S6, Ep 124: Fly Tying with Chase Smith

Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the articulate fly. On this episode, I'm joined by Chase Smith, the fly designer behind the spiral spook. Chase and I take a deep dive into his design philosophy process, the evolution of the spiral spook, upcoming creations, and much more. But before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast, please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating review in the podcatcher of your choice.

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Thanks for having me on, Marvin. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And we have a tradition on the articulate fly. We like to ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory. Yeah, let me think. Honestly, whenever someone asked me about the first time fishing, I usually think about going with my granddad out to Lake Amistad in Texas, and we went to Walmart and bought combos before we went out there.

So I was probably twelve or 13 at the time, but that was like the first, biggest. We're going fishing and we're gonna go catch bass. And it was really fun and we snapped our rods and everything, but that was the, that was when I got hooked. Very, very neat. So when did you come to the dark side of fly fishing? I didn't start fly fishing until I was my senior year of college. So I spent a long time just conventional bass fishing.

Some saltwater stuff, some I like to do shark lines at the beach, paddle, paddle out lines really far and stake them out. We did that a little bit, but mostly just conventional bass fishing until, until my senior year of college got it. And so who are some of the folks that have mentored you on your fly fishing journey?

Honestly, a lot of it has been just me and a couple of my friends who got into fly fishing before or around the same time as me, and we just kind of figured it out on our own for the most part. Of course, we looked stuff up online, and there was one local fly shop with a few people who helped us out, but most of it was just me and my buddies getting on the water. Yeah, it's interesting.

You know, I used to live in Dallas, and I don't really think of Texas particularly, like, back when I was there, like, really having very many fly shops at all. Yeah. You know, there's a. There's a few really good ones. Living waters is my favorite, but it's over in Austin. I'm in. I'm in Kerrville, so I'm an hour away from San Antonio and a couple hours away from Austin. And there's an orgas store in San Antonio.

There's a tiny little fly shop that an older gentleman runs in Fredericksburg, about 20 minutes away from me. And we've stopped in there a couple times, but for the most part, there's just. There's not much in this area in terms of the fly fishing world, so you kind of have to travel a little bit before you get over to Austin and Houston, Dallas, where you get more people that are into it. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, it's interesting.

I spent some time in the hill country when I lived in Dallas, down around kind of green and San Marcos. Yeah, yeah. On the Guadalupe down there. Yeah. I didn't fish, but went and, you know, drank lone star beer and went to the dance halls and all that kind of good stuff. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. We. We started fishing on. On the Guadalupe down there where they stocked the trout, but we would go try to catch the striped bass that are eating the trout. So, uh, some people don't like them, but that's.

That's the only way we fish down there. Yeah, that's. That's funny that, uh, we have that problem on the Wetaga in the south Holston, too. Of the stripe bass, eating the trout. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good problem to have, I think. So, uh, so when. So when did you get interested in fly tying? So I've always been kind of. I really like to do arts and woodworking, stuff like that. You know, growing up, I used to.

In fact, for one of my birthdays, when I was, like, eight or nine, we invited, like, 30 or 40 kids over to my house, and I had built, like, medieval weapons out of popsicle sticks and duct tape for everybody. And we just had a melee battle of, like, 30. You know, 1011 year olds just hacking at each other with all this stuff.

So I've always liked building things and making stuff, and so as soon as I got introduced to fly fishing, I knew I wanted to start tying flies, so I probably had a vice then three or four months after I started fly fishing. Yeah. Do you remember what was the first vice you had and what fly you tied on it? The first vice I had was something really cheap, probably off of ebay. The first real vice I had was a stanfo Caiman. It was. It's kind of like a regal. Where do you just.

It just has the clamp, but it didn't. It didn't hold shanks very well, so I upgraded pretty quickly. But I had that one for a good little while, and trying to think what the first. What the first fly I tied. It wasn't a woolly bugger. I know a game changer is one of the first things I tied. Uh, it was. It was real crappy, but I was real excited about it. Yeah. And what do you tie on today? I I have a rinsetti master now. Got it. And I bet you you have shank jaws on it. I actually don't.

