Excuse me?? This is what the folks on this list think of beginners?
DonO; You sure tie great looking flies. I am glad that you can even get more than 300 dollars for them. I think that is great! I wish that I were half as good as you. Maybe even a quarter as good. Damn, I just wish that I was a hair on your ass as good.
I am a beginning fly tier. I thought that doing the occassional swap would help me to get better. But if this is the consensus of this group, I can see that my unworthy attempts are not welcome here. It is great that some folks have a fly shop within walking distance of their house. The nearest one to me is a 250 mile round trip. I just can't see the justification in making that drive just to be in a swap.
You can rest assured that from now on, I will not enter any more swaps. Yes, I entered the crease fly swap. I was pretty proud of the one I tied, even though it didn't measure up to the standards of this elite group. It was only the second fly I ever tied for a swap.
I will send your fly back to you and I will do so for anyone else that thinks they got shafted from my unworthy fly in the crease fly swap.
I think that I will start to hang out at FOAL. At least they don't come out and blatantly belittle beginners like you just did.
Bye Dan Harriman Orange, Texas
At 04:25 PM 11/20/2004, you wrote:
As for the quality of flies, the same goes for the regular swaps. There are tiers that put out a worthy effort in the swaps, and there are tiers who don't. Is it fair for one tier to put in the effort to trim wings, add eyes and legs and feelers- and another to submit a fly with 3 wraps of chenille and a hackle-tip wing? I personally feel that if someone is such a beginner that the flies they submit will become throw-always, it would only be fair to go down to the local shop and buy the flies required for the swap, and just let the meister know. This is not unfair, and the step-up in quality would serve everyone, and the swapper would still get nice different patterns in return. They would thus still progress in their skills until they felt confident in submitting their own. Plus, better tiers would sign up for swaps if the reciprocation was better.
If we all exhibited the conscientiousness that Nick and Rodney do in their approach, the step-up in the swap flies would be drastic. It's not that all swap flies are poor now, as a whole, actually it's the opposite. It's just that a certain % of flies of each swap could use some more effort.
Flame me if you wish, but I think that it would be fair for swap-meisters to ask for submissions of photographs of swap flies from participants. This would serve two purposes. 1st it would weed out the throw-away quality flies. 2nd, and even better, the meister could offer constructive criticism for the tier to improve his entry for the swap. Now how cool is that?
Now I'm not advocating that all flies for fishing have to be exotic artwork flies. Far from it. Simple flies catch fish. But there should be an equality of effort to make things fair for the tiers who put forth great efforts in their entries. An hour's effort per fly (or more for some) should not be traded for 2 minute's effort on the parts of others.
I'll respect everyone's opinion in this. I've had comments made to me in the past about the quality of the flies in swaps, and maybe now's the time to address it, with the comments on the perp box.
Sine the vfb is the forum for swapping flies, I'll give the floor (screen) to Byard and let him comment on my thoughts and give his.
DonO
If at first you don't succeed, maybe you shouldn't try sky diving!
dit dit
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