The Cigar Box

Each winter around the first week of January, Steve hand-delivers the wooden cigar box. Previously filled with premium Nicaraguan Padrons, the box now holds premium hand-tied flies. Steve always comes through for our Penn’s Woods West TU chapter Great Fly Sale fundraiser. 

Collecting the donated flies for our annual event offers a glimpse into the lives of our local tyers. Most deliver their patterns and prototypes by way of plastic fly boxes and containers to organize them in sets. Six flies for five bucks.

Some members provide their patterns in more unconventional ways. They’ll wrangle up old film canisters, hospital specimen-sample containers, or sometimes they’ll hook each fly to a particular day on an old calendar. 

Like the last remaining present under a Christmas tree, I hide Steve’s cigar box during the early part of the program until a big reveal at the end. He meticulously sorts every group of six patterns—from Renegades and Zebra midges to Dirty Birds, Sparkle Mohair Leeches, and Pat’s Rubber Legs—then he threads four-pound mono through each hook eye before attaching a folded sticker label. He then handwrites the fly’s name and hook size on the label. 

Steve lines the cigar box with white typing paper and then, layer after layer, he stacks the fly patterns, like ingredients in a Reuben sandwich. He demonstrates his tying versatility and technical skill on the vise each year through the variety and abundance of his patterns. 

Steve proudly hands me the Padron box and says, “Keep a few for yourself. Don’t need the box back.” My home contains fifteen cigar boxes from previous years. Some hold my kids’ matchbox cars and Lego creations. The others contain random piles of my disorganized fly gear.

I carefully unpack the box, exploring each clump of half-dozen flies as they’re unveiled. Each group fits perfectly into the plastic clamshell boxes for the sale. No need to label them, as the white stickers are evident.

At the fly sale we scatter all the donations on three long tables. Non-tying anglers, newbies, veterans, and finicky fly tyers converge to make their choices from the excess of nymphs, dries, wets, buggers, streamers, and buggy creations.

Steve’s flies evaporate from the table as most anglers know a quality pattern when they see one. Sadly, Steve has shared with me that he spends more time in his old age on the vise than on the stream. But happily, for Steve and for others, many of those patterns will find their way to a local watershed, or perhaps even to a river or lake overseas. Some may even be fished in Central America, where their humble cigar-box home originated.