I just have the regular jaws, and, uh, they work great for me. I'm sure the shank jaws are awesome, but, uh, no, I don't have them. Yeah. And so, you know, who are some of the folks that you kind of pay attention to and have kind of influenced you as you developed as a tire?

Well, obviously, Blaine's probably the one biggest influence, because when I first started fly fishing, one of my friends around here that I fly fished with is a doctor. He's a bit older than me, and he sent me a video and was like, chase, if you get a chance, look at this. I think you would really like this fly. And it was a video of one of the older game changers, I think, that Blaine had put out.

But I saw that, and immediately I was ordering all the materials I needed to try to tie that up, and I tied up the first one and gave it to my friend for him to end the fish with. And so that's probably the first thing that I looked it up and tied it. I used to just go on YouTube, and it was more. If I saw a pattern that I liked that someone was fishing with, then I would look it up rather than, you know, following specific people, per se. But I pretty quickly, I just kind of started doing my.

My own thing for a lot of them, but definitely, definitely Blaine Clouser, minnows, I used to tie a lot of clouds of minos at first, so I really liked Bob's design on that. And, you know, there's a, there's a few guys I follow now. You can kind of, you can kind of sift through all the chaff on Instagram and, and find a few guys who are really doing some cool stuff. So there's a few guys that I like to watch. Cause they come out with unique stuff.

But I also, I really try not to spend too much time looking at other people's stuff so that I don't just subconsciously start trying to imitate other people and doing stuff. Especially now that I'm licensing patterns and coming up with stuff on my own. I like to, as much as I can, I like to try to be thinking and ruminating on things in my own mind and not taking in other people's stuff and then like, you know, condensing that all into something different. Yeah. You're not.

Not taking a fly and putting a different color hotspot on it and calling it something different. Yeah. As much as you can. I try. I try not to do that. I think, you know, to a certain point, everything's, you know, there's a lot of things that you might, you might come up with something and it's already been done and you might not know it or, you know, you think making one little change warrant something like that? No, I think there's a way.

A way to, you know, find a good balance of when it, when a fly gets a new name versus, you know, such, with a hotspot, like you say. Yeah. And so, you know, when did you decide to jump in the deep end of the swimming pool and start production fly time? You know, it was actually fairly quickly and it wasn't really on purpose. I was a senior in college. I still wasn't sure what I was going to do coming out of college.

So I had stuff on my personal Instagram and realized all I was doing was posting phishing pictures and all these people I didn't know would be getting on my personal Instagram and messaging me. So I started a separate Instagram page for I, and pretty quickly just had a bunch of people wanting to order them. So I decided I'd try to make it official and get, you know, start paying excise taxes. And orbit store nearby had seen my stuff and started wanting to make wholesale orders.

So that's kind of when I had to really kind of make it official. Yeah. It's interesting you say that about the excise taxes. Because I think a lot of people don't realize that. Don't realize that's a thing. And then also, what a pain in the behind it can be, right? Oh, yeah. It's a hassle. It's a hassle to set up. It's annoying to have to pay a straight ten off the top kind of tax on everything. Flies. Flies are already low margin as it is, especially when you calculate the time involved.

And so, and then you try to build that into your pricing, and people don't like that. It adds more expenses to it. And there's no good way to say, hey, this fly is such and such, but I got to add an extra 10% because of this tax. You can't really do that. So you kind of just end up eating that cost.

Yeah. And so, you know, what were some of the big surprises or adjustments you had to make when you kind of went from tying for yourself to kind of scaling up your. Your production tying business? Uh, you know, it's. It's probably balance of what. What can you spend your time on that's worth it?

