Fly-Fishing Soft-Hackles: Nymphs, Emergers, and Dry Flies
By Alim MrGa. Published by Stackpole Books, 20117; $29.95 softbound.
Artiruloted, extended-body soft hackle. That’s one of the innovative fly designs that leaps off the page of Allen McGee’s Fly-Fishing Soft-Hacklss, and it represents the essence of this exciting and comprehensive book about a very old and traditional fly design a design that, in its elemental form, the North Country Spider, is merely a hook, a thread body, and a sparse single turn of a pliable feather. Herc, you’re in the hands of someone who has thought long and creatively about how to apply and carry forward this venerable tradition and in the process transform it into a forward-looking style of tying and fishing the artificial fly.
“Progressive” is the word that McGee uses to characterize his approach to fly de sign and presentation. Compared with his earlier book, Tying and Fishing Soft-Hackled Nymphs (Frank Amato, 2007), which largely covered the basics, Fly-Fishing Soft-Hackle, “expands on the field, and I hope it pushes the boundaries of how we think about soft-hackle flies and what they can imitate,” McGee writes.
What they can imitate, as McGee tics and fishes them, includes not just the nymphal, pupal, and emerging forms of mayflies and caddisflies, as the traditional ties mostly do, but the adult forms of these insects, usually fished with dry flies, as well as the spinner stage of mayflies, plus the nymphal and adult stages of stoneflies, terrestrials, midges, scuds, and baitfish_And they also can be tied as general attractor patterns. He has thus expanded the received conception of the soft-hackle fly wingless wets, winged wets, and, more recently, the flymphs developed by James Leisenring and Vernon “Pete” Hidyto include imitations of virtually everything a trout cats.
He sums up his design philosophy for all these flies as “B.A.M”: the fly and how it’s fished should imitate the behavior of the originals in their natural environment, their characteristic action in the water, and their movement through the water and within the water column. Too much realism is “,1 detriment,” he believes, because it makes a fly “stiff and inflexible, and what a fly needs to imitate is, basically, life.
That, of course, traditionally has been the soft-hackle fly’s claim to fame its behavior, action, and movement anywhere in the water column arc lifelike. On the one hand, chat tradition is as old as the documented history of fly fishing itself: among the flies listed by Dame Juliana Berner in A Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle in the fifteenth century is the “donne fly” – today, we call it the Partridge and Orange. On the other hand, the soft hackle also has been seen as something brand new, at least in the United States. Many modern American anglers associate it with the work of Sylvester Nemes, who in his first book, The Soft-Hackled Fly. in 1975, could declare that he wrote it “because the soft-hackled fly and the mending method of fishing it … are rarely, if ever, discussed in angling literature published in America” and that he “has never seen the soft-hackled fly used by any other fisherman.”
Nemes was of course aware of the work of Americans Leisenring and Hidy in The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and Fishing the Flymph in the early to mid-twentieth century and of the long British tradition of tying and fishing soft hackles. He cited numerous British works in The Soft-Hackled Fly and even provided color plates from E. T. Prin’s North Country Flies of 1885 in his next book, The Soft-Hackled Fly Addict, in 1981. But Americans are notoriously more interested in pragmatic results than in history, and it was as a “new” effective way of tying and fishing flies new to those of us who were among the audience for the original Nemes hooks, at least chat the soft-hackle By appealed.
It’s that appeal that McGee’s Fly-Fishmg Soft-Hackle, extends and amplifies. The heart of the book for the fly eyer at least for the fly tyer willing to follow McGee beyond the traditional ties lies in the chapters titled “Progressive Fly Materials and Methods” and “Progressive Fly Design Applications.” What’s striking in both is the inventiveness of thought and research that McGee has undertaken, beginning, in the materials and methods chapter, with a list of no fewer than 10 different weighting methods and a chart of sink rares for 16 variously weighted fly patterns.
If you tie soft hackles, you know that there are traditionally two ways to hackle them: with a single feather behind the eye, whether tied in by the tip or by the base of the feather, or palmered though the thorax, as on a flymph. McGee illustrates several more, including some employing compound hackles – two feathers, using materials such as marabou or cul de canard, in addition to the usual partridge, grouse, or hen and some with a forward-facing hackle at the eye and a backward-facing hackle at the bend of the hook, which are pretty far out. Just the examples pictured in this section are enough to hook you on the book, unless you’re an incorrigible traditionalist.
