At the Vise // A series on craft, preparation, and process

The Empty Slots

You do not have to remember which flies worked. The box remembers for you.

I opened mine at the bench last week for the first time since June. Not to fish out of it. To take stock. There is a row along the top that is untouched, twelve of something I tied in March and never put in the water. Then there is the middle, where the foam is chewed and half the slots are bare, and that is the part worth reading.

Nobody keeps an honest log. We keep a flattering one. You remember the fish and you forget the eleven drifts before it, and by October the season has smoothed itself into a handful of good afternoons. The box does not do that. The box records what left and never came back.

What left this year: a size 14 soft hackle, almost all of them. A Frenchie on the 516 that I tied with three different color beads and only fished one of them. Caddis pupae, half a row of them gone by June. What stayed: everything I tied because it looked good in the vise.

Nearly all of it is nymphs, and that is its own tell. Once trout start looking up in late spring I have a hard time tying a nymph on. I know it is the better bet on most of those days and I fish the dry anyway. So the spring nymphs go out of the box and nothing replaces them, and the slots sit open all summer while I am doing the more fun thing. September is when that catches up. The restock is almost entirely the flies I used and lost in the spring and will want again in six weeks.

That gap is the lesson, and it comes around every year.

So I fill them. That is what the bench is for right now, before the fall water gets good and well before it is cold enough that tying is the only thing on offer. Sit down, look at the holes, put back what the season took. It is the least creative tying I do all year and probably the most useful.

There is a temptation in it, which is to fill the gaps with something better. You sit down to tie twelve of a fly that worked and by the fourth one you have thinned the body, changed the bead, moved to a different hook. Improvement is a good instinct in most places and a bad one here. The box already told you what it wanted. The point of the audit is that you listen to it.

So I tie them the same. All twelve. Then I go back to that untouched top row and think about why I tied those in March and never once reached for them, which is a different question with a less comfortable answer.

Mostly it is that they were fun to tie. That is not nothing. There is a kind of tying that exists for its own sake and I would not give it up. But it should know what it is. It should not be pretending to be preparation.

The season is turning now. Water coming down in temperature, fish getting serious, the light going earlier every week. A month from now I will be tying for November and guessing at it. Right now I am not guessing at anything. I am reading what the spring wrote down and answering it, slot by slot, twelve at a time.

There is something settling in that. No decisions to make. The record is already there. All I have to do is fill it back in and pay attention to what it says about the way I actually fish, as opposed to the way I think I do.

By the time the box is full again it will be October, and the water will be cold enough that I will fish them without arguing about it.

~ John