Hans van Klinken was born in 1956. After his studies he worked for several years in his father’s business. After compulsory military service, he remained in the army for nearly 40 years, retiring in April 2012 as commander of the Royal Dutch Army Gunnery School.
He now enjoys his retirement, doing what he loves most, fly fishing, fly tying, organising workshops and classes, giving lectures, writing on fly fishing and fly tying. Beside all this he spends lot of time with his camera as an outdoor journalist. Hans particularly loves to share his knowledge and skills with youngsters all over the world.
Inspired by inquisitiveness, Hans began bait angling at the age of six in a local lowland brook called the River Dommel in the Netherlands. In those days fish were abundant in this river and it even held a reasonable population of brown trout.
Hans started fly fishing at the age of 15 in Norway. He fell in love with the beauty of the Northern Regions and travelled to Scandinavia to spend all his summer holidays there until the late 1990. It was in the large variety of the river systems and lakes of Scandinavia that he honed his flyfishing skills.
Hans began flytying in 1976. By the early 1980s, he was creating his own designs, mostly parachute flies. This eventually led to the development of several unusual patterns and tying techniques. Hans was a fanatical dry fly purist until 1984 when he recognized the value of other flies, including nymphs, streamers and emergers. Unlike most European flyfishers, Hans' first salmon and sea trout were caught on dry flies.
Hans' greatest outdoor experience happened in 1975 when he spent almost four months in the wildernesses of Northern Finnish Lapland, enjoying his longest holiday ever. It was also his last holiday as a student. Here he learned how to survive in the forest and on the tundra. His teacher was an elderly Laplander and they mainly communicated using their hands and feet.
At the age of 20, and with huge enthusiasm and fitness for travel, Hans had already seen large parts of the wilderness areas of northern Scandinavia including Denmark, Norway Sweden, and Finland where he caught char, trout, grayling, pike, perch, whitefish, sea trout, arctic char, grilse and salmon, all on dry flies. He fished places such as Tjuonajokk, visited Leningrad, travelled to Spitsbergen (Svalbard), spent time on the Lofoten and was thoroughly addicted to travelling.
Probably because of his young age, not many people believed his stories about catching salmon, grilse, sea-trout and arctic char on a dry fly. He was therefore left to go his own way and he constantly sought out friends with similar inclinations and ideas.
After nearly ten years (1971-1981) exclusively fly fishing in Scandinavia, Hans began traveling to other European countries such as Ireland, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Austria and Switzerland. The effectiveness of the large series of patterns that he had developed in Scandinavia for Scandinavian conditions was immediately also evident in these countries.
In 1981 Hans' married Ina and moved to the north of Germany for his army work. Now even closer to Scandinavia, more time on the water was possible and flyfishing became an obsession.
In 1982, Hans started his first private workshops in Bremen and Hamburg for small groups of anglers who loved to fish in Scandinavia. His special army job provided ample spare time so was ideally suited to building on his unique background knowledge of flyfishing with more hands-on fishing and tying experience. In those days, he was able to fish Scandinavian waters between six and ten times a year
In 1986 Hans went back to Holland to begin a completely different army job. He didn’t have much experience in flyfishing in Holland because he had spent so many years abroad and not many Dutch people had heard of him. This all began to change when he joined a general meeting of the Dutch FlyFishing Association where they called for some new staff members. He became a member of the editorial staff of the Dutch FlyFishing magazine, a position he held for 15 years.
In 1986, Hans became the Dutch-area secretary of the Grayling Society in Holland which is a position he still holds. From 1986 onwards, he began giving more lectures, flytying demonstrations and workshops. The year 1986 was very important in his flyfishing life, especially after he visited the UK, Wales and Scotland, where his Klinkhåmer and Leadhead did amazing damage for the first time in those countries.
The Klinkhåmer Special's first real success was in the UK on the River Dee in Wales where he fished a beautiful stretch with Ian Small. This pattern was so unbelievably effective that stories of its remarkable results spread like wildfire.
Since 1986, Hans has given several classes and workshops in the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Bosnia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada, South Africa, Asia and U.S.A. He has written for many international and club magazines as well as contributing to books by his friends, such as: Tying Flies with CDC by Leon Links, The World's Best Trout Flies by John Roberts, To Rice a trout by John Roberts, River trout flies by John Roberts, Fly Fishing for grayling by John Roberts, Trout on the nymph by John Roberts, Illustrated Dictionary of Trout flies by John Roberts, Fly Tyers of the world volume 1 by Steve Thornton, Fly Tyers Masterclass by Oliver Edwards, The Complete Book of the Grayling by Ron Broughton, Fluer med historie by Mogesn Espersen, 60 fluer til regnbuer by Mogens Espersen, The Complete Book Of Fly Fishing by Malcolm Greenhalgh, Modern Atlantic Salmon Flies 1st and 2nd edition by Paul Marriner, and many more. Today Hans writes his own columns in magazines in Europe, and Canada. He is also working on several new flyfishing projects.
In 2024 Hans first book The Klink was published by Merlin Unwin and reviews and sales are very positive. It was a big challenge for him get the book published in the same year that his iconic fly, the Klinkhåmer Special, had its 40th birthday.
Hans is well known for providing an excellent non-profit guiding service, mainly for friends in Scandinavia. From the late nineties (1997) he yearly travelled to Canada where he spent his long summer holidays testing his patterns on Atlantic salmon, Pacific salmon, steelhead, different char species, shad, inconnu, whitefish, pike, grayling and smallmouth bass as well as organizing flyfishing workshops and classes.
Hans' favourite patterns are parachutes, emergers, flymphs, soft hackle streamers and realistic nymphs. He enjoys sharing his knowledge about flyfishing and flytying and is particularly skilled in taking Atlantic salmon and grayling on dry flies. Although dabbling in the classic salmon fly world for about seven years, by 1990 Hans was concentrating his efforts on workshops for river fishing and holding fly tying classes for realistic and effective fishing patterns. Since 1986, Hans has participated at many flytying shows with fly tying, lectures, classes and workshops.
Hans also supports and sponsors wildlife and environmental projects close to his heart and gives all the money he receives from auctions, workshops and classes to charity, donating substantial sums to different charity projects since 1986.
Hans van Klinken's best-known patterns are his large L.T series, developed in Norway in the early eighties, including the Klinkhåmer Special and the ParaPoly Sedge, his Leadheaded grayling bugs, the Caseless Caddis series, the Remerger series, his Flymph series, the Para-poly sedges, the Baetis nymph and dun, the Once and Away series, the Ugly Bugs, the Bondal series and the Culard series. Less well known are his productive series of salmon patterns, of which many are dries.
