The picture above is glimpse of Rim Chung at his fly tying desk, where he has been tying one fly for over 30 years, largely just one fly— the RS2, which is a legendary fly in the Rocky Mountain States and becoming well-known throughout the world. I have fished it on several continents and it is my go to fly, although I was a professional fly tier in my youth, I find it is the only fly I need these days. I have become truly a minimalist in terms of fly fishing and fly tying, but yet, I would not have done so if there were a more effective fly or method, as I was formerly a commercial fly tyer and used to carry several thousand patterns on the stream for anything that might arise.
Visit my friend’s RS2 site for Rim Chung or my site at www.oneflyfisherman.com, which explains in detail the tying instructions for the only fly we use fly fishing. Like Rim, I tie it in about 6 different sizes and 6 different colors, to match the prevalent insects. We have found that it is the only fly we need and, when tied like this in many of the prevalent sizes and colors, we catch more fish than others, it is simply that effective of a fly and method.
As Stanley Stewart writes, “To its devotees, fly fishing is a philosophical pursuit. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean begins with a simple declaration: “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” Fly fishing is angling for existentialists. The flies are meant to mimic the insects that hatch on rivers – and they come like the insects themselves in an almost infinite variety. Flies are the sacred artefacts of fly fishermen, and mythologies surround them. Their names reflect their mysteries: the Royal Trude, Lawson’s Spent Partridge Caddis, the Floating Nymph, the Quigley Cripple, Tup’s Indispensable. The greatest fly fishermen tie their own, with a bewildering variety of ingredients: bird feathers, coloured thread, elk hair, goose down. Tup’s Indispensable is made from the scrotum hair of a ram. Another uses the urine-stained fur of a vixen, yet another the armpit hair of a polar bear. A letter writer to The Field caught a four-pound salmon with a fly made from his wife’s pubic hair. Gathering the raw materials was presumably more fun than plucking a bear’s arm pit.” Fly tyers have often believed in materials with magical qualities from Sawyer’s Chadwick’s 477 wool, to now banned polar bear fur, and some of the materials listed above.
The RS2 is the antithesis to all of that magical mystery and the endless need for match the hatch thousands of patterns filled with nonsense—-it is meant purely to resemble an insect, you have to have several sizes and colors to represent the prevalent insects, and boy does it work. Some have even called it the Holy Grail or Magic Bullet of Fly Fishing, but I leave that for you to decide. I can only tell you that I am a convert after commercially tying many patterns of flies, this is the one that I now exclusively use for the last 25 years. Here are some of the patterns I used to tie in my old fly tying notes from Conyers, Dewey and others.
