Saltwater fly fishermen often base their imitations on baitfish removed from the water. However, these baitfish display many different colors in the water. With an artist's eye for these nuances, Abrames has refined the art of color-blending bucktail to create flies that look alive when fished.

Flatwings feature jungle cock eyes, bucktail blended to achieve subtle colors, and long, thin, saddle hackles that move in the ocean's currents.

Tiers credit Abrames with incorporating flatwing fly design into Northeast saltwater fly patterns. While he didn't develop flatwings (they were first used for Scottish Spey flies a long time ago), he modified them for saltwater fishing in the Northeast. Flatwings feature hackles tied in at the tail and horizontal to the hook shank, a construction that allows the fly to suspend naturally in the water.

Abrames has spent a decade working with a hackle supplier to develop a long, thin-stemmed hackle that moves with a natural side-to-side undulation in the water rather than the thick-stemmed hackles used in standard featherwings. Hackle length corresponds to the length of the baitfish, and he spreads his bucktail to mimic the wide, translucent profile of a living baitfish without added weight or bulk.

Sight fishing to stripers on the flats is challenging and exciting. Floating lines facilitate quick casts and multiple flies help you determine the size, color, and silhouette of the bait bass are feeding on.

While flatwings catch fish with any technique, they excel when they are combined with dead-drifts and mends that allow the feathers to undulate in the water like a living organism. By using a different mend, split-shot, or a sinking-tip line, you can fish them throughout the water column from just under the surface to on the bottom.

A prolific fly designer, Abrames developed and outlined hundreds of patterns over the years. He chronicled several dozen as template patterns in his second book A Perfect Fish and has influenced many fly tiers.

Last year, Abrames shared flatwing design, mechanics of construction, use of the color wheel, theories of impressionism, and blending bucktail before it is tied into a fly with another well-known Northeast saltwater fly tier, New Jersey's Bob Popovics. Abrames's influence is seen in Popovics's Hollow Fleye. The Hollow Fleye features blended bucktail, sparse construction to allow light and water to pass through the fly, a wide silhouette, and is lightweight for easy casting. Popovics adapted a reverse-tie method for the bucktail, and he tied sections of blended bucktail in segments throughout the hook shank for fullness.