Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 830 is my conversation with Drew Chicone, an expert saltwater fly designer, author, and former tennis pro. We get into how he actually develops fly patterns, the coveted rooster capes he inherited from his father, why he leans on big spawning-style shrimp and gurgler patterns he can impart movement to, the crab-fly presentation that drops to the bottom in front of a spooky fish, and the writing discipline behind his books and step-by-step tying content.
▶ Watch on YouTube · 🎧 Listen now
Drew Chicone is an expert saltwater fly designer and author who has spent decades developing patterns for species like bonefish, snook, and redfish. He writes books and produces step-by-step tying content, often building patterns to fill gaps where no good instructions exist. A former tennis pro, he approaches fly design as a craft — part art, part science, and a lot of time on the water watching how fish actually eat.
Drew works backward from need. He identifies a gap — a handful of really good redfish, snook, or bonefish patterns for a specific place like Texas, Andros, or Abaco — and drills down from there. He spends most of his time perfecting flies, and he pays close attention to how fish respond, designing patterns he can impart different movement to when a fish is not reacting the way he wants.
He likes a big spawning-style shrimp he can animate with movement rather than just letting it fall to the bottom, and he is drawn to topwater shrimp and gurgler-style patterns, including strong-arm gurglers. For crabs, he and Tom get into the deadly presentation of dropping the fly to the bottom right in a fish's line of sight, mimicking a crab that has spotted the fish and is diving for cover.
He is refreshingly honest: compared to everything else, he says he kind of hates permit fishing. He spends most of his fishing time on bonefish when he is in the Bahamas with clients and on snook and redfish at home. Tom and Drew also discuss the wave of anglers jumping straight from trout fishing in Montana to permit with zero saltwater experience, and why that is so hard.
Tom recounts a bite that happened almost entirely on the drop — you cast close enough that the fish catches the fly out of the corner of its eye, then let it fall to the bottom without moving it, so it looks like a crab that saw the fish and bolted for cover. The cast has to be close enough to be seen but not so close that it spooks the fish. Drew unpacks why that works.
Drew keeps a running log of words, sayings, and phrases he finds funny, catchy, or useful — enough material, he jokes, to be its own book. That habit feeds his fly-tying books and articles. He and Tom talk about how that newsletter-and-writing discipline turned out to be some of the best career advice he ever followed.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 830 with Drew Chicone is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. The video version is embedded at the top of this page — press play to watch.
I am fascinated by people who treat a narrow craft as deeply as Drew treats fly design. He is not just tying flies; he is studying how fish eat and engineering patterns around that. He is also a former tennis pro and a writer, which means he thinks about discipline and communication in ways most fly tyers do not. I wanted him to walk me through how he actually builds a pattern. Press play in the YouTube player above to hear it.
Drew does not start with a hook and wing it. He starts with a gap — the redfish, snook, or bonefish patterns a given fishery needs — and drills down until he has something that solves a real problem. He explains how he tests movement, why he wants a fly he can animate when a fish hesitates, and how much of the answer comes from watching fish rather than tying. Listen to that breakdown in the episode.
A big spawning-style shrimp is one of Drew's favorites because he can impart movement to it instead of relying on the fall. He is also into topwater shrimp and gurgler patterns, including the strong-arm gurgler. We get into when each one earns its place in the box. Watch that section in the YouTube player above.
This is one of my favorite parts. I describe a bite that came almost entirely on the drop — fly falling to the bottom in front of a fish like a crab that just got caught out — and Drew explains the design and presentation logic behind it. Close enough to be seen, not so close it spooks. Listen to him work through it in the episode.
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Drew says it plainly — relative to everything else, he kind of hates permit fishing, and spends his time on bonefish, snook, and redfish instead. We also get into the modern phenomenon of anglers going straight from Montana trout to permit with no saltwater background. Hear his unfiltered take in the episode.
The day after this one, what stuck with me was how much Drew's edge comes from observation. He spends time bait fishing and just watching fish eat so his flies imitate the real thing — the craft is downstream of the watching.
The other thread is his writing log, the running collection of words and sayings that feeds his books. It is a reminder that the best people in any field tend to keep notes the rest of us do not bother with.
Watch the whole thing in the player above. If you tie flies at all, you will pick up something.
The Tom Rowland Podcast brings you long-form conversations with the most accomplished anglers, hunters, conservationists, and outdoor professionals in the game. Listen to every full-length Tom Rowland Podcast interview.
Drew Chicone is an expert saltwater fly designer and author who has spent decades developing and documenting fly patterns for species including bonefish, snook, redfish, and permit. A former tennis pro, he treats fly design as a discipline rooted in observation — watching how fish actually eat and engineering patterns and presentations around that behavior. He is also a prolific writer, producing books and step-by-step tying content, and is known for principles like prioritizing a fly's profile and movement and keeping pattern construction effective and intentional.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 830: Expert Fly Designer, with Drew Chicone.
Tom Rowland: Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the show today. We've got a great podcast with a great guest, Drew Chicone. He is a world class fly tyer. He's written 17 books, starting out with one called Feather Brain, which is one of my favorite fly tying books. Drew has a wide amount of knowledge on all things fly tying and fishing, and we have a really good conversation.
Tom Rowland: Got a couple of announcements to make before we get started. We have three segments for the Tom Rowland Podcast. We have the How To Tuesday episode, which is the first one of the week. Then this is a Wednesday episode, a full length episode. And then on Friday we drop an episode called Physical Friday, which is intended to help us all stay in good shape so we can hunt and fish and hike and backpack and ski and do everything we wanna do for as long as we can in our life. What we're gonna do is start moving the Physical Friday episodes over to their own YouTube channel. The Tom Rowland Podcast has a YouTube channel — just search it out, or look in the description of this podcast below, and you can get a link to it. It would be awesome if we could get a bunch of followers and subscribers on the YouTube channel. Eventually, everything podcast is going to move over there, but it's not gonna happen anytime fast. We'll start with Physical Friday, then move some stuff that isn't necessarily fishing related, and the last thing to go will probably be the How To Tuesday episodes, which are very fishing focused. But eventually everything's gonna move over to the Tom Rowland Podcast YouTube channel, so please go over there and subscribe.
Tom Rowland: I also want to thank everybody who watches and listens to this podcast. It's been so fun to watch it grow and get bigger every week. It's been fantastic. Drew Chicone, like I told you before, is a world class fly tyer — 17 books and counting, doesn't seem to be slowing down. He hosts trips, he's got a coaching role in doing these trips, and he's a really interesting guy. So here we go with Drew Chicone.
Tom Rowland: Drew, what's up, man? How are you?
Drew Chicone: I'm doing great. Happy to be here. Good to be back on the show with you.
Tom Rowland: I know, I'm glad to have you. Look — it looks like we got you right in your tying studio. Look at all that material behind you. That's awesome, man.
