Simple Flies: 52 Easy-to-Tie Patterns that Catch Fish
By Morgan Lyle. Published by Headwater Boo/u/Stackpole, 2015; 119.95 softbound.
One of the appeals of fly fishing is the simplicity it makes possible. I used to fish the Deschutes with a guy who carried a small box of nymphs in the pocket of a cheap, drip-dry short sleeve business shirt, along with a spool of tippet material and a drug-store nail clipper, He waded wet in cut-off jeans and could work down a run catching fish after fish, doing it righteously, without a strike indicator. He also had a wicked side. At the boat ramps, he liked to sidle up to sports who were wadered and vested in the latest catalogue’s gear and who were decked out with every conceivable accessory gadget, their fly boxes bulging with all the latest patterns. He’d ask, in his best faux-hillbilly voice, “What’re y’all usin’ fer bait? Some kinda bug?”
There are a lot of reasons to embrace simplicity when tying and fishing flies. One is necessity. For example, when Frank Saw yer came up with the original Pheasant Tail Nymph and Killer Bug, two of the patterns included in Morgan Lyle’s Simp lt Flits: 52 Easy-to-Tit Patterns that Catch Fish, he just used materials at hand pheasant feathers and copper wire and sweater wool. Another is the self-knowledge that comes with maturity. At some point, some anglers realize that they fish only a few patterns, catch enough fish with them, and don’t want anything more, because they don’t need anything more to enjoy themselves. Yet another reason is the sense of unexpected pleasure that can come from refinement by self-limitation. Just as some poets value the process of creation forced by working within the formal confines of the sestina or the sonnet, some anglers delight in producing pleasing results from self-chosen limited means.
In such cases, simplicity either is engendered by necessity or embraced by choice among the great variety of approaches and enticements that fly fishing offers. But in American culture, especially, there is a way of thinking that insists that not only can we embrace simplicity, if we so choose, but that we should do so. My friend on the Deschutes was happy with his own minimalist approach, but his needling of those who don’t share it shows him playing both sides of the can/should divide.
Simple, Flies takes sides in the tension between can and should. One place where this comes out is in the basic terms the book uses for the approach to fly tying and fishing that it advocates: “mini malist” and “essentialist.” They aren’t synonymous, and the differ ence between them is the difference between what is sufficient to catch fish on a fly and what is essential to doing so and even to the sport itself. Lyle tends to use “minimalist,” as a synonym, but he’s actually an avowed “essentialist,” as the term is employed by the author of What Trout Want, Bob Wyatt. “It’s not just that simple flies work well enough, or even that they work just as well as derailed flies,” Lyle writes. “Over the decades, some very serious fly fishers have concluded that simple flies work better than derailed ones.”
That’s in part because it is not the fly, but the angler that catches fish.
Going simple with your tying shifts the emphasis of your fishing in a very important way: You no longer rely on pat tern to fool fish. You rely instead on good fishing. You no longer anxiously try fly after fly; you trust the fly you have and present it properly. You take care not to reveal your presence or to spook the fish with a sloppy, splashy cast. You think about where you should be in order to make a cast that will drift your fly naturally down to the feeding trout. You make sure that you have a leader that’s the right length and strength.
That sounds like a good way to think about angling with the long rod. However, if an angler’s skill and mindfulness are what arc essential to the sport, then it should not matter all that much whether the fly is an exact, hatch-matching imitation or a mini malist gesture toward “insectness,” a term that Lyle endorses and that was employed by longtime Field and Stream writer and editor Ted Trueblood. But the claim here is that the fly does matter and that simpler flies are essentially better.
The argument for the superiority of radically simple flies is not just that too much emphasis on the details that produce exact imitations is counterproductive, but that what’s productive in a trout fly is the opposite of exact imitation. Chapter 1 begins with an epigraph from Datus Proper’s classic What the Trout Said: “Mixtures of science and art have produced ten thousand pretty flies we don’t need,” and Lyle, narrating the history of fly tying in terms of the pursuit of ever-increasing complexity, concludes that “the tying is overtaking the fishing.” By contrast, he writes in the introduction, “minimalist fly design relies on including only those features that serve as ‘triggers’ that cause a fish to bite, and having the confidence to restrain the age-old urge to add more detail to a fly.” What is striking about essentialist fly tying, beyond such mere minimalism, however, is that it seems to involve removing as many details as possible in the interest of creating a sort of Rorschach test for evoking piscine desires. Explaining what Trueblood meant by achieving “insectness” in a fly, Lyle writes:
If I read Trueblood correctly, he’s saying that the more detail you give a fly, the more chance you have of getting it wrong. “The trout, which could easily see the defects in one of my hard-bodied ‘exact imitation’ nymphs, cannot see them in this [fly] because it has no detail. In the absence of anything 10 create suspicion and since the trout is a creature of impulse he takes.”
