Tying Streamers: Essential Flies and Techniques for the Top Patterns
By Charlie Craven. Published by Stackpole Books, 2020; $49.95 hardbound.
“Pinch the butt ends of the feathers together and stick them right into your yapper,” Charlie Craven instructs his reader in the step-by-step descriptions of how to tie the Platte River Special streamer. “Slobber on them a little bit (don’t get all gross, just wet them against your tongue) so they stick together Stop being squeamish — I know that’s not the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth.” Mounting matched pairs of feathers for streamer wings atop a hook shank is indeed a tricky operation, but that technique is not one you’ll usually find in a fly-tying manual. (A friend says that people who buy flies wouldn’t touch them if they knew how much spit there is in them. That sounds alarming these days, but fortunately, the COVID-19 virus probably doesn’t survive long on wood duck flank, Krystal Flash, or rabbit fur.)
That’s an extreme example of Craven’s teaching style, but teaching technique, rather than tying the specific patterns presented in the book, is one of the principal foci of Tying Streamers. The other is fly design.
“We live in the good old days of fly tying,” Craven writes, and “streamer fishing and tying is at a zenith right now.” “Early streamer fishermen pretty much had their choice of feather-winged patterns like the Black or Grey Ghost or the option of hair-winged flies like the Mickey Finn. Not much in the way of articulations or stinger hooks and nary a whisper of cones and premade heads.” Since the advent of Intruder-style steelhead flies, though, all those innovations have transformed streamer tying, especially articulation, which is appearing on everything from trout flies — the subject of this book — to honking big pike streamers, though Craven says of pike anglers, “they just ain’t right in the head.”
However, even among trout anglers, Craven writes, “there is an awful lot of overdoing it these days,” because “the current trend leans toward piling every available material onto a hook with no regard to the design, castability, or even, in some cases, good taste.” People are designing trout flies that “cast like a piece of firewood.” Instead, the patterns he presents were chosen not just as ways to discuss particular techniques, but as examples of good fly design. In addition, because function is important, he discusses material selection as central to both good design and effective technique. In that sense, Tying Streamers isn’t just about tying streamers, but about how the be a better fly tyer. And since form follows function, there are discussions of the angling circumstances they are designed to address and how he fishes them.
As a way to teach tying techniques, the book is superbly thought out, progressing from an initial pattern, the Thin Mint, which is essentially a beadhead Woolly Bugger with a couple of tying wrinkles, to seriously complicated articulated streamers such as Blane Chocklett’s Game Changer. A few “classic” streamer patterns are covered — the Black Ghost, Mickey Finn, and Muddler Minnow — because they allow Craven to focus on specific techniques, including the “slobber” method of mounting feather wings, but this book is really about the modern articulated streamer.
There are of course plenty of online videos that deal with these flies, whether their dressings are overdone or not, but a book is an appropriate medium for learning the techniques necessary to tie them, because to say that they can be “seriously complicated” is an understatement. The photos and texts that accompany the step-by-step tying instructions are excellent, but for the Sculpzilla pattern, there are 88 of them, and for Craven’s Double Dirty Hippy streamer, there are 109. For flies such as these, you are essentially tying two quite complex flies at once, and weighting the rear hook, coning it, wrapping marabou, veiling with synthetic fibers, wiring the articulation and beading it to prevent the articulation from fouling, then repeating it all and more on the front hook adds up to quite a process. Full-dress Atlantic salmon flies can be simpler. And if one of these creations snags a submerged tree limb, I imagine you’d think twice about breaking it off.
However, you’d definitely have been fishing the pattern, because it was indeed well designed — castable, appropriate for the conditions in which you’re fishing and the way you’re fishing it, seductive in the water, not just in the vise or shop bin, and a proven fish catcher. At several points for flies he’s designed, in the texts that introduce the pattern, Craven walks you through the process by which he created it.