And, uh, how do you separate yourself from everybody else who's, you know, it's a. There's a very low barrier to entry, or all you need to do is get some hooks and bison materials, and it's all fairly cheap, and you can start selling flies. Lots of people that don't have a business set up or any sort of llc, nothing like that, can just start selling flies for cheaper than you can. And it's not sustainable, but they're just doing it for fun, and they're in the same space as you.

And so it's hard to scale properly and keep your margins to where they need to be to make it profitable and sell the volume and not spend more time than it's worth tying them. It's very difficult to find something that's actually profitable within the fly tying space. Going to the bigger companies and stuff like that. If you're just doing it yourself, it's hard to be long term profitable in that way.

Yeah. And I would also say some of these bigger patterns, it's just, they're just so involved, it's kind of hard to scale it, right? Absolutely. Well, I, you know, I don't sell game changers anymore, but what I. When I did, you know, the most I could tie in a day was maybe eight to ten, something like that, because I'm making all the brushes, making all the shanks, doing handmade, and.

And then you're selling the fly for $20 and, you know, minus your material costs all the time it takes putting into it, then the excise tax on top of that. Plus, if you want to even consider selling them wholesale, that's 40% to 50% off the top right there. And it's just, you're looking at minimum wage or something like that at that point. Yeah. Any other challenges kind of jump out to you? Kind of, you know, being a production tire?

Yes. So when you're trying to, you know, production tie and you're having to use so much materials and you're having to tie so many flies, you're dealing not only with the monotony, but a lot of people think you got to use materials from a fly shop that are specific to fly tying. But the reality is the industry so small, lots of the fly time materials are repurposed materials from other industries.

And so if you look around, you can find, you know, I use wig hair for a lot of stuff because it's very similar to, uh, some of the stiffer synthetic fibers that you can find from fly kind companies. And it probably is just the same stuff being repackaged, but, uh, it's, it's, it's handy to be able to go off script and find bulk materials that are, uh, that are not specifically branded fly tying, but that do the same thing.

Yeah, it's also too, I mean, it's like, you know, it's also a good idea for folks to go to hobby lobbies and, you know, Michaels and places like that for exactly that reason, because you can find some pretty cool stuff to tie with there. Absolutely. I have spent way too much money at those stores. So. So what attracted you to tying? You know, I guess what I would generally call predator flies.

Is it just, you know, that's what you like to fish for, or is there something else that kind of drew you in? I mean, I think it would just mostly stem from. That's what I like to fish for, because so if you, if you go look on my website, the flies that I tie are carp flies, redfish flies, you know, saltwater predatory species, and bass flies. And so, obviously, you can use that kind of stuff for pike, muskie, all sorts of other species, but it's.

I tie for what I fish for because I can't go test my flies on other species because they're not here. You know, I have to, have to design for what I can fish for, typically. So, so that's what I do. And, and, yeah, that bass are mostly what I'm fishing for. So a lot of my time is spent trying to come up with bass flies. Got it. And, you know, I think you're probably best known for your spiral spook pattern.

I was kind of wondering if you could let us know a little bit about, you know, where the idea for the pattern came from and kind of how you developed it. Yeah, I, you know, when I was conventional fishing, I. My favorite way to catch fish was to throw a four or five inch stone spook and catch bass on top water that way. And it was just, there's, there's nothing quite like it being able to move the bait so much in such a short space.

So you're not, you know, ripping a, ripping the lure away from the fish where you can really work it in one spot and seeing the lure go side to side, there's a lot to it that I really enjoy. And so there's really cool deer hair scoops that people tie, and some of them are just gorgeous works of art, but I don't do a ton of deer hair work. I've tied some of those, but, uh, you know, it takes a long time, and, uh, they, they can absorb water and get heavy and, and all the. Well, there's.

There's a host of reasons to feed fish them, and there's a host of reasons not to. And I just wanted to find something that was more in my wheelhouse. And I really like to use foam and synthetics and, and a lot of the newer style of fly tying stuff. And so I was, I also didn't want to just stick foam on a lathe or something like that. I wanted to actually tie up a fly that's, that could walk the dog like that and replicate that side to side motion.

