My AI Fly Box

I've given in with a lot of my fishing Pedros around the state, staying in and reorganizing, cleaning, tying...for coming fishing days.

Which also gives me a lot of time to actually think about some things that cross my mind every time I think "fishing". One of those thoughts being, "How can that cream color scud/sowbug that I tied just dominate Meramec River (or park) last year, and I haven't caught one on it this year?! That led to me deciding I had enough "in-time" coming, that I could put together a fly box of flies that aren't fickle. Plenty of social media disclosures out there. But each influencer's title or intro usually begins with something like, "...the only thing you'll ever need." That's how I ended up with a fly shop inventory of cream scuds, San Juan and squirmy worms, CK nymphs, and more. A good run of catching on a certain flavor of fly and I was sure that moving forward, that flavor would be, "...the only thing I'll ever need." So, relying on old time research (people) wasn't going to cut it.

Limiting my use of AI to now, to things "not fishing" because there's just some things that technology needs to sit on the sidelines, I was just bored enough to have the idea to ask AI four questions. "If I can use only one dry fly in Central Missouri, what should I use?" "If I can use only one nymph in Central Missouri, what should I use?" "If I can use only one streamer in Central Missouri, what should I use?" "If I can use only three flies for bluegill and red ear in Central Missouri, what three flies should I use?"

Ta-da! Here's the box AI put together for me. I had the parachute Adams, Had a few of the Prince nymphs in brown, so tied three more using peacock herl (not "hurl"-like peacock vomit), the tying material the original Prince was bult around. I don't tie my poppers-I buy them. Anyone reading this that ties is probably scratching their head, "Poppers are the easiest thing in that box, to tie!" True-but you gotta paint 'em. Acrylic paint, paint brush, air brush, whatever. Not on my watch. I've tied in new feathers on some of those poppers because bluegill can be unruly kids when it comes to how they'll pick my toys apart. The bully bluegill spiders is all AI born-and verified by fly tying greats Tim Flagler and Charlie Craven. Long legs and all. And finally, AI was pretty happy about any style of the hundreds of streamer styles out there-as long as they were olive in color. I added the two micro-streamers since I have more confidence in micro everything.

If I were to put together a box of my confidence flies-none of these would be in it. And right now, as covered above, of the colors and styles combined being about 20 that I would organize in that confidence box-only one was working before ice in. So the plan is, to always have this AI box with me and when that one of 20 also stops working, start picking the AI choices (within reason-no poppers in January-February).