Tying and Fishing Deer Hair Flies: 50 Patterns for Trout, Bass, and Other Species
By Tim Jacobs. Published by Stackpole Books; $34.95 softbound.
Americans like to point with pride to the things that the United States has provided to the world that are uniquely American — jazz, baseball . . . monster truck racing. Somewhere on that list is the spun deer hair fishing fly. It is the product of an inquiring spirit that asks, “I wonder what would happen if ” Several explosions, duds, or crashes of Rube Goldberg devices later, what results is the electric light, or the airplane or the Deer Hair Frog.
To experiment with deer hair at the tying vise, a much less risky thing than the classic American “Hold my beer — watch this,” you obviously need access to deer hair, something Americans have always enjoyed, while Brits have not, since deer hunting has been an upper-class preserve there. While classic American dry flies evolved from British patterns, adapted by the likes of Theodore Gordon and Roy Steenrod, the deer hair fly is wholly a product of American ingenuity. Constructing fishing flies using deer was a natural outcome for American tyers who, like Gordon and Steenrod, used local materials pragmatically to imitate what fish eat. That included developing new trout flies, but stretching back to the writings of the avuncular Thaddeus Norris after the Civil War, such innovation included bass flies and flies for other species, as well, since the trout snobbery of the British chalk streams hadn’t yet taken hold in democratic America. As Tim Jacobs points out in the introduction to Tying and Fishing Deer Hair Flies, the use of that material actually is American in another way, as well. “One of the first documented uses of deer hair was from James Henshall in his Book of the Black Bass (1881). He described the Native Americans’ use of deer hair ‘bobs’ for fishing for largemouth bass in the Southeast.”
Jacobs adds: “Bucktail became a staple for the streamer patterns that were developed in Maine during the late 19th century. Don Gapen’s Muddler Minnow and Joe Messinger’s Bucktail Frog are both early examples of flaring deer hair to create spun deer hair heads.” More recently, Dave Whitlock has contributed influential patterns to the development of the deer hair fly, and Jacobs affords him the recognition he increasingly is receiving as a major influence on American fly tying.
That brings us to Tim Jacobs himself and this book. Jacobs, who began fly fishing and tying deer-hair flies in Michigan and who now fishes, guides, and ties in Colorado, has been working with these materials for thirty years and offers what is the current state of the art on the subject. He covers the full range of flies tied with deer hair, from trout flies, to bass flies, to flies for pike and muskellunge. Apart from a hair-wing dun pattern developed in Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s, Robert’s Drake, which features a bound-down deer hair body, many of the trout flies are familiar patterns, including the Humpy, Sparkle Dun, Deer Hair Ant, and Black-Nose Dace, although there also are treatments of modern bucktail streamers, including a Fish-Mask Bucktail (an updated Joe Brooks Blonde).
But the heart of the book, and the real interest for any fly tyer, are the chapters on spinning deer hair and the flies, ranging from trout patterns to humongous articulated muskie flies, that can be constructed in that way. Like fly casting, spinning deer hair involves physical skills — touch — that can be acquired only by doing it, and Jacobs make it clear that practice is necessary to get it right, but he provides a comprehensive introduction to the materials and tools necessary to make it happen.
The effects that can be achieved with tightly packed spun deer hair are stunning, and Jacobs clearly explains how to achieve them. In the hands of a pointillist artist such as Pat Cohen (check out his creations on the Web), these flies can be so tightly packed that they can seem to be made of a single substance — wood or plastic — not myriad little points of hair. To the relief of those of us whose flies still appear to be constructed of spun deer hair, though, Jacobs declares that “density has a function but is also a personal preference.”
The chapter “Spun Deer Hair Flies for Trout” rounds up some of the usual suspects: Dave’s Hopper, the Muddler Minnow, and the Irresistible (no Rat-Faced McDougall), and those in the “Compendium” that accompanies this chapter (every chapter has one) are all well known. The meat of the book is in the chapters that follow: “Topwater Deer Hair Flies,” “Waking Deer Hair Flies,” “Diving Deer Hair Flies,” and “Deer Hair Flies for Pike and Muskie.” The first of these lays out the basic approach, implementing the lessons in the chapter “Techniques for Spinning and Flaring Deer Hair,” and helpful sidebars explain such topics as bass-bug proportions and adding rubber legs to flies that, scarily, will eventually be trimmed using a double-edged razor blade.
