Essential Trout Flies, Second Edition: 50 Indispensible Patterns with Step-by-Step Instructions for 300 Most Useful Variations
By Dave Hughes. Published by Stackpole Books, 2017; $24.95 softbound.
If it’s a slow day with friends on the river, waiting for fish to start rising, or you’re passing a bottle around a campfire, or it’s a cold winter evening and you just want to start a conversation about fishing, making a list of “essential” trout flies can be a lot of fun. But Essential Trout Flies, revised from the initial edition published 15 years ago, with one-third new material and 20 new patterns, is not a thought experiment, an idle pastime, or fodder for trolling Internet fly-fishing forums. It’s actually a primer on the basics of fly fishing using fly tying as a focus. For newbies, it’s a guide to assembling and fishing a collection of trout flies that stand a chance of working well in most circumstances anywhere in the world — a collection that will fit in just two fly boxes “of at least modest size,” one for dries and one for nymphs, wets, and streamers, perhaps plus a third for stillwater anglers. And for oldies like me, it’s a reminder that carrying every fly and every pattern you’ve ever tied — you never know when you’ll need a 1/0 Clouser on a small tributary, right? — is not . . . well, essential.
The basic premise here is that the multitude of fly patterns can be simplified by recognizing that they are all examples of a few basic, recognizable styles, such as traditional dries and parachutes, among dry flies, each with many variations. For each style, Hughes provides a single example with instructions for tying that style using that example, then several current variations on that style. He also provides “fishing notes” that explain the best way to fish that style of fly.
I say this is a primer that takes tying as its focus, and not just a tying book, because after all it is by Dave Hughes, who has a clear and uncomplicated sense of the ways in which fly fishing is a holistic enterprise in which one aspect is always implicated in another, not just tying flies and fishing them, but the joys and frustrations of doing both in an evolving sport with a long history. In particular, the fishing notes take the reader directly from the vise to the water, to casting and mending line and targeting holding lies, and they do so in Hughes’s equally clear and uncomplicated prose, which condenses angling advice so that it, too, merits the adjective “essential.”
That quality is already evident in the opening chapters, where Hughes begins by covering tools, materials, and what he calls the “basic maneuvers” of fly tying. I review a lot of tying books, and almost all take providing such introductory material as a requirement of the genre — I assume that publishers insist on it — but too often, it’s perfunctory, not all that clear, and boring even for the neophyte who really needs to grasp what’s being said. When I initially saw such chapters here, I groaned, “Not again,” but the suggestions, descriptions, and even the prescriptions in the 30 pages devoted to this generic requirement are brief and to the point. What’s intended for newbies will have oldies nodding their heads in agreement: “Yes — that’s what’s important.”
Hughes divides dry flies and nymphs into searching and imitative categories and then, in the imitative category, provides a series of different styles for mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, midges, and terrestrials (among the dries) and for mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, midges, and “other food forms,” such as scuds, damselfly and dragonfly nymphs, and worms and eggs (among the nymphs). Wet flies and streamers get their own category.
There are surprises among the styles represented, and there have been substitutions since the first edition. Hughes explains, “Some old styles, either not often used or found not as pleasing to trout as they used to be, have been dropped. Many more new styles, tied with new materials and tying techniques available now, or found necessary to please trout that seem to be more demanding than they used to be, have been added.” Gone, for example, is René Harrop’s Hairwing Dun. New is (avert your eyes, traditionalists) the Chernobyl Ant. I fish Quigley Cripples a lot, and I was happy to see them included as a style of imitative dry fly.
The tying instructions for the example of each style are themselves examples of the way fly-tying instructions ought to be written. And while they teach pretty much every technique a tyer needs to know, they don’t make concessions of the simple first, complex later sort, despite the book’s overall emphasis on simplifying the sport. The first example in the book — a hackle-tip-wing Adams as the example of a tradition dry in the searching patterns category — is not the easiest pattern to tie correctly, nor are the Quill Gordon and quill-winged Royal Coachman, which are listed among the variations. There is also an example of an articulated streamer, which isn’t exactly a simple tie, either.