Drew Chicone: Floor to ceiling Tupperware containers. The key is numbering them, for all you guys trying to organize your stuff, because you can put it all in containers, but then when you put them back you never find it again. You have to have, like, craft fur fourteen, eyeballs six, and then you start to remember it and you can do it with some sort of efficiency. But if you don't number it, it's a debacle.
Tom Rowland: Well, how much fly tying stuff do you think you've accumulated over your career?
Drew Chicone: When I started, I kind of took over from another commercial fly tyer, so I had his entire lifetime worth of stuff, and a number of friends have passed and bequeathed me all of their collections. So I have way more than I would need, or my kids' kids would ever need. I don't know — when I check out of the game, somebody's gonna get a garbage truckload of stuff.
Tom Rowland: Man, I tied flies for a while, and I still dabble with it. But for a while I got pretty serious about it, and I'd go through Randall Kaufmann's book or something and think, I wanna tie this one. So I'd go to the store and get everything I needed for that, like a recipe you'd go to the grocery store for — I'd get every little thing I needed. Well, you get way more than you need, right, and then you have all this stuff. Even with that, I have shelves of fly tying stuff. I can't imagine how much you have, probably way more than what we're looking at behind you.
Drew Chicone: If I were to take my phone and just pan through the feathers, I think it would blow your mind. It's hundreds and hundreds — the other thing is, when manufacturers want you to try a new material, they send you every color of it. You end up with, like, "here's every color of this new material," and, you know, we only use tan and white, so I don't know what the—
Tom Rowland: And you use, like, three strands of crystal flash or something, and you've got all these other extras.
Drew Chicone: Yeah, exactly — cut it out of the fly when you're on the water anyway. It's gotta be the flash.
Tom Rowland: That's funny. Where do you see things having improved the most? Of course synthetic materials have come around, but you mentioned feathers — they've got chickens bred specifically for hackles now, better and better hackles. What do you think has improved the most in the time you've been tying?
Drew Chicone: Well, first, let me say feathers, I think, have gone the other way. They're great for trout flies where you need to palmer, but for the old tarpon-style flies where you want that real thick quill, they've kind of genetically bred that out. So I have my coveted father's capes — chickens he killed in the garage, that kind of stuff — where the feathers are really thick and awesome, but you can't find them like that anymore. As far as what's really improved, hooks are just incredible. You gotta be careful, they're so sharp — it sounds crazy, but my mentors would grab a file and take the old 3407, hit it twice with a big foot-long file, and that's how you kept them sharp. But the Gamakatsus and stuff I tie on now, oh my gosh — I can't tell you how many times you're reaching in the box too fast, go to the next one, and think, oh, I don't need the fingernail.
Tom Rowland: One of the questions I was asking people at the end of the podcast was what technology do you think has improved your fishing the most. Richard Black was the first one to say hook technology, the sharpness of the hooks. For people who got started after chemically sharpened hooks, they don't remember — but man, that 3407 would be so dull coming out of the package, you'd never get a tarpon on it, and then you'd have to sharpen it. There were all these different styles of sharpening, short and blunt or long and needle-like.
Drew Chicone: That was a whole other religion right there, how you sharpen your hooks. I still wear my belt buckle with the file on the inside, you kind of touch them up on the water. But hooks, for me — I'd tell any tyer the most critical thing you can do after your vise is invest in a pair of scissors. If you really wanna take your fly tying to the next level, go get the best pair of scissors you can afford, because that's the one thing I can't do without.
Tom Rowland: Do you like offset scissors, or just regular ones?
Drew Chicone: My favorite ones right now are these Umqua TMCs. These things are razor blades, but you gotta be careful — if they fall off your bench, they're done, because it's like they magically hit point-first, the way dropped bread always lands butter-side down. Those either stick in your foot or break the tip off, and they're one and done.
Tom Rowland: You hold those in your hand when you're tying, right?
Drew Chicone: I never put them down. They're always on this finger, and you get to a point where you're comfortable, though I keep telling myself to be careful, because I'm always touching my face, and these things are so sharp you have to be acutely aware of what your hands are doing. You reach down to scratch the dog, it runs off crying.
Tom Rowland: I liked — when I asked about offset, that's what I meant. You keep them around one finger, but there was a shorter handle you could put around it so you could keep it in your hand all the time. Those really helped. I still have those things, I don't know who made them.
Drew Chicone: I think once you become really serious about tying, especially production tying, once you get in the habit of having them in your hand, everything gets faster. You realize you don't really use the scissors for big cuts — you're just doing micro-trims, jabbing at feathers or thread. So a lot of times you just leave them in your hand, partially open.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, that made my tying so much faster when I learned that trick of never putting the scissors down.
Tom Rowland: Before we get going too much, we have this new section called the Hot Seat, and these questions are kind of either-or preference. You can pass if you don't like them, but it's not a gotcha question — they're just kind of interesting.
Drew Chicone: Politics?
Tom Rowland: There's no political questions here except for the first two. Here come the first two, and you can say they're political if you want. East Coast or West Coast?
Drew Chicone: Oh, East Coast.
Tom Rowland: East Coast or West Coast of Florida?
Drew Chicone: West Coast.
Tom Rowland: Early fishing memory, or a trip that made you a lifetime angler?
Drew Chicone: Early fishing memory. I'll try not to get all misty-eyed, but my grandfather was dying of brain cancer and hadn't spoken in about a year. He was a game warden and an FBI agent, and I was the little guy who followed him around all the time. He was upstairs in bed, and it was Easter. I was down on the dock — I'd tied one of the first flies I ever came up with myself, just a streamer, silver, red tail, chartreuse top. The whole family was upstairs, and I was down on the dock messing around with it. Out of nowhere, this giant landlocked salmon came up and just garbaged it. I was literally just making a little roll cast off the dock, and the big landlocked salmon for Seneca Lake, where I grew up, was usually about this big off the dock — but this one was double that. I landed it, ran upstairs to my grandmother, and said, look at this thing. She said, well, get in there and show your grandfather. It was dripping blood all over, but she didn't care. He sat up in bed — granted, the man hadn't spoken — and he said, nice fish, Andy. That's what they called me when I was little. Everybody just kind of stood there, agape. After that he didn't really speak anymore, but he acknowledged me, and it was like being struck by lightning. Everybody couldn't believe he'd talked, let alone knew my name. For me, that was the lightning rod — that was the moment it was like, okay, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna create flies, fishing's my deal.
Tom Rowland: That's so cool. What a great story, that's amazing. Okay, so we'll get back onto the deal — I think I already know the answer to this one. Spinning rod, conventional, or fly rod?
Drew Chicone: D, all of the above. I love fly fishing, obviously, but I think people forget how much fun it is to go out back and put on a cork and sit on the dock with some kids and rip lips or flip plugs underneath bushes. I'm in for everything.
Tom Rowland: I love it. That's not the answer I thought — I figured it was fly for sure.
Drew Chicone: Ride or die, right? But, you know.
Tom Rowland: Inshore or offshore?
