About Hackle Tracker
Built for the moment when your bench is full but your brain still says, "I have no idea what I can tie."
Hackle Tracker came out of a pretty simple problem: owning a lot more fly tying materials than knowing how to think with them.
I've been fly fishing since I was around 12, and I've been fishing in general for as long as I could hold a rod. For most of my life I picked up a spinning rod more often than a fly rod, but in the last five years I made a real commitment to learning how to fly fish well. Like a lot of people who fall deeper into it, I also wanted to tie my own flies.
I'm not a professional fly tyer, and I'm not here to pretend I'm some kind of grand authority. But I do catch fish on flies I tie, which feels like enough to keep the experiment going.
I started with Fly Tying Made Clear and Simple and worked through beginner patterns like the Pheasant Tail Nymph. After enough rough early attempts, I finally tied one that looked genuinely fishable. That was the moment it clicked. After that, I was in.
Then the usual thing happened: books, videos, patterns, substitutions, color variations, and a steadily growing pile of hooks, feathers, dubbing, beads, and materials that somehow reproduced when I wasn't looking.
Why I Built It
Midge insisted the problem was obvious. He was not especially kind about it.
Before long, I had an unhealthy amount of fly tying gear and a very healthy inability to look at it all and say, "Oh good, I can tie twelve useful patterns with this." So I went looking for something that could help answer a simple question:
What can I actually tie with what I already own?
I couldn't really find the tool I wanted, so I decided to try building it.
How it's built
Hackle Tracker is something I'm building with a small group of collaborators, and I lead the product and app development. The goal is to make something genuinely useful for fly tyers who buy materials with optimism, lose track of what's already on the bench, and would like a little help turning inventory into actual fishable patterns.
That's where Midge comes in too. He's the app's mascot and resident voice of reason, mild sarcasm, and occasional unearned confidence. Basically the opposite of buying six new materials for one flashy pattern you saw online at 11:30 p.m.
About the pattern catalog
The pattern catalog is actively improving, and it's important to be honest about that. Some recipes are stronger than others. Some material mappings are still being refined. Fly tying has always involved variation, substitution, and opinion, so Hackle Tracker should be used as a practical starting point, not the final word handed down from a mountaintop.
The goal is to keep making it better over time through research, comparison against trusted sources, and feedback from people who actually use it. If something looks off, incomplete, or worth improving, that feedback helps make the app better for the next person too.
What I hope it does
At its core, Hackle Tracker is for people who tie flies, want to tie more often, and want a better sense of what their bench is actually capable of right now.
The hope is that when I get a last-minute call from a buddy who wants to go fishing, or when I know someone is about to donate a few flies to trees, rocks, grass, or the back of their own head, I can open the app and know whether I can sit down and tie what we need.
Questions, feedback, or partnership inquiries
support@hackletracker.com