The Blowtorch is my favorite fly. I’ve said that before and I’ll keep saying it until someone passes a law. What I haven’t explained is that I don’t buy them — I tie every single one I fish, and I’ve been doing it long enough now that the thought of opening a box full of store-bought Blowtorches feels vaguely like cheating on a person. This post is about why a grown adult develops feelings about a jig nymph.
Let me get the disclaimer out of the way first: you can buy a great Blowtorch from a great fly shop — Olsen sells his own tied version, in fact. Same materials. Proportions close enough. The fish will eat both without filing a complaint. So this isn’t an argument that hand-tied is automatically better than commercial — sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, and the trout genuinely do not care who held the bobbin. The argument is that something happens to you when you tie your own, and it changes how you fish more than the fly itself ever could.
The short answer
The honest reason isn’t money — a commercial Blowtorch runs about $2.50–3.00 and tying one costs roughly $0.50, but that savings only counts if you’d actually fish all of them. I tie every Blowtorch I fish because authorship changes how I fish it: I know exactly what’s on my line down to the wire wraps, I fish it more confidently, and I can tie the exact variant the day calls for — orange hot-spot tag for stained water, green for clear.
Everything below is the long version of why the fly stopped being a product for me.
The economic case (backwards)
Most “tie your own” pitches start with money. They’re not wrong. They’re also not the point, and pretending they are is how people end up with $600 of materials and 40 finished flies.
A commercial Blowtorch runs about $2.50 to $3.00 at retail. Tying one at home costs roughly $0.50 in materials, once you’ve amortized the vise, the light, and the tools. So if you tie 200 a year, you “save” $400 to $500. Real money — enough to notice.
But that math only works if you’d actually fish all 200. Tie 50 and lose interest because the bench started feeling like a chore, and congratulations: you’ve now paid more per fly than if you’d just bought them, plus you own a vise that’s becoming a very specialized dust collector. The economic case is real, but it quietly depends on tying becoming a habit instead of a New Year’s resolution.
For me, after enough winters at the vise, the math tipped so far that I stopped doing it. Materials shrank to a line item I don’t think about. The savings are baked in. But honestly? If tying cost me money I’d still do it, which tells you it was never really about the money.
What tying changes about how you fish
This is the part most articles skip, so here’s what actually happened to my fishing when I started tying my own.
I started fishing patterns I’d never have bought
A fly shop carries maybe 30 to 50 patterns. A bench with stocked materials can produce 500. When you tie, you find patterns no shop within driving distance stocks — the European jig nymphs the competition guys tie, the farm-creek standards from Pennsylvania that never made the trip west, the specific Perdigon variants that exist only in a Spanish guy’s YouTube channel with 4,000 views.
The Blowtorch itself was one of those. Six years ago, not one fly shop within an hour of me carried it. I knew about it from competition-tying forums, and the only way to fish it was to tie it. Now I can buy it commercially — but by the time the shops caught up, I’d been tying it for years and didn’t need them to. Tying doesn’t just save money on the flies you’d buy anyway. It opens the door to the flies you’d never have known to ask for.
I started actually understanding flies
When you tie a fly, you internalize its anatomy whether you mean to or not. You know exactly how much it weighs because you wrapped the lead and seated the bead. You know exactly how deep it rides because you tied twenty of them in three bead sizes and watched each one fish. You know which version moves fish on a given day because you’ve been the variable in that experiment all winter.
That’s not trivia. It changes decisions on the water. When you’re fifteen minutes into a dead morning at Deckers and the dropper isn’t producing, knowing precisely what that dropper looks like underwater — its profile, its sink rate, how the light hits the flash — tells you what to change and why. A guy fishing commercial flies is guessing in the dark. A tyer is editing a thing he built. Same river, very different conversation with it.
I started caring about proportions (to a slightly unhealthy degree)
Commercial flies vary. A Blowtorch from one shop has a fatter body, a thinner tag, or a softer collar than one from the next, and as a buyer you never notice because they all look “right enough.” As a tyer, you lose the ability to ignore it. You see proportions the way a baker sees a bad croissant. It’s a little bit of a curse.
The upside: it makes you a pickier buyer on the rare occasions you do buy, and a harder critic of your own tying, which makes your flies better over time. The feedback loop tightens until a slightly-off collar physically bothers you. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m saying it catches fish.
I started fishing more confidently
This is the one I didn’t see coming. Knowing I tied the fly on my line — picked the hook, wrapped the body, counted the wire turns, cured the resin — gives me a small but genuine confidence bump on the water. It’s my fly catching that fish, not one some stranger cranked out by the gross.
I’m not claiming the trout know. They emphatically do not. But I know, and confidence is a real variable in fishing. When I trust what’s tied on, I fish it differently: I change flies more deliberately instead of in a panic, I commit to a drift longer, I set the hook like I believe something’s going to be there. Belief isn’t a tactic, exactly. But it sure acts like one.