Drew Chicone: My knee-jerk is inshore, but I'm really starting to get into offshore. I'm working on a book for blue water flies now, and I'm trying to catch some pelagics, a billfish in particular, on fly. So, inshore, with the hopes of becoming an offshore guy.
Tom Rowland: I like it. River, lake, or backcountry?
Drew Chicone: Backcountry, unequivocally.
Tom Rowland: Would you have a reptile as a pet?
Drew Chicone: No. I'm kind of like Indiana Jones — I'm not afraid of them, I just don't like them.
Tom Rowland: Coffee, tea, or energy drink?
Drew Chicone: Coffee. Like, four cups a day minimum.
Tom Rowland: Right on. Mountains or beaches for vacation?
Drew Chicone: Beaches.
Tom Rowland: Favorite fishing movie or TV show?
Drew Chicone: Spanish Fly. That's what I grew up with.
Tom Rowland: Winter Olympics or Summer Olympics?
Drew Chicone: Summer.
Tom Rowland: Going out on a limb here — favorite pro wrestler of all time?
Drew Chicone: Oh, Hacksaw Jim Duggan.
Tom Rowland: Nice, with the two-by-four. That's old school right there — I was going out on a limb to see if you were really a wrestling fan, and you pulled out a real wrestler.
Drew Chicone: Pretty impressive, though it's tough, because Jake the Snake and the British Bulldog were up there too. I grew up in that era, with the big rubber guys you'd play with — we call it the cassette era, we don't like to say old.
Tom Rowland: Well, I was too. Sunrise or sunset?
Drew Chicone: Sunrise.
Tom Rowland: Country, classic rock, or rap?
Drew Chicone: Classic rock — classic country, Hank.
Tom Rowland: There you go. Best catch of your career? You've probably already told us.
Drew Chicone: Fish-wise? I was gonna go with the standard "my wife."
Tom Rowland: I like it. You never know, she might listen to this.
Drew Chicone: Yeah, that's it — gonna go with wife, and then maybe a monster snook or GT or permit. I don't know.
Tom Rowland: What about GTs? Where have you caught those?
Drew Chicone: I went to Cozumelito. That was a gift from a client who hurt himself and couldn't go — one of those, "hey, I got something for you, you've got seven or eight weeks to get your stuff together, and everything's paid for." My wife was like, you just — you're going, you have to go. So, great, it was incredible.
Tom Rowland: That's so great. A movie that makes you laugh?
Drew Chicone: Great Outdoors.
Tom Rowland: Text or calls?
Drew Chicone: Calls.
Tom Rowland: Last book you remember reading, or your favorite book?
Drew Chicone: I think I've officially written more books than I've read. A Land Remembered was the book about Florida.
Tom Rowland: So good, I love that book — I listened to it on audio, and it was incredible. Highly recommend it for anybody.
Drew Chicone: A Land Remembered, all the time. What book are you reading? I don't read books, I'm way too — I can't sit still. So when I walk the beach looking for snook, I always have an audiobook going. I do a couple audiobooks a month, probably, just burning through them. I'm listening to one right now that you would love — it's called Younger Next Year. It's about guys getting up there, and when they retire, their brain kind of goes and their body blows out, and it's about what you do to push off disease and decay. It's really interesting — they talk about, okay, you're sixty now — I'm forty-four, but I figured it can't hurt to start early.
Tom Rowland: Alright, there's another one by Peter Attia on that same kind of deal, a little more physical, called Outlive. There are a couple of chapters that are so technical you could just fast-forward through them if it starts to put you to sleep, but it's a really great book. I read another one too, I can't remember what it was — I'll have to look through our book club. We have a book club here; Younger Next Year isn't in it, but A Land Remembered is. So if you're looking for that book, you can go check it out.
Drew Chicone: The whole thesis of it is, really, as a species, we haven't been sitting in chairs that long. We're plains animals, so you've gotta trick your body — you gotta walk five, ten miles a day, you gotta have bursts where you're hunting. If you can do that, even if you walk fifteen thousand steps and hit the gym a couple days a week for some weights or circuit training or sprints, you'll be fine.
Tom Rowland: Yes, I believe it. Okay, so let's get back onto this. Feathers and hair, or synthetic materials?
Drew Chicone: Feathers and hair. Natural.
Tom Rowland: One of your favorite bands?
Drew Chicone: AC/DC.
Tom Rowland: Instagram or Twitter?
Drew Chicone: Instagram.
Tom Rowland: One thing you're afraid of?
Drew Chicone: Snakes.
Tom Rowland: Gamakatsu, Tiemco, or Mustad?
Drew Chicone: Gamakatsu.
Tom Rowland: The Office, Friends, or Parks and Rec?
Drew Chicone: Oh, I don't think I've watched any of those, so I'm gonna have to pass.
Tom Rowland: One piece of technology, other than your phone, that you rely on heavily?
Drew Chicone: My AirPods, my earphones.
Tom Rowland: Favorite fish?
Drew Chicone: Snook.
Tom Rowland: Android or iPhone?
Drew Chicone: iPhone.
Tom Rowland: Audio, paper, or Kindle?
Drew Chicone: Audio.
Tom Rowland: Chocolate or vanilla?
Drew Chicone: Chocolate.
Tom Rowland: Tying flies or writing books?
Drew Chicone: Tying flies.
Tom Rowland: And lastly, one piece of advice that's served you well?
Drew Chicone: Every trip you miss is one you never get back.
Tom Rowland: I like it. Was that from your grandfather?
Drew Chicone: Yep, that's what he told me — you better get out there and get everyone you can.
Tom Rowland: He sounded like a real badass, an FBI agent and a game warden.
Drew Chicone: Yeah, he was, I think, the youngest FBI agent in history at the time, and he was later the sheriff of our town — just hunting and fishing, that's all the man did. So all I wanted was to be in his hip pocket, but he got sick real early, so I didn't get to do much of that with him. My other grandfather did, though, so that's all I did was hunt and fish.
Tom Rowland: That's cool. And then the fly tying started early — what got you started on the path of fly tying?
Drew Chicone: I found my parents' fly tying kit — this pistachio-colored sewing box in the basement, full of tinsel and hackle and all the stuff. It was winter, I was bored, going through picture books in this storage room, and I found it, along with my mom's notes. My parents got married at nineteen, and for something to do, they started taking fly tying classes. I found my mom's notes on tying, with little drawings and everything — and that's what got me started. I just started messing around with it. This — Artflick, The Master of Lifetime.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, I think I have that book.
Drew Chicone: What's really funny is it's signed "Happy birthday" to my father in 1975, from my grandmother. So it's kind of in the blood — everybody was doing the hunting and fishing thing, and when it was too cold to do that, they were inside talking about it or tying flies.
Tom Rowland: Where did you grow up?
Drew Chicone: In the Finger Lakes, upstate New York — Watkins Glen, to be exact.
Tom Rowland: And what were the hunting opportunities — deer and turkey and upland birds? What else would you hunt?
