A very special fly tying friend of mine is Branko Gasparin and my recent visit to him in October 2016 is the reason for this story. How close we really are will be told in the pictures shared in this article – and we even share our traditional dance with you! Every year when we hook up again we do our famous dance and it’s become a happy tradition at each of our yearly reunions. Because we are both big guys I call it the ‘Dance of the Giants’, which is a more appropriate name than the more graceful Slovenian Dance. The dance reminded Branko that he had to show me his new series of glass bead nymphs. I got befriended with Branko and his wife Vlasta in Italy a long time ago and we have always stayed in contact. We met again during the 2010 World Tuscany Open Fly Tying Competition in Italy. The WTO is undoubtedly one of the most respected fly tying competitions I know of, and it was a big honour for us to be two of the ten international judges during this extraordinary event. Today I am a really close friend with the whole Gasparin family.

Branko and I have quite a few things in common when it comes to fly tying and our minds are amazingly alike. Both our tying tables are a big mess and our vices, threads and feathers are always on standby just in case a good idea suddenly pops into our minds. In spite of the chaos we know exactly how to find every tool, spool or hook in seconds. Nobody is allowed to clean this mess because then we would completely lose control. We can hardly store all our stuff, but we still always seem able to find or create an extra place to add even more. Although Branko is a world class and award winning fly tier, who is highly specialized in fishing flies for the Balkans, he has travelled a lot and fished many other places in the world, which makes his fly tying pretty all-round too. His Branko Killer, a very special parachute fly for grayling, is perhaps his most famous fly, but I personally think he has designed many more killers that I love using in remote places in the Yukon Territory, Labrador, Mongolia or Scandinavia. We both love big dry flies, but we have also designed many un-weighted and heavily-weighted nymphs over the years. Quite a few of our patterns are similar and were developed with the same thoughts in mind. We have so much in common that as you would imagine, when we start chatting about flies, hooks, tools and materials, our discussions go really deep and they know no end.

During our reunions we share all our new patterns, new techniques, new ideas and any new materials we have discovered while we have separately been busy with own things during the year away from each other. Once we meet up we always tie a few flies together and in my last visit in October, Branko showed me some new nymphs that he developed with very special glass beads from Japan. The special shape of these beads was the magic touch I had been looking for since the late 1980’s. After I invented the final version of my Leadhead in 1984, and as soon I was familiar with the unusual tying technique to secure the split shot, I began searching for a special bead that could replace my leadshot. The Peeping Caddis improvement of the Leadhead by Oliver Edward speeded up my search. The idea of my split shot was stunning and the nymph’s action in the water was unbelievable. Catches were unreal at time, but I wasn’t entirely happy with my nymphs from an environmental point of view. In the old days split shot lead was very poisonous and it took me quite some time to find a perfect substitute. Using gold or silver beads was not an option because I simply loose them too quickly with this kind of tying technique. The serious improvement in my series of Leadheaded Grayling Bugs happened somewhere in the 1990’s when I finally found none toxic split shot from Dinsmores in the UK.  From that moment my big search was over, but I always kept looking for that one particular special bead that could replace the split shot without losing the perfect upside down, bottom bouncer effect.

The Miyuki OF-Beads

The glass beads that Branko introduced to me were named ‘Mini-gouttes Miyuki’ on the packages that he gave me. While doing further research at home, it turned out that the original name for the special shape is “Drop Beads” or “Magatama Beads”. The Miyuki beads have existed for a long time, because in the mid 1930’s Seiichi Katsuoka started to produce the first glass seed beads in the world. The Mini-gouttes belonging to the “Delicate Beads” assortment, and they were introduced in 1982. Exactly when this drop bead shape was developed I don’t know, but the value of these beads lay in the fact that the hole isn’t in the middle and therefore another name shows up, the “Off-Bead”. By using this awesome shape in my fly tying I finally could skip the special tying step that I had used to tie split shot onto the hook shank since 1984. By using this “Drop Bead” it is not only much easier to make Leadheads look like flies, but it also makes tying them a lot faster and they are far more durable than other upside down or jig head-related patterns. Tying experiments also proved that the beads were much harder to twist once they were tied onto the hook shank, and because of the special “drop” shape, a much wider range of hooks will pass through the hole as well. The new beads have a lot of benefits and the tungsten version may even make jig hooks superfluous. I was never a big fan of jig hooks because their shape makes the gape smaller and I prefer hooks with a real big gape. Once I had done all the possible experiments with the glass beads and knew their quality and possibilities I started searching for a weighted “Drop Bead”, which I couldn’t find until November 2016. I finally found the perfect tungsten “Drop Beads” when I gave a tying demonstration at ADH-Fishing in Peine near Hannover. They gave me some to experiment with and it didn’t take long before I figured out that my good friend André Fournier, owner of French fly tying products, Bidoz, was the manufacturer of the tungsten drop beads or OFF-Beads as they actually called. Years ago I had got in contact with André thanks to our late mutual friend Jurij Shumakov. Jurij was working for the Nahlyst  (the Russian national fly fishing magazine) and we had just settled a big cooperation agreement involving a large project for the Russian magazine shortly before Jurij passed away. I got to be a friend of Jurij’s through our common activities for the Rackelhanen online fly-fishing magazine in Sweden. Jurij, who lived in Sweden, contacted me in the early 1990’s because he had read about my Bondal series of Atlantic salmon flies, which he tied and enjoyed very much. André made all Jurij’s metal tubes for his Atlantic salmon flies and it is so good to see how the fly tying world is actually so closely connected by friendships like these.

The idea for the “OFF-Bead” arose after an interesting discussion between André and one of his customers in Spain who explained him how popular fishing with Perdigone nymphs is in his country. Sadly, finding suitable beads was impossible for him. André told me: “A very good French fly tier, Seb Oudard, explained to me that it would be an excellent idea to find a way to tie the wing case above the beads, while another friend, Marc Petitjean, said he would like to create a swimming nymph, like a jig, using a standard hook”. Oh how I wished I had discussed this subject with André years ago. I probably would have tied five times as many of my Leadhead’s and Peeping Caddis nymphs if only I had discovered his OFF-Beads much sooner.

Most amazing about his OFF-Bead is that André offered his new product to Terminal Tackle to participate in the Best New Product Awards 2016-2017 and he won first place, even ahead of as big a company as Rapala. André couldn’t believe it because his product was so tiny. In my opinion the award was well deserved especially because I had been looking for a weighted  “OFF bead” shape for almost 30 years.