Giveitasquirrel

I REALLY must spend some time at my vice. These days it’s my only vice, so I have no excuse.

But fly tying, for me at any rate, is a winter pursuit – and I clearly didn’t spend enough time at it last year to see me through this season.

Yes, I’m running out of flies in my favourite patterns just as we come to the tail end of the trouting and the last two months of the salmon fishing, when every spare minute should be spent on the water.

Just go to the shop and buy some, I hear you cry. It’s something I resort to from time to time but every time I catch a fish on a fly someone else has tied, I feel I have to give them some of the credit.

I still recall the first salmon I caught on a self-tied fly – an unlikely looking Mylar-bodied Slaney shrimp-esque number with a few turns of lead wire round the body to “get it down”.

“You’ll no’ get a fish on the likes o’ that,” they said.

But I did, and it wasn’t the last on that pattern.

You really have to experience it for yourself to understand the sense of achievement so I won’t waffle on too much – but trust me, it’s well worth the effort.

Tying flies in your tried-and-tested, go-to patterns can get rather monotonous but there’s always something fresh to rekindle your interest.

I have a red squirrel tail my dad gave me a year or two ago that had been lying, forgotten, in the bottom of the box.

The poor beast had been run over near my parents’ home on the Black Isle, where our native species still thrive.

I dug the tail out the other day and had a look for some patterns to use the fur in but while American grey squirrel tail is commonly used in hairwing flies, I found only one using red – imaginatively named a Squirrel Tail.

I tied a few up and I’ll give them a swim some day but it set me thinking that there should be a better use for what is quite a rare material, red squirrels being protected as they are.

I have a few ideas for shrimp-style flies with maybe a copper body that should fish well at the back end of the season on my home river, which always carries a bit of colour.

But just so I can enjoy telling folk the story, I plan to design a fly that uses red squirrel in the wing, a rust-coloured body with a wee white bib and a shiny black nose – as squirrelly looking as possible.

Given that the donor animal was run over by a car, older readers will understand why I’m going to call my new creation a Tufty.

I really must spend some time at my vice.