I don’t make a secret about it but I tie most of my flies during bad weather and there is a kind of compelling link between fly tying and the long periods of heavy rain for me. We also have a lot of harsh winters in Holland that suddenly make fly tying an awesome hobby. To be honest, as soon as rain, snow, ice or hail dominate the day, my hands get itchy and I need to tie flies instead of going out. Don’t misunderstood me because I love being outdoors and I don’t mind cold or rain while fishing, but when it rains heavily I usually wait until the rain blows over before going out. Perhaps this attitude came about because most of my trips from 1971-1986 were to sub-arctic regions using old fashion waders where I quickly realised that once the cold gets into your bones it is very hard to get it out again.

When I still had my army job and spent a lot of time abroad in camps I preferred to stay in my room instead hanging around in a bar or canteen in the evenings and over weekends.  It also felt good to be away for a while from all the soldiers I worked with day after day. It was in these moments of privacy that I tied flies, made my own tying tools, created a lot of fancy fly patterns and wrote many fly tying articles and stories.

In the autumn of 1982, when I lived and worked in Germany, I started my first modest classes in Bremen teaching small groups of fishermen about the wonderful fly fishing opportunities in Scandinavia. The owner of my local tackle shop in Zeven had introduced me to a fly fisher who lived in Bremen. His wife had lost her job and so was running a little mail order company selling very exclusive fly tying and fly fishing materials, mainly imported from the USA. They had lots of contacts with anglers in northern Germany and because of their interest in fly fishing in Scandinavia, we became friends very quickly. After doing a private slide show for them, they were so impressed with my presentations, the large trout and grayling that I caught, and the dozens of beautiful outdoor pictures that filled the screen, that they asked me if I would do the same presentation for a much larger audience. I was familiar with teaching platoons in the army and was well educated in it, but I had never done a lecture on my hobby to a large group of anglers. Nevertheless, I saw it as a new challenge and I agreed.

They first set up meetings with anglers at their house, but when interest increased and the groups got bigger, we had to move to other locations in Bremen, Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Lübeck, Kiel, Flensburg and Hanover. Most of the participants were much older than me, but they were very kind and extremely polite, which made the presentations all the more enjoyable for me especially since there was plenty of healthy interaction. Perhaps my photographs in combination with my stories convinced them that I really knew how to fish in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The groups were a minimum of ten and maximal of twenty people and while I did my talks, his wife was able promote her company during the breaks. In return she provide me with some high quality tying materials and tools. This presented a perfect opportunity for me to use Regal vices and Hoffman capes which were top of the range in the 1980’s. Nowadays I love capes from Chevron Hackles, a small company in the UK who offers great quality dry fly capes and sells the best soft hackle capes on the globe. It was a unique opportunity for me, because I not only learned how to do better presentations, but I also made a lot of new friends. The polite German anglers really stimulated and motivated me to share my knowledge and my patterns with the world.

In 1984, after I had designed my Klinkhåmer Special, more and more tackle dealers and fly-fishing clubs started inviting me to demonstrate my flies, and that’s how I actually got involved with demonstrations, classes and workshops about fly tying on a much larger scale. In the late 1980’s and 1990’s I started doing workshops, classes, lectures and fly tying demonstrations more professionally and outside Europe as well. My first fly tying lessons for kids only started in 2002, but until 2010 I was only doing a handful of classes every year. However, when I retired in 2012, I not only increased my fly tying participation at shows, fairs and festivals, but I also increased the number of workshops and classes I did for kids. When I managed to get a very special picture of two salmon leaping real close in front of a family’s noses, and saw how their oldest kid only remained interested in his cell phone, I made myself a promise: I wanted to keep kids away from Nintendo, Play Station, cell phones, tablets and computers. Even if it was only for a few short moments, I tried my best to awaken in the kids a little interest in the environment, fly tying and fly fishing. I succeeded and have held well over a hundred classes since then, with the largest event in Bosnia in 2016 with the incredible number of seventy-eight kids attending and all tying their very first fly!

The fly tying world is a very special one!

At another location in Bosnia I found a whole school class crying when I left. Tears were rolling down my cheeks as well. I never realised that I had given them the highlight of their year just by presenting a small program on the environment, letting them search for insects in the river, teaching them the basics of fly tying and then taking them fly fishing for the weekend. My good friend Ado Adnan Zvonic was responsible for all the planning, organising and translation, and I was completely overwhelmed by how well some of these kids spoke English, or at least tried to.  In moments like these you realise that you are on the right track and you feel that fly tying has a really great future.

In Canada in 2012 I gave my own vice to a young participant, a girl, who had was attending my classes for the third time. She was just eleven years old, but so talented that she deserved a much better vice and nowadays she ties salmon flies for the entire community. She is a lovely young teen now, but still contacts me at least once a month. The fly tying world is a very special one and I love being a part of it. I made hundreds of friends over the years and many of them were famous people in their own right. Sadly, I have also lost quite a number of my friends over the last 20 years. Real close friends with whom I had really meaningful contact and with whom I shared information, fly tying ideas, techniques and even what I call some of my  ‘big secrets’. But we actually didn’t have any secrets, and most of us shared our knowledge and ideas freely and openly with the world.  We even worked closely together on projects and publications, or had big plans for doing something special together in future. The list of those that have past away is uncomfortably long now, but it is a part of life, and it makes the ties with your living friends even closer.