Trimming itself is a big part of constructing these flies and a way in which you can screw up an otherwise well-constructed fly. Jacobs has an interesting technique for dealing with the rear hackle collar, installed before the hair is stacked, spun, and trimmed — he just ties it down, then releases it when the trimming is done. And the chapter on big pike and muskie flies includes an innovative use of body tubing to construct a disc to flare the materials at the rear of the fly, something that other tyers of big flies will no doubt appropriate. But the real value of the book lies in its careful and clear instructions for spinning and stacking deer hair to create floating and diving flies for big fish.
The late Pete Parker used to demonstrate spinning and stacking deer hair in the Fly-Tying Theatre at the International Sportsmen’s Exhibition shows by tying imitations of helicopters — Bells, mostly — complete with rotors and pontoons. It was an ingenious approach to teaching the techniques involved. You won’t laugh as much, reading Tying and Fishing Deer Hair Flies, as we did at those presentations, but with practice, someday you, too, like Pete and many others before him, may find yourself sitting at your vise, thinking “I wonder what would happen if ”
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Jack Gartside: A Classic Life
He was one of the nation’s most innovative fly tyers and the author of self-published how-to fishing books. But Jack Gartside’s most creative accomplishment was in the unusual way he arranged his life. He found ingenious ways to fish all over the world on the cheap, using means so clever and entertaining he was lionized in publications ranging from Field & Stream to the Wall Street Journal.
“I frankly don’t make much of a living,” he once said, “but I make a hell of a life.” A bachelor and a bon vivant, Jack Gartside lived life exactly as he pleased. Most of us don’t get to fulfill our childhood fantasies, but for Jack Gartside, the child really was father to the man, and from the get-go, pretty much all the kid ever wanted to do was fish. Thanks to his love of angling, he held the record for the most unexcused absences of anyone in his seventh-grade class. In his high school yearbook, he listed his life’s ambition as “fishing.”
Gartside grew up in Beachmont, a Boston neighborhood inside Revere, and he got his first fly-tying lesson from none other than baseball great Ted Williams. The year was 1956, and Gartside was 10 years old. The Red Sox slugger (and maniacal fly fisher) was manning a booth at a sports show downtown. The boy managed to worm up to the table where his hero was tying flies. “I asked him to show me how to do it, and he obliged,” Gartside recalled of that memorable day in his life. “It was five or ten minutes, but it seemed like an eternity, because there I was with my idol. And so I went on and learned how to tie flies and became a fly fisherman.”
That same year, walking along the beach while fishing “the Bubble,” the business end of a pipe discharging raw sewage into Boston Harbor, Gartside came across a corpse from the wreck of the Andrea Doria, which sank earlier that year off Nantucket. The ‘turd line” from the Bubble isn’t there anymore, and these days, the harbor produces more “stripahs” than “floaters.” The boy grew up to become its f ly-fishing Nureyev. Among Gartside’s many how-to books is his self-published The Fly Fisherman’s Guide to Boston Harbor, an out-of-stock volume that is almost impossible to find these days. As a fly-rod wizard, Gartside haunted the shorelines of the harbor, sometimes fishing directly under the roar of jets taking off and landing at Logan Airport. There were times when he would fish so close to the runways that he could smell the jet engine exhaust and the smoke from burning rubber as the planes screeched in for their landings. He would seek out other unlikely places to fish, such as the waters near the New England Aquarium, the estuary of the Merrimack River, or hidden coves on Ipswich Bay. Often he would cadge rides from friends and fishing acquaintances who owned boats, but his specialty seemed to be working the flats around 34 uninhabited islands in Boston Harbor that were too shallow to be fished effectively from a boat. To get there, he would hop on a shuttle ($8 round trip) to George Island, site of a nineteenth-century fort, and from there take free water taxis to the undeveloped islands. He would fish the incoming and outgoing tides for striped bass until it was time to catch the last water shuttle back to the city at 6:00 p.m. If his car was still where he had left it, with all four wheels intact, he was happy.
