Ulf Hagström


I was born in 1974 in Nacka in Sweden far away from any good flyfishing stream....

I’ve been fishing since I was three years old but for many years only with spinning rod and winter fishing on ice for which I had a short but successfull competition career.

I started flyfishing about ten years ago and a few years later started tying my own flies. In 1999 I started “Elmerfishing” together with a few friends and started elmerfishing.com on the internet a year later. The involvement in that movement helped me to a jump start with everything surrounding fly fishing and fly tying in particular. For the first couple of years I did almost nothing but buying fly tying books, surfing the internet for fly patterns and of course tying numerous of flies. These were flies mainly for trout and grayling with the occasional pike fly trown in there aswell.

Since I live far from any good flyfishing streams I don’t get to fish as much as I want to, so in the beginning I tied a lot of flies that I gave away or sold to friends and their friends who got to fish more than I could.

I go away on longer fishing trips 3-5 times a year and my favourite has to be to fish graylings in the smaller northern Swedish streams. I am a dry fly fanatic, and the Grayling really is the ultimate “dry fly fish”. Between these trips I fly fish a lot for pike in my home waters in the Baltic sea where I started my fishing many years ago. There is still something very special about the feeling of a big strong pike furiously attackning my fly! As long as I live I will never stop fishing for pike.

In 2005 I changed my focus in flytying completely when I turned into the world of tying super realistic “art flies“. These are flies that are meant to imitate an insect as closely as possible and are displayed in frames or glass dome. At the same time I met Leif Örtenholm who also was getting in to super realistic flytying and we got closely involved in it together and 2006 we started www.artonhook.com to have a place where we could showcase our realistic flies.

During this time I've also experimented and developed my semi-realistic fishing flies more and more to try and come up with flies that were very realistic but at the same time had movement and flexibility in them to lure the fish. I have also a big interest in entomology which helps me alot. Nowadays I tie much more fishing flies than artflies but things seem to go in cycles. Privatly I nowadays live in Nynäshanm with my girlfriend and my three year old son.

Bumble Bee

Ulf's website

Heptagenia Nymf

Hydrospyche

Mayfly Emerger

Vulgata Nymf

Aeschna Adult

Date: 12.1.2008