Drew Chicone: My favorite was September squirrel season. When I was really little, I'd go sit in the woods with grandpa — he always hunted with a side-by-side double barrel, and once he let me pull both triggers, he got sick of me asking, and that was about it. We'd go kick out rabbits or walk for grouse or sit in a tree stand. I did a lot of bow hunting when I was a kid because I could do it young. My dad was an archery instructor and a duck identification instructor, so probably the most we did was duck hunting — we sat in the duck blinds on Seneca Lake and did a ton of that. That's probably my favorite.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, I'm getting ready to go duck hunting, day after tomorrow, with my eighty-five-year-old dad and my two boys.
Drew Chicone: That's so great.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, I've really researched this trip because my dad — well, he could still do it, he's in remarkably good shape for his age — but I wanted to avoid the waders in the water, the little johnboats, the typical duck hunting scenario, and I didn't know if that was possible. I started asking around, and one of my friends who's also going on this trip said, oh man, we go to Canada, and it's dry fields up there. I asked what you wear, do you wear waders, and he said no, you can walk out there in what you're wearing. I thought, that's perfect — how do I do this trip? He said we're going this certain week and there's probably room at the lodge, so I jumped on it last year, booked it about nine or ten months ago, and it's coming — I'm packing my stuff this afternoon. That duck hunting up there is supposed to be amazing. We're gonna be north of Calgary, around the Edmonton area, duck and goose, and my boys are in Montana so they're just gonna drive up. It's quite a difficult place to get to, even by airplane — it's gonna take my dad and me two days to get there.
Drew Chicone: You kind of get ruined, though, I'll tell you.
Tom Rowland: I'm sure. Listen, that's what I'm trying to do for my dad — I wanna ruin him on this one, maybe he won't even need to go again.
Drew Chicone: That's it — the memory galvanizes into your psyche, it just stays forever.
Tom Rowland: Right. Well, he certainly galvanized plenty of memories into my psyche with duck hunts throughout my childhood, and it's his favorite type of hunting. He's never been a deer hunter or done big game hunting — he loves hunting birds. Ducks, in my opinion, would be his favorite, though I'd have to actually ask him — he likes dove hunting, pheasant hunting, any kind of pigeon hunting. We went down to Bolivia and did that one time. He's been all over the place hunting birds, but I think duck hunting is his favorite. So this is a real special trip for us, and I'm really looking forward to having three generations up there.
Drew Chicone: It's the camaraderie, right? You can go sit in a deer blind, but you just don't get the interaction and talking — oh, here they come, get the coffee, that kind of stuff. It's the whole experience of being together with your family. I can't tell you how many times we schedule our trip back to New York around when duck season is, because my wife loves to duck hunt, and my daughter will get in the blind if you give her a couple of donuts. There's no iPad, but there's donuts.
Tom Rowland: Right. Hey, donuts are awesome — hot chocolate and donuts.
Drew Chicone: That's it, that is the currency.
Tom Rowland: It's worth it — that's actually how I learned to drink black coffee, in a duck blind, because my dad brought his crappy old thermos that would literally stay warm for about three minutes.
Drew Chicone: The green Stanley.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, the green Stanley, exactly. I don't think there was any insulation in that thing at all — maybe if it stayed in the truck it'd keep warm, but to today's standards it didn't keep anything very warm. He just had that one, it's not like we had two of them. He put black coffee from the Waffle House in there, since we always stopped and ate at the Waffle House, and if I was cold or wanted something, that's what I got.
Drew Chicone: Here's your hand warmers — the coffee in that tin cup for a lid.
Tom Rowland: And I was like, dad, I see everybody else putting sugar and milk in there, do we have any of that? And he's like, no. Nope, you either drink that or nothing. So today, I actually enjoy drinking black coffee — I've never put anything in it.
Drew Chicone: At two-oh-eight degrees, I drink it. I'll tell you, when I got my Yeti, I burnt the hell out of myself because I was so used to it not being hot — I'd put the Pyrex in the microwave and hit it for like four minutes, so it was nuclear when you put it in that thing. And then by the time eight-thirty or nine o'clock came and you had your first cup, it was drinkable. You leave it in one of those Yetis and the roof of your mouth is gone for the next three weeks.
Tom Rowland: I know, that is the worst, burning your mouth. I burned my mouth on — what was that I ate — oh, it was oatmeal, at ICAST. I ordered oatmeal, and when it came and sat down at the table, there was no steam coming off it at all, because it had formed like a little skin over the top. I thought, this has been sitting up there waiting for the rest of our food to be cooked. I took a big bite, put it right in, and burnt my mouth so bad — it was weeks before it got better. I've learned my lesson on that, and on French onion soup too — that hot cheese. I also went to a particular steakhouse that likes to brag about their fifteen-hundred-degree plates, and they do have great steaks — but I got that steak there, and, "the plate's very hot, sir," and I'm like, yes, I know. I took the broccoli, dipped it in some steak sauce, popped it in my mouth, and burnt my mouth so bad on that.
Drew Chicone: So bad.
Tom Rowland: I don't like that, I don't like burning my mouth. I don't usually have super hot things — I'll pour my coffee and let it cool down a little before I even drink it, I don't know why. I guess that goes back to the duck blind again, because I learned to drink black cold coffee, and it turns out that's apparently what I like.
Drew Chicone: I freeze coffee in ice cube trays and cool down my coffee with coffee.
Tom Rowland: Oh, you are a true pro.
Drew Chicone: Well, you get to a point where you have to drink a lot of coffee — I'm a coffee super freak. If you're gonna put three or four shots in one mug, I use the Nespresso machine or whatever, because otherwise — I'm not the only one who drinks coffee, so if you make a whole pot, you're just throwing it away. So I ended up making a pot and putting it in ice cube trays, and now sometimes I'll freeze a couple flavored Nespresso ones and use them if I wanna cook with it or cool something down. It works great for iced coffee.
Tom Rowland: So have you ever had Black Rifle Coffee?
Drew Chicone: I have not, I've heard a lot about it.
Tom Rowland: Get you some Black Rifle Coffee, it's the best, I love it. They have a whole bunch of different kinds, but my favorite is just a light roast — my new favorite is the Gunship. They also have one called Just Black, and there's nothing fancy about it, it's just good black coffee. But my coffee journey has gone more and more into, I guess, coffee snobbery, somebody would say.
Drew Chicone: You're kind of sore now.
Tom Rowland: Kind of, kind of. I can taste the difference between good coffee and bad coffee, and I don't know if that's a good thing, but I do enjoy good fresh coffee in different ways. I've learned how to brew it differently than just the straight auto-drip machine. Then I got a French press, and it actually tastes different. And I learned how grinding it differently changes the taste too — I got really interested that you could take exactly the same coffee and brew it one way and it's marginally okay, or brew it another way and it's the best cup of coffee you've ever had in your life. And then I got into the pour-over, which I think is the—
Drew Chicone: The least — once you start going down that rabbit hole, you're like, well, I like this roast a little better. You go from the gourmand stage, and the next stage is straight connoisseur.