He was a frugal fisherman, because he could never afford to be fancy. Rather than pursue a career, he chased fish. He believed that having fun is preferable to any nine-to-five job, so he was willing to live close to the poverty line to fulfill his life’s ambition. He found ingenious ways to fish, to follow his many cultural interests, and to pursue the life of a globetrotter on only a few dollars. He owned only two fly rods, a 7-foot fiberglass for trout and a 9-foot graphite for salt water. “You don’t need gear if you have smarts,” he once said.
He pulled in enough money to make the rent on his Mission Hill apartment in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury by tying custom flies for his mail-order business and by driving a cab parttime. He lived inexpensively in one of the last rent-controlled cubbyholes in the city. His ground-floor apartment, part of a house, overflowed with a thousand books, heaps of hides and capes for fly tying, and at one time an upright piano that he had to sell to pay off a vet bill after his cat, Tobermory, got sick. He had named his pet after the talking cat in a famous short story by Saki. He was a voracious reader since childhood, and there didn’t seem to be a novel or a short story that he hadn’t read. Gartside would sit at his vise for hours, happily tying up batches of flies while listening to his classical music cassettes. In the evenings, he might go out to one of Boston’s taverns to sip a few beers with friends or cut a rug on the dance floor. (He was tall and slim, and people said he looked like Fred Astaire .) A lot of his spare time was spent playing poker or penny-ante pinball, much to his profit. He once told the author Robert
Boyle, who was profiling him for a story in Sports Illustrated: “That’s why I read and why I fish and why I live and why I play poker and why I drive a cab — for the surprise ending.”
As an independent cab driver, he could make his own hours, leasing his vehicle by the mile from the Boston Cab Company. While waiting in taxi lines at Logan Airport or in front of the Ritz Carlton, he would fill his time by tying flies in a vise he clamped onto the steering wheel. The Ritz was close to the theatre district, and his celebrity fares included Laurence Olivier, Yo Yo Ma, and Sandy, the dog from Annie. After he made enough scratch to pay the bills, with maybe a little something left over, he would go fishing abroad. There would be a month out West, followed by another in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, or Central America, and maybe yet another month in Europe, if he could squeeze it in. And then back to the vise and the cab.
It wasn’t always that way. For six years, he was a high school English teacher. But after delinquents set fire to his desk, smoking him out his classroom, he decided it would be safer driving a cab at night than teaching in Boston’s public schools by day.
Gartside’s first full-time gig, taken the year he graduated from high school, had been in a bank. He figured at least he could fish on the weekends. But he wasn’t at all suited to a nine-to-five grind, so he joined the Air Force at age 18 in order to satisfy an itch to travel. To his great consternation, he was stationed first on Cape Cod, only a few miles away, but then came postings to Okinawa (saltwater fishing), Japan (freshwater trout), Vietnam and Hawaii (more saltwater) and then back again to Cape Cod, completing the circle. Having acquired a bad case of wanderlust, the first thing he did after his military discharge was book a trip to Europe that he couldn’t quite afford. Rather than low-budget travel, it was no-budget travel. To pay for transportation and make ends meet, he took low-paying jobs abroad that included everything from working in factories to hiring out as a movie extra in a Norwegian film about Vikings. He learned he could always get by if he was willing to work cheaply and sometimes go without meals. (He never weighed more than 155 pounds.) He learned all the tricks of inexpensive travel — sleeping in graveyards and getting into museums for free by walking backward through the front door. And so the itinerant fisherman caught trout in England, Germany, Austria, and Sweden, sometimes by poaching. He was arrested in Norway for trespassing with a fly rod on a very expensive salmon river, but talked his way out of a fine with a little help from a Norwegian girlfriend. He took particular pride in a four-pound brown trout that he brought to hand while fly fishing at dawn in the moat that surrounds the Old Palace near London’s Parliament. The bobbies never laid a hand on him. He always released what he caught because he hated the taste of fish. “Like many things in the world that are beautiful,” he once said, “you don’t have to own them to appreciate their beauty.”