He also not only advocates using Prismacolor or BIC Mark-It markers to achieve colored hackle and variegated colors that are not available by dying, but supplies a detailed chart showing which specific markers will produce colors appropriate for a host of important mayfly hatches, and he gives recipes for using markers on available feathers to create substitutes for the exotic feathers such as waterhen, wood cock, jackdaw, coot, and golden plover that are specified in the construction of some traditional soft hackles. Also, because there are a limited number of appropriately small hackles on partridge, grouse, and hen capes the bane of the soft-hackle tyer’s existence McGee also rehearses a couple of methods for using longer feathers to tie smaller flies.
What really got my attention, though, was the discussion in the “Progressive Fly Design Applications” chapter of what McGee calls UVR ultraviolet reflection. When I started eyeing soft hackles, I used gray-mottled partridge feathers for the collars. The flies worked great, but I eventually strayed into the thicket of dry-fly snobbery and stopped fishing soft hackles. Recently reformed and resolved to return to tying and fishing them, I was told (I suspect by the same expert McGee cites) that I had been wrong, and that only brown partridge belongs on a soft-hackle fly. McGee says l was right. “A gray partridge feather has tons of ultraviolet reflection,” and because a trout’s vision extends into the UV spectrum, chis “makes a fly pop . . . It resembles a mayfly wing, which also has UVR.” So UVR, which occurs in many natural materials, is a central concern in how McGee thinks about tying and fishing his Ay designs, and he provides an extensive discussion of the implications of this phenomenon.
In addition to this, there’s a section devoted to how and why to tic tho,e extend ed-body articulated-nymph soft hackles he c.ills them Articunymphs JS well as extended-body soft-hackle emergers, and (here’s where he really pushes the envelope) soft-hackle dries and spinners, the claim for these being that can be fished both on and below the surface on the same drift.
Following these chapters, there is a series of chapters devoted to matching specific hatches by genera and species of mayflies, caddisflies, <toneflies (including big Salmon Fly Articunymphs and soft-hackle dries), as well as midges, scuds, terrestrials, and baitfish (some of the soft-hackle baitfish imitations look a whole lot like Woolly Buggers), plus a series of “modern prospecting soft-hackle flies,” all with plenty of pictures and recipes for inventive examples.
But an innovative fly still needs to be fished properly, and this is not just a fly-tying book. The final substantive chapters systematically cover presentation tactics, rigging, and leaders for the multiple-fly rigs that traditional wet-fly anglers often use. The common thread in the discussions of presentation is what McGee calls a “slack-tight” line, treading the “fine line between slack and tight” so that “the angler fully controls the line out to the leader, tippet, and fly, but fly and line also drift in a somewhat drag-free state,” a presentation achieved by “mending, high-sticking, and dropping the rod tip as the fly drifts up, across, and down and across-stream.” Treading fine lines has never been my forte, and I suspect that if skunks have followed the wandering path I do tread, it’s not just because I’m fishing soft hackles tied with brown partridge.
In addition to exhaustively discussing a number of different presentations based on this foundation, McGee also broaches the interesting idea that he calls “free-line nymphing,” a downstream presentation. This is basically center-pin fishing with a fly line. McGee writes: “I discovered that by bending the pawl spring to allow the pawl to completely disengage from the gear when the drag is all the way off, the spool turned freely, allowing the line to feed off the reel at the same rate as the current.” Of course, you can’t do that with a state-of-the-art sealed-drag, space-age-grade wondereel, so maybe the old ways are the best ways, as a basis for innovation. Allen McGee certainly has found interesting ways to make what’s very old new again.
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Salar the Salmon
By Henry Williamson (1935). Available used and as a paperback published by Little Toller Books, 2010, from $10.75.
Let’s call the literary genre “animal biography.” Popular works in the field range from the sublime (The Peregrine, by J. A. Baker) to the ridiculous ( Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach). Fly fishers might be familiar with Roderick Haig-Brown’s Silver: The Life Story of an Atlantic Salmon. But the real gem in the angler’s library is Salar the Salmon, by Henry Williamson. Haig-Brown’s book came first, but it was Henry Williamson who inspired him to write it.
