Inside a Salmon Guides Fly Box

Ever wanted to look into a salmon fly fishing guides fly boxes?
Here's your chance!

Over the years guiding clients on fall salmon trips I've come to form some pretty strong opinions about fly design and patterns that chinooks eat.  No doubt the best designed fly won't get ate, if it ain't presented properly, but if you present the fly the way you should, the patterns in this box will catch fall chinook.

Obviously Clousers occupy the vast majority of real estate in my Bugger Beast Box.  ALL of my salmon flies have an "eye" of one kind or another.  Two themes to take note of.  I'm also pretty partial to my Coastal Bucktail series.  They're exceedingly similar to Trey Comb's Sea habit series.  Other standard types of patterns that occupy space in my salmon boxes are various shrimp patterns as well as comet type flies. 

As for the success enjoyed by the "comet" type patterns, just take a look at Dungeness "crab larvae" (one of pacific salmon's favorite food sources) and you'll understand why they eat comet's!

This year, my friends at Spirit River hooked me up with some of their latest UV dyed materials.

This is the same box of flies, lit up by my little UV light source.

This is a clouser I put together using Sprit River's UV dyed bucktail.

This is the same fly with a UV light source. Pretty cool huh?

This is a pink and white clouser tied with the UV materials and lit up with a UV light source.

Not sure yet how the salmon are going to respond to the new UV materials.  As yet, I've only used them on one trip for coho on the lower Umpqua and darned few coho were around that day so I'm not even close to making a call about the UV material.  In the next few weeks all of my time on the water will be chasing chinook so I'll let you all know if the UV died materials make a difference.

Also, for anyone hankerin' to try their hand at this amazing fishery, I have a last minute opening for the 24th and/or the 25th of November. Call me or shoot me an e-mail if your interested.