But for that reason, the instructions contain insights for oldies, as well as for newbies. It took me longer than I want to confess to understand why wrapping parachute hackle counterclockwise is a good idea (it makes tying off the thread without trapping hackle fibers much easier), but Hughes strongly emphasizes it here. And there’s a technique for stabilizing Comparadun wings that I’d never seen before. Plus, at last there’s an explanation that a math-challenged tyer like me can understand for how to get the same amount of weight from the lighter, lead-free wire as from the toxic lead kind: six turns equals five turns of lead. Among the many variations listed are interesting patterns I’d not seen before, such as the CDC Little Caddis Thing, which uses that material creatively for small caddis imitations. And Hughes usefully reminds us that for nymphs, even for honking big stonefly nymphs, their smaller instars are always present, so exclusively tying and fishing only the honking biggest versions of these patterns is missing a bet.
In short, there’s something here for a wider audience than just those starting out in fly fishing. In fact, though, as someone who has kept hoping to find the perfect pack, bag, or vest that would finally allow me to carry all the flies that I don’t need, instead of just some of them, what I most valued here was the reminder that simplicity is a virtue and that two fly boxes really will cover almost every situation in trout fishing with the likelihood that you’ll actually catch fish. And it’s by one of the best writers in the sport, Dave Hughes. ’Nuf said.
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
The Compleat Angler
By Izaak Walton. Available in numerous editions.
One of the many things I cherish about fly fishing is that it lets us partake in a long tradition. Trout rise to us as they did to our grandfathers, their grandfathers, and Izaak Walton’s grandfather. They are the same trout and not the same trout. They are now and they are ever. Fishing for them, we enter the stream two ways and at the center find our richer selves. It is said that true happiness comes from being so engaged in something, you’re not even aware you’re in a state of happiness. Maybe that is what happens to us when we fish. A river renews our capacity for joyful living. I know that without rivers and without fishing, real life would leak away from me as if through a hole in a bucket. The most important thing about fly fishing is not rod, reel, or fly. The most important thing is to have a river to fish in.
Fly fishing also helps keep the world in perspective. Given enough time on a trout stream, we might even begin to see ourselves as a part of nature — not a person projecting himself into it, but simply another life form, in continuity with all organic and inorganic phenomena. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human. That is why my favorite river is the stream of consciousness.
And we’d all have to be unconscious not to know we are living in ugly times. The public square has become a battlefield. Society has grown uncivil. One might be tempted to say, as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said of the turmoil of his times, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Perhaps a guidepost to seeing our way through the current crisis of spirit might be found in an unreliable fishing manual written more than three centuries ago.
The advice dispensed in its pages is useless, if one’s aim is to catch fish. Its methods are obsolete. But as a guidebook to a contemplative and joyful life, The Compleat Angler might be the answer to some of our prayers. Its author, Izaak Walton, was a survivor of the English Civil War that tore apart his seventeenth-century society. He found a way to peace and a better world through love of nature and humanity.
Izaak Walton lived in stirring and dangerous times. Born in the countryside, he moved to London early in life, where he established himself as a successful linen draper. A self-educated man, he cultivated friendships with noblemen, clergymen, and scholars. He loved to fish in the streams and water parks that were plentiful in seventeenth-century London. But the city was becoming an alien and dangerous place for him. England was in the midst of a civil war. Oliver Cromwell led Puritan forces on a charge against the monarchy and the Anglican faith. Walton’s Anglican beliefs and loyalty to King Charles I were known to all. And when Cromwell’s Roundheads overcame Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor, in the first major Puritan victory of the revolt, Walton knew it was time to quit his trade and depart London for his own safety. He joined the general retreat of Royalist gentlemen to the English countryside. Or as he put it, “I have laid business aside, and gone a’fishing.”
Walton acquired a modest parcel of land, with a cottage and fishing rights, at Shallowford, a few miles north of his birthplace, and there he wrote his masterpiece. In his lifetime, Walton would publish five short biographies of notable poets, including that of his friend, the clergyman John Donne, dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. But the world knows Walton for his little fishing book.
