I like things that are made by hand by people I have met and worked with. I have no hesitation in talking about Andy Elliot and his super saltwater flies or Brian Healey and his own incredible range. Working with people like Andy and Brian allows you to add a sense of individual contribution and creativity to a constantly evolving and changing product, a sense of self input of experience and instinct. You think you know and understand what the fly needs to do, look like, how it needs to behave and the people working and building the flies know how to fit the material and hooks to achieve many things including limits and capabilities.
Like most things that work the combined constituents of a
saltwater fly go way beyond material, there’s time spent testing, time changing, testing again, evolving, talking, observing, more time changing and finalising, the end result is often a completely unique and special variation on an already established pattern.
Getting it right is a long, challenging and interesting process. Its not as simple as making a fly, casting and catching fish. A difficult year like 2012 sets projects like fly prototypes in development back in time, because you cant work you can’t test, you loose your momentum and stop, you cant evolve and improve or promote. Getting this development going again for the last quarter of the season and the season for 2013 is now the task at hand, if it improves of course!
I had a wonderful half days fly fishing with Rink van der Wal this week– during our many conversations he mentioned he built rods from CTS blanks. I am familiar with CTS as Casper Hansen a fly fishing customer from Denmark also used these blanks for his own rods and fished with them here during 2010. Rink showed me the rod he had hand built himself from a range of the best quality components available – Rink now has a winter project to complete for me, hand made ready for spring 2013, I just cant wait!
I guess support comes in many ways and I certainly know I get a lot of it from many people, a word of encouragement here or there, a website link, an e-mail or other acknowledgement. They keep you positive and often times sane. There are many smaller sustainable bespoke opportunities for employment, of genuine expertise, people with experience and skill which exist in local communities in this country that are connected directly or indirectly to bass fishing which need support too.
If we cant do that at least, then what can we do?