Sudden inspiration at the vise is not part of that process. Thought is. As he says, “From a fly design standpoint, try to remember that just because you own it, that doesn’t mean that you have to tie it to the hook. While rabbit strips and chenille and hackle feathers and rubber legs and lead eyes and wool all make for great patterns, combining them all together makes for an incredibly bulky fly that sinks slowly for its weight.” What he says of the complicated Double Dirty Hippy he repeats for most of his flies: “I played with the idea in my head for several long car trips before I ever sat down to tie it When I finally sat down at the vise, I had a great idea about what I didn’t want, but it took some tinkering to get around that and end up with the right result.” And tinkering is not the same thing as trying something to see if it works. As he says of his Swim Coach pattern, which he at one point abandoned as unworkable, “I really like to take each piece of a fly and justify to myself why it’s there.”
The same goes for material selection. The classic feather-wing, hair-wing, and spun deer hair patterns are included not just because they involve techniques that apply to modern streamers and that any competent fly tyer should know. (“Throw out the idea that you’ll never fish a simple-looking old-school fly like this,” he says of the Mickey Finn, “and first see of you can actually tie the dang thing before you go running your mouth.”) They let him stress what is also a basic principle throughout: you can’t design and tie a good fly with materials averse to its use and construction. Not all bucktail works on a Mickey Finn; “selecting the right materials for a Muddler is at least half the battle”; hackle fibers long enough for the throat of a Black Ghost are hard to find, but UNI-Stretch is a great substitute for floss on the body. Craven’s prose is easy-going and bro-speak colloquial, as you can see from the quotes, but as with fly design, what Craven explicitly emphasizes and what he implicitly performs in the conception and structure of the book is that intelligence and thought matter a lot in fly fishing.
The result here is not so much a book of fly patterns as a catalogue of fly types, sorted not just from simpler to more complex, but in terms of application and intended use: heavy, deep sinkers (Barr’s Slumpbuster) versus skinny-water attractors (Tequeely), for instance. That’s probably more important to know about the book than the names of the specific patterns — and the names that he and other tyers come up with are something else again, anyway. Heifer Groomer? Baby Gonga? Drunk and Disorderly?
It’s also the case that Craven fishes streamers in a particular part of the country and in a way adapted to that situation: “mainly in Colorado on medium-sized rivers” and banging the banks from a boat. Many of these patterns are tied on size 1 hooks, and you’re unlikely to be throwing them on a 3-weight to brook trout in the outflow of a Sierra lake, though the classic streamers are an exception, and the Baby Gonga (103 steps) is tied on two size 8 TMC 5262s, which still makes it the size of some of those brookies.
What’s interesting about how Craven fishes these big flies in that context is that he uses 0X fluorocarbon tippet. He’s thought this out, as well. “First, the larger-diameter wire used in the larger streamer hooks prevents a standard clinch knot from tightening down properly, with smaller-diameter tippet material, and the fly will almost always break off right at the knot on the lighter tippet.” (Yes, he uses a loop knot at the fly, but if the fishing is hot and heavy and he loses a fly, he just resorts to the quick and dirty [unimproved] Clinch to get back in the game.) The heavier tippet and the fluorocarbon also make the rig more durable. He doesn’t say so, but I imagine that the 0X also means he can haul a snag in with the fly instead of losing it.
He bangs the banks with a 9-foot fast-action 6-weight and either a floating line and 9-foot leader or a sink-tip line with a short tip and a few feet of 0X fluoro tippet. In other words, this is a specialized kind of fly fishing, and the flies are explicitly designed for it. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be adapted to other pursuits — steelheading, or Delta stripers, or salt water, for example — but viewed simply as fly patterns, most of the flies in Tying Streamers are specialized tools, not Swiss Army knives.
However, Craven makes clear from the start that the book is intended as a “toolkit” of fly-tying techniques, applicable to any tying problem. That and the thoughtful approach to fly design and material selection that are the real topics of the book, and that’s why it’s a valuable addition to any tyer’s library.
— Bud Bynack
The Classic Streamer Fly Box
By Mike Valla. Published by Stackpole Books, 2020; $21.95 softbound.
