Flyfishing, flytying and hooks
Home » Archive by category "sites"

The Fishing Gazette – Major Traherne’s patterns

A while back I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time reading the original 1884 editions of “The fishing gazette”. In 1883/84 George M. Kelson ran a series of text called “On the description of salmon flies, Major Traherne’s Patterns” where he presented (as far as I know) 18 patterns by Major Traherne, but also describes the steps involved in tying a salmon fly.

These text have not been easily available, and when I had a chance to read the 1884 editions I got some pictures and have transcribed the text and added a new “book” to flypattern.org where I will publish the 12 chapters I have from this series.

If you have the first four, or the No.18 of these, then I’m interested to get in touch with you to see if I can get my hands on them!

The book is listed on flypattern.org under “The fishing gazette: On the description of salmon flies” and the first pattern published today is “No. 5. Tippetiwitchet

Mustad: Zulu patterns

A couple days ago I published a Mustad catalogue with a extensive list of patterns, the pattern illustrations was scanned and added to flypattern.org

The patterns are at times blurry, and the scan doesn’t do them justice, so I’ve started tying up some of the patterns and photograph them for the site.

I’m not saying that I’ll do all 339 patterns, but we’ll see…. I’ll do parts of them on and off going forward, and then we’ll see what happens. Today was a set of 6 different zulu patterns. See them all on flypattern.org

Mustad: trout-, salmon- and lit-fly catalogue

flypattern.org have been a place to gather up the patterns from classic books, trying to preserve the historic fly-patterns from the earlier days of flytying history. The intention have always been to start on other sources and ensure that important fly-pattern lists are gathered in one place, and today I have added a new and important one!

Mustad have defined a lot when it comes to fly/fishing hooks (see the Mustad listing on flyhooks.org), but they have also a long tradition of selling flies. The names and numbers when referring to the old Mustad patterns haven’t been readily available, but a while back I stumbled over a old catalogue that showed itself to include a very comprehensive list of Mustad fly ID/pattern names.

The catalogue is now scanned, and all the patterns illustrated in the catalogue (339 of them), are now available on flypattern.org: https://flypattern.org/authors/mustad/book/catalogue-trout-salmon-lit

You can expand and see the entire catalogue there, or download the PDF from the site (note: the PDF is 33MB and might take a while if you are on a slow network).

The 339 patterns in the catalogue that are illustrated are registered as patterns on the site with a closer look at each individual pattern. The remaining pattern names can be found in the individual plates that are scanned and showed on the site (I might create a page with all the patterns that are not illustrated later on, but not right now)

The quality of the pictures are not top-notch due to the source I had to work with, but they should give you a good indication on the pattern and how it should look like. I have not started writing up the material-list for each pattern, that is something for a very rainy day (and week….). For now the list is up and I hope it can be a good reference to you all!