Digging Out the Bench
Fly Tying Bench … Resembles Tornado Rubble
When you live a pretty sizable fly life, it can overwhelm a humble home and more humble fly tying studio. The long list of intrusions, inventions and failed concepts leaves a lot of shrapnel behind. That happens here regularly, and leads to an all-out scraper of a cleaning and sometimes even disinfecting of my fly tying table. The “before” video of my bench, clean and new is here –
Do you ever wonder what someone else’s fly tying bench looks like? I do. I wondered what mine looked like under the piles of … stuff. This happens. So I decided to go through it a piece at a time, and document this winter’s pre-epic fly tying sessions with a video of (unfortunately for you) epic proportions. It takes one to know one!
Therapeutic Cleaning Leads to Better Flies
If you take the time to clean the background, the area behind your vise, I BELIEVE you will be able to tie better flies. Why? Focus. While your eye does focus, on the jaws and hook in the vise, your brain still takes in all the flotsam and jetsam (F&J) behind that spot. Trust me, it does. So the choice could be to either, a) pile a blank surface on top of the pile, or, b) deal with the F&J. Trust me, dealing with the F&J when you get into volume fly tying works. BESIDES, it is only temporary – as the piles of materials accumulate once again to form yet another distraction.
RIDING THE BENCH – A “Boy’s Life” FLASHBACK
As a major minority in high school, a 5-percent-er of the student body if you want the real truth, I was a bench riding basketball player. That’s because that is one of the ways discrimination works. I know first hand. Been there, done that. So I knew how to ride the bench, game after game after game …
But now, there’s a new bench to ride – the fly tying bench! And it is one unruly, always too small, surface that could use a STRAIGHT UP doubling in size RIGHT NOW.
A fly tying bench, my bench, can get SO BAD that I don’t even want to look at or think about tying a fly. BUT, winter does always come. It’s cold again here. And this winter I am dealing with new flies and a shortage of flies as I look forward to some serious private pond action and lessons for pond owners this spring. Add to that the Military Veterans program, and this bench needs work NOW.
Category: Body-Mind-Soul
