Read the book: «Fishing Flies»

Introduction

But nothing can compare with the moment that a fly of your own making … is accepted by the fish.

Preben Torp Jacobsen, in Judith Dunham,

The Art of the Trout Fly, 1988.

This Encyclopedia examines the whole range of fishing flies, from the smallest trout dry fly to the largest bait-fish imitation for catching huge predators. It also goes back in time to the first fly ever recorded for catching fish, almost two millennia ago, and includes some of the most recent fly designs. It also includes flies designed to catch fish in all the far-flung corners of Planet Earth: from the United States to New Zealand, from the British Isles to Patagonia, from Norway’s North Cape to South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Yet, though a fly may have been designed for one purpose (for example, catching peacock bass in an Amazon tributary), it may well be that the same fly might be useful in other situations (to continue our example – catching pike in a cool northern lake). So although a fly may be included in, say, the section on saltwater patterns, it may also be useful for catching freshwater predators, like pike and Nile perch. Thus, while this book is separated into sections, it is essential to remember that, to catch a particular species of fish, there may be relevant flies to be found in more than one section.

The great problem has been the selection of flies to include here: for it is impossible to include every fly that has been published somewhere (in magazine articles, books or on video/CD). The total number of published flies is quite likely to exceed 100,000 – it would be near impossible to account for them all – and the number increases every month. In his book Flies, published almost 60 years ago, J. Edison Leonard gave nearly 2000 different tyings that would catch most species of fish swimming in the rivers and lakes of the United States. But he was completely outgunned in 1960 by Donald Du Bois in his The Fisherman’s Handbook of Trout Flies. Some 5939 trout flies are listed … add to these the trout flies published since 1960 and the plethora of flies for catching salmon, steelhead and sea trout, bass and pike, and the full array of saltwater fish … and the list could become endless.

One game played by many an amateur and a few professional fly-tyers, is to claim a fly invented by someone else as their own invention. Another is to change the dressing of a fly just slightly and then to rename the fly. When done deliberately, this is tantamount to theft. Lefty Kreh complained of such behaviour in the Introduction to his Saltwater Fly Patterns:

During the past ten years many fly patterns, some developed generations ago, were renamed. Or someone sticks an extra feather on a new pattern, or changes the color slightly, and calls it by his or her name. This is something many people, including myself, find distasteful and unfair.

I agree.

One effect of this tendency has been that the number of published patterns has mushroomed needlessly. Consider just one category of fly, the Irish salmon shrimps (see here): there are now in excess of 130 published tyings, many of them only slightly different from earlier ones, with new ones being invented every year. Do we need so many? I don’t think so.

Ed Jaworowski and Bob Popovics described (in their quite revolutionary book on saltwater flies, Pop Fleyes) how a trout angler had approached them to sing the praises of a new nymph he had invented. Its virtue was that it caught trout. ‘Well, then, we probably don’t need it,’ they replied to the angler, who seemed taken aback by their response. ‘If you had said that your fly sinks, floats, or casts better, acts differently, absorbs water, sheds water, anything, that’s something else.’ Ed and Bob continue:

Thousands of flies are created annually, and it’s only natural that their creators fall in love with them. But the fact remains that flies like Lefty’s Deceiver, the Clouser Deep Minnow, the Muddler Minnow, the Dahlberg Diver, the Wulff drys, and some others are classics because they broke new ground. They redirected the course of fly tying and, as a result, fly fishing. They have a common element. They evolved from a need – a need to do something better. Note, we did not say they simply did something differently, rather, they answered a need. New fly designs should always strive either to do something previously not possible at all or to do something better than was previously possible, be it ever so small a difference.

By all means invent ‘new’ patterns for your own use, but don’t go to the press and tell them that your ‘new’ fly is essential unless it is really different in its tying or the way that it fishes!

Even worse is the publication of flies that have never caught a fish. There is one professional fly-tyer who has invented several salmon flies and published their tyings. That fly-tyer never goes salmon fishing! Some years ago a semi-professional fly-tyer had published, in a book, an imitation of a pale watery dun, but the following year, when pale wateries were hatching out from a river, he asked his host what they were! He had invented a fly to match a real insect that he had never seen! Such flies are untruths.

The flies that have been selected for this book have all made a major contribution to the progress of fly-tying. They are proven catchers of fish, are good examples of a category of fly, and can be tied because the materials they incorporate are readily obtained. Above all else, the selected flies are for fishing and because many fishing flies have a short life span (sometimes only one cast in a piranha-infested river!) – they should not take too long to tie. Someone once said that if a fly takes more than five minutes to tie, time has been wasted! That may be a little hard … but imagine if you were to spend half an hour tying one fly, and the loss whilst out fishing was ten or more flies per day. Each day’s fishing would require a full day spent in tying.