Henry Williamson was a rather odd bird, as only England can hatch them. Soldier, farmer, naturalist, author of many books — he wound up a card-carrying member of the British Union of Fascists. If you can ignore his politics, you can enjoy some of his books. His fans have included Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, T. E. Lawrence and — on this side of the pond — Rachel Carson. The pioneer conservationist and author who wrote The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring credited Williamson with being her major literary inspiration. She was particularly fond of Salar the Salmon and used it as a model for her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. As her biographer, William Souder, said, “She loved his books and ignored his fascist politics.”
Williamson was a soldier in the Great War, having seen combat in the trenches until sidelined at various times by trench foot, dysentery, and finally a mustard gas attack. He also took part in the famous Christmas Eve Truce of 1914 between British and German soldiers at Flanders. His experiences ultimately convinced him that war is pointless, that Germans and Britons had a common bond, and that they should never go to war again.
Discharged back to England to enjoy civilian life, Williams thought he might become an author. When he wasn’t working on a war novel, he was tearing about the countryside on his motorcycle. And then in 1919 he had an epiphany. He came across a slim volume called The Story of My Life, by Richard Jefferies, a nineteenth-century novelist and nature essayist. This book gave Williamson his great theme in life and inspired him to commit himself fully to writing.
Jefferies was something of an eccentric, England’s answer to our Henry David Thoreau. He was a nature mystic, but one who didn’t look away from all the violence and pain in the natural world or the frequent barbarism of humans who engage with wildlife. He was known for growing his hair long and tramping about the countryside with a shotgun while thinking deep thoughts. They say he worried his neighbors. Among his many novels about the outdoors and country life is a book for young readers called Wood Magic that, for a children’s book, has a very high body count. It’s about a free-spirited little boy called Bevis who communes and speaks with animals, and the book, published in 1881, is a kind of precursor to many other children’s classics that would feature talking beasts and anthropomorphic fantasies, such as The Wind in the Willows and The Jungle Book.
Williamson was much taken by Jefferies’s books, especially the philosophical viewpoints advanced in The Story of My Life, which pretty much rejected the whole of modernity. Williamson vowed to become as serious and significant an author as Jefferies. He also joined an otter-hunting club. (There really were such things back then.) This led to the book that would make Williamson famous. Tarka the Otter was published in 1927. Fortunately, the otter doesn’t talk. But the book succeeds in presenting the world from the viewpoint of an animal. And it is frank and unflinching when it comes to the violence in nature. A few months after its publication, Williamson received a fan letter from one of many enthusiastic readers — T. E. Lawrence, of Arabia fame. And thus a long correspondence and friendship ensued — until it ended abruptly in May 1935, after Lawrence lost control of his motorcycle on a country lane in Devon.
A continent away, another fan was reading Williamson’s otter book and enjoying it very much. Roderick HaigBrown was an English émigré who had settled in Canada. A bit of a tearaway in his youth, Haig-Brown had been packed off to America by his family in the best tradition of Western remittance men. He ended up in the Pacific Northwest, first near Seattle and later in British Columbia, working in the forests as a logger, guide, and fisherman. Somewhere along the way, the minor scapegrace became one of Canada’s most respected authors and conservationists, as well as a magistrate and a university chancellor known for civic probity and moral rectitude.
His first book, Silver, the Life Story of an Atlantic Salmon (1931), was inspired by Tarka and a few other tales written from the point of view of a wild animal. HaigBrown wrote it during one of his return visits to England. It is essentially a story for juvenile readers, although it’s hard to imagine any kid today staying awake through it. Rectitude is fine in a magistrate, but it does little to thicken the plot. When brave Silver finally surrenders his life to the Good Fisherman, everyone’s a bit teary-eyed at the end, what with the author having wet his line in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.
In contrast, there isn’t an ounce of sentimentality in Salar the Salmon. Williamson would publish his book four years after HaigBrown. Flush with royalties from Tarka, Williamson rented a cottage in Devonshire that included two miles of fishing rights on the River Bray, a salmon stream rising in the moors. On his first day there in midwinter, the author stood on an old triplearched stone bridge that spanned the river and gazed down at trout holding in midstream. He vowed to go fishing come spring. He was there with a fly rod on opening day, and when he wasn’t fishing, he was studying the river and the wildlife and taking notes. Most of his salmon research was first-hand. By January 1935, he felt he finally was ready to write his book. It was to be a kind of biography of an Atlantic salmon, much like the novel he wrote about the otter. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work.
