Tying Dry Flies: How to Tie and Fish Must-Have Trout Patterns
By Jay Nichols, with Charlie Craven, Paul Weamer, and Mike Heck. Published by Stackpole Books, 2021: $21.95 softbound.
Fly fishing may be about hooking fish, but it hooks fly fishers, too. That’s what lies behind all those references to the stages of a fly fisher’s life — not the rise and fall of Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, from the infant, “Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” to the corpse, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” but an actual progression in which fly fishing lures anglers deeper into the sport’s dimensions and promises. As the adage has it, we begin just wanting to catch a fish, then more fish, then bigger fish, then more difficult fish, until we realize we don’t need actually to catch fish — the sport lies in fooling them. Along this arc, a fly fisher has the opportunity to explore multiple other aspects of the sport, and fly tying thus hooks us, too.
These days, if you begin by wanting to catch a fish and have progressed at least as far as wanting to catch a lot of them, chances are you’re a nympher and were first introduced to the sport during our current era, when Euro nymphing became the way newbies were initiated. Or perhaps it was through older-fashioned indicator nymphing. Either way, that’s understandable — if fly fishing is about hooking fish — and fly fishers — nymphing is the most efficient way to do it.
Or rather, it’s the most efficient way to do it most of the time, and the central theme in the progression of the stages of a f ly fisher’s life is that other values supplant efficiency. I’ve watched gonzo Euro nymphers who can vacuum up trout after trout from freestone riffles and runs stare in bafflement at the waters of famous spring creeks, where the aquatic vegetation that paved the stream came within inches of the surface. And committed nymphers may catch a lot of fish, but if they fish long enough, they see others happily catching fewer fish or even ignoring some fish to target others, and they realize there’s something else going on, something they’re missing.
One thing they’re missing is the thrill of fishing dry f lies to rising fish, and the generation that entered the sport during the rise of Euro nymphing is beginning to notice that. And once you get hooked on fishing dries, you may want to learn how to tie them, which requires skills well beyond wrapping flash on a beadhead jig hook and hitting it with UV resin.
That seems to be the premise for the reissue in paperback of Tying Dry Flies: How to Tie and Fish MustHave Trout Patterns, a decision that says a lot about the state of the sport in 2021 and how publishers of the books that serve it see its future and hope to shape it. The book originally was published hardbound in 2009, and its republication now in a more affordable form bespeaks a belief that it has a new audience.
Tying Dry Flies itself is not just a compendium of “must-have” trout patterns, which as Jay Nichols says in his introduction, ultimately is a matter of individual choice, however much such choices tend to agree, but a kind of “Greatest Hits” album of fly patterns and the essays that discuss them and how to tie and fish them, “ lifted,” as Nichols says, “from books previously published by Stackpole Books,” where Nichols has had a long and distinguished career as an editor publishing authors whose work has influenced the sport. That’s the “with” part of the book’s byline. Nichols is responsible for some of the texts and ties, but in others, Charlie Craven, Paul Weamer, or Mike Heck have supplied the f lies, f ly-tying instructions, and step-by-step photos and sometimes the whole text, as well. In addition, still others, including noted fly designers John Barr, Guy Turck, and Harrison Steeves, have supplied material that Nichols has adapted.
The intention is to teach both the techniques required to tie a broad range of dry-fly styles and more generally how to think about, select, and f ish them. But this is a tying book. Every book that claims to introduce tyers to the fundamentals uses specific examples to illustrate generally applicable techniques, and it’s how successfully they get from the one to the other that determines their value.
That’s where Nichols’s choice of his collaborators kicks this book up a notch. Craven, Weamer, Heck, and the others, like Nichols himself, are not just pros in the fly-fishing business, but skilled at explaining in print and in photos the sometimes arcane how-tos of fly tying. The patterns vary considerably in complexity, from Craven’s Mole Fly and Weamer’s Burke’s Emerger, simple dubbed-body emergers with CDC wings, to Weamer’s elaborate Truform Dun, with its parachute hackle positioned underneath the fly on a specially designed (Daiichi 1230) hook, and Turck’s Tarantula, with its spun deer hair and rubber legs. The complete list, though, indeed would give any tyer new to dry flies both an education in dry-fly tying techniques and, once these were learned by doing, a box of really effective flies to fish.
