There is no questioning the effectiveness of balanced flies, especially for stillwater anglers. Yet in tying them there are some design limitations to the conventional cut-pin and bead engineering. The pins tend to be too thick to enable well-proportioned smaller flies, awkward to tie with, and not particularly good looking on the finished product. Accordingly, balanced leeches and damsels all tend to be about the same weight, and most are a good deal larger than what I ideally want to fish. Most are too much for more conventional dry dropper rigs as well. So, these were the issues I wanted to engineer around to come up with smaller lighter and more effective stillwater and slow water flies. My earliest prototypes headed out to the Williamson River with master guide Paul McDonnald. Two days later he was frantically texting me to see if he could get more of them. In his words, "they crushed big rainbows". I later tested them on a prolific private reservoir in Montana. I caught heaps of browns, rainbows, cutthroats and a few nice brookies. All of these were caught stripping with no means of suspension, and they performed well.