But getting Salar the Salmon down on paper was an agony. The words wouldn’t come without a terrific struggle. No book had troubled him like this before. He said it was “boring the life” out of him. But he stuck grimly to his task and finished it. It was said he killed the salmon to keep the book from killing him.
Whatever miseries he suffered by writing Salar the Salmon, there are no signs of strain in the prose. Nor is there any tedium in the story. In fact, the book is a bit of a miracle. The only thing that needed changing was the original title. Salar the Leaper was redundant, because salar is Latin for “leaper.”
Salar the Salmon is a vivid and often brutal story. The author brings it to life by his eye for naturalistic detail and his intuitive grasp of what the world must feel and look like to a sexually driven salmon transiting from ocean to river on a spawning run. Nature is seen as both glorious and remorseless, just as it was in Tarka. Salar’s world is filled with natural enemies, privation and loss, and ultimately death. Williamson doesn’t sugarcoat any of it. But he also draws readers into its glory.
The book is as much about the watery realm of a salmon’s world as it about the fish itself. Salar’s world is one of ever-shifting light and transparencies, brightness and darkness, constantly changing weights and pressures. From salt water to fresh, from deep to shallow, it tells the story of an animal’s transition from ocean to estuary and then to a ceaselessly changing river, where the weight of moving water is always pressing itself against the determined salmon. Salar experiences the river in each of its different moods, shapes, and seasonal forms, at low water and at spate, all the while running a gauntlet of animal predators, poachers, and sportsmen waving double-handed split-cane rods.
A chapter at midbook recounts one of the most vivid struggles ever put on paper between a fly fisher and a fish. The author’s understanding of what a salmon might actually perceive when a fly is presented close by is a marvel of empathic thinking. And the chapter contains the single most beautiful and breathtaking paragraph ever written about an artificial salmon fly.
No wonder Salar had felt curious about it, for human thought had ranged the entire world to imagine that lure. It was called a fly; but no fly like it ever swam or flew through water. Its tag, which had glinted, was of silver from Nevada and silk of a moth from Formosa; its tail from the feather of an Indian crow; its butt, black herl of African ostrich; its body, yellow floss-silk veiled with orange breast feathers of the South American toucan, and black Macclesfield silk ribbed with silver tinsel. This fly was given the additional attraction of wings for water-flight, made of strips of feathers from many birds: turkey from Canada, peahen and peacock from Japan, swan from Ireland, bustard from Arabia, golden-pheasant from China, teal and wild duck and mallard from the Hebrides. Its throat was made of the feather of an English speckled hen, its side of Bengal jungle-cock’s neck feathers, its cheeks came from a French kingfisher, its horns from the tail of an Amazonian macaw. Wax, varnish and enamel secured the “marriage” of the feathers. It was one of hundreds of charms, or materialized river-side incantations, made by men to persuade sleepy or depressed salmon to rise and take. Invented after a bout of seasickness by a Celt as he sailed the German ocean between England and Norway, for nearly a hundred years this fly had borne his name, Jock Scott.
Happy to be done with his salmon book, Williamson went on holiday to Germany for a quick tour of the Fatherland and to check out the National Socialist rally held at Nuremberg. Germany’s romantic back-to-nature movement appealed to him, and he tended to view the Hitler Youth as little more than wholesome boy scouts. He thought Adolf Hitler a splendid fellow and admired how efficiently he ran his country. Remembering the camaraderie of the trenches and the bonds of kinship that ordinary British and German soldiers felt for each on the night of the Christmas Eve Truce, Henry Williamson held out hope that Hitler might be the world’s best choice for peace.
Shortly after war broke out, Williamson was taken into custody and held over the weekend for his political views. He remained an unapologetic member of the antiwar British Union of Fascists even as German bombs began to rain down on his country. (The group was outlawed and disbanded in May 1940.) Even after the war, Williamson continued to express admiration for some aspects of Nazi Germany. He should have stuck to his Jock Scott.
