The western Montana hot stove fly tying league

The meetings are probably coming to order – in some sort or another, all over western Montana.

For about 16 years on Tuesday afternoons we held a meeting that would qualify for the hot stove fly tying league in my shop. A typical session might go like this:

The guys would start rolling in about two in the afternoon and we'd exchanged greetings. They'd get settled into their customary places around the fly tying table, plug in their lamps, set up their vises and fuss with their other tools.

"What are we tying today, Chuck?" one of them would ask.

"Let's tie some Caddis Variants," I might say – or I'd name another pattern.

What we did weren't really fly tying classes; they could be called seminars, maybe, or in another sense, club meetings. There was a sense of fraternity among us. They were there to learn and I was there to teach. Sometimes the teacher learned from the students.

We called our meeting sessions. Seminar sounded too formal, meeting sounded too formal, and class sounded too bookish, too lifeless.

Sometimes when I visit friends during the winter I bring some fly tying tools and materials. Sitting and tying flies, sharing secrets, fly recipes, materials and stories in just about any warm setting on a cold winter afternoon would qualify as a hot stove fly tying league meeting.

This league, insofar as it exists at all, is loose and far-flung. When a couple of buddies get together to tie flies at one of their houses, though, we know we're connected to something bigger.

It's not ethereal or transcendent; it's more like simply knowing you're not the only ones.

A fly tying hot stove league meeting can be those couple of guys getting together once, or it can be a tradition that's older than the one held forth at my shop until it closed.

One of the oldest is the Fly Tying Roundtable that the late Doug Persico and his wife Carolyn started at the Rock Creek Fishermen's Merc in Clinton. I was surprised and pleased to learn that Doug and Carolyn's grandson John is keeping up the tradition when I read the following announcement:

It's that time of year again to fire up the fly tying vises and create some new buggy goodness! The first Fly Tyer's Roundtable of the season begins this Saturday (1/6/24) starting at 11AM here at the Mercantile!

We will be hosting Roundtables every Saturday through the winter. For more information, please contact us or check out our webpage in the link below. Happy New Year and happy tying, anglers! https://rcmerc.com/fly-tyers-roundtable/

The Roundtables at the Merc weren't classes per se and probably still aren't. Basically you'd come, set up, and watch somebody tie and learn from them.

If Carolyn and John don't mind, when the roads clear a bit I might devote a Saturday to joining them.

Until then I'll fuss here at home, and maybe have some friends over to tie. Eventually I'd like to re-start the sessions I held at my shop on Tuesday afternoons. There are logistics to deal with but I'm working on it.

There's a certain pull, an attraction to the notion of spending cold winter afternoons where it's warm, hopefully where it's heated with wood, to tie flies. We inevitably tell stories. We show each other the new materials we've discovered and maybe share them.

There are so many new materials on today's market that keeping up with all of them, even if you own a fly shop, seems nonsensical. You can't do it. But hearing from your buddies what works and what doesn't is a short-cut to knowledge that could drive you insane if you tried to discover it all by yourself.

Back to that Caddis Variant we were going to tie at a Tuesday afternoon session. We'd devote several sessions every year to that fly. Why? It's deceptively simple – and easy to get wrong. When I announce that it's Caddis Variants again, I might hear:

"Caddis Variants again, Chuck? Will you show us how to flare the wing this time?"

"He showed you how last time," somebody answers. "You just weren't paying attention."

"Yes I was – I just got stuck on getting the dubbing right."

We all laugh and eventually we practice flaring the wings. It takes time and practice to learn – and the camaraderie is a catalyst to the learning and the reason why we're there.