In a sidebar on Bob Wyatt, Lyle quotes \IVyatt making a similar claim: “leaving out the insignificant details actually makes for a stronger stimulus 1he fly looks like a bug and acts like a bug, but the trout isn’t ‘sure’ until it catch the fly. The same thing happens when you look at an impressionistic painting; it provides plenty of stimulus but keeps the brain engaged longer.”
Essentialist fly tying, in short, involves reducing a fly to what is claimed to be its essential qualities. Ironically, removing the “insignificant details” on a fly, the details that risk “getting it wrong,” tends to make much more important getting right the details that remain. Sawyer’s Killer Bug is just Shetland yarn wound on a hook, secured with copper wire instead of thread, but the yarn he used, Chadwick’s 477, hasn’t been made for over fifty years, and Internet bulletin boards often feature discussions in which devotees search for and suggest substitutes, none of which ever seem quite right, while cards of the original yarn go for big bucks on eBay. Likewise, devotees of the “flymph” flies originated by James Leisenring and Vernon “Pete” Hidy” — wet flies without wings, resembling bushy soft hackles — tend to follow Hidy’s emphasis on the importance of blending different subtly colored dubbing for the flies’ dubbing-loop bodies. And the choice of materials and how they behave can be crucial, when there is only one or two materials in a fly, as with Hans Weilenmann’s CDC and Elk or the simple marabou streamers that Lyle presents. Any claim to having knowledge of what is essential tends to produce a certain amount of attitude toward those benighted souls who lack that knowledge, as happened with my Deschutes fishing buddy’s goofing on more conventional fly fishers. That’s also the case here. “I haven’t become a fan of essentialist fly tying . . . simply because simple flies are effective,” Lyle writes. “I have to confess that getting away with a pinch of fur and a puff of hair when everyone else relies on complex designs gives me a certain smug satisfaction. It appeals to my rebellious streak. I think I like simple flies for the same reason I like the Ramones.”
What all this means is that what you think about such claims and the attitude they encourage will have a lot to do with how convincing you f ind Simple Flies. Fishing radically simple flies is certainly something that we all can do. If fish really do look at flies the way that we look at a Cézanne painting, maybe it’s something we should do, too.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve concentrated on the conceptual framework of the book and haven’t yet said much about its actual contents. That’s in part because from a fly-tying point of view, these flies are really simple: a hook and one or two materials, with only basic techniques required to tie them. The most complicated pattern, and the one requiring something slightly beyond the most rudimentary of tying skills, is Lyle’s own High-Tie Streamer, which uses that technique to build the head of the fly. Ultimately, Simple Flies is about having fun fishing, not having fun tying.
Lyle envisions a double audience for Simple Flies, first, “experienced fly fishers and fly tiers,” for whom the claims that I’ve been discussing will be of most interest, not the patterns themselves, which are almost all well known to such tyers, and second, “newcomers to this fun and absorbing hobby,” for whom he includes a chapter on basic tying tools, materials, and techniques, but who, unless they become dedicated essentialists, probably will want to move on to more complicated patterns and techniques. There are chapters on simple wet flies, nymphs, dry flies, and streamers, and there also are sidebars profiling devotees of and advocates for simplicity. Notable among these are Tenkara USA’s Daniel Galhardo and “tenkara bum” Chris Stewart, and both the burgeoning tenkara movement and tenkara kebari flies find a place within the overall framework that Lyle establishes here, as do “Euro” competition nymphs. In the streamer chapter, where you might have expected to find Bob Clouser profiled and the Clouser Minnow offered as a simple fly, Lyle profiles Chico Fernandez and presents Bob Popovics’s Jiggy, on the grounds that compared with the Clouser, “it’s easier to make and more durable.”
