Bristol and West Fly Dressers' Guild - "Serious" Fly Tying Competition

Comedy Fly Competition Report and Pictures

"Serious"

Fly Tying Competitions 2024/25

If you are impatient, scroll down to see the overall results.

Set fly tying competition

This was held on 15th January, our first meeting of 2025 after the meeting scheduled for 8th was cancelled on account of the atrocious weather.

The fly had been set in December, to allow people to tie it before the competition, and 9 members put their efforts forward. The fly set was TC Kingsmill-Moore’s Golden Olive Bumble - The standard was really high, and everyone present at the meeting – whether or not competing – marked the flies anonymously. Here are the flies:

The results were:

1 Jim McLaughlin 73

2 Dave Price 51

3 Nick Boyd 41

4 Chris Leat 31

5 Steve Coles 28

6 Len Harris 26

7 Alan Varley 14

This was Jim's winning fly:

Mystery Fly Tying Competition.

The competition was held in December 2024.

This is a new type of competition dreamed up by the chairman – it was meant to test the tyers by telling them nothing about which fly was going to be tied, other than they would need a range of tying silks & a vice.

The fly would be revealed on the night, and all the competitors issued with a bag of all the materials needed, plus a competitor number so that the marking remained anonymous.

The materials were carefully assembled on the chairman’s living room floor:

And on the night the fly was revealed – an old staple, the “Invicta” - with a tail of Golden Pheasant crest, oval tinsel ribbing, a yellow seals fur body palmered with a brown cock hackle, a throat hackle of Jay wing feathers, and a wing from a matched pair of Hen pheasant wing primaries.

It was thought that this would provide a “stiff” challenge to the tiers.

And it proved to be thus!

Silence has never descended on the hall as markedly as in this comp.

Tongues were out in concentration, & despite being allowed 45 minutes to tie the fly, some took even longer.

Finally, after nearly an hour of tying all 8 flies were lined up on the stand, on their allotted numbers, and the voting took place, with competitors only being able to vote for a number, not knowing who tied the fly.

Voting was overseen by Alan Varley, who made sure no shenanigans took place, and then numbers were matched to names, with 10 points allocated to 1st place, 7 to 2nd, 5 to 3rd & 2 to 4th: the final results came out as follows:

Points

1 Jim McLaughlin 51

2 Chris Leat 41

3 Dave Price 31

4 Steve Coles 26

5 Bob South 20

6 Alan Varley 19

7 Len Harris 2

8 Nick Boyd 2

Jim has promised that even though he chose the fly, he hadn’t practiced it before – despite Steve’s moans of “FIX!!”.

Overall results

Adding together the results of the two competitions, the final championship ended like this:

Position Total points

1 Jim McLaughlin 124

2 Dave Price 82

3 Chris Leat 72

4 Steve Coles 54

5 Nick Boyd 43

6 Alan Varley 33

Congratulations Jim!

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