The good folks are UpCountry are hosting fly-tying sessions with guides Zach St. Amand and Derrick Kirkpatrick. I’ve signed up for the 8:30 am session and hope to run into you there.

Here is the description from UpCountry:

Full-time Farmington River guides Derrick Kirkpatrick & Zach St. Amand will reveal their thought processes and open up their fly boxes to students on how they come up with their patterns for specific and non-specific entomology. They will be providing macro photos of some of the bugs that trout eat, and then show you how to imitate them with your fly tying. Proven patterns will be taught, but they will be designing new flies live in front of you and walk you through how to create them as well. See what materials Zach and Derrick choose as they give specific reasons why they picked them. On pressured streams like the Farmington, being able to present educated trout something different can often be the key to hooking some large quality fish.

Both Zach and Derrick find those larger higher quality browns to be the ultimate goal on the Farmington, these are the hardest fish of all to catch. If you can boost your fly tying design skills to an elevated level, you will have an big advantage when targeting large, pressured, educated trout. Catching these upper echelon trout on fly patterns you personally designed is extremely rewarding.

The flies that work here will work on many other tough rivers, and the thought process that you learn in this class will enable you to come up with your own unique flies for both the Farmington River as well as other rivers.

There will be two 4 hour sessions with a max of 8 people per class, giving you a 4:1 student/instructor ratio to make sure everyone gets plenty of 1-on-1 instruction. Date is Sunday September 24th, Class A will run 8:30 am to 12:30 pm, and Class B will run 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm. Cost is $250 per student, paid in advance & non-refundable. Call UpCountry at 860-379-1952 to reserve a spot before the classes fill up.