Published Nov 28. 2020 - 3 years ago
Updated or edited Jul 19. 2022

Streamers 365 joins the Global FlyFisher!

The renowned streamer aficionado site streamers365.com is shutting down, but GFF has "inherited" all its fantastic content.

The old Wordpress-site
The old Streamers 365 site
Pacres

I have covered the fabulous streamer site Streamers 365 on several occasions.
Canadian Darren MacEachern has been running the site, which has featured some stunning streamers tied by the world's leading streamer tyers, and became a household name in the classic streamer community when he launched the impetus of the site: one new streamer published every day all during the year 2012.
This massive project with dozens of contributing tyers not only lead to a series of beautiful streamers published online, but Darren also turned the 365 streamers into a three volume book series, suitably named Streamers 365 volume 1, 2 and 3, each featuring about a third of the 366 streamers.

I bought and reviewed the books when they came out, and was duly impressed. Enough to reward them with a Global Class verdict, and call the books "a landmark in streamer literature and history", and I still mean that. These streamers are exquisite, the photography is top notch and the flies represent a fly tying tradition and its tyers in the best possible way.
The project had to find an end of course, and publishing one fly a day in a year – and continuing into the next year with 100 more flies – must have been a colossal effort. Darren continued updating the site, but the publishing rate went down (what else could it do!?), and the last article was published in mid-2019.

Darren has been busy with other activities since then, tying flies and producing a lot of videos – and doing live tying sessions on YouTube. He continues doing videos, and you can find his material under the name Piscator Flies on YouTube, and his products on the web site Piscator Flies. He is also on Instagram @piscatorflies and on Twitter and Facebook.
So he decided that was to be the end of the Streamers 365 web site as a stand-alone project, and back in late 2019 he dropped me a mail containing the words "I'm considering taking the Streamers 365 project offline next year, but I was wondering if you you be interested in hosting to original 366 patterns on GFF?".

Would I? Definitely!

Leprechaun
Dixie
Kennebage Streamer
Spring Breeze
Streamers!
Pacres
A lot of programming
A lot of programming
Martin Joergensen

If Streamers 365 was going offline, I'd feel that as a great loss to the fly tying community, and the content would fit perfectly with the large collection of streamers material already on GFF – not least the legacy content from Raske's New England Streamers page, which was integrated into the Global FlyFisher already decades ago (literally!).

Would I? Definitely!

So Darren and I agreed on a plan for a "friendly takeover", and Darren gave me access to the site. I will not drag you through the harrowing details of merging two sites made in two different systems, but trust me when I say that it's not trivial! There's too much material to make a manual transfer an option, but on the other hand it's complex and varied enough to make an automated one a pretty tough task.

Along with that we both have other things to do, so it's just a few weeks ago the first import went smoothly, converted 99% of the content correctly and left me with all the relevant Streamers 365-content in a form that integrated well with the existing GFF content and looked nice as well.
I still want to maintain it as a separate section on GFF, and make sure that people wanting to explore the S365-material can do so in a logical manner.

The new section
The new section
Martin Joergensen

So there are now more than 800 new articles on the Global FlyFisher, all added to the new Streamers 365 section. These include all the 366 + 100 flies published daily during 2012 and 2013 as well as a ton of other articles on hooks, tying methods, videos, books and much more.
At the same time the original S365-authors have all been added to the list of existing authors here (some were there already), and their articles have been linked to their profile, and their bio has been brought over from streamers365.com as intact as possible.

Since the site was a thriving community with many loyal visitors and contributors who have all been very keen in commenting on the content, these comments have of course also been added to the GFF comment system, and will appear as always under the articles as well as in the commenter's profile in the case that there is one.

Visitors looking for articles on the original site will be redirected here, and the original URL's will basically all work for a while. That means that links from all over the world to streamers365.com will not lead to a dreaded "404 page not found", but hopefully show people what they expect – just in a slightly different setting.

I have been through almost all new additions and made manual corrections most places needed, but of course there can still be errors and odd layouts somewhere in this new material. If you find something that doesn't act or look as expected, please let me know and I will mend it as soon as possible.


