Bryan Hostetler
Bryan Hostetler specializes in tying the kind of flies that are apt to illicit a nervous laugh. The operative description here is “small.” In fact, tiny. Warning: don’t sneeze. Immediately, questions arise in the average angler’s mind: can I even tie one on? How am I ever going to see it on the water? Will my tippet fit through the eye? What is this craziness, anyway?
It started with baseball. Hostetler grew up in Hubbard, Oregon, a sleepy, somewhat ramshackle little town nestled amid the towering green walls of hops farms. Like other small-town lads in the 1980s, when Hostetler wasn’t playing school sports, he could be found hunting and fishing at various haunts in the Willamette Valley. As it so happened, during spring of his senior year in high school, James Peterson, one of Hostetler’s baseball teammates, invited him on a trip to the lower Deschutes River. Hostetler jumped at the chance—splurging on a 5-weight Cortland rod-and-reel outfit—but didn’t hook a single fish. Still, the trip was hardly a loss.
“What really drew me in was the insect life,” Hostetler recalls. “We were there during the Salmonfly hatch, and I was mesmerized by the size of the bugs and how many of them were in the vegetation along the riverbank. … When we got back from the Deschutes, James showed me his fly-tying stuff and his Randall Kaufmann tying books.”
The die was cast, but life intervened, and it would take another three years before Hostetler tied his first bug. After moving to the Albany, Oregon, area, he eventually crossed paths with pro fly tier Tracy Peterson (no relation to James), a principal at Hareline Dubbin’ and a signature tier for Umpqua Feather Merchants. Peterson showed him the ropes, the kind of “tying efficiencies and consistencies” that can help ambitious new fly tiers advance to the next level.
Initially, Hostetler tied heavy ordnance: steelhead streamers and big weighted nymphs for steelhead fishing on the South Santiam River. As he got more and more into trout fishing on such streams as the Metolius and Crooked Rivers in central Oregon, his tying efforts veered into “strictly nymphs.” Hostetler observes, “I was again drawn to the bug life under the rocks for my inspiration, but had yet to expand to dry flies.”
While running his own landscape company, Hostetler took a long-overdue meeting with a guy named RJ, the owner of one of his main commercial accounts. “When walking into RJ’s office for the first time, I noticed fly boxes sitting on his desk,” Hostetler explains, “and that prompted the beginning of a lifelong friendship.”
RJ subsequently introduced Hostetler to the allure of trout fishing Oregon’s Owyhee River, and the South Fork Boise and Lost Rivers in Idaho. But it was a single distinctive episode on Idaho’s famous Silver Creek that radically changed the course of Hostetler’s fly-tying endeavors. “We were in our float tubes fishing the meat hole on the S turns, and Tricos were coming off to the point that so many fish were rising they created their own nervous water,” says Hostetler. “I was getting frustrated because I was having a hard time seeing a size 22 Trico pattern on the water, and when I did manage to hook a fish I immediately broke it off. … In the meantime, RJ, who had been slowly kicking his way upriver, bumped his tube into mine and nonchalantly observed, ‘Hey, hey, hey, don’t be so hard on yourself; you’re not that good.’ At first, I was irritated, and then I began to laugh uncontrollably, because I knew he was right.”
Moments later, while floating along together, fins up amid a welter of feeding trout, RJ made an observation that would prove to be an epiphany: he told Hostetler, “If you could figure out how to tie small flies so that guys like me who are getting older can see them and continue to fish them, you will fill a niche all your own.”
After more than a decade of scrambling to make an honest living in the landscaping trade, Hostetler did what any red-blooded angling nut would do: he severed some personal ties, sold his business, and moved lock, stock, and belly boat to the heart of trout country: Bellevue, Idaho. By day, he is a full-time guide who specializes in both the famous and little-known trout fisheries of central Idaho. By night, he ties flies—dozens and dozens of flies—scurrying to meet the demand of his customers, especially those fishing Silver Creek and other technical fisheries in the region. (Contact Bryan by email at brysflys@yahoo.com).
These days Hostetler views himself as occupying the role of problem solver, perhaps even more so than that of adept fly tier. For instance, he frequently asks himself questions such as what materials and tying techniques must be employed to achieve the right silhouette. What is the right orientation in the surface film? What is the right amount of visibility in difficult light conditions?
One of the main issues Hostetler confronts when tying ultra-small flies concerns finding the right body material. As an alternative to dubbing (it soaks up water) and to thread alone as a body material (trout teeth shred it), Hostetler settled on 0.5 mm micro tubing (obtained at a jewelry supply), using varied tension on the wraps to create a tiny, tapered body. However, the biggest problem with little flies—in Hostetler’s words, “the final hitch”—involves coming up with on-the-button wing materials. He says, “It took several years and several prototypes for me to figure out the blend: a recipe of materials that would compress small enough [remember, we’re talking teensy here] to not change the profile of the fly, while still matching the natural’s wing shape and coloration, plus stand out enough to provide angler visibility.”
When asked just what that blend is composed of, Hostetler hedged a bit before saying, “Well, it’s kind of proprietary.”
But, laughing, he added, “This much I can tell you: the natural part of the blend is fur from snowshoe rabbit feet. As for the synthetics used in the recipe, I’ll leave that up to fly tiers out there to figure out for themselves. …That’s half the fun, isn’t it?”
Oregon-based Don Roberts is a veteran writer and longtime contributor to American Fly Fishing magazine.