Tom Rowland: I don't know if I'm gonna get there, because it's not like I won't drink bad coffee — I still drink plenty of bad coffee, you go to the Waffle House, I'm happy to drink that. But what I like about the pour-over is that it all revolves around the scale — there's this accuracy where you grind up the same amount of coffee, forty-two grams, and put the same amount of water, six hundred grams. That's like a seventeen-to-one ratio or something. I watched the Black Rifle Coffee video on YouTube, and that's what they said to do, so I was like, forty-two, six hundred, that's easy to remember. So I make exactly the same cup of coffee every day, because there's nothing worse than making it on your machine and not measuring it out exactly right, and it's weak or too strong. I can make the same cup every time.
Drew Chicone: Do you journal?
Tom Rowland: Well, some — I go on and off of journaling.
Drew Chicone: I've been journaling my coffee cake recipe for the last six months. I've probably made it forty times, and I keep doing micro-adjustments — the temperature, the water, the different types of honey, what type of rosemary I finish it with, whether it's sea salt or maldon salt on top. I got it to a point where it's two stones on the bottom, four-seventy-five degrees, twenty-six minutes, pull it, one minute on the stone, and it comes out. You gotta eat it within the first two hours because it's still crispy. Baking, I don't know — it's just one addiction after the next, like fly tying or cooking. Baking takes it to that scientific level you're talking about.
Tom Rowland: Where does that come from, with you and your personality, that kind of perfection or attention to detail? And obviously you have this whole part of your life where it's exactly the same with your fly tying — I wonder where that comes from. Have you ever thought about that?
Drew Chicone: Some neuroses and defects, too — the ultra type-A, quest for perfection, I don't know. But everything, if I care about it, it's like that old adage: anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I just keep doing it to the point where it's mastered, and then I get bored with it. When I was in sports — I was a tennis pro, played tennis through high school and college — and then you just kind of burn out, like, okay, I don't wanna play tennis anymore. But fly tying is more art, so no matter how good you are at it, you can always say, how'd you hit Santa Claus, crap — you just, that's why fly tying keeps going.
Tom Rowland: That's why you should've picked up pickleball — that's the next level.
Drew Chicone: Everyone keeps telling me, hey, if you played tennis, now that you're over forty, you should move to pickleball — my wife's actually been leaning on me about trying it with her.
Tom Rowland: You're gonna have so much fun, because you're gonna immediately be better than all these other people getting into pickleball who don't have a tennis background, or even racquetball, I think, crosses over. I was never a good tennis player, but I was a pretty decent racquetball player, and there's a good amount of crossover, because a lot of times in pickleball you're picking the ball up very low to the ground, there's a lot of wrist involved, you're trying to catch one going out of bounds and you flick the wrist and the racket's shorter. There's no ceiling though, so typically that's where my racquetball background isn't an advantage — you go for a ceiling shot and it just goes right over the fence.
Drew Chicone: Yeah, home run derby.
Tom Rowland: But you'd like pickleball, because you'll get out there with people who think they're pretty good, and with a substantial tennis background you'll beat them, whatever the pickle-point count is, to zero, every time.
Drew Chicone: I can't wait to try something different.
Tom Rowland: It's fun. What about the thought that once you become good at something, you can become good at anything — do you see that with your fly tying, your tennis, other things? Is there a process where, if you're gonna take on something like this blue-water fly tying, you think, well, if I can master snook flies, I can master offshore flies, or if I can master tennis, I can master pickleball?
Drew Chicone: I'd say with anything that's muscle memory, I'm pretty good — but if it's something I don't have the passion for, like, I need you to start taking over the books and doing accounting, doesn't matter how many spreadsheets, it's not gonna happen. But if I wanna do something repetitive, where I wanna be the best at it or get better at it, you just keep going until you're happy with the level you're at. I remember the reason I got into tennis is because my brother and his older friend wouldn't let me play, because I wasn't good enough — I was sitting on a fence. So I'd put on my yellow Sony Sports Walkman and go over to the high school and just hit tennis balls against the wall for hours. It got to the point, after some lessons, that by the time I was a senior it was like, okay, who's taking a whooping now — I was just handing them out. But it was more that I wanted to do it. So if you wanna be good at something, you'll find a way, you'll just keep doing it until you're at the level you wanna be.
Tom Rowland: What about writing a book? You seem like you've been on a lot of different journeys with your fly tying book writing — how many books have you written now?
Drew Chicone: Seventeen, I think.
Tom Rowland: Seventeen books, so you're a seasoned expert in this. I'd be interested to know — on the first one, looking back with what you know now, were you lucky to get that thing published, or did you go on the right path right away?
Drew Chicone: I was lucky to get an opportunity. In an industry where everybody would cut off a finger to work in hunting or fishing, there's a lot of competition, and I was lucky that fly tying wasn't exactly the sexiest of sports — there weren't a whole lot of guys doing it, and it was one of those, okay, there's these five guys, and when they're dead, fly tying's gone forever. At the time, that's what it felt like. So I got an opportunity — Jay Nichols, I think it came from John at Fly Tyer or Fly Fishing magazine, that was my first one. I wrote an article, and they said, could you do more of these? Jay said, well, if you can show me six, we'll make you an offer for a book contract. That was probably the most painful thing I ever did, writing that first book, because I was not a writer at all. One of my mentors said writing's like lifting weights — you're not gonna bench three hundred the first day, you gotta build up and do a little every day, and the best thing you can do is start a newsletter. Give yourself some accountability — write a newsletter every month, even if only five people read it, one's your father, one's your brother, whoever, just put it out there. So I started the Salty Fly Tying Chronicle a hundred and thirty-five months ago or something, and I haven't missed one yet. Each month is a how-to that's free, on a fly, and that's why it became so easy for me, because I do one every month. After ten months, you've got a book. So I just randomly do them, as I find people I wanna interview, or fly patterns people are really interested in learning to tie that have never really been published — people ask, how do we do a Boyer's Crab, or this or that — so I hunt it down, write it up, and it becomes a chapter in a book, you flesh it out a bit more. That was my model for writing books, but the first one, I didn't have that model — it was, from scratch, write a book, and oh my god, it was like pulling teeth. I remember I thought I was done, and I sent it to Jay, and he said, okay, here's my notes — these all need to be rewritten, and every one of your nine hundred pictures needs a caption. You're just like, I can't keep going, what will it take to make this end? I vowed never to write another book after Feather Brain — nope, never again, it was too laborious, it took forever. But I guess you forget, it wears off, and you go back in.
Tom Rowland: What was the second book?
Drew Chicone: I think I self-published Snook Flies. That was the second one I did, through Amazon, through KDP. And then I did Redfish Flies and a couple of the more species-specific ones, because everyone was like, okay, Feather Brain is really cool, it was kind of the road map for designing your own patterns, and had some weird stuff in there like dyeing feathers with Kool-Aid and UV work — but it was more like, okay, I need a handful of really good redfish patterns, or snook patterns, or bonefish patterns for, say, Texas or Andros or Abaco, and you get to a point where you drill down and say, these are where people are going, this is the information they're all asking for. It's pretty easy — you've got the road map right in front of you.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's interesting. I would think, almost, when I asked you that question about the best piece of advice that's served you well, that newsletter piece seems like pretty good advice.