As if to maintain the cosmic balance in the world of streamer fly tying, Stackpole also has published Mike Valla’s Classic Streamer Fly Box. While Charlie Craven’s Tying Streamers is centered on current fly designs and especially on the modern articulated streamer, with some attention to the techniques involved in tying classic feather-winged and hair-winged flies, The Classic Streamer Fly Box, as the title says, is devoted almost entirely to streamers whose origins date back as far as a century or more, though it also includes a few patterns that Valla says he “developed while fishing for trout, landlocked salmon, and bass during my teenage years.”
That wasn’t a century ago, but it wasn’t yesterday, either. During those teenage years, Valla learned to tie flies in the 1960s at the knees of legendary Catskill fly tyers Walt and Winnie Dette, who took him under their wings when, as a kid crazy for fly fishing, he spent as much time as he could in the Catskills, fishing the waters known as the cradle of American fly fishing, the Beaverkill, Willowemoc, and Neversink. After college at Cornell, which he chose because he could fish there, and a career as a pediatric dentist, Valla has become a major chronicler of American fly tying, both on the East Coast, with books such as Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies (Stackpole, 2009) and across the nation, with The Founding Flies: 43 American Masters, Their Patterns and Influences (Stackpole, 2013). The Classic Streamer Fly
Box is part of a series also composed of The Classic Dry Fly Box (Whitefish Press, 2010) and The Classic Wet Fly Box (Whitefish Press, 2012).
If the repetition of “classic” in all those titles has led you to suggest that Mike Valla is a traditionalist when it comes to fly tying, you are correct. Full disclosure: Mike’s a friend. He recently proposed a kind of antiquarian fly-tying cosplay in which people get together and tie only classic patterns using only materials and tools available in 1970 or before. It’s unclear whether long hair (or for some, just hair), bell-bottoms, and tie-dye T-shirts or polyester leisure suits are also required. I know he has recently decided to tie solely on the same kind of jeweler’s vise used by Reuben Cross. That’s just Mike being Mike, but he also has a fundamental respect for the past, evidenced here, for example, in his refusal to include the band of red tying thread on the Carrie Stevens streamers that he ties because that was her personal trademark.
Better than anyone else currently writing, Mike Valla knows traditional tying, the patterns it produced, and the sources to consult to understand them today. The format of The Classic Streamer Fly Box is deceptively simple: there’s a large picture of a feather-winged or hair-winged streamer, all beautifully tied by Valla, a quote about streamers from some source, usually a book or article by a major fly tyer or an angling writer of the past, such as Joseph D. Bates, Jr.’s Streamer Fly Tying and Fishing or A. J. McLane in Field and Stream, and a short text by Valla (with source notes in the back) about that particular fly. At the end of the book, there are tying recipes for each streamer. That’s it, but that’s not all.
Classic streamers are like trees: most of them look alike. If you just page through The Classic Dry Fly Box looking at the pictures, you won’t get what this book really is about. In the interaction between the pictures, the quotes, and what Valla has to say on each page, you end up with a having a pretty good short history of the fly-fishing streamer in the United States. You can see that if, instead of listing the patterns that the book presents, I list the tyers who originated them and some of the sources he cites: Carrie Stevens, Sam Slaymaker, Reuben Cross, Lew Oatman, Walt Dette, Keith Fulsher, Joe Brooks, Theodore Gordon, Herman Christian, C. Jim Pray, Charlie Fox, Helen Shaw, H. G. Tapply, Don Gapen, and Dan Bailey.
That’s a Who’s Who of American fly tying. If you have any interest in the development of the sport, The Classic Dry Fly Box will be something you’ll want. And if you don’t recognize some of those names, it’s something you need.
— Bud Bynack
Favorite Flies for the Catskills: 50 Essential Patterns from Local Experts
By Mike Valla. Published by Stackpole Books, 2020; $24.95 hardbound.
The blurb on the back of Mike Valla’s Favorite Flies for the Catskills says:
New York’s Catskill rivers are the cradle of American fly fishing, and today, what works to catch fish there still is likely to catch fish anywhere. From classic Catskill trout patterns such as the Quill Gordon, to innovative flies such as Pat Cohen’s Spaghetti Cat salamander imitation, to West Coast patterns such as Ralph Cutter’s E/C Caddis, Mike Valla’s collection, Favorite Flies for the Catskills, brings together classic and contemporary Catskill fish-getters that belong in anyone’s fly box. Valla, a Catskill fly tyer and angler since his teens, is a traditionalist with an open mind, and the contributors here are accomplished tiers and anglers whose patterns you can fish with confidence.