The book is divided into sections on mayflies and midges, caddisflies, terrestrials, and attractors, which in effect also cover stonefly adults. The first section starts where the modern American dry fly began, with the traditional Catskill-style dry and its upright and divided wings: a Quill Gordon tied and explained by Paul Weamer. As in many of the chapters that follow, there’s a quick, but informative discussion of the origins of the fly. Then chapters on the Adams and Parachute Adams teach hackle-tip and parachute winging styles, and as is also the case throughout, there are some interesting comments. Craven prefers to tie his parachutes with the concave side up, for example, keeping the body low in the water. Barr’s Vis-a-Dun is an unusual hybrid of hackle and Comparadun-style poly wing, and it sets the stage for tying the Sparkle Dun mutation of the Comparadun, distinguished by a technique Weamer uses for shaping the wing by tying it down in stages, producing a wing that is both completely flared in a half circle and durable. Then there’s a CDC Comparadun, a flat-water pattern that introduces working with CDC. A Green Drake version of the versatile and effective Harrop Hairwing Dun introduces that style of fly, followed by Weamer’s weird, but interesting Truform Dun, the Craven and Weamer simple emergers, and the Quigley Cripple style of emerger. A Trico spinner introduces tying any kind of spinner, and the Griffiths Gnat concludes the section to cover midges, though Nichols says it “was not originally tied to imitate midges clumped together,” as is usually claimed, but “to represent a subtle stage of the hatch between the migrating pupa and the adult, before the final escape from the pupal skin,” with the grizzly hackle as “a tiny bright halo.”
You can imitate pretty much any caddis adult merely by changing the size and color of the fly, and most of caddis emerge quickly through the surface film, so caddisflies don’t get the coverage here that mayfly imitations do. There’s just the X Caddis, CDC and Elk, and Elk Hair Caddis, all proven patterns, but also mostly employing techniques already covered, although there’s a helpful discussion by Nichols about the selection of hair for hairwing flies. And to cover crippled emergers and exhausted egg layers, there’s a Smashed Caddis variation of the X Caddis (or just an on-stream modification), with splayed wing fibers and no trailing shuck.
Terrestrials, however, are a widely varied group, and they get a lot of attention, not least because in terms of technique, foam enters the picture. Grasshoppers are represented by two patterns that couldn’t be more different: Art Shenk’s Letort Hopper, with its turkey wing and spun deer-hair head and collar, and Charlie Craven’s Charlie Boy Hopper, with its foam body, synthetic underwing, rubber legs, and CA glue construction. Nichols says that “many streamside observers have noted that while motion may be a trigger for the fish to take the hopper, imitating the legs exactly may not be,” so you can save the time and hassle of trying to imitate them. Yay. There’s a Fur Ant, Parachute Ant, and Foam Beetle, all basic patterns, the beetle with an origin story in which its supposed creator, Don DuBois, shows it to dry-fly theorist Vincent Marinaro while fishing the storied Letort spring creek in Pennsylvania, eliciting a curse-filled deprecation of that “damnable rubber fly” that has been repeated by defenders of the use of natural materials ever since.
Interesting stories like this appear throughout, and it was news to me, when I came to the attractors section, that the model for the gnarly Turck’s Tarantula was the humble X Caddis, which Guy Turck thought needed to float better and be more visible in rough waters. Craven’s instructions use wraps of lead wire around the fly’s rubber legs to hold them out of the way when finishing the fly, a neat idea for tying any rubberlegs pattern. A Stimulator and a Foam Humpy with calf body hair for wings, the foam substituting for the deer hair hump on the back, fill out the section. The Stimulator is tied by Craven on a straight-shank hook, which suggests a kinship with the Sofa Pillow, but Jim Slattery, who says he originated the Stimulator, not Randall Kaufmann, claims he didn’t have the Sofa Pillow in mind when he designed it to imitate Eastern stoneflies in New Jersey in the 1980s. (Nichols still attributes it to Kaufmann.) As with the creation of the earth, the creation of fly patterns produces some conflicting accounts.