During his teaching years, he spent every summer fishing out West, in and around the Yellowstone region. His old and decrepit vehicle was always breaking down. On his first trip to West Yellowstone, his van hit a moose in Minnesota. To pay for repairs, he spent a week in Minneapolis putting screws in caskets and another week degreasing snowmobile runners. By the time he reached West Yellowstone, he had only four dollars in his pocket. So he leaned up against a tree in a campground, tied up a batch of flies, and started selling them to fly fishers. “It was good money,” he recalled, “twenty or thirty dollars a day.” (His traveling companion, Tobermory, provided a lot of the fur on that trip.) Bud Lilly so admired Gartside’s handiwork that he soon had him filling mail orders for his fly shop in West Yellowstone. This inspired Gartside to set up his own mail order business, one that he limited strictly to his own customized creations. The funniest story might be how he wangled his maiden trip to New Zealand. The year was 1981. Gartside spotted an ad in the Boston Globe featuring a promotional contest by Continental Airlines. To publicize a new Boston-to-Denver route, Continental was giving away 225 roundtrip air tickets to anywhere in the world where the airline flew. Just show up at Logan Airport in a costume matched to your destination, and you had a chance to win. The only catch was that you had to be prepared to leave right away. Gartside showed up in an Aussie campaign hat and a bush jacket tailored in New Zealand. It won him a free flight to Auckland, leaving Gartside only two hours to rush back to his apartment, grab his gear, drain his bank account of his life savings, which was a princely $200, and return to claim his boarding pass.
He stretched that paltry sum into a full month of fishing in New Zealand. An Auckland tackle dealer loaned him a pair of waders. Thumb out, rod and waders hoisted high, he hitchhiked to blue-ribbon trout streams all over the North Island and made lots of new friends. He was “given a shout” wherever he went, with Kiwis putting him up in their homes and on their farms. A motorist who fished guided him for a week to his secret spots. Another generous New Zealander loaned him use of a car so he could fish “far out in the wops,” which is what Kiwis call the middle of nowhere. Gartside made it back to Boston a month later with only $1.35 in coins jingling in his pockets.
In time, as his fame grew in fly-fishing circles, Gartside was able to augment his income by making the rounds of angling clubs and sports shows worldwide, earning good appearance fees for his lectures and fly-tying demonstrations. Many of his travel expenses were picked up by these organizations, and thanks to invitations from strangers, he no longer felt much of a need to poach anymore. Certainly not after a British nobleman, who had been best man at Prince Charles’s wedding, invited him onto his private estate for a spot of trout fishing. “Not bad for a cabdriver from Boston,” he said. But Gartside needn’t have felt embarrassed in the presence of any peer of the realm. As a fly fisherman, he was without peer.
Sadly, Jack Gartside died of lung cancer a decade ago at age 66. (In photos, he seems never to have been without a cigarette in his mouth. He must have broken every No Smoking rule in Massachusetts. He once sold a bag of his used cigarette butts to a gullible fisherman after convincing his fellow angler that the filters were indispensable for the dubbed body of a fly he had designed.) Friends still maintain his website, where some of his articles and stories can be perused and his books ordered online.
His books are short and pithy, highly instructive, conversational in tone, frequently anecdotal, and all self-published. Scratching the Surface includes “strange, but true” stories about his fly-fishing life, and Striper Strategies: Secrets of a Striper Bum pretty much covers the waterfront on the topic, so to speak. Fly Patterns for the Adventurous Tyer includes all of Gartside’s greatest hits at the tying vise, including his top-water Gurgler (a pattern popular among California’s fly fishers who chase striped bass, and who often customize it), the Sparrow, the Gartside Pheasant Hopper, and his Soft Hackle Streamer. He is remembered as a proponent of natural materials, impressionistic, rather than imitative patterns, and sleekly designed, aesthetically pleasing flies.
But his true greatness was in his zest for life and in the creative way he lived it. We tell ourselves that fly fishing and fly tying are true arts. Jack Gartside has shown us that a fly fisher’s life can become a work of art, too.
