This chapter might get a bit technical if you're not a fly fisherman, but I want to tell it anyway. It's about the birth of something I'm still proud of: a little innovation we ended up calling Eco-Bodies.
As a teenager and avid fly fisherman, I'd noticed that weighted flies often caught the biggest fish. Not always, but big fish tend to lurk near the bottom, and if you wanted to get your fly down deep, you'd wrap lead wire around the hook shank before tying the fly over it. The downside was obvious: as you retrieved the fly, imitating a dragonfly nymph or some other insect, it would snag on the bottom. You'd lose flies, time, and patience.
One of my first designs for the Fly of the Month Club was called the Fire Tiger. I added a brass bead to its abdomen, flipping its center of gravity so the hook's barb faced upward—like a scorpion's tail curling over its back. This worked brilliantly and sparked an idea: what if I could mold the body itself to achieve the same effect? Instead of winding lead wire, I wanted something sculpted and precise.
I've already mentioned the ill-advised spin-casting equipment we bought to produce jig heads for Ron Rigger, so the concept wasn't new to me. I began shaping prototypes out of Pratley's Putty, an epoxy compound. I'd mold a blob of putty onto a hook, let it harden, then sand and file it into a streamlined shape designed to flip the hook's orientation while looking like an actual insect body. Eventually, I partnered with a Johannesburg company with spin-casting gear, and to my delight, it worked beautifully.
Clinton was so impressed he pushed to patent the idea—which we did. But I wasn't done. Lead worked fine, but it wasn't environmentally friendly, and I knew we wanted to break into the American market. So I switched to bismuth, a heavy, non-toxic metal. With that shift, the Fishy Pete Eco-Body was born: a greener, smarter fly-tying innovation.
Around this time, Clinton and I took the Fly of the Month Club to the Chatsworth Show in the UK. The trip wasn't a roaring success—we didn't have the funds to make the splash we'd hoped for, and we'd misjudged the conservative UK market—but it opened my eyes to new techniques, like crocheting fly bodies for added realism. Most insects aren't perfectly round, but wire-wrapped hooks always produced a circular cross-section. Spin-casting allowed us to create the flattened profiles of real nymphs, and crocheted coverings made them look astonishingly lifelike. I was thrilled.
I also tracked down a source for chemically sharpened hooks, the latest buzz in fly-fishing circles. Mustad, our Norwegian supplier, didn't offer them then, so I scoured the early internet until I found Dohitomi, a South Korean company. They sent samples, and soon we were importing top-quality hooks that gave us an edge in the market.
It was a wildly creative time. We had the Fly of the Month Club as our launchpad, a unique product, and a growing online presence. I'd started building our website myself, hosting it on our server perched on bricks at ZA-Net, but web development wasn't my strength. Clinton introduced me to John Cartwright, a brilliant designer with his own company, websitedesign.co.za, who would later become a significant figure in my life. John was British-born but raised in South Africa. He had a razor-sharp mind and was exactly what we needed. Together, we began building fishypete.com to take our vision global.
We had our eyes on the UK first, but ultimately, our sights were set on America. For a while, everything felt electric—full of possibility.