Adeodatus in Wonderland

I haven't organized my flyboxes in years. Typically I just shove new patterns into the old boxes wherever they might fit, and if there is no room I toss the new flies into smaller containers and fill up the vest pockets with a confusing array of ad hoc Solo cups.

Most of my flyboxes, then, are museums to my whims and skills as a tyer -- snapshots as to what I liked and what I could manage with the abililites and materials in my possession in 1996. The system works just fine until I find myself standing midstream, staring into a crowded flybox with no idea where such-and-such a pattern is hiding. I know I tied up a few #18 olive-biot bodied CDC emergers, you think. Maybe they're in my chest pocket? Maybe I left that container in the fanny pack? Meanwhile the trout ignore your grey dubbed deer-hair emergers and your #16 olive parachutes.

There are but a few organizing philosophies regarding flyboxes. The first (in chronology and simplicity) revolves around What You've Got. You just plunked down several c-notes for a rod and reel, waders, boots, vest and polarized glasses. Your one flybox holds every bug you own, from a black wooley worm to #14 Beadhead Hare's Ears to some Pale Morning Dun quills the guy at the shop recommended. Streamers, attractor patterns, hatch-matching duns - they all go into that one box. At $1.50 - $2.25 per fly, this system may work really well. Until you start tying your own flies.

When you begin knocking out a dozen or so bugs at a sitting, that one box gets full awfully fast. Now we need to be a little more sophisticated in our cataloging and organization. You have two ways to go: river-specific boxes, or species-specific. If you fish specific rivers often and don't mind several boxes full of redundant patterns, this will work fine. Except when you use up all the Blue-winged Olive Mayflies in your South Platte box and you need to take along your Green River box.

The better solution is to have species-specific boxes loaded to the gills, as it were. So if you are heading to the Arkansas River in April, you take the caddis and small mayfly boxes. Colorado in August? Caddis, terrestrial, and bigger mayflies. And if you plan on swinging by the Frying Pan during that trip, be sure to include the small mayfly, attractor dries, and Green Drake boxes. You see the trouble with this solution, don’t you? You might end up waddling onto the river like some fishing commando, bulging with ammo boxes. The price you pay to catch wary trout during dryfly season. [The observant reader will look at the box pictured above and say, Wait just a minute, Commando-A. You call this a baetis box, but it clearly is packed with not only trico patterns, but also SJ worms and not a few scuds and midges. What gives? Excellent! A little sleuth work would reveal that you are witnessing the evolution of a box before our very eyes. This particular Morel ultralight flybox began its life as a whim purchase to hold Bighorn bugs on a trip in 2000. It then was pressed into double-duty, holding patterns for the finicky trout in the Cheeseman Canyon stretch of the South Platte. Rather than purge its history, I just filled all its empty spaces with baetis patterns and called it good.]

A few final notes for anyone still reading: the retail value of the box above is well over $400. It holds around 325 flies. You can imagine the heartbreak this causes a guy when he loses a box (which I have done. More than once). Another note: my current library of flyboxes includes the following: a Wheatly swingleaf, for both caddis and larger mayflies; a small bristletack box for green drakes (including flavs); a small box for hoppers; a midge box (including Mysis patterns); an attractor nymph box; a 16-compartment aluminum box for attractor dries; a big ol’ streamer box; a big box for lake and small streams; a big box full of carp patterns; a mostly empty aluminum clip box for wetflies (including kokannee nymphs); and a stonefly box (which is a work in progress. Not a lot of opportunity for fishing exclusively for stones around here). The bass and pike flies are tossed into big organizing containers rather than proper boxes. I suppose if I ever fish those I could just toss them into an old margarine tub. No need to get fancy with bass or pike.