Somehow, I stuck with it thru the years. For me, there is no feeling like getting skunked one day, only to come back the next day with a new, modified pattern and watching that same fish just nail the new creation. Even if that fly never catches another fish there is nothing more satisfying to me. When you see a fish inhale one of your own creations, you truly own that moment.
Coming from the southwest, I focused on local fishing, mostly warmwater species of all types with occasional trips to the high country. Somewhere along the line I got into bass tournament fishing and learned to build those techniques into my fly patterns. I eventually gave that up and went back to fly rodding full time for bass. Later in life I ventured into Montana and became a licensed guide for a few seasons and became a production tier for a few shops and individual sales. I’ve since traveled and fished in several states out west and floated many rivers but fly rodding for bass will always be my favorite.
The bottom line is, I take pride in developing patterns that work. All of my patterns have been fished for multiple seasons. I do not develop patterns to win the catalog picture contest or to catch fisherman. Each pattern is designed to look and perform in the water as intended and I have caught fish on everything you see here.
Meet Dave
I started tying flies when I was 9 years old at the kitchen table of a farmhouse in the desert of Arizona. At the time, I didn’t even own a fly rod. That would come a couple years later. But by the time I was about 14 or so I moved from the kitchen table and tying was a permanent thing I did in my room. By the time I was out of high school I fished almost exclusively with a fly rod. No one in the family fly fished or even had an interest in it so I was completely self-taught, using only books with black and white sketches and pictures and articles from magazines that came in the mail. To say the least, it was a long, slow learning curve.
Because I started fishing in isolation from the mainstream fly fishing world, pattern development came early for me. I lived far away from trout water and had no family who fished. I had no access to modern materials at the time or any information. I didn’t even know what real flies looked like. This was a blessing in disguise because it led me to create patterns based on what I saw on the water and in nature. I used whatever materials I could think up, which led to the simple paradigm of developing flies that worked.
If a fly didn’t work, I changed it, no matter how good it looked. If it did work, I left it, regardless of what it was “supposed” to look like. The only critics were the fish. This led to the development of a process that included an intense study of the natural world coupled with a lot of trial and error…and some peculiar looking patterns made from really peculiar materials. I used stuff like brown plastic from potato bags, old flip flop shoes and all types of yarn stolen from my mother’s quilting supplies. All of it could be found in the shoe box where I kept everything, including any type of feather I picked up off the ground.