Matt Bennett Tying with Whiting Farms

We will give people a few more minutes to roll in, before we get started, I wanna make sure you guys can hear me okay. If somebody would just say something before we get started… Sounds good. Yes, no, maybe sweet. Thanks, Adam, give a few people a few more minutes to get in here and we’ll get rolling in a few minutes or so.

I can try and answer questions like as I’m tying, feel free to ask anything, and I’ll try and get to it if I miss it, and I’ll try and scroll back through at the end and answer any questions you guys have. Yeah, I’ll go ahead and get started. It’s 8 o’clock on my watch. So my name is Matt Bennett, I own and operate Fly Geek Custom Flies. I live in Austin, Texas. I do most of my fishing here locally, so I do a lot of warm water fishing for bass and Sunfish and things like that, so I’m gonna tie a few patterns for my favorites for those fish, doesn’t mean they won’t work elsewhere. I take several trips to the Rockies, usually every year, so I fish a lot of these flies for trout as well, and in the salt water when I get down there also, so… The first one I’m gonna do here is the one that I already have in the Vise, it’s the lunch money, it’s kind of my signature pattern, it’s kind of a bite size stream here, I’m gonna do a size two since about the biggest one that I tie…

This is kind of the tan and white color, the color I fish the most, so I’m gonna roll through this one, I have a carp pattern, and I have kind of a pan fish and a small bass kind of nymph that I’m gonna tie. So we roll through all those… This is gonna be on an Ahrex NS 172 or 122. I can’t remember. It’s there little stinger hook. You can sub in Gamakatsu to BT 10 as well. It makes a pretty good substitute. So again, this size to in time with 140 Veevus power thread, I’m gonna start right behind an eye link and just make a little threat bump there, I’m using these or hair line, Double Qs and the size medium. I’m gonna tie these on the top of the hook, give them about eight reps one way, kinda twist them straight.

About 8 wraps the other way, and then I’ll go over and just do these crossing wraps, eight or so of those, and then to secure them down what I’ll do is go over the hook Shank and then underneath the eye, I’ll do these kind of cross-raps underneath to get those nice and set and then pull fairly tightly.

You can add some super glue or something if you want to, I don’t usually bother with that, they’re still fairly here. So now that our eyes are good to go, I’m gonna wrap a thread base here back, and I always try and find a pretty consistent stopping point, so usually my stopping point is gonna be right here between the barb and the hook point, so it’s till where I’m gonna start this fly every time the tail on the fly I use these groovy bunny zonkers at regular zonkers from hairline, these groovy ones are kind of cool ’cause they’re barred in kinda tie-dyed, so you can use what ever you have… I will tell you a little tip, so I go through a lot of zonkers, so what I do is go through and put them on a safety pin like this, and leave him kind of on a hanger overnight with bulldog clip or a binder clip or something like that just holding them straight up, and that way when you get them out of the package, they’re kinda cranked, this will help straighten those out if you just leave them, hang it up somewhere over a couple of nights, a little straightened out…

Nice, and you won’t have kinks in the skin side or anything like that, so we’re gonna measure our tail… I always measure it with the skin side because the hair side being a natural material, some of this is longer than the other, so I just measure with the skin side and I want it to be a hook Shank and a little bit extra, so… Usually about one and a quarter hook shank I want the tail to be about that long, so like that what I’m gonna do is take this and poke the hook through its skin side first, I take it out of the vise, just kinda pop it all the way through, kinda get that hair out of the way, put it back in the vise and then flip it over. And that’s how we’re gonna do our tail like that. So.

To separate the hair from the hide Here, find us a pretty good tie-in spot. I try and do this without hitting my camera, this is my one little party trick, because I am a production tyer, I try to get a lot of flies Tied whenever I sit down and kinda have a tying session, so every little bit of speed helps me to all that I do to tie this down is to just give it a couple of flicks like that, pull the front piece out of the way, pull it, wrap up to behind the eyes, and now we’re gonna take this piece here that’s gonna form our collar kind of our transition, and we’ll go usually two or three wraps, I’m gonna do three, I’ll know, so on and kinda strike these fibers back as I do it, and then same thing again or a secure this down and separate our hair from our hide and just flick it over just like that. And then come in with your scissors now and just cut that skin zonker side, wrap over that tag in, and that’s gonna form your base for the rest of the fly.

And it Also gives us a nice kind of taper in the baitfish taper. Not only when you get it wet it’s gonna extend out to the sides like that, and obviously top and bottom of that classic to your drop shape, so you’re gonna add some legs just for some more motion and some accident color. These are also from hairline or the… The Chicone Crusher legs in the tan, no the sand clear color, and just the regular size on the smaller side is… I’ll use the micro-size, we’re on a pull-off two of these legs and trying to tie, I’m on the side closest to you guys where you can see, but you kinda find the midpoint of those, set them right behind the high pitch down. So give it two or three wraps, and then this piece that’s facing forward here, we’re gonna take and pull to the side to the other side, the side closest to me, kinda hold those there and wrap back over them with your thread to lock those in. This is how I tie most of my legs and other materials, just ’cause if you get a fish that comes in and tries to grab it by one side, it’s not gonna be able to pull this whole leg out if you were to time in the middle, one on each side.

So that’s the reason I do it that way. And I’ll come in and cut the legs to be just a little bit shorter than the end of the tail itself to where it kind of tapers back, kinda like that. The rest of the fly is gonna be all out of laser dub, it’s just a synthetic kind of acrylic dubbing, so I’m gonna use… I got some tan here, so I got a clump of tan, and a clump of White, and then I have a little bit of this kind of rusty bronze color that I’m gonna use as an accent, marks asking What color combo that rabbit strip is… This is the groovy Bunny and the yellow tan barred White, I think is the name of the color. I’m 95% sure that’s the right one. So to form the head, you’re gonna use laser Dub come in and I’m just gonna pick off a little bit clump that the trick with this fly is not to use too much of this stuff. A little bit goes a long way. So I’m gonna actually do here is just take it and re-align those fibers in my hand, I kinda get them all go in the same way, and then I’ll come in and pull out some of these longer fibers on one side, pull out these longer ones on the other side, and just get rid of those, so now we have a nice kind of uniform length with a little bit of taper on the end clump I’m gonna try and separate that into two fairly even pieces like that.