Speed Bugs

Turn your fly-tying station into an assembly line with these pro tricks.

- Joe Cermele

YOU SIT DOWN at the vise on a cold winter night with the best intentions: After a few hours—and perhaps a few beers—you’ll have easily knocked out two dozen Buggers, Adamses, or Copper Johns. By spring, your fly boxes will be teeming. Then comes reality. Between distractions from the kids, restarts on a couple of flies, and spending 10 minutes looking for that hook you dropped, you are lucky to have three bugs completed in one sitting. It’s happened to me countless times, but for production fly-tiers Mike Schmidt and Aaron Letera, the shortcomings of hobbyists are not an option. Combined, these two burn through nearly 30,000 hooks a year to fulfill their orders. For Schmidt and Letera flies are money, and to produce that kind of volume, you have to be very fast and incredibly efficient.

Although you will likely never tie half as many patterns as they do in a year, you’ll be shocked by how quickly you can knock out a dozen flies using a few of their tricks, even during those short vise sessions squeezed in between bouts of daily life.

ASSEMBLE THE TROOPS