A momentus day

The recent cold weather and rains have given me an itch that can only be scratched when sitting down at the vise.  And consequently I have been turning out some flies over the past couple weeks.  Nothing cool or important.  Mainly I pop open my fly boxes when I sit down, survey the damage the season has done to my small stockpile, and begin tying accordingly.

I am by no means a commercial tier, and I never will be.  It would be nice to learn some tricks to make my tying quicker, but in all honesty I enjoy just sitting down at the vise with the boob tube or music on in the background, and tying a couple flies.  I have never in my long tying career (about 2 whole years now!) sat down and churned out many dozens of flies.  Instead, once I reach a dozen or at most 20 I'm bored and on to other things.  Some Adderall might help with that, but as I said I don't tie commercially.  It remains something I simply enjoy doing in stints.

But I recently reached a milestone!  I finished off my first pheasant tail feather!  When I bought this thing, I was wondering if it made sense to buy the whole bird tail, or the small package of feathers.  I distinctively remembering the guy at the fly shop telling me that one feather will probably tie around 100 P-tails.  I didn't believe him because I know how people like to exaggerate, but I figured one feather would last a long time so I opted for the small package and saved a few bones.  Now I'm glad I did.  That guy wasn't kidding.

The P-tail is my go-to nymph pattern almost everywhere almost all the time, so I go through quite a few of them.  I didn't keep track of how many I tied off this feather but I'm sure it was a lot.  Still maybe not 100, but a lot.

Here are a few of the culprits that finished that feather off.

Disclaimer:  this post may be totally bogus.  It's possible I have finished off other feather(s) previously and forgot, but I KNOW I've been working with this one feather since moving to Oregon two years ago, and I didn't start tying much earlier than that so I'm sticking with my story.


PS - why is it that sometimes Blogger likes to reorient my pictures vertical when they are horizontal???  It's quite annoying.