Drew Chicone: Oh yeah, that was up there. I worked as a consultant for several years after I shut down the mortgage and title business — I worked for a supply chain logistics consultant, a super-niche guy who lived on Sanibel and was an incredible writer. He did a newsletter, had a master class, a study group, and he created these getaways where people would come have a share group. I learned a lot of those techniques from him, and he was really adamant that I write all the time, just keep writing, because that's really gonna help. He also had me start journaling — well, it wasn't really because he had me, but I journaled words I would hear on these conference calls with, you know, the CEO of Heinz or Campbell's or Sara Lee. These are powerful business guys, and they'd be dropping knowledge, and I'd be like, oh, what does mellifluous mean? So I had this journal of words I'd look up after the calls and write down what they meant. I can't tell you how many pages — it could be its own book now — of words I've written down, or sayings that I thought were funny or catchy, but I've kept that log. That really helped me increase my vocabulary, and every time I'm writing, if I need a fancy fifteen-dollar word, I just see what I've got.
Tom Rowland: That's funny, because when you hear people talk like that, and they're talking pretty quickly, it's funny — if you write the word down and don't know what it is, you kind of get the gist of the conversation. But when you actually go look up the definition, you realize the whole conversation takes on a slightly different meaning than you thought. It's funny like that. And I'd imagine once you become really in tune with that, you're actually looking for the words you don't understand the meaning of, and the conversation takes on a slightly different meaning.
Drew Chicone: And you find you really don't need to say as much if the words you use are correct — you can use a couple of really well-used words that drive a point home. If you're in a group of educated people, it kind of makes everybody stand back, like, okay, what am I dealing with, that guy just used a—
Tom Rowland: Do you have an example?
Drew Chicone: I remember being in line with him — he was this really kind guy, but we were late for a meeting, at Starbucks, and he was getting coffee, and they were just kind of jerking him around, laughing, throwing stuff around. He said, no, could we get this going, I gotta go — and then finally he just lost his temper and said, if we could get some ambulatory people around here — ambulatory. Now put that in the old log. I think a well-used word has a lot more weight to it than swearing.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, I mean, some comedians, like Brian Regan — I love that guy — he's got some interesting thoughts on cussing. He never cusses, never swears, ever, and he just says, I just think it's lazy, I think it's easy to get that quick, easy laugh with that, and I choose not to do that. So, I don't know, who was the first comedian to swear a lot?
Drew Chicone: George Carlin?
Tom Rowland: Yeah, probably, in that time frame.
Drew Chicone: Richard Pryor.
Tom Rowland: Richard Pryor, so that was his thing, right? That was a unique thing at the time, but now everybody does it, and you get that quick laugh. Brian Regan's thing is not to do that — he's gonna figure out a way to get the laugh without it. And one day, Brian Regan is just gonna drop it, and it'll be hilarious.
Drew Chicone: Because I'm that way with tattoos — I don't have any tattoos, people always ask, and I'm like, you get tattoos to be unique, well, I'm the only guy that's unique now.
Tom Rowland: People ask me why I don't have any tattoos, and I'm like, dude, I can't — I don't even have a favorite T-shirt for more than two weeks. I'll have a T-shirt and think, this is my favorite, this little thing means so much to me, some kind of saying or word — and then a month later I'm like, I don't know, moved on.
Drew Chicone: Remember the Dr. Seuss book, where there's a star and then there's two stars — I can't remember the name — but that's what I always think about when I think about getting tatted up, because there've been numerous times I said, oh, I'll go get a tattoo — my brother and I were gonna get something funny — and it was always like divine intervention. I got food poisoning the night before we went, and I was in the hospital, and it was like, nope, I guess I'm not getting a tattoo.
Tom Rowland: My dad always told all the grandchildren that he would get a tattoo with them if they ever wanted one — I guess there was some psychology in there, like, I don't really wanna take my grandfather to get a tattoo. But he would do it. So my son said, granddad, I'm gonna go get a tattoo, and I want you to come with me, and he backpedaled — hard. And I don't know that it went so well, because my son was like, for twenty years he's been telling me he's gonna get a tattoo, and I finally take him up on it—
Drew Chicone: You called his bluff.
Tom Rowland: He called his bluff, man, and he was like, no, I'm not getting a tattoo. So that one didn't go quite as well as he'd hoped. But I just can't decide on anything — I look at T-shirts as a great example, because just like I said, I'll have a favorite T-shirt and then not anymore.
Drew Chicone: I'm a sales guy — if there's nothing, I want the new one, so I'll sell that off. I figure if I get a tattoo, I'd be like, now I need a different one.
Tom Rowland: Well, I think that's how it goes, and the next thing you know you've got a whole tuxedo, up to the roof.
Drew Chicone: Yeah, I just run out of room. We had a friend in Arizona, a straight-laced dude — you'd never in a million years know it, always wore a black T-shirt. He came over for a pool party one time and took his shirt off, and his entire back, from his hairline to his belt buckle, was this Poseidon scene — him pointing the trident, fish coming out of the water. I said, how many thousands of hours did that take, the color was amazing, the artwork and detail — and he said, yeah, I only have one tattoo. It's across my whole back and down my legs.
Tom Rowland: I learned about that listening to David Lee Roth on Joe Rogan — I've never seen David Lee Roth with any tattoos, in all the Van Halen days you don't see any. But apparently he has what he calls a tuxedo — covered from your ankle to your collarbone, down to your wrist, but nothing shows if you're wearing a regular shirt. He's completely covered head to toe. Well, anyway, that's called a tuxedo, I didn't know that.
Tom Rowland: So we're almost about to run out of time here — it's been an awesome, good conversation so far. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was the future of fly tying, especially something I'm very interested in — permit flies. Just curious what your thoughts are. We've had some minor improvements, like strong-arm flies, some more realistic things, guys tying ultra-realistic crabs, and those are good — the fish will definitely eat them, bonefish really like them. But with permit specifically — and you've written a good bit about permit flies — why do you think the flies don't work very well?
Drew Chicone: I think it's more about presentation, sink rate — I think most people get excited and try to move a crab in a way that a crab doesn't move. That's why I fish a shrimp the majority of the time — I like a really big, spawning-ish shrimp, something where, if the fish isn't reacting the way I want, I can impart the fly with a different movement, short of falling to the bottom. If you start stripping or popping with a conventional Merkin-style fly, typically you get an indignant refusal and they're gone. Whether it's a topwater shrimp — I've seen a lot of guys fishing a gurgler style, or something like this, which I call a Gulf Coast Drifter, which is just a foam top versus, say, a contraband style, more of a Belize-style crab — but a lot of guys are just fishing the claw with a little feather. I think that's the main problem, how the fly is moving. If you're gonna count on the crab looking natural, you have to really dial in the sink rate and make sure it's not pinwheeling or doing anything like that. And then it comes down to lead time — if you're not a next-level caster, you're gonna have a lot of problems, because you need to put the fly where the fish is gonna be if you're counting on sink rate. It's like soccer — you don't pass to the person, you pass to the spot they're running to, and that's how I think about it. If it's on a ray, or there's a couple in a group working, they're moving — you put the fly in front of them and think, okay, that fish is in eight feet of water, I need it to pick it up around four feet, so how far in front do I have to cast, and what fly should I use? There's a lot of intangibles and moving parts. So for me it's, okay, I'm gonna fish a shrimp, which sinks pretty consistently at this rate with this style of lead eye, and I can pop it along and get a lot better reaction to that movement than just waiting.