The Compleat Angler came out in 1653. His was a pastoral voice rising out of the uproar of the times. It seems wartorn England was ready for a book written by a gentleman who found his muse in fishing and in communing with nature. Walton had a way of making his readers see the special greenness in the English countryside, smell the honeysuckle bursting with flowers, and hear the murmur of his gentle streams. He wasn’t much of a fly fisher, though. He left that part of his book to his friend Charles Cotton.
His book could have been called The Complete Anglican. It is among the first texts to equate fishing with a spiritual realm. Anglers, he wrote, are honest and virtuous men, as well as all-around lovers of life. In his book, he calls for a return to a kind of “primitive” Christianity, by which the author meant the kind of faith once practiced by “such simple men as lived in those times when there were fewer lawyers.” Such men, he said, are “contented to find happiness in a drop of dew.” And they are “thankful for what they have, and they are not concerned with always catching, getting, and corrupting.” Walton implores his readers to be less concerned with the hurly-burly of daily life and more focused on its simple pleasures, as well as on its spiritual verities. He shows us a way to sidestep history’s trickier currents through a love of nature.
The book begins as a conversation between two strangers, Piscator and Venator, who meet on a trout stream. Their day turns into a kind of pastoral idyll, where they seem to be given a glimpse of eternity. It is a curious book: a compendium of practical fishing advice, poetry, ballads, recipes, musings on nature — even encounters with singing milkmaids. “Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant,” Walton wrote, “that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.” In code, Walton expressed his feelings about the times and his religious views. His first argument in favor of angling is that the earliest Christians, the apostles, were fishermen. Walton believed that the same qualities that make a good angler make a good Christian. He believed fishing is proof of God’s blessings. (“God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation as angling.”) He felt that fishing could bring a person around to wisdom, as well as joy. (“Rivers and the inhabitants of their watery elements are made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.”) He urged fellow anglers to avoid strife. (“Blessings upon all that hate contention, and love quietness, and virtue, and Angling.”) He knew that a day’s fishing is not a day spent in indolence. (“These poor rich men, how we anglers pity them perfectly.”) And that angling might even by an anodyne for life’s disappointments. (“No man can lose what he never had.”)
The Compleat Angler has never gone out of print. It is said to be the third most-reprinted book, after the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare. In our time, it might be a book everybody has heard about, but few have bothered to read. Every fly fisher seems to own a copy, but more as an ornament for the bookshelf. It’s certainly not a very handy guide for catching fish. All its techniques are hopelessly antiquated. And its methods are a bit brutish — those bait fishermen weren’t sentimentalists when it came to killing animals. There is little in its pages for the modern-day tackle jockey. But there is wisdom of another kind, in that it extols the emotional benefits of fishing. Walton shows us through fishing how to balance action with contemplation. In the end, what it comes down to are a few simple pleasures. Good angling, friendship, the beauty of nature. And afterward an “honest” alehouse, where an angler might find “a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.” It couldn’t be more relevant today. If you really want to be a complete angler, this is your bible.
It seems these days we are so much in the grip of ideas that we live among them more than we live in nature. Back in Walton’s day, the literate classes were
in the grip of ideas, too. The passions and conflicts of their time have passed into history and have been replaced by new ones. One reflects that in the age of the Internet, we might absorb more information in a single day than a seventeenth-century Englishman received over his entire lifetime. And yet their world was just as riven by conflict. To us, some of their concerns must seem almost quaint by now — their politics as outdated as their fishing tackle. No doubt future generations will say much the same about us. Fishing brings us back to a more balanced way of looking at the world. In the midst of a mayfly hatch, we might just come to realize that current events are only turbulence in a much larger stream. As it was back in Walton’s day, the challenge is still to find a way to simplify our overcomplicated and harassed lives. To maintain equilibrium, perhaps we should try to strike a balance between meaningful engagement and a more relaxed and meditative life. Like Walton’s anglers, we, too, can look for everyday miracles. And study to be quiet. Each day on a river is a reminder to us to be thankful for the natural world. And each sweet glide of water going by is a music that comes as close to explaining the meaning of life as we are ever likely to get.