Clearly, it’s easy to be too complicated for essentialist tastes. Lyle is well aware that there are those who enjoy tying and fishing more complicated flies — he’s been among that number himself. If that describes you, Simple Flies will give you plenty to think about as winter sets in.
— Bud Bynack
Fly-Casting Finesse: A Complete Guide to Improving All Aspects of Your Casting
By John L. Field. Published by Skyhorse Publishing, 2015; $29.99 hardbound.
Books about fly casting are inherently paradoxical: you can benefit most from them by putting them down and actually doing what they can only discuss. In some ways, that’s true of books in general, as Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden repeatedly insists about itself. But as Thoreau also says, books can also get you from reading to doing: “There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.”
That’s the case with John Field’s Fly-Casting Finesse. There is so much there that what you will take from it and what you can put into practice on the water is what you are prepared to hear and understand, and that will likely be different for every angler. What makes the book worthwhile is that there is plenty there for every angler, whatever skill level or conceptual grasp of fly casting he or she possesses.
John Field is president of the American Casting Association, and he really knows casting. One of the strengths of the book is that he has drawn together the insights of a variety of casting experts from across the spectrum of those concerned with the cast, from tournament casters such as Steve Rajeff to teachers whose emphasis is bringing people into the sport of fly fishing, such as Joan Wullf. But he is not a casting wonk — or not just a casting wonk. He is a dedicated fly fisher who has fished for a variety of species in salt and fresh water all over the world, and the focus here is pragmatic: improving your casting to improve your angling success and enjoyment, which of course can include enjoyment of casting itself, when the fish aren’t cooperating.
Indeed, most of us learn to cast for purely pragmatic reasons: you can’t fly fish if you can’t make a rudimentary cast, and we just want to go fishing. But when situations arise in which our limited skills make fishing difficult, it’s too late to do anything to improve. As Field notes in the preface, “Half of the sport of fly fishing is the challenge of properly using the tackle.” This is a book for people who just want to go fishing, but need to improve how they do it.
There is a sort of dialectical play between casting and understanding casting. You learn to cast by casting — ideally with an instructor who can help you develop the physical skills needed for improvement, and Field is well aware that no book can substitute for personal instruction and correction. But for most of us, developing physical skills isn’t enough. To improve, we need to understand, as well — understand what it is we’re doing wrong, doing right, how, and why. However, what you can raise to the level of understanding about a physical activity like casting depends a lot on what you already have done physically. The learning curve is powered by a feedback loop between mind and body.
Duffer that I am, I haven’t progressed very far along that learning curve, despite my years on the water, and what I found most illuminating in Fly-Casting Finesse was Field’s early chapters: “Mastering Fly Casting,” which includes suggestions on how to diagnose and cure flaws, along with the admonition that you get to be a better caster the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice; “The Loop and the Rod,” which explains with uncommon clarity the basic dynamics of the cast, illustrated by some of the book’s revelatory strobe-light photographs of loading and unloading fly rods; and “Casting Mechanics and Adaptation,” which covers stance, grips, strokes, and the various ways in which your cast — well, OK, my cast — goes kaflooey.
That’s about casting, pure and simple, but most of the rest of the book deals with casting as fishing: “Presentation Casts,” “Presentation Scenarios,” and “Maximizing Casting Distance” on the water, with the real-world conditions of wind and weather that every angler faces. There is so much specific information here, from ways to sling a beetle imitation under an overhanging branch on a small tributary to how to present a fly to a teased-up billfish and how to prepare for a shot at a cruising tarpon, that what you take away will depend even more than in the discussion of casting basics on what kind of fishing you do and what kind of fly fisher you are.
The book concludes with chapters titled “Tackle” and “The Fly Casting Universe.” The former is not the sort of Cliff Notes discussion of tackle for newbies that some books offer, but an exploration of the current state of things by someone with knowledge of the business side of fly fishing who knows that the challenge of properly using the tackle involves understanding and evaluating it. The latter surveys the resources available to those who want to improve their casting beyond what insights a book can supply: schools, clubs, and organizations where an angler can find help and support from like-minded people.
