I have been tying now for about 50 years, and in my
prime ran a company called Fly by Night Products, and supplying around
90,000 flies a year to the NZ domestic market. Poor health saw me having
to sell off the company and today I tie mostly artwork flies for wealthy
collectors.
I found that to train new tyers, mostly housewives who were looking for
their own disposable income but cluttered with kids, meant that I had to
keep their interests alive and have them able to tie commercially
acceptable flies within a week, otherwise they went `off the boil'.
Thus I found it necessary to question almost everything I read about fly
tying and develop new and easily understandable training techniques so
that the new tyers could clone every fly they tied and have an immediately
saleable product almost from the start. I now run tying and fishing
training through our Government Learning courses run by my local high
school.
Many years later I was involved in a local TV company as a front man in a
garden programme (I was and still am, one of NZ's top Landscape
Architects) although I have been trying unsuccessfully to retire for the
last four years, but no-one will let me off the hook.
This link with a top TV Company led me to propose that they entered the
world of making videos of skills such as mine, and together we produced a
series of five Videos dealing with the five main styles of flies in use
today. This was a five camera, in-depth macro shoot in the main, with the
accent on Technique, as I believed this type of video had never been done
before.
This has been very successful, but of course the new technology of DVD has
opened a huge market, hence Bruce Masson and I have collaborated to condense and
edit my five videos in to one 2 hour DVD, and I am delighted with the
results of Bruce's awesome abilities. The DVD is called "Tie A Fly", and features the five patterns I have submitted to Hans' page.
Recently I was selected as a Fly tyer from sixteen international
communities along with 150 of the top US Tyers for the world first expo in
America called Concepts, Art and the Trout fly
