Dry fly fishing for salmon is a truly fascinating sport that has its origin in Canada where pioneer anglers in the province of New Brunswick launched their salmon dry flies almost a century ago. The early flies where most likely regular trout flies but soon anglers would tie dedicated flies to suite this sport - some of which live on today with names like Colonel Monell and Soldier Palmer. These where bulky flies dressed with heavy hackles extending from front to hook bend, giving the fly a appearance very much like a - bottle brush. Some of the first description of these special salmon dry flies can be found in the book: The Salmon And The Dry Fly from 1924 by Mr. George M. La Branche. La Branche was an avid trout fisherman but also enjoyed fly-fishing for salmon. This he did together with his friend and mentor Colonel Ambrose Monell, in the clear Upsalquitch River in New Brunswick. Monell was probably one of the first salmon anglers ever to catch Atlantic salmon on dry fly. Rumours of La Branches skills soon reached England and the legendary angler A.H.E Wood made an invitation for La Branche to join him on the river Dee in Scotland. La Branche went and had quite a large number of salmon to the dry fly – but hooked only very few. One can only guess why La Branche had such significant problem’s hooking the Dee fish – but the fact that the flies where bushy an tied on small hooks probably didn’t help him a lot.

Another couple of decades came to pass when salmon dry flies yet again made the headlines. With the book The Atlantic Salmon - published in the late 50´s, author and famous angler Lee Wulff made dry-fly sport popular. In his book Lee Wulff presented a new line of dry flies called the Wulff series that he and fellow angler Dan Bailey had designed. The flies were big bushy cartoon like imitations of mayflies and was originally intended for trout fishing – but had soon proven to be just the right flies for Atlantic salmon. The Wulff series was designed almost 50 years ago – but still today these flies is closely linked with everything concerning dry fly for salmon.

In 1979 Lee Wulff wrote in his book Lee Wulff on flies about his experiments with dry flies and skaters tied on plastic tube. Lee was intrigued by the possibilities of making flies up of sections thus designing the right size fly at the riverbank – without having to change the size of the hook.

We at Fishmadman took the concept of tube dry flies a bit further and in 1995-96 we tied the classical Bomber patterns and other dry flies on very thin tubes. With this approach we created some very light dry flies with a very different hook-hold than that of the traditional flies. Our flies could be fitted with small wide gape hooks with no considerable weight and superior hooking abilities.  Our first tube dries was the Tube Bombers TM designed for fast flowing waters on big rivers…These where +2 inch flies that would had been very heavy if tied on single hooks. We also made a huge imitation of a caddis found in great numbers at the rivers we fish in Northern Norway. This fly is: the Monster Tube Caddis TM – A fly with a fantastic capability of pulling big salmon to the top and a must have… in the fly box of any modern salmon angler.