If you fish, you cast. If you fish, you can expect that somewhere in Fly-Casting Finesse, there are words addressed to your condition exactly. You can’t ask for more from a book.
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
“He Sets Me in the Stream”
A short story by David James Duncan. Orion Magazine, vol. 26, no. 5, September 2007. Available free online at https://orionmagazine.org.
Great writers make readers want to do the things the authors are doing in their books. How many yearned to explore desert canyons after reading Edward Abbey or learned to fly fish after reading Norman Maclean?
The River Why, by David James Duncan, is one of those books where fly fishing stands for life. If we submit to the sport’s discipline, along with its rhythms, and learn to read our own character as well as we can read the river, maybe we can attain some of the grace necessary for a good life. If we recognize that the natural world is a gift to be used wisely, we will have mastered the most important lesson of all. The River Why is one of those books that actually teach us something, like Walden or Huckleberry Finn.
Fly fishing may be a deliberate lifestyle choice, but in truth, we can exert little conscious control over our destinies. Contrary to what many people feel or believe, one’s whole life is not some grand design. Fly-fishing helps show us how to wade into the unpredictable stream of existence and face with humility, gratitude, and grace whatever life brings. It teaches a way to do something right and in accord with nature, and maybe if you do something well enough, you get a fair number of moments in your life that seem as if they were works of art.
The River Why is by no means a “perfect” novel, like A River Runs Through It — the kind of book that says everything it needs to say without a single tone-deaf phrase in it. It is extravagant, word-drunk, unabashedly sentimental, and overly playful in the manner of a Tom Robbins novel. But in its quirky and pleasing way, The River Why, like A River Runs Through It, has become one of our sacred texts.
We all know the story. Seeking to escape home and the confines of society, Gus Orviston sets out to spend every day fishing his brains out, to the exclusion of everything else in life. But this trout bum soon discovers that fly fishing is not a panacea, nor is flight from the world a solution to anything. By discovering love, Gus comes to see fly fishing for what it truly ought to be, a way of being in the world.
A decade after publishing The River Why, Duncan came out with another ebullient novel about love and spiritual growth called The Brothers K., a family romance that used the national pastime of baseball as a metaphor to ground its big themes, much the way fly fishing did in his first book. Baseball fans know the letter K is the scorecard symbol for a strikeout, and the “strikeout brothers” in this novel struggle through the turbulent 1960s, leading lives of noisy, rather than quiet desperation.
Legend has it that the author originally planned to end The Brothers K with a fishing scene, but changed his mind. Instead, he gave his baseball book another ending. But the fishing scene was a short story complete in itself that he published in Orion Magazine. Duncan titled his story “He Sets Me in the Stream.” It is a fishing story that has no fishing in it, just the buildup to it. And it is one of the most wonderful fishing stories around. Like everything Duncan writes, it is told with great humor and heart.
The Chance family lives in Camas, Washington, a mill town near the Columbia River. Papa Chance is a pitcher for a minor league ball team, hoping to make it to the majors. He supplements his meager baseball income with a job at the paper mill. Mother is a God-fearing Seventh Day Adventist. Papa recognizes no heavenly power but baseball. “Following ball games to the bitter end is his religion, and it’s damn near as hard on people as the other kind.” The story is narrated by little Kinkaid Chance (or Kade, as he loves to be called), the youngest brother in a large sprawling family of misfits — he also narrates The Brothers K. “He Sets Me in the Stream, is about “the one and only time my father took no one but me fishing.”
The story opens with a father and son driving in an old Ford up the Columbia Gorge, “which on a fish is its throat but on a river is its canyon.” The gorge cuts through the Cascades, “with thousand-foot cliffs and four-thousand-foot mountains on both sides.” A ball game is on the radio, but it’s not Pee Wee Reese or Dizzy Dean doing the color and play-byplay, but “some announcer I’d never heard before, sounded like an Adventist preacher.” Father and son are bound for a day of fishing on the Wind River. “I remember Whitey Ford still pitching, the score still knotted at 3, Moose Skowran headed for the hospital to have his head examined, the Indians up again, top of the tenth. But for me, the game had turned boring. All I wanted was to get to the Wind.”