A fly fisher’s life goes through many stages. For anyone wanting to take the next step in becoming a complete fly fisher and a well-rounded fly tyer, not just a gonzo nympher, Tying Dry Flies offers a well-paved way forward.
— Bud Bynack
Landon Mayer’s Guide Flies: Easy-to-Tie Patterns for Tough Trout
By Landon Mayer, Published by Stackpole Books, 2021; $39.95 hardbound.
A guide’s job is to get clients into fish, and guide flies “need to work — because your job depends on that — but they also need to be durable, versatile, and easy to tie,” as Colorado guide Landon Mayer says in Landon Mayer’s Guide Flies. That usually means they’re simple, though in the era of articulated streamers, “simple” can be a relative term.
Simplicity may be the most difficult thing to achieve in fly tying. Everyone’s tendency is to add materials to a pattern or to overdo what’s called for, not subtract and pare a f ly down to its essentials. And essentials really are all you need. When the fish were on stonefly nymphs, a friend experimented with tying and fishing imitations with fewer and fewer elements — no tails, then no tails or rib, and so on — to see how far he could push things and still catch fish. What ended up working just fine was just a body of the right size and color. Now that’s simple.
The pressures that a guide is under require not only an economy of action — they have to be organized — but an economy of thought: find something that works, then exploit it. What’s striking about Landon Mayer’s guide flies is that many of them are the same f ly design tweaked with a few different materials to imitate different things. His Tube Midge, Titan Tube Midge, and Trident Tube Midge all riff on small wire inserted in micro tubing for segmented bodies, and his Landon’s Larva caddis imitation uses D-Rib in much the same way. His Mini Leech, Mini Leech Jig, and Micro Jig Radiant begin with a Krystal Flash body, micro pine-squirrel Zonker strip, and ostrich herl collar, then switch in a jig hook and black or colored beads, and since damselfly nymphs swim much like leeches, a change in color and the addition of a few more materials turns the design into a Mini Leech Jig Damsel. The design of his Tails Up Trico is also the design of his Sink It Spinner and his Candy Shop Callibaetis. His simple, minimalist flies get more out of less: using a UV Krystal Flash wing on his Purple Wing midge emerger, for example, to define a simple beadhead thread-and-wire-bodied fly.
The pressure to produce means adopting what works for others, as well. Not all of the f lies in Landon Mayer’s Guide Flies are Landon Mayer’s guide flies. A number of them were designed by other guides and adopted by him. The Prospector, by Truckee River guide Arlo Townsend, is an elegant jig-hook rubberlegs stonefly imitation with an ostrich herl thorax, and Phil Tereyla’s Light Saber is a simple ready-to-emerge mayfly nymph imitation that exploits the properties of Veevus Iridescent Thread to create reflective, segmented bodies. Others include Angus Drummond’s Swiper articulated streamer; Dave Hoover’s Animal crayfish imitation, another articulated fly; Michael Burgess’s Cosmic Caddis, a beadhead larva/pupa imitation; an ant imitation tied with foam cupboard liner for the body by Ken Walrath and Kevan Davidson; and Walt’s Sucker Spawn, by Walt Mueller, Jr.
That last fly, along with another of Landon Mayer’s flies, his Mysis Shrimp, are direct responses to the angling environment below the giant reservoirs in Colorado and may not be as widely fishable as the others, but there’s plenty for any fly tyer to get excited about in Landon Mayer’s Guide Flies. Because a guide’s job is to get clients into fish, most of these flies are fished subsurface — larva, pupa, or nymph imitations or streamers. After all, that’s where fish mostly feed. As a result, dry flies get short shrift. But because a guide’s job is to get clients into fish, you’d be a fool not to listen to someone like Landon Mayer when he comes up with durable, versatile patterns that are easy to tie and that get the job done.
— Bud Bynack
If you enjoy mysteries and thrillers, you might consider picking up a copy of Peter Heller’s latest novel, The Guide. I’m not going to reveal the plot (why ruin the fun?), other than to note the story takes place in Colorado and the protagonist is a fly-fishing guide. This is not high literature, just entertainment, but Heller understands fly fishing, and his descriptions of it are among the finest I’ve read.
— Richard Anderson