Pacres signing off

Darren MacEachern AKA Pacres

It was way back in 2011 when I made the decision to take on a massive 365 project. The idea is to present one thing every day for an entire year. It could be music, photograph, artwork, recipe, or in my case, to present one streamer fly every day during 2012. I was inspired by artist Jeff Kennedy and his Drawing Flies 365 project he completed in 2011. Being that 2012 was a leap year, the 365 grew to 366. My vision was to showcase a fly with a photograph, the recipe, and some background information about the history or design considerations of the pattern. I soon realized that 366 streamers would be too many flies for me to take on by myself so I reached out to streamer tyers whom I had met over the years. I also approached many I had not had contact with before. I was lucky to find over 50 talented tyers from 8 countries. Anglers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the United States all participated in the 2012 project. I was able to meet many of the tyers in person and it was an amazing project to head up.

Darren MacEachern AKA Pacres
Darren MacEachern AKA Pacres
Pacres

The original streamers were auctioned off and we were able to raise some money to fund several donations to fishing organizations. Trout Unlimited, Atlantic Salmon Federation, Project Healing Waters, and several other organizations all received donations from the project. I would have loved to keep the entire collection together but I feel putting some funds towards promoting fly fishing and preserving habitat was a noble cause.

We continued the project in 2013 with 100 hairwing flies and in 2014 we added a few collections of flies from several fly tyers. The original Streamers 365 project was also turned into a series of 3 books and a special limited edition of 50 copies which included all 366+ patterns and cover art by Diane Michelin. The project covered original patterns from many of the tyers as well as reproductions of the classics like the Grey Ghost, Cains River Series, and the Silver Darter.

But time marches on and with the project firmly wrapped up, I decided it was time to move ahead. These days I spend most of my time tying flies for my business Piscator Flies and when possible film some fly tying videos for my growing YouTube Channel. There are many costs associated with hosting websites and so I decided the time had come to start shutting the doors as I wasn’t actively creating new articles or videos for Streamers 365. But, there is a ton of content on the site in streamer form that resulted from the project and it would be a shame if it disappeared from the internet.

I felt like I needed to find a new home for the articles and Global FlyFisher immediately popped into my mind. Martin Joergensen is the angler behind the scenes at GFF and he has been avidly collecting and publishing fly tyer articles since 1994, WOW. He was an early advocate of the project and showed his support of the project with book reviews and an interview on his website. With over 2500 articles on the site, it has become an essential resource for fly tyers. Even when I was building the Streamers 365 project, the Raske’s New England Streamer Page section of GFF was an excellent resource.

I reached out to Martin Joergensen from globalflyfisher.com to see if he would be interested in hosting the archive. To my delight, he agreed to take on the project and to give it a new home. I’m grateful that the Streamers 365 collection will be housed at such an exceptional and trusted resource. Thank you, Martin, I’m happy to have my project cached with such an outstanding collection of fly tying.

I want to thank all of the tyers and artists who took part in the project. It was an honor to get to know you all better and I’m all the richer for it. Thank You!

Tie them long, and keep a hook in your vise! – Darren MacEachern

Related articles

Comments

Streamers365...

Hello Martin: I think this is wonderful that you undertook this colossal merger and helped preserve all this beautiful information and keep it accessible for all of us. Thank you very, very much!
Tom

Martin Joergensen's picture

You're welcome...

Tom,

It was an offer I couldn't resist as it's said in a famous film...

When Darren reached out there wasn't much doubt in my mind, and even though the conversion was a fairly tough job, the result is great, and a valuable resource is preserved online.

Martin

.

Log in or register to pre-fill name on comments, add videos, user pictures and more.
Read more about why you should register.
 

Since you got this far …


The GFF money box

… I have a small favor to ask.

Long story short

Support the Global FlyFisher through several different channels, including PayPal.

Long story longer

The Global FlyFisher has been online since the mid-90's and has been free to access for everybody since day one – and will stay free for as long as I run it.
But that doesn't mean that it's free to run.
It costs money to drive a large site like this.

See more details about what you can do to help in this blog post.