Not far out of Camas I asked what smelled so strange. Papa sniffed the air a bit and said it wasn’t what smelled but what didn’t. He said I was so used to the stink of the paper mill around our house that I’d forgotten what real air smelled like. I guess I turned red or something then, because he quit laughing and said, “Shoot. We ought to get out more.”
I don’t think we should get out. We should move out. Just look at it up here! Trees instead of phone poles, waterfalls instead of billboards, whole empty mountains where our log or stone cabin could be.
A highway sign says “Bridge of the Gods.” “It’s just a gray steel bridge for cars now. But once upon a time, cross his heart Papa says, a mile-long basalt arch rainbowed clear across the Columbia here, and real Indian gods — or so say the Indians — really did use it for a bridge.” Kade asks why if they were gods, they needed a bridge when they could have just jumped across the river. “Why jump when walking’ll do?” says Papa.
Of course, Mama maintains there’s no such thing as Indian gods, there’s just Jesus, God, and the Holy Ghost, and out of these three, Jesus is the only one who really lived. When Mama’s not around, though, Peter — an elder brother — says balderdash. Pete says there were gods coming out of the woodwork in America, Ireland, Greece, Tibet, India, you name it. And for his money, he adds (as if he had any), he bets there still are.
Papa asks Kade if he’s ever noticed that the names Indians give to places and things seem to evoke something older and more lasting than the names white people give them. But Kade is perfectly OK with towns named after heroes such as George Washington.
They finally roll to a stop beneath a huge grove of Douglas firs. Kade has to wait for the ball game to end before the radio gets switched off. “And as fast as silence falls, everything changes. I feel how we’re in deep woods. I hear river now, way down in the canyon, and the wind it’s named for in the tops of the firs.” Papa asks him which fishing pole he wants to use: the spinning rod that took a big steelhead or an old bamboo fly rod. Kade picks the fly rod, “the pole with the most family in it.” This pleases Papa no end. Together, they start their climb down into the canyon.
And then we’re here! The Wind is right below us! . . . Every stone on the bottom’s a different color. Indian paintbrush is everywhere. Overhanging vine-leafs turn the sky greenish yellow. The moss and ferns and sorrel are every green there is. But the green is gone from the river. The water’s clear as air here, or bright silver in the fast parts, slurping and fizzing like it’s eating the light above it, sending shooting stars streaking where it bounces off the boulders.
Papa starts explaining the different parts of the river to Kade, such as “the tongue” and “the rapids.” Papa then points to something hovering near the bottom of the river: “There’s three beautiful big steelhead in the tail of the glide. See ’em?” Kade can’t, but pretends he does, to make his father happy. (“Too bad lies are so worth it.”) But Papa can read the score and has a little fun teasing Kade about how dangerous the river can be. When he sees the look of true fear on his son’s face, he relents. “Kade!” he laughs. “I’m funnin’ ya!” The story ends with the image of a father guiding his son across the river.
In the novel The Brothers K, an injury at the mill, followed by a botched operation, ends Papa’s dreams of the major leagues. One brother becomes a campus radical. Another goes off to Vietnam. Another goes to India in search of enlightenment. Kade stays behind in Camas, trying to hold together what remains of his wounded family. God and other religious celebrities feature prominently. Duncan’s goal in The Brothers K, like Dostoyevsky’s in The Brothers Karamazov, is to justify the ways of God to man. So the big question of theodicy comes up: Why does a benevolent God allow evil to exist? (Krishnamurti says it’s there “to thicken the plot” — my favorite explanation.) For Duncan, it seems that villains are there to give the rest of us a chance to be heroes. If there is evil, it is up to us to bring more goodness into the world. In the end, all quests end in the numinous — “The Line of Light,” as Duncan calls the presence of the divine in The River Why.
Duncan can get away with saying things like that because unlike most serious authors, he is wholly unafraid to sound naïve or sentimental. In an age of literary irony, that’s a profile in courage. Sometimes I think he could use a dose of Joseph Conrad — or Werner Herzog: “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” A fuller vision of nature requires the ennui and the horror, as well as the encompassing glory. But then I am reminded of the truism that a critic is someone who gets paid to sit in judgment of people who can do things the critic can’t. Aristotle said tragedians show us the world as it truly is; comedic playwrights show us the world as it should be. And as Chuang-Tzu said: “A tragedy is a comedy misunderstood.”
— Michael Checchio