Tom Rowland: What's your permit record these days?
Drew Chicone: As far as landed and counted — one. I've come unbuttoned on numerous ones at the boat, I have several leader touches, which I don't count in permit fishing, and I had one in Mexico about the size of this Yeti, which I'm not counting either. But my big one was caught on a Merkin — two, actually, I caught one in Belize this last year, a twelve-pounder, and hooked another one there. It's one of those, the game goes on forever — so for me it's, what am I getting reactions to? A lot of it is user error, breaking them off or coming unbuttoned, but are they following the fly, are they eating it, are they rushing it? For me, I've got it dialed into my favorite, a Bailey's No-Name Shrimp, modified with hot-orange eyes and a little hot-orange spot. I think that orange gets their attention, and it's big enough that you can cast it with pinpoint accuracy — it's not like a trash can lid where, depending on the wind, it could be six feet to the right or six feet to the left. And I can also throw a much longer leader with a shrimp fly than with a big, non-aerodynamic crab — I go out to fourteen feet on my leader, my tippet's usually fifteen or twelve, sometimes twenty if I'm in the Bahamas where those fish are like dinosaurs. But yeah, I think a lot of it is getting the rest of it dialed in, not just the fly — it's iterative.
Tom Rowland: You know, one of my favorite things in the world to do — I love fly fishing, and for a long time that's all I did. But then I discovered spinning rods and live crabs. After ten years of going out there and having, maybe my best year — I remember when Brett Favre was a really good quarterback, he threw fifty-two touchdown passes one year, and I thought, that seems like a good thing, that's one a week. I had a lot of people coming to fly fish for permit — not every week, because we have a significant period where all we're doing is tarpon fishing, but for the rest of the year we're basically permit fishing. I thought, well, fifty-two seems like a real stretch goal, but kind of attainable — you could catch one a week, or average one a week, so some weeks you'd catch multiple fish, and clients would catch multiple fish, all on fly. And I did get there — fifty-two permit in a year, and I was very happy with that. Some days you catch three, some days one, but a lot of days you're starting to catch them, and it was almost entirely: throw the fly close enough that the fish can see it, let it drop to the bottom, and do not move it. That was my strategy. The fly looked good on the way down, but then when you start stripping it, it didn't look good anymore, or it would catch grass or something would happen and it wouldn't look good. I've certainly had people strip it and the fish tail up on it and chase down the fly, but that's very rare. I've also seen people try to lead them — let it fall to the bottom, let the fish get up there, then just move it a little bit — and that usually results in an atomic explosion, they seem to hate that. But they would pick it up dead off the bottom. You had to get the cast right there, perfect — so close that they'd kind of look up and see this thing go into the bottom like the crab had seen them and was shooting down to get out of the way. If you ever watch a crab in the water, snorkeling, they'll go down, put their claws up, and just sit there, relying on camouflage — maybe move very slowly. That was my strategy — let them see it, but you couldn't cast too close or you'd spook them, close enough that maybe they look up and see it out of the corner of their eye and think, I'm going for that, and go over and eat it. But what I really like to do, even more than all that, is throw live crabs on spinning rods.
Drew Chicone: Mhmm.
Tom Rowland: Man, you can catch fifty-two in no time.
Drew Chicone: Yeah, it works great.
Tom Rowland: It works so well. And I really like it because, first of all, I spent so many years trying to catch so few of these fish, and even once I got to where I felt pretty good at it, it's still so few fish compared to any other style of fishing we're doing. Catching fifty-two a year sounds amazing, but it's really one a week — if you caught one bonefish a week, that would be terrible, one tarpon a week, terrible, one redfish a week, oh my gosh, that would be horrible, with that style of tackle.
Drew Chicone: And you live in the Keys, right, so you're fishing for them all the time. What you gotta remember, and what I have to keep top of mind, is most of my clients — I'm not a guide, I'm a host, I take people places and coach — so most people, it's like jumping off the deep end, they go from trout to permit, and you could have the best day on the water ever, but if they don't catch one, it's a bad day. So I'd say I hate permit fishing compared to everything else, because I spend my time perfecting flies, and I spend most of my time fishing for bonefish if I'm in the Bahamas with clients, or snook and redfish here. I don't do a lot of big tarpon, and I don't do a lot of permit fishing in the Keys, almost never. It's one of those things that takes a special kind of person to devote themselves to something that difficult — the guys who are ride-or-die, only permit fish, but live in Montana — when they're in saltwater, that's a special breed of human.
Tom Rowland: I guess, or it's like Del Brown — Del Brown had done it all, man, caught plenty of tarpon, fishing with Steve Huff, had plenty of opportunities, and basically had had enough of tarpon fishing, enough of bonefishing, and it was like, okay, here's this challenge, no one's catching these fish — if we even caught a couple, let's pioneer this sport. They tied a fly that seemed to be working a little bit, and they pioneered the whole sport, which is very interesting to me, that's super cool. But the type of person who got into permit fishing when I started guiding had already done all the rest of it. And then you started to get these other guys who not only are going from trout fishing in Montana to permit, but have zero experience with any saltwater species whatsoever — which on one hand is incredibly difficult, but on the other hand, it's like, well, just hit them in the head with the fly and don't do anything else. If they get that real simple instruction, just hit them in the head and let it fall, that's it.
Drew Chicone: Don't worry about it — like dogs smell fear. I swear, if a guy gets on and has no idea what a permit is, doesn't even care, and you say, just hit the fish in the head, and they do it and catch one the first day, no big deal. And it's for everybody else who has that permit shake, and when the ray comes, you're like, okay, this one's over thirty-five pounds, and they can't even cast, they get up on the front of the boat and they're just a hot bow.
