Consolidation: part 2So how do you go about choosing which soft hackle wet flies and flymphs to keep from your fly box from last season? Well you need some way to identify the patterns that were effective to some degree anyway from last season. This could be from written journal records of your fishing trips. Here is what I do. I keep a spreadsheet of my current soft hackle and flymph patterns which contains fields, amongst others, of each individual pattern’s dressings, their largest fish, total numbers of fish they individually took and the respective months where each pattern was effective (sad I know…). The one feature of the spreadsheet which is most useful though is the sort filter. You can use it to sort your list of individual soft hackle wet flies and flymph patterns by the largest numbers of fish each pattern caught or perhaps by the biggest fish that each pattern caught. Another way to select them is simply by look, by memory of your successful patterns, because you like a particular pattern or that you just have confidence in a pattern. I use both these methods, first I refer to my spreadsheet and then go back over the other patterns that remain in my fly box, and then use my gut feeling and choose another smaller selection of soft hackles to add my spreadsheet selection.
The selection I made includes in part, the soft hackle wet flies and flymphs in the gallery below and you can see additional patterns on the Gallery of Flies page. This is the second part of a three stage process and you can read about the first stage in my post Soft Hackles: consolidation (part 1). I hope you enjoy and thanks for reading.
SoftHackles 