Morningwood Special by Charlie Craven

Designing a fly pattern rarely starts at the tying bench. For me, it most often starts with a vague idea, a spark, that glows and gets kicked around a fair bit in my head before I ever even sit down to try it. Sometimes, that spark turns out to be a complete dud, and thankfully, it usually makes itself apparent pretty quickly. Other times, the prototypes show a bit of promise and through some technique tweaks and material replacements I can come up with something that is very often, much better than what I originally imagined. The MW Special is one of those flies that traveled a lot of miles through my head before ever coming to fruition, but I am pretty proud of what it finally came to premise for a new foam stone came from my good friend and former Umpqua Feather Merchants Fly Czar, Brian Schmidt, mentioning something about maybe developing a Charlie Boy Stone pattern based off of my Charlie Boy Hopper. I liked the idea and brazenly thought to myself, ‘Well, this ought to be easy!” The Charlie Bo