Boyd's Renegade

Curtis - October, 2019

This fly and tying tutorial is dedicated to our good buddy Boyd Guymon, who passed away a few months ago after a very long battle with cancer. Boyd was one of the most happy and helpful fly tiers and fisherman we've known. During his last few years as he battled the nasty cancer, he would always make the time to come visit us in the shop where he'd regale us with stories of his fishing exploits -- primarily up at Henry's Lake in Idaho where he spent a lot of time with his wife living out of their camper trailer.

In particular, Boyd would get so excited to chat about the flies he'd be using up there. He would often tweak his own patterns or fine tune others' patterns as he searched for the magic bullet on a given lake. For this pattern, he took the standard double renegade, that is still very popular at Henry's lake and was a pattern I'd seen at FlyAnglersOnline a number of years ago and he added a bit of a hot spot with some red vinyl tubing along the butt. Every time he came in, he would buy more of the body material and tubing and tell us how many huge fish he was catching on the pattern.

Since it's what I do, I made a couple of small tweaks to the pattern and used it. I felt the resin hot spot was a good swap for the small piece of tubing and I like to mix up the hackle color (some use all brown) but the rest of the pattern is pretty much the same. I've had some good days on this pattern on a number of local lakes here in Utah. If you're ever fishing Henry's Lake, you'll see people fishing this great pattern.