The Making of a Custom Fly

I was contacted by an angler looking for a new fly design, for a shallow Scottish spate river where the fish strongly favour yellow. Having shared my fly template with him, he chose a Snaelda type design all in yellow. Crucially, he needed the fly to be lighter than normal and the challenge was that the metal carrot-shaped tubes usually used for Snaeldas were too heavy. So I modified the internal design of the fly to create the classic carrot shape on a flat plastic tube using embroidery thread that was super-glued to provide a firm base before tying the Snaelda pattern. A one colour fly looks simple of course, but there are as many components in it as the multi-colour fly that provides the basis of the design. Here you can see the fly and all it's key components.