I think that sums up the book really well, but then, I wrote it.
Favorite Flies for the Catskills is actually the first of a projected series of Favorite Flies for [Someplace] books from Stackpole. It’s likely that in the future, the flies for anyplace else also will work where you fish. This and future volumes are really collections of interesting flies currently in use around the country. Having lived in the Mysterious East (New York) for over fifteen years, I know most of the “experts” whose flies are represented here, and I intend to rib them mercilessly about the label, but there really are some interesting ties and even tying concepts, if you can use that word for Ted Patlen’s Fluffy Nymphy Emerger Thingy, a wet-fly-ish pattern that can be tied with pretty much any material you want and fished anywhere you want in the water column.
Valla of course included some classic Catskill patterns, but also flies such as the Katterman, the Conover, and the Dorato Hare’s Ear, not just the usual suspects. They do work elsewhere: I caught a 20-inch rainbow on the Henrys Fork on a size 16 Dorato Hare’s Ear last year. Ralph Cutter won’t recognize the E/C Caddis here — it’s an adaptation of his pattern, but that’s interesting, too. I imagine Valla took a deep breath before including the Spaghetti Cat, an articulated streamer for smallmouths by deerhair-spinning guru Pat Cohen, but there it is. People in the Catskills tie and fish these flies because they work. They can work for you, too.
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
The Works of Charles E. Brooks
I am looking at a map of the Yellowstone Plateau. My attention is focused on three familiar blue lines that show where the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers merge to form the upper Madison inside Yellowstone National Park. This is where I will be fishing — in my mind.
I think of Nick Adams, the traumatized soldier in Hemingway’s short story “Now I Lay Me,” who blots out the horrors of warfare from his conscious mind, if only temporarily, by lying awake at night and fishing from memory the trout streams of his youth. And I think of Doug Peacock, the defender of grizzly bears, ecowarrior, and fly fisherman, who survived two tours as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam by staring at maps of the Rocky Mountain West. Peacock was the inspiration for the character George Washington Hayduke in Edward Abbey’s comic masterpiece The Monkey Wrench Gang. On his return home. Peacock turned to the wilderness for solace, and he found that the presence of grizzly bears helped to restore his broken spirit.
Because they saved his life, he has devoted a lifetime to saving theirs in the wild. “The grizzly bear,” he said, “is the one animal on the continent capable of reminding the most arrogant species on earth its true place in the world.”
You could say the same about a virus. Once again, contagion rears up — as it has throughout history — to lay waste to a portion of humanity, reminding us of our place in the web of life, not as captains of our destiny, but as answerable to nature. In The Road Home, Jim Harrison writes that the world wasn’t created for our benefit, “but for its own evolving magnificence,” and we are only a small part of its glory.
Many of us won’t be going fishing for a while — except in our heads. Fortunately, the fishing has always been excellent in print. There are more books on angling than on any other sport. The coming weeks or months in lockdown will give us ample time to fish vicariously by reacquainting ourselves with a vast body of literature.
Not surprisingly, I have been drawn to rereading introductory works that I devoured when I took up fly fishing many years ago. Is this the equivalent of comfort food? The New York Times has reported that in the midst of our pandemic, shoppers who once were focused on quinoa and kale have been scooping up from supermarket shelves familiar childhood treats such as Campbell’s Soup and SpaghettiOs. Am I taking comfort in books that remind me of my first trout rivers?
A lot of those books depict fishing as a beautiful idyll. They tell the truth, but not the whole truth. Nature is as ferocious as it is generous. The world is beautiful, but its gaze is pitiless, and death is the mother of beauty, as the poet Wallace Stevens said. Those mayflies in an evening spinner fall, like his flocks of pigeons, “sink downward to darkness on extended wings.”
We can’t escape our fate, but we can choose how we respond to it.