And so the very first time, I just, I thought about, you know, having weights inside of a foam wrapped body, and I tried something and tied it up, and it seemed to work okay. And I knew I had something that I could work with from that point. I wanted to go side to side, and I knew I could just play with the weights and the sizes and the thickness and all the different things that go into it and make it work. So, you know, I've. I'm.

I've been still messing with the design of that fly three, four years later now. And. Interesting. And so are you imparting the action on the spiral spook the same way you would, you know, impart the action, uh, with a conventional bait, or are you. Or did you adapt it for, you know, um, for fly fishing? That's. No, that's a good question. I, uh. With a conventional bait, you know, you're using the rod tip, you're having a pocket. You gotta let slack come into blinden.

And you do use some of the same concepts when you're fishing these spooks, but they're so light compared to their conventional counterparts that you do have to fish them differently. The first ones that I made, you had to strip them fast to get them to walk. It's kind of how I weighted them was get a good cadence going. You could get them to walk side to side. But I realized pretty quickly that not everyone can strip really fast or keep the tempo just right.

And if you couldn't do that, then it wouldn't walk, and so people would get frustrated. So one of the solutions to that is to add more weight to kind of help keep it going side to side, but then they get heavy to cast. So I ended up kind of realizing that the fly doesn't have nearly as much inertia as conventional spook does. So you can't just weight the fly in one spot like a conventional spook. You have to distribute the weight throughout the fly.

And it's all wrapped under, under that outer foam wrap. But it has to be very, very precise to get it to go side to side. So now I have it where you keep your rod tip in the water, pointed at the fly. You don't move the rod tip at all. And you do a slow, deliberate, but sharp strip, just maybe three or four inches aligned with a very sharp stop. But you can do it smooth and slow, and that gets it walking side to side with. With a lot more glide than I used to have it.

It used to kind of chop side to side if you moved it fast. Now it glides more, and it's a lot easier to walk, and it's a lot easier for people that aren't as skilled at stripping fast to be able. To make it work

very, very neat. And, you know, it's always interesting because I always find that kind of almost every predator fly guy I've talked to, they have a deep, conventional angling background, and they just decided that they wanted to kind of apply that knowledge in the fly fishing space. What are some other things that your conventional angling backgrounds brought to your fly designs?

Yeah. So I think most of what I brought coming from a conventional background, I wasn't super serious on the conventional side of things. I did it for fun fairly often, but just the movements that trigger bass, especially, were some of the things that I still try to replicate with my flies. Whether it's you know, right now, I've. I've been messing around with, uh, some glide bait style, uh, fries that I still haven't perfected. But I just.

I love seeing a glide bait chop side to side, and that's something I want to, uh, do with a fly. And, you know, the stook, obviously, I've got a frog that's really, really cool that are actually Blaine's gonna be producing through his chocolate factory, and that'll hopefully be here this next spring. But, you know, just replicating the style of what I used to enjoy throwing on conventional bait. I still do that with a fly rod, because the reason I use a fly rod is I enjoy the casting so much.

I enjoy being able to make my own flies. I enjoy the light presentation of the flies. Just everything about that is kind of what draws me to fly fishing. And I don't feel the need to throw any conventional anymore just because I have more fun not catching fish, fly fishing than I do if I were catching fish, conventional. And so that's kind of my baseline. And fortunately, fly fishing, you usually do catch fish.

And one of the best parts is you can see any fish, you know, any fish in the river that you see. Typically, there's a fly that it's going to eat. So that's the other, you know, side of that coin is when I was conventional fishing, I would never catch a carp or, you know, some of these cichlids or other things that are in the river. Just, you don't catch those on the things that you're throwing for bass.

So now I usually keep three rods, you know, top water streamer, and then a carp or panfish style sour rod. And any fish I come across in our rivers I can make a decent presentation to that has a chance of catching them. Got it. And, you know, it's interesting, too, because your patterns are, you know, stylistically different. But I was wondering if there's maybe, you know, like, a unifying design philosophy that you have when you're trying to create new patterns.