Tom Rowland: I do believe there's something going on there, and it can happen with tarpon too, it can happen with anything — you're so nervous that, first of all, that's the opposite of a flow state. In a flow state, you just flow, you just make the cast — like maybe you've been in Cozumelito all week long, how nervous were you to catch a bonefish on the last day? It's so smooth, everything is smooth, there's no way you're gonna miss, you've caught two hundred of them already — two hundred and one is gonna be backhanded, behind the back, over the shoulder, oh I got him, oh he came off, no big deal, catch this one over here with my left hand. But try that on your first day in the Bahamas and you're never gonna be able to do it, I don't know why. Once you get in that flow state, that's great, but the opposite of the flow state is the knees knocking, being so nervous. But what I was trying to get to is that I spend a lot of time throwing crabs — I prefer to throw crabs now than to fly fish for them, and one of the reasons is I like to see them eat. With a crab, it's not like you just throw it out there and they eat it — you have to put it in the right place. You can scare the hell out of them with a crab, or place it somewhere they don't see it and don't want anything to do with it — your crab can die, and you throw it over there, and they don't want anything to do with it. And that's what I think — I think all of our crab flies look like dead crabs. Most people fly fishing for them, I think, don't have a lot of experience throwing a live crab or a dead crab — it's not easy, you have to be very good with the spinning rod, and once you are, you can be super dangerous, catch five, six, seven, eight, ten in a day. But if your crab dies, you're catching sea grass.
Drew Chicone: With the dead crab — and I have hundreds of pictures and dozens of videos of crabs, I just study crabs, I watch them in the water. How do they look upside down, because the fish is gonna be looking at them from the bottom? What do their legs do? Why do their swim fins always have little checkers on them? All these little subtle nuances and details make a difference. Even when a crab is still, it's still moving — there are little mouth parts going, or — I videoed these crabs in Belize floating on mangrove leaves, and it was the most interesting thing, they always had one leg going to steer. So I started using thinner rubber legs and keeping them short so they're vibrating — there's always some sort of movement happening. And for the mouth parts, a lot of times I use rabbit fur now, because that stuff gets on you and your flies, it never goes away, and when it's in the water it's always doing that same undulating thing. So I think you've nailed it — the more research you can do and time you spend with the actual thing you're trying to emulate, the better you're gonna be. Your flies are gonna get better, your casting and placement are gonna get better — just understanding the organism you're trying to represent with fur and feathers.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, you know, I thought at one point, man, if we could put a little piece of Alka-Seltzer in there, on the bottom, so there'd be bubbles, because crabs are putting off bubbles too, a lot of bubbles.
Drew Chicone: There's dudes in Louisiana doing that for redfish too.
Tom Rowland: Really, with Alka-Seltzer?
Drew Chicone: Yep, and they bubble it.
Tom Rowland: That's where you have a great idea twenty years ago and think, who wants it — that's probably cheating, I don't know, it's not cheating though — we're just trying to — it's not like you're gonna do that and all of a sudden be the best permit fisherman in the world, it's like, oh man, we're trying to get better at this. That's where I leaned into the bait fishing — I'm trying to get better at fly fishing, so I do more and more bait fishing, so I see more of these fish eat, more of their natural behavior, more of them eating something the way they'd eat it naturally. You get to do that with bonefish all the time, but permit is just a funny fish like that — I just think fly fishing for them is so ineffective, and people would say, what, we're way better than we were back then — okay, sure, but you still don't catch very many compared to bonefishing, or redfishing, or jack crevalle fishing, or even tarpon fishing. You catch more — the flies just represent what they're eating, and it just works better.
Drew Chicone: And don't get me wrong, I've checked it off — I got a thirty-four-pounder in the Bahamas, which was the holy grail, purple, and I got a nice twelve-to-fifteen-pounder, we didn't weigh it, a pretty fish in Belize this year. And I'll still permit fish, but given the opportunity, I'd rather bonefish. I'd rather duck hunt over deer hunt because of the camaraderie — I wanna be walking shoulder to shoulder, hey Don, look at this one, or here they come. It's like a team sport, like walking fields for pheasants — you're with your buddies.
Tom Rowland: But as an angler-guide team, permit fishing, there's a lot of that where you really need to be dancing.
Drew Chicone: That's the key — having a guide and you guys working in tandem.
Tom Rowland: One of the things about that little fly you showed me — the reason I don't use a lot of those ultra-realistic flies is I think most tyers use hooks that are way too small. When I think about getting a thirty-five-pound permit on one of those things, and the body of the crab — not saying exactly the one you're talking about, but a lot of crabs started out with the McCrab, right? It was like an epoxy body and deer hair back, with almost zero hook gap. I'm not gonna risk it on that.
Drew Chicone: I can't tell you how many manufacturers I've worked with on that. Gamakatsu actually kind of cracked the code — they make wide-gap hooks, and they also make an SL12, which is like three times the wire, so as you drop down into smaller hook sizes, the wire isn't so insignificant that fish can crush it.
Tom Rowland: Right.
Drew Chicone: Mike Hennessy out of Hawaii got me started on those for bonefish, because he was throwing twelves and eights and tens, itty-bitty sizes. Bonefish hooks were regularly like a 3407-style Tiemco hook, and if you went down to, say, an eight, the wire was too small — if you caught a ten- or twelve-pound bonefish, there's no way you're keeping it on, they'd straighten it or crush it.
Tom Rowland: Right.
Drew Chicone: So you're exactly right — these really short-shank, wide-gap hooks let you put something on the inside and still have plenty of effectiveness in the gap. The SL12s, those super-wide short shanks, are all I use on crabs.
Tom Rowland: Interesting, interesting. Man, this has been really great, I don't wanna take up too much of your time, I know you had some stuff going on. But that last part about the permit flies is what I kind of wanted to talk about, and it was really interesting.
Drew Chicone: I enjoyed it — you too.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, no, it was great, we'll have you on again. I gotta get you some Black Rifle Coffee, somehow I'll get some over to you, and you can try that out.
Drew Chicone: I'm afraid I'm gonna get hooked on that stuff — those guys, they send it to me every week.
Tom Rowland: Oh, there's a coffee club, you can join that, get it every month. Hey, tell people how they find your newsletter, how they find your books — how do people find you?
Drew Chicone: Instagram, Dr. Chicone, is probably the most up to date. If you're looking for new content, my website, saltyflytying.com, has all my books, newsletters, and fly tying materials and things like that. But you can always email me, drew at salty fly tying, if you have questions, or DM me on Instagram — that's probably the fastest.
Tom Rowland: Awesome. And you've got hosted trips going too?
Drew Chicone: Always, always trying to put something together. I've got a little company called Luxe Cadre, and it's more than just hunting and fishing, it's the food too, for us old folks — into the fancy cocktails and high-end food. So I try to put together experiences that are the whole thing — bring your wife, your family, whatever, we do family trips, couples trips, dudes trips.
Tom Rowland: Oh, that's really cool. You got a website for that?
Drew Chicone: I don't, I'm trying to keep that real small — what I found is it's friends of friends, by referral only at this point. But if you have questions or wanna go somewhere, email me. It's one cool thing about being in this business, you get some great connections and know what time and where to be. So I get to go to some pretty cool places, eat some delicious food, and hunt and fish some great stuff.
Tom Rowland: That sounds awesome. Alright, Drew, man, awesome conversation, thanks for being on and helping us out with a bunch of fly tying information.
Drew Chicone: You got it, always a pleasure.
Tom Rowland: Alright, thanks, Drew. We'll see you later.
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