Tero Lannes

Hi, my name is Tero Lannes and I come from Finland. I live near Helsinki, the capital city of Finland. I have graduated engineer (M.Sc. Techn) and work nowadays in IT- business. For me fly fishing and fly tying is the way of living. I also like photography and use a lot of time for canine photography (I have two beagles).

“Tying the Classic Salmon Flies” - for me it took years to find the trailhead. It was in the late 90’s, when I took my first steps on that attractive trail. I remember the evening, when I was plucking up the courage to tie my first salmon fly. “Just tie it”, I said to myself, it couldn’t be so difficult. I don’t remember anything about the tying process or the pattern, but it took only couple hours to tie my first fully dressed salmon fly.

Afterwards I thought “this is almost easy”. Yes easy, but only because I didn’t pay attention to the faults I had made. I had no idea how to tie them right, because I had no mentor.

I began to tie hours a day and learn by myself. I had some old fly-tying magazines and pictures of salmon flies tied by great Finish tyers. I learned by my eyes and by doing. I found a lot of small mistakes from my first flies. One of the funniest things was I had started to tie all the body hackles right from the butt.

Only couple months after, I had tied my first salmon fly I began to tie flies for international competitions. I thought it could be one way to show also my own creations. In the competitions I acquired an own style, which I could call “poor man’s style”. That is because, I didn’t use any rare CITES –materials in my competition flies - never.

There are so many beautiful feathers found from common birds, which are not on the CITES list. I was wondering, why they are so rarely used? So, if there was a competition pattern, which called for jungle cock or macaw, I didn’t tie for that category. I found out very quickly, that there was one competition category exactly made for me - the creation category.

I have continued my journey year after year, tying and reading books and become convinced one thing – Salmon fly-tying will always be a never-ending journey of exploration!
Tero Lannes

Flies By Tero

Beyond the Sky

Diamonds

FCW

Golden Heart

Plunging Wave
 

Smooth Dancer

The Falling Star

Gut tutorial (see instructions below)

Gut Tutorial

I usually use monofilament for the gut eyes. It is quite a good silkworm gut substitute. Some years ago I got an idea, how to make the gut loop easily without heating the monofilament.

Just read the following steps, this is the easiest way to make a very nice substitute:

  • Take a short peace of monofilament and sand it matt with sand paper. The gut should be a little bit matt. (There is also matt fishing line available, but it could be hard to find).
  • Hold the line in your hands or use your fly tying vise (Picture 1).
  • Twist the line with hackle pliers and simultaneously keep the line tighten (Picture 2.).
  • Stop twisting the line, when it starts to “shrink” or curve a bit.
  • Keep the tension and fold the line in half (Picture 3.).
  • Then open your fingers and the line will twist by itself. After that, twist a little bit more to achieve nice and regular twist.    
  • Now you can easily form a gut eye by using that twisted monofilament (Picture 4). No need to heat the line, just tie it first on the hook and trim the waste ends off obliquely with razor.

    If you use two thin monofilament lines in stead of one thicker line, the eye might look a little bit better. When you look at the twisted loop made of two monofilament lines, you can’t actually count how many lines there are used, but the loop turns more opaque. It is more like a matter of taste, how many lines to use.