You know, probably the one thing I keep coming back to is trying to make weedless designs, or at least nagless, because I get really frustrated throwing any fly that's hook point down. And I also don't enjoy throwing jig flies all that much, so I really like to try to get level sinking flies that are hook point up, you know, whether it's a game changer that has a little bit of foam in it in certain places or some of the light style flies that I have, the spook sits hook point up.

The frogs that I, that I've been designing are weedless. So I really like being able to throw flies back into the back into the junk and into the thick stuff where the bass, you know, typically are and not get snagged. So even on my cart flies, they all sit hook point up. And that's probably a pretty unifying thing that I use. Got it. And, you know, where do you get your ideas for your new patterns? And kind of like, how do you like to kind of go from kind of concept to finish flyver?

Most of the time I start from being on the water and seeing either like a localized event where I see bass feeding on a certain bait fish or something, acting a certain way and wanting to replicate that movement, or just a bait fish in general, or for example, the frog, it's just wanting to replicate the kicking motion of a frog. So on the fly that I've designed, the legs, when you strip it forward, the legs kick backwards and then retract. And it looks like a frog swimming.

But it took forever to figure out how to make that happen because it's a very unique motion in the design world. To have legs that kind of stay in place as you strip forward and then can spring back. It's a very difficult, but I enjoy that aspect of it. I like to try to have something slightly unique as kind of a selling point in each fly to make it, to make it worth designing a new flyer around something. Got it. And I always like to ask, you know, really serious tires to share three tips.

Um, for us mere mortals, that will kind of help us up our game and bench, right? Yes, I can. All, you know, some of the, probably the biggest thing that, that has helped me is not being limited to materials and recipes and more understanding the inherent, like, qualities of each material.

So being able to see a specific fiber and know that it's stiff or going to absorb water or whatever it is, and it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to be exactly what a certain fly pattern calls for, but if you have something that's going to perform the same, typically you can sub sub it out and it's going to be just fine. And honestly, you know, honestly, fish are not nearly as picky as we like to think they are for the most part, especially in the streamer world.

And you can get away with, with some changes that may not be exactly what the original recipe calls for, but, uh, but it'll work out just fine. So I found that I tied up when I was first starting to, you know, tie, I found that I would. I had a lot more fun when I started, like, straying from. From designs and from the recipes and using new things and trying things out of and not being afraid to do that because you don't have to stick to exactly what's being called for.

The second thing is something that I tell everybody whenever they come to any of my shows. And I'm tying up, especially if I'm tying up game changers and I'm using certain tools. But if you're going to mess with wire dubbing, brushes, anything like that, buy a pair of orthodontics flyers, orthodontics snips, and they are the best tool for $10 that you'll ever get.

I've tied thousands of game changers with the same stainless steel orthodontics snips, and they're better than the flushed wire cutters you can get at hardware stores, anything like that. They're probably my favorite tool that I found that doesn't come from a fly shop. Got it. And how about number three? Let me think. Uh, you know, the. The last one that I. That I really use a lot is learning to make your own shanks. It. It just is so helpful to be able to.

To measure out to the millimeter how big I want a shank to be and then make it myself. So whether. Whether you're buying a wire bending jig or getting the, uh, there's a one step looper tool, and you can. You can bend stainless steel wire yourself. That's probably another of the biggest things that I use all the time. Got it. And I always like to ask, you know, serious tires.

The other one is like, everybody's got some kind of squirrelly tool that may not even kind of officially be a tool that they can't live without. Do you have anything like that? You know, those orthodontics pliers are up there. I use those all the time, and I have multiple pairs in case I ever lose them. Let me think. I don't use too many. I don't use a lot of tools, honestly. Probably those one step looper, the wire benders. I use those a lot. So that's probably the one.

If it broke, I would have to order a new one that same day.

