments that I had set out to do didn’t quite happen, but I did have some time to sit down at the vice and tie up some experimental patterns as well as necessary ones to fill the box.
Fly Tying Video Feature: General Nymphs
We’ve come to the final post in the Fly Tying Video Feature series! Thanks for tuning in. We hope that these posts have been giving you some good inspiration at the vice over the past two months. Our final post features some general nymph imitations that don’t imitate a specific insect, but imitate a variety of them.
Oak Hall Outfitters 