There are, of course, many books of fly-tying recipes. This Encyclopedia goes further, and includes details of the history of the flies, of who invented the different styles and categories, and where and when. So contained within it are many of the world’s greatest fly-tyers. It also gives some brief notes on where and when and how flies should be fished. There are also many books, videos, CDs and DVDs on how to tie flies. The beginner should use them and join a fly-tying class, for there is no better way to learn than in the company of someone who is a good tyer and a qualified teacher of fly-tying.

Above all else this Encyclopedia is a celebration of the world of flies, an important part of the finest occupation that anyone in the world can have – that of a fly-fisher.

WHAT IS A FISHING FLY?

One of the most apparent and widespread developments in American fly tying has been the increasing use of flies that do not imitate real flies. “Fly fishing” has come to mean, to most people, at least, the use of a fly rod and fly line to cast something we still call a fly but might imitate anything from blobs of stonefly eggs to a baby muskrat.

Paul Schullery, American Fly Fishing: A History, 1987.

The fishing fly greatly predates the fly-fishing rod and heavy fly-fishing casting line. Until the eighteenth century artificial flies and baits were both used on the same rod and line. These early flies were attempts to imitate the flies that hovered over water and that, when they landed on the water’s surface, were preyed on by trout. So when the angler spotted a trout (or other fish) rising to take real flies from the surface, bait tackle was cut from a fine horsehair line and an artificial fly that had some passing resemblance to the real one was knotted in place. Often, in these bygone days, the angler might take a bag of fly-tying materials to the waterside, and use them to produce an imitation of the type of fly the trout were eating as they watched. The fly could not be cast as we can today with the use of heavy fly-line – for the horsehair line was not weighty enough. Instead the fly-fisher used the breeze and a long fishing rod to dap or dib the fly on to the water’s surface. That most (if not all) fishing flies back then were designed to match real species of fly is borne out by the writings of anglers in those far-off times (see here).

A further step in the development of the modern fishing fly was taken in the tying of fishing flies that did not imitate flying insects. Instead, other stages of aquatic insect life cycles were imitated: nymphs, larvae, pupae and, most recently, that remarkable and very short-lived stage, the emerger. Once that step had been taken, then it was logical to imitate other subsurface aquatic trout foods: crustaceans such as shrimps (scuds) and hog-lice (sow-bugs), water snails and fish fry. If these creatures are acceptable as flies, the argument continued, why not tie flies that imitate larger fish or frogs to catch predatory species such as pike and largemouth and smallmouth bass? Go one step further, argued those anglers who lived by the shore. So a huge number of bait-fish imitations were concocted for catching species such as striped bass and bluefish, some very special shrimp imitations for catching bonefish, and crab imitations for casting to feeding permit. All these imitations – though far removed from a mayfly or stonefly imitation – we still call flies.

When a fly-fisher sets out to catch a fish, the important two questions usually are:

 What is the fish eating? And,

 What fly shall I use to match that food?

Such questions are irrelevant when it comes to catching species such as salmon, sea trout or steelhead, for they do not usually feed on their return to the river from their oceanic feeding grounds. It is true that sometimes such fish can be seen taking some sort of food and that they can sometimes be caught on food-imitating flies. To catch these fish, special flies have been designed that arouse aggression or curiosity. For example, in the autumn when cock Atlantic salmon are nearing the time to spawn, a fly with a lot of orange in its dressing is often most effective (see here). Because shrimps and prawns turn some shade of orange when they are cooked we often refer to these flies as shrimp flies, but the salmon does not take the orange fly because it resembles something that it ate out at sea. It takes the fly because its vision is most sensitive to reds and oranges and because, with its high level of testosterone, the cock salmon is highly aggressive at that time of the year.

It is important to note that through the almost four centuries that flies have been tied for catching salmon, they have always been called ‘flies’, even though they imitate nothing living, and certainly not real flies. Because the salmon fly is usually not designed to imitate what the salmon is eating, some fly-fishers may prefer to call it a lure. This takes us into a second category of flies, for, besides feeding, most fish use their mouths to investigate what is, for them, new, and to attack intruders. Look at a range of tarpon flies, for instance (see here). Many look nothing like the lesser creatures that tarpon eat. Yet, when fished in front of a tarpon, the tarpon looks and responds by giving such a fly a good chew.

