Speaker: Chris Reeves

Thursday 29th Jan 2015

Chris Reeves concentrating on getting everything exactly right!

Chris Reeves concentrating on getting everything exactly right!

Chris Reeves devoted the evening to demonstrating the flies required for the FDG Gold Standard Award. He explained that this would be very different from his usual demonstration evenings – instead of tying lots of flies he would be spending time to get each stage of these rather more complex flies absolutely right and to talk about the sorts of things the Assessors would be looking for at the Gold Standard. But the talk proved invaluable as well for us preparing for the Bronze standard as he gave lots of guidance and tips about the processes for ensuring that the three examples of each type of fly being tied were as near identical as was possible – such as making sure you select three identical, good quality hackle feathers before attempting to hackle any of the flies! A particularly valuable part of the evening were his demonstrations of tying different types of wings – which is slightly foreign territory to many of us, and emphasised once again the importance of selecting the right feathers! – and how to effectively pack deer hair for tying flies such as Floating Fry as well as the more standard muddlers.

It really was a very inspirational evening for those of us aspiring to improve the standard of our tying.

Chris was unable to tie all the Gold Standard flies in the time available and so very generously offered to come back again during the next winter session to carry on from where he left off.