Designing a fly pattern rarely starts at the tying bench. For me, it most often starts with a vague idea, a spark, that glows and gets kicked around a fair bit in my head before I ever even sit down to try it. Sometimes, that spark turns out to be a complete dud, and thankfully, it usually makes itself apparent pretty quickly. Other times, the prototypes show a bit of promise and through some technique tweaks and material replacements I can come up with something that is very often, much better than what I originally imagined. The MW Special is one of those flies that traveled a lot of miles through my head before ever coming to fruition, but I am pretty proud of what it finally came to be.The premise for a new foam stone came from my good friend and former Umpqua Feather Merchants Fly Czar, Brian Schmidt, mentioning something about maybe developing a Charlie Boy Stone pattern based off of my Charlie Boy Hopper. I liked the idea and brazenly thought to myself, ‘Well, this ought to be easy!” The Charlie Boy Hopper is one of my first commercial patterns and frankly, is one of those flies that took far longer to become the simple, effective pattern it has than it really should have. My brain has a way of overcomplicating things and that dang fly took me a whole summer, fall, and winter to fine tune and polish up. Reasoning that so much of the hard work was already done, I foolishly thought that I could just sit down and tweak a few parts and have a killer stonefly adult pattern magically fall from my vise. Wrong again, Craven.As I sit here typing this, I have a rather large fly box overflowing with about seventy-five prototype flies showing the progression of what has turned into a pretty craftily designed fly pattern sitting near my right elbow.
Materials Needed:
Hook: 200R #8-12
Thread: UNI 6/0 Rusty Brown
Body: Thin Fly Foam, Gold
Legs: MFC Sexi-Legs, Golden Yellow
Wing: Umpqua Stonefly Wing
Indicator: Hot Pink over Black McFlylon
Specials: Sewing Needle, Zap-A-Gap, Copic Markers, Sepia and Black
All materials available for purchase at charliesflyboxinc.com