Living in northern Alberta does have its faults and one being that I have to drive 2.5 hours to buy tying materials in Grande Prairie and have limited choice or drive 5 hours to Alberta's capital city, Edmonton. Well I mostly have opted out of doing either. Having three boys at 3, almost 2 and 5 months can make the trip very exhausting to say the least. So what I have been doing is searching and ordering over the internet and surprisingly its very difficult to find an online store in Canada that has anything that I want, which forces me to make purchases from the US.

The reasons I bring this some what of a rant to light is that I recently ran out of hooks and have decided that I needed to learn about Tube flies.. and of course we all know how thrifty we can be when it comes to scrounging the thrift stores for fur or the Dollar Store for whatever the hell they have. Prior to the day I'd decided tube flies were the ticket I was checking out wigs (I swear this town thinks I'm up to something) when I came across some flexible colored tubes for crafts, I thought they would be fun for the kids, and they played with them for hours and then it hit me..

So I tied a few with obvious struggles being that they were too flexible to tie tightly with my crude coat hanger mandrel. I started searching the house and found Heat Shrink tubing that I had from repairing my fly line. ( remember previous post.. well it worked like shit!) So I melted a shape out and it works actually pretty good. I also stole the tubes out of the Windex bottles and tried them too.. they're even better. Anyways for now I think I may get into this for awhile and see how well they fish. Top one is an Intruder type fly with the heat shrink. Bottom one being a bunny using Rabbit zonker and Ostrich, yellow Finn Raccoon and marabou dubbing looped with Windex bottle tube