Photo shamelessly lifted from Scott Hood’s Facebook page.
My friend Scott Hood shared a little video recently on his Facebook page—simple instructions for tying his locally famous TFTCE fly (The Fly That Catches Everything). To date, Scott tells me, this Woolly Bugger-variant has nabbed about 15 species of fish, both near Scott’s home in Broken Arrow, Okla., and wherever he’s traveled to fish. I liked the story behind it—he says his friends often “borrow” a few TFTCEs from him, using the term “borrow” loosely, of course.
I equate to the old saying, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Only this case, it’s “Give a man a fly, and he’ll catch a fish today. Teach a man to tie the fly, and he’ll catch fish for a lifetime. And stop ‘borrowing’ your flies.”
I’ve known Scott for quite a while—he’s a TU evangelist, a real believer in what we do all over America to make fishing better. But what I’ve always appreciated about Scott is his ability to bring people together and look past the prickly issues that often get in the way of productive conservation work in today’s polarized political landscape.
These days, he serves as a grassroots trustee on TU’s national board, and locally, he serves as the youth education coordinator for his local Oklahoma Chapter of Trout Unlimited, and is the treasurer for both his local chapter and the Oklahoma Council of Trout Unlimited.
Thanks for the fly pattern recipe, Scott. The word is officially out.
— Chris Hunt