Two large categories of flies may be taken by the fish as imitation food or as lures. These are streamers (see here) and poppers (see here). Some streamers are quite fish-like, so they may be taken as food. Others look nothing like something that has lived. Poppers, bobbling across the water surface, may suggest a meaty frog or injured bait-fish to a hungry largemouth bass or pike. But both streamers and poppers might just as easily be taken because they lure the fish to take out of curiosity or aggression.

Traditionally flies are ‘tied’ or ‘dressed’. They are not ‘made’ or ‘constructed’. The tying or dressing involves fixing the materials that go into the fly’s construction – traditionally hair, fur and feather – onto using nothing but thread. The majority of flies are still tied in this way. However, glues are increasingly being used in fly construction, and some flies are constructed, not dressed. One of the most primitive examples of this is the Wake Lure used to catch Atlantic sea trout in their natal rivers in the dead of night. This ‘fly’ simply consists of a piece of cork from a wine bottle, cut and trimmed to shape, lashed to the top of a hook shank. Painted a nice colour, or embellished with a couple of feathers, it’s still just a bit of cork tied to a hook! The Wake Lure originates from the 1930s (see here). Today similar flies are being constructed from deer hair or wool, that have all the properties of Rapallas and other wobbling plugs to catch saltwater species and pike. Cast them out and retrieve quickly: they dive and wobble from side to side in a way that predatory fish find so attractive.

There are some fly-fishers today who believe that fly-fishing should be solely about imitating real, winged flies and that to fish with ‘flies’ that do not (such as streamers, poppers and saltwater flies) is not fly-fishing but fishing with a fly-rod and line. Those controlling the fishing on some English rivers are perhaps the strictest, with ‘dry fly only’ or ‘maximum hook size 10’ rules. They are entitled to their opinions and to set whatever rules they want on their own waters. But does it matter? After all, fly-fishing and fly-tying for most people is a way of escaping for the day-to-day job of earning a living, of feeding the family, of maintaining a home. It is not about politics, argument and rules.

FLY-TYING MATERIALS

This book contains the dressings of a large number of flies and, consequently, a huge number of materials from which those flies are tied. In the fly-tying recipes as much detail as possible is given as to precisely what materials should be used.

HOOKS

A hook is the one essential ingredient in every fly. Since the 1960s the number of hook types designed for fly-tying has increased greatly, and some have been devised for the tying of one special style of fly. An early example of this came with the book The Trout and the Fly (1980) by John Goddard and Brian Clarke, and its accompanying TV/video spin-off. Though the first upside-down dry flies had been tied on ordinary dry fly hooks, hookmakers Partridge of Redditch were persuaded to produce special USD hooks that helped keep the point and bend of the hook pointing upwards, out of the water. Three decades on and the USD hooks are no longer made and consequently the flies promoted by Goddard and Clarke are rarely, if ever, tied. A current example is the Klinkhamer, a very popular emerger pattern devised by Hans van Klinken (see here). Originally the fly was tied on Partridge Long Shank/Caddis hooks code K12ST, later a special Klinkhamer hook code GRS15ST. Should Partridge (part of the Mustad company) cease the manufacture of these hooks, then it will become impossible to tie Klinkhamers … Well, not quite. Parachute emergers, of which the Klinkhamer is but one, can be tied on a range of hooks – just observe the commercially tied Klinkhamers available in tackle stores!

Many tyers who publish their fly recipes give quite precise instruction as to what hook should be used: manufacturer and hook code. Here, precise hook sizes are given, but other than that, usually only a general category is given: e.g. wet fly, size 14; dry fly, size 18; stainless steel streamer, size 2/0; midge, size 22–28; salmon low water, size 6–12. Readers may then examine tackle catalogues, or visit tackle shops or web sites and choose an appropriate hook by their favourite manufacturer. If a fly recipe specifies that a fly must be tied on one specific hook, it becomes defunct if that hook becomes unavailable or the manufacturer goes bust.

Perhaps the best piece of advice when it comes to choosing which hook to use comes from George Selwyn Marryat, the driving force behind the great and sadly maligned pioneer of the dry fly, F. M. Halford. A good hook, said Marryat, ‘should have the temper of an angel and penetration of a prophet; fine enough to be invisible and strong enough to kill a bull in a ten-acre field.’ In other words, buy the finest and strongest hooks you can find for the fly-tying bench and with an eye to the fishing situation in which it will be used.

TIP: With the increasing prevalence of ‘catch-and-release’ – either because of fishery rules or reduced fishing stocks – buy barbless hooks, or crush the barb before tying the fly.