Fly Tying

HOA Karens gatekeep eight-pound peacock bass

Don't let the park police keep you off your personal best. Fly fishing stoke from around the world in this week's newsletter

Nick Parish

10 Nov 2025 — 8 min read

📷 from The Fly Project's MIAMI VICE

Hey gang,

It was a big, busy week around here! I paid a visit to the final meeting of Hendo’s five-week Fly Tying For Beginners class at PCC and saw some class alums, and met some new pals. The CFS crew got together and tied a soft hackle fly from Pheasant Tail Simplicity. And we passed an exciting milestone on a special project (secret for now) that has me really jazzed.

I’m fiddling with the newsletter format a little this week. Hopefully it’s a little more user friendly. Here are ten fishy links to start your week off right. Is this more compact format working? Let me know with the thumbs up / thumbs down at the bottom of this note.

Ten Foot Leaders ➰

Events 📆

Thanks to everyone who came out on Friday night to shoot the breeze about Pheasant Tail Simplicity and practice tying some flies from the book. Even with a few challenging fiddly bits (winding hackle, whip finishing) everyone managed to tie a fishable fly. Special shout-outs to Colin, who nailed proportions, Caitlin, who whip-finished her fly on the first try (speechless) and Margaret, who came up lucky when we rolled our eight-sided D&D die for the book giveaway. We’ll be back at The Paladin’s League on November 21st. Join us for a good time!

RSVP For Tying Night

📷 from tying night, courtesy Colin, Caitlin, and Ana. Thanks to all who came out!

Mindset 🧘‍♂️

We’ve all seen the yellow POSTED NO TRESPASSING signs marking accesses denied and concealing all manner of secrets behind them. “Angling welcome” signs are much less common (and, once you start seeing them, have a great homemade nature). After being stymied by evil HOAs across the fish-rich Miami Dade area, Sam Wike and the Fly Project crew took some initiative and created the means of permission to enable a little more joy in the world with some Fishing Allowed signs. (link)

📹 This week’s film pick captures the inspiration for Wike’s signs, in which a group anglers set out to find urban monsters and encounter numerous rent-a-cops and general petty bureaucrats stand along way. They strike peacock bass gold, but not without static. Check out "MIAMI VICE | Evading the HOA in Search of a 8lb Peacock Bass" (link)

Environment ⛰️

I read an awful lot of fly fishing media every week to bring you what I feel are the most important stories, both from a quality perspective, and around stuff you may want to know about the fly fishing industry. I don’t always get to everything in my groaning inbox, but one thing I never skip are the fishing reports, especially in the shoulder seasons. Spring and fall reports are great at marking the changes in our ecosystems heralding both new opportunities that come up and specific hatches and anadromous fish movements that are petering out. If you’re fishing in Oregon, you should be getting Jeff Perin’s email. There’s no better bug-watcher. (link)

And here’s Josh Linn’s update on the Deschutes summer steelhead season as things wind down on that fishery. Is that optimism I sense from Josh about winter fish closer to home? Here’s hoping. (link)

Tools 🎣

Nets are for protection. They protect two things: the fish, and the angler's ego. Read the CFS lowdown about net styles, the perils of netting fish for your friends, and why nets are an essential carry to make sure you've got it bagged up

Get the net-net here

Technique 🤺

Some of you may recall the bonkers story in The Atlantic last fall about surf anglers off Long Island who brave the dark, dangerous rocks, fully wetsuited and flirting with death swims, in search of striped bass. Well, The Mission’s got an interview with some anglers doing just that in Australia, but with fly rods. And, they made a film about it. Far too dangerous for me, but just a whiff of the fumes on this one offers some stoke, and a great amuse bouche for when the film shows up in next year’s Fly Fishing Film Tour. (link)

Conservation 🌲

Dr. Len Necefer is one of my most prized voices in the conservation movement right now, and in this wide-ranging essay he looks at the past and future of the environmental movement and concludes it’s so hyper-focused on raising awareness out of actual ideas. While I disagree in the specific (Here’s one: Free clean electricity from noon to 3pm every day.) I agree in broad strokes. Actions speak louder than words, always have, always will. But have we become afraid of big ideas? (link)

To wit: Data centers are having a cultural moment. Constructing these massive server farms is center stage in both their economic impact (an absurd portion of the United States’ GDP this year) and potential environmental costs, in groundwater pumped to slake those hot, hot computers and the electricity they need to keep them spinning. The Oregon Citizens Utility Board is soliciting comments from its constituents (You!) about whether your home energy bill should help subsidize utilities’ data center customers (Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.). Sure, ratepayers should let the CUB know how they feel. But to Necefer’s point, what would this look like, from an action POV? Forcing a line-item “data center tariff” on electricity bills? Withholding everything but your share of AI usage, based on how many pictures of cats fighting sharks you make every month? (link)

Community 🏘️

Over at Angling Trade fly fishing media don Kirk Deeter enters the fray (get it) around fishing focus and product quality at Simms in an editorial with the no-holds-barred title “Lose the fishing focus and you lose your soul.“ This happens as the titan literally rebrands its Bozeman headquarters around its parent-company’s private equity portfolio. Yuck. I thought about including an image of the new facade but it’s too depressing. “What [the PE firm] seemingly failed to realize when the company sent out a press release extolling how the Simms HQ had been converted to an “innovation center” was that the announcement would go over within the fly-fishing world like a lead balloon. When they lowered the Simms logo and set in line with a handful of good-but-not-great brands on the façade of the building, the fishing world thought that was like parking LeBron James on the bench with the junior varsity.“(link)

In other film fest news, The Mission’s RUAFFFF (Raw and Unfiltered African Fly Fishing Film Festival) hopes to catch some grass roots African fly fishing mojo. As the editors make clear in the earlier Q&A, so much of fly fishing film has become overly glossy and slick, and lacks the essence and soul that makes for good storytelling. Preach. (link)

More from Current Flow State

Here's more of what's been happening recently:

What do a legendary surfer, Hollywood director Christopher Guest, and zen archers have in common?

Learning to cast a fly rod like Harry Potter uses his wand.

Are Grateful Dead collabs the sign that outdoor brands have jumped the shark? A look at Simms latest, and the value of high-quality gear.

That's it for this week! Current Flow State is a weekly newsletter from me, Nick Parish.

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