Got it. And, you know, are there. Are there any projects you're working on you'd like to share with our listeners? Yeah, you know, I've got. I've got several patterns coming out with Montana Fly company that I'm excited about. We've been working on those for a long time, and they'll be hopefully here pretty soon and finalized and everything. So I'm excited about that. I'm really excited to be working with Blaine with the chocolate factory stuff.

I've stopped selling game changers because he's finally selling them himself, and he's the original designer, so I strongly believe that he should be getting royalties from that pattern. And so it's unfortunate to see all these other companies selling game changers, but no royalties going to him anyway. I can push people towards that, I do. But I'm also. I'm super excited that he's going to be making one of my flies with that frog.

So, hopefully that'll be this next year, and that'll be really cool. Other than that, I've got. I've got a new hook that's.

That I'm putting on the spiral spook that has made the hookup ratio probably five or six times better because I spent a lot of time watching bass eat it and seeing why they didn't get hooked, and so I've made a switch on that, and I'm finally finishing up rebalancing all the different sizes of the spoops and getting the new hook source and everything like that, and they'll be way better. So pretty soon, I'll be back in production on those. Got it.

And is that a hook that's going to be available to everybody else, or is that just something just for you? Oh, it's already a hook that's out there. It's a gamma katsu finesse wide gap hook. It just has an upturn point that works way better than the one that I had. The other hook is an a rex hook, and it's great, just not for this application. So switching to that is that other hook has made a huge difference. Got it. And so folks want to check out your flies and purchase a few.

Where should they go? Yeah, they can go to my website, ww dot fishchaseflies.com, and they can also go to my Instagram, which is fishchaseflies. And that's typically all my stuff is either on my website or coming out on my instagram. There's quite a few fly shops that have this groups, and pretty soon there'll be a lot more once I get back into the slinger producing them again. Got it. Cause I know you've got. I know your favorite fly shop in Austin has them for sure, right? Oh, yes.

Yeah, they've got a bunch of them. Yeah. And so is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners before I let you go this evening. You know, I can't think of much off the top of my head. Just, you know, I'm always trying to get out there and film and hopefully pretty soon I'll have a bunch of top water stuff for that, that frog and spook. And I've been trying not to put as much on Instagram lately just because I've been redesigning the spoop with a new hook and everything.

And so pretty soon I'll have. I've been taking a bunch of footage and you can see it all on my instagram once I get it all put out there, but that'll all start ramping back up pretty soon. Got it. And if folks want to find you on the show circuit in 2025, you got any shows on the calendar? I'll always be at trout fest here in Texas. They do that one over on the Guadalupe by green and all those other places. Uh, it's an awesome show.

I'll also be at a. There's a couple other local Texas shows that I'll do. I'm not sure if I'm going back up to, um, to the, uh, Schultz outfitters, Bob in the hood, but I hope so. Um, other than that, I don't have anything quite planned. I've still got, you know, two little kids at home, so some. A lot of my time is pretty limited. Yeah, no, fair enough. We were talking about that. I, uh, you know, it's interesting.

Mine are 22 and 16 and, uh, just different challenges, I guess, is the easiest way to say it. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so if folks want to follow your adventures at the viceroy on the water, where should they go? Uh, following my instagram is the. The best way. Fish chase flies on, on Instagram. That's. That's where I post everything and put all my videos. And I do have a bunch on YouTube tutorials and stuff like that. So I'm pretty sure it's just fish Chase flies on YouTube as well.

But those would be the two places to see pictures and videos. And then you can actually buy the flies on my website. Got it. And I'll drop all that stuff in the show notes for you. Awesome. Yeah. Well, listen, Chase, I appreciate you spending some time with me this evening. It's been a lot of fun. Of course, yeah. Thank you so much. Have a great one. You too. Well, folks, we hope you enjoyed the interview as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Don't forget to check out trout routes.

Pro at maps dot troutroutes.com use artfly 20 art fly 20 all one word to get 20% off of your membership. Tight lines, everybody.