Durability is a thing

Durability in flies is a thing. Not often you can fish a fly to its death. . . Unless it hadn't been constructed properly and it comes to an early end. I recently gave a friend a prototype reject fly. These rejects are defined as a stack of perfectly good flies that are created during the process of getting a fly to where you want it. Sometimes it's just a couple flies, sometimes it runs a little deeper into the dozen zone, and in some extreme cases it goes beyond.

I gifted a friend of mine one of such rejects awhile back and reported back to me an interesting story. He was on an annual steelhead trip and tied the fly on the first day. He somehow managed to not lose the fly for nearly 6 days. The only time it was cut off was to replace the hook (tube fly)

The chatter of this fly grew, not only that he still had this fly but, that his fishing partners were losing 4-6 flies a day sometimes to bad casts into trees or stuck on the riverbed. As the week went on the fly showed some wear but remained intact, so he kept it rolling. Continuous spey casting has got to take some toll on bugs, and it's not often that you go the distance like that with one fly to actually see how long they will hold up.

Part of the reason he kept the fly rolling was due to the considerable amount of success he was having with it. One day he reported having hooked up 10 Steelhead with this little pink tube.

Another interesting twist is that he was hooking beautiful sea-run cutthroat at a ratio of over 20:1 his fishing partners. On the last evening of his trip, the fly finally met a watery grave but not before one of his fishing partners took the time to get a photo. Upon seeing the picture, I realized that this fly hadn't been head cemented upon construction as often flies for myself or when I'm not selling them. I'm pretty pleased with the results. Gotta love that rejects bin.