Forget the too-weak magnifying glass on the fly tying vise…we’re gonna need a microscope.

And no fish will be safe.

While others resort to fishing the foul-smelling irrigation ditches — brownlining — close to home in the off season, I’m betting my marbles on “buckypaper” for that smallest of fly rods…maybe a size .01 wt¹ for those guppies in my fish tank. (It’d all be catch and release, of course.)

A thin nanotech “buckypaper” developed in a Florida lab offers a super-thin material 10 times lighter and about 500 times stronger than steel when it’s stacked in sheets to form a composite. This “paper” is made from tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, so putting a few of these tubes together should yield a dandy super-ultra-lightweight fly rod.

The problem will be tying those size 44² flies in a “flake” pattern.

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¹ For non fly fishers, the smallest fly rod currently is a 0 wt.
² Roughly one-eighth of an inch long, maybe smaller?