When I first took up fly fishing, reading everything about it I could lay my hands on, I found myself put off by writers who dwelled on sentimentality and nostalgia. Much of it struck me as backward looking. Now I am the one who looks back and relives those special moments as if they were yesterday.
When I close my eyes, I try to picture just how it was back then. Then I reach for a book to get a closer look. I suppose I have been happiest in my life while fishing for trout in and around Yellowstone, so naturally, this is what I want to relive again in my armchair. Instead of high literature, I reach up to my bookshelf for good old Charlie Brooks.
I discovered the writings of Charles E. Brooks about the same time I discovered Western fly fishing. Brooks was a trophy headhunter who knew where all the honey holes were in the rivers and streams in and around Yellowstone Park. That region exerted a powerful draw on an Eastern fly fisher like me. The West seemed to be a place where you could live your life like a fable, surrounded by beauty, leave your city skills behind, and ditch your past. You wouldn’t get rich, but you’d get by, and you could live as you pleased. It was a harmless fantasy.
Reality is always a little different from what we want it to be. Charlie Brooks came out of our country’s last Hard Times. His existential crisis was the Great Depression, closely followed by the Second World War. They say history repeats itself, but that’s not true. History never repeats itself exactly. That’s its deadly charm.
Charlie was raised in sharecropper shacks in the Missouri Ozarks. He taught himself to tie a fly at age nine. The kid loved to fish, but had to chop cotton to help his family get by. The youngster left home after graduating from grade school to work as a migrant farm laborer just to help support his parents and five siblings. When his daddy died a few years later, Charlie signed up with the Civilian Conservation Corps. That brought the sixteen-year-old out West to Montana and Wyoming, where he fell in love with the trout fishing. He promised himself that one day, he would make a home out there and write about fishing. But first he had to get a high school diploma. So the teenager enrolled in a little school in Milan, Missouri, where he held down two jobs while lettering in football and three other sports, all the while maintaining a straight-A average. He was named the school’s most outstanding all-time defensive player and led the conference in punting and scoring. Upon graduation, he joined the Army Air Corps and ended up as a bombardier flying 50 combat missions over Europe. After demobilization, he took a job as a part-time ranger at Yosemite, but was turned down for a permanent job because he didn’t have a college degree. Charlie thought about going to Stanford on the G.I. Bill, but figured he would learn more from books and life, so he decided to reenlist in the Air Force and retire later to write and fish after putting in his twenty years. He was assigned to counterintelligence in the Korean War and sent to Alaska as a secret agent to scout the coast for possible invasion sites. He saw right away that the tide went out too far to allow for amphibious landings, a fact his superiors were slow to grasp, so Charlie got to enjoy several months fishing for trout and salmon while posing as a wealthy sportsman. He retired from the military in 1964 at the rank of major in the Air Force Reserve. He and his wife moved to West Yellowstone, Montana, where Charlie lived out his dream until cancer took him twenty-two years later.
The half dozen books he wrote in those two decades, especially Larger Trout for the Western Fly Fisherman (1970) and The Trout and the Stream (1974), were a feast for fly anglers. Charlie took readers down to the water and introduced them to each notable bend and riffle on blue-ribbon streams such as the Firehole and Madison. He showed you exactly what you would find in each section of river and how to catch it. He knew every rock and undercut bank by name, where the trout would be lurking, why they would be there, and how stoneflies and other insects would be moving about on the bottom. He was a fabulous guide and good company in print, but his books were about more than fooling trout with artificial flies. They were among the more thorough examinations of life in moving water. He was one of the first to focus attention on things such as stream ecology, water chemistry, and habitat management. He made the most of scientific papers and his own stream studies, but never made it feel like algebra. He could be set in his ways, favored heavy rods and ordnance that has since fallen out of fashion, and no one would ever mistake him for a prose stylist, but his writing was always clear and direct and free of pretense.
And so it’s Charlie Brooks I pull down from the bookshelf. I open the pages of Fishing Yellowstone Waters (1983), and there I am, back at Muleshoe Bend on the Firehole River, happier than I have ever been in my life.
