“Discipline makes things easier. Organize your life.”—Dead Prez
Do you ever find yourself frantically digging through multiple boxes searching for a particular fly? Maybe it's that one super-technical spent caddis pattern you bought on a trip to Colorado, or a bug a long-lost buddy gifted you before disappearing from your life. Or, maybe, you need a size 20 BWO emerger (because you're surrounded by tiny, slate mayflies and rising trout), but you can't locate a single one, even though you know you bought six the last time you were in a fly shop. That confusing collage of stoneflies, hoppers, midges, caddis, and mangy streamers in your box—what folks in New Zealand would call a "dog's breakfast"—makes fishing less fun.
Most of us let our fly boxes get unruly over the course of a trip or a summer. Look through any guide's boat or bag at the end of the season and you'll probably find chaotic jumbles of flash, feather, and fur punctuated with sharp points. A temporarily messy box (or collection of boxes) means you've been fishing. But boxes that stay messy? That means you're lazy.
There are few things you can do off the water that might make you a more effective angler on the water—practice your casting, tie flies, and organize your boxes. Well-organized boxes make it easier to find what you need when you need it and know when you're out of a particular pattern or size.
You might assume organizing flies is boring, but people say the same thing about fly fishing (and tying). If you can’t find satisfaction from a relatively futile, non-competitive activity, this might not be for you. Maybe try pickleball.
Don’t approach fly organization as a chore. Think of it as an opportunity, a chance to fondle and catalog your most essential gear.
Know What You Have and Where to Find It
If you get in the habit of going through all your flies at least once a season and putting them in their proper place, you’ll always know which bugs you have and where they’re hiding. Equally important, you’ll know what you don’t have. Next time you stop into the fly shop (or sit down at the vise), you’ll fill those empty gaps instead of buying bugs based on your vague recollection of what you might need or whatever the shop kid suggests. You don’t need any more size 16 beadhead pheasant tails—you have approximately four dozen of them. But you are out of 18s, a fact you would know if you organized your boxes.
Thin the Herd
If you’ve been at this for any number of seasons, you’ve acquired an eclectic selection of flies along the way. Some of the patterns you bought or tied haven’t seen the end of a leader in a season—or ten. Maybe it was a specific fly you got for a particular destination. Maybe you were experimenting with a new pattern or material. Maybe that fly used to be a ringer but it stopped working and now you’ve lost the faith. Those flies need to go...somewhere else. Think of your main boxes as your starting lineup. Don’t let your second string take up valuable spots. Pull out all the flies you’re not fishing. (You can keep them in a beater box in the garage, or better yet, give them to a neighbor kid who will love you forever.) Those empty spaces will remind and motivate you to replace them with flies you will (or might) use.
Assess the Status of Your Flies
When you go through your boxes row by row, you might notice that some of your bugs are no longer mint. Rubberlegs can rot. Biots can fall off. Hackle can fray. Squirmy worms can melt. Worst of all, hooks can rust. You can reattach legs and biots, and chewed-up foam hoppers still get bit, but even a spot of rust means that your hook is shot. Don’t risk losing the fish of a season. Throw out anything with rust. (Don’t give those to the neighbor kid. That would be mean.)
The Satisfaction of Creating Order from Chaos
We’ve covered some practical benefits of fly box organization, but spending a few hours in meditation over your fly collection also soothes the psyche. You get to relive a whole lifetime of fishing memories. Remember the trip to Rock Creek when you first discovered the micro-may? Or how about that time you and your buddy got kicked out of the diner in Wyoming for setting up a fly tying station in the booth and leaving mallard feathers everywhere? Flies are more than objects to fool fish; they’re artifacts, mementos, pointed memories.
Putting your collection in order offers a sort of Zen satisfaction. Perfectly organized rows of parachutes arranged top to bottom by size and color calm the anxious monkey mind.
Get Creative
Do you remember the album organization scene from High Fidelity, when Rob describes re-organizing his records autobiographically as “comforting”? You can do something similar with your flies. You can organize your boxes by pattern, by target species, by region or body of water. You can organize them by color, by size, by how dirty fishing them makes you feel, or by any other classification. Best of all, if you get in the habit of doing this regularly, you can re-organize them according to a different need next time.
Quit being lazy and get your flies in order. You might be surprised at how much you enjoy the process.