Why the Blowtorch specifically
Not every pattern earns a permanent spot at my vise. The Blowtorch did, because it does everything the math says a tie-your-own fly should:
- I fish it constantly. It’s my point fly more than half the time on Deckers. That’s hundreds of flies a year right there.
- I lose them at a steady clip. Snags, break-offs, fish that take them deep and keep them. A fly you fish hard is a fly you go through fast — and the Blowtorch lives in the rocks where the fish do.
- The materials are cheap and common. Jig hook, tungsten bead, peacock Ice Dub, copper wire, a little CDC, a hot floss tag. Nothing exotic, nothing I have to special-order from overseas.
- The tie is fast. Once you’ve done a few dozen, a Blowtorch takes about four minutes. Fifteen an hour, a respectable pile in one winter evening with a podcast on.
- The variations matter. Orange tag for stained water, green tag for clear. Standard bead or heavy bead for different water columns. As a tyer I produce exactly the variant the day calls for. A buyer is stuck with whatever the bin happens to hold.
Add it up and the Blowtorch is the pattern where tying pays the most leverage. Not everything’s like that. I still buy some flies — particularly hatch-specific dries I tie badly (Sparkle Duns are harder than they have any right to be) and patterns I fish so rarely it isn’t worth setting up the bench for. Tying is a tool for the right patterns, not a religion you apply to every hook in the box.
My take
Every Blowtorch I’ve ever fished came off my own vise, and I intend to keep it that way — not because mine are better than a shop’s, but because the fly stopped being a product for me somewhere around the hundredth one. Orange tag for stained water, green for clear, a winter’s worth of small decisions riding on a jig hook. When a fish at Deckers eats one, I know exactly what it ate, down to the wire wraps. That’s the entire transaction I want from this sport. The economics are nice. The authorship is the point.
When NOT to tie your own
In the interest of honesty, tying doesn’t make sense for everyone or every fly:
- If you fish fewer than ten days a year — you’ll lose interest before the math catches up. Buy your flies and fish more.
- If you fish one pattern type (say, all dries) — a small commercial selection in the right sizes might be everything you need.
- If tying frustrates you — it’s supposed to be enjoyable. Force it and you’ll quit the whole hobby out of spite. Buy what you need, fish, and come back to the vise later if the itch shows up.
- For an unfamiliar pattern — buy one or two commercial versions first to study the proportions before you commit a winter to tying twenty of your own slightly-wrong ones.
Tying is a craft. It pays off when it’s a craft you enjoy and a habit you keep. It doesn’t pay off as a chore you assigned yourself.
What tying gave me beyond flies
The flies are the deliverable. The real return is the winter.
November through March in Colorado, the river’s still fishable but the days are short and the conditions have opinions. The tying bench is what makes the off-season continuous with the on-season instead of a four-month sentence. Two hours at the vise on a January Sunday isn’t downtime — it’s loading the box that empties out April through June. The flies I produce in February are flies I simply wouldn’t own otherwise, in patterns and quantities no shop budget would ever have justified.
That’s the thing the spreadsheet misses entirely. Tying isn’t a cost-saving measure. It’s a way to stay in fly fishing year-round, on the nights the river isn’t an option, when the alternative is staring at the weather app like it owes you money.
If you’re considering starting
The rest of this series covers the setup: The Bench Tour walks through my vise and tools, Materials That Earn Space covers what’s actually on the shelf and what got cut, and The Whip Finish, Three Ways handles the one knot that ends every fly. The order of investment is vise → tools → materials → the patience to practice, in that order, and don’t let anyone sell you the order backwards.
The Blowtorch is a great first pattern to commit to, for three reasons: it’s forgiving (a slightly imperfect one still fishes), it’s a fly you’ll throw all season, and it’s got built-in variations to keep the bench interesting once the novelty wears off. Tie twenty and you’ll have learned the techniques that carry over to half the nymphs in the Colorado tailwater catalog.
The Blowtorch sitting in your box six months from now won’t really be a Blowtorch. It’ll be a record of every winter night you spent at the bench, every proportion you fussed over, every fish that ate the thing you built. That’s worth a lot more than $2.50.
What hook and bead size should I tie a Blowtorch on?
For South Platte tailwater nymphing I tie mine on a #16–#18 jig hook with a slotted tungsten bead sized to the gap — roughly 3.0–3.3 mm on a #16, 2.5–2.8 mm on a #18 — in copper or black. Drop to a #20 and a 2.0 mm bead for picky winter fish in low, clear water, and go up a bead size when I need it deeper in faster current. Same recipe otherwise: orange hot-spot tag for stained water, green for clear.
You can pick up materials through The Fly Fishing Place — use code RDC at checkout. They stock the Veevus thread, tungsten beads, jig hooks, and peacock Ice Dub a Blowtorch needs.