The Feather Bender’s Flytying Techniques: A Comprehensive Guide to Classic and Modern Trout Flies
By Barry Ord Clarke. Published by Skyhorse Publishing, 2019; $26.99 hardbound.
The Feather Bender’s Flytying Techniques is one of the most interesting fly-tying books to come along in many a moon. Tying books tend to be a lot alike, because there’s a kind of inherent conservatism in fly tying. There are only so many ways to bind materials to hooks so as to imitate things that fish eat, and what worked for Theodore Gordon and the Darbees and the Dettes in the United States or for Frederic Halford and G. E. M. Skues in England are techniques that are still basic to how people learn to tie flies today. Generically, almost all fly-tying books teach those techniques, addressing themselves to beginners as well as more advanced fly tyers, and consequently, the techniques and the advice are all pretty much the same from book to book.
The Feather Bender’s Flytying Techniques is different, and “techniques” deserves its pride of place in the title. This book, too, “is aimed at all flytyers, from those with modest experience to those with advanced skills,” and Clarke declares that “my aim is to give tuition in certain important elementary techniques, and in particular to share some of my favorite contemporary twists on old techniques.” It’s those twists that set this book apart, along with its strategies of “tuition.”
Clarke started tying flies — including full-dress Atlantic salmon flies — even before he started fishing, and he has been tying for over 35 years, so he certainly is steeped in conventional Anglo-American techniques. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The field cannot be well seen from within the field.” Although Clarke is British (the book originates from there), for the past 25 years, he has lived in Norway, working as a fly-fishing and fly-tying photographer, and the perspective that distance has provided on conventional techniques, as well as his association with the innovative tyers of Scandinavia, led him to develop techniques for tying classic patterns and executing innovative designs that are entirely his own.
Among the 28 fly patterns covered here, there are indeed a few classics, and there are perforce some basic techniques, as well. However, among the “classic” patterns referred to in the title, a Pheasant Tail Nymph, a Klinkhamer, a Humpy, and an Irresistible, it’s the twists, some of them radical, that stand out, most notably in the Deer Hair Irresistible, which features Clarke’s method of spinning deer hair in a dubbing loop for the classic Irresistible body, not by spinning it around the hook shank, the way its originator, Joe Messinger, and the Dettes and the Darbees did it and most people still do. For good measure, it has a deer-hair hackle — hence the seemingly redundant name. Even when he ties an upright and divided wing on a large mayfly imitation, as on a classic Catskill dry, he does so in a way I’ve never seen, first with a wood duck f lank feather on one side, then another on the other — easy peasy.
It’s the other patterns and the techniques involved in tying them, though, that make this book exceptional. Clarke has developed a “para-weld” technique for securing a cul de canard hackle on a mayfly parachute pattern, an innovation endorsed by CDC eminence Marc Petitjean. (Clarke also uses the technique with conventional hackle on a CDC-bodied downwing caddis pattern.) He employs a collection of plastic tubes of all sorts, including the tips used to dispense UV resin, as prostheses in various ways to control and shape materials, for example, when tying his Wally Wing Mayfly Dun, which not only features the realistic upright-and-divided wing made from a single feather that was developed by Wally Lutz (you can see Lutz’s original conception at http://www.telusplanet.net/public/whlutz), but which is tied in the hook-point-Waterwisp series in the United States and Roy Christie’s flies in the UK. There’s a cool Antron Caddis Pupa that features an easy technique to create a translucent shroud around the body, à la the LaFontaine Emergent Caddis Pupa, but without the aggravation. There’s a Scandinavian deer-hair fly imitating a large caddis, tied in the usual way to spin deer hair, that just begs to be fished during the Motorboat Caddis hatch on Manzanita Lake. And there are imitations of bugs native only to Europe that can easily be adapted to imitate their American cousins, notably the Willow Fly, a small black stonefly imitation. There’s a quite realistic adult midge imitation with horsehair legs, too.
Above all, there’s Clarke’s All Hackle Dry, which actually also uses Antron and pearl tinsel, but was developed to make use of unusual feathers such as Coq de Leon, teal, and even partridge for dryfly parachutelike hackling. It is another hook-point-up dry, and there is literally nothing about this mayfly imitation that is anything like any other dry-fly parachute pattern in appearance or technique, from the way the hackle is created to the tails. Words seldom fail me, but . . . you’ve got to see it tied.
And you can. Because Clarke is a photographer, you would be correct to expect that the book contains lucid step-by-step photographs for all the patterns, as well as stunning photos of insects and fishing scenes. What you would not expect is an instructional feature that is unique to this book, though it may be imitated by others in the future. For each pattern, and also at a few other points in the book, there is Quick Response (QR) code, the square, rasterized thingy that the QR reader on a cell phone can interpret. Clarke’s QR codes take you to YouTube videos of him tying the pattern in question or delivering other information relevant to the book, as well as to a tour of Clarke’s tying room. You can check them out, as well as his other tying videos, on his YouTube channel, The Feather Bender.
You might think that linking a book to videos makes one or the other redundant. After all, if you’re reasonably familiar with conventional tying techniques, just sequentially eyeballing the steps in the step-by-steps of most books is like animating a series of flip cards to produce a movie from a sequence of still frames, while like the book, the videos also take you through tying each fly, step by step. You might think that, but in fact, the book and the videos complement each other.
The great value of the book is the out-of-the-box thinking about techniques, and real-time videos do not match up with the implementation of new techniques in real-time tying. When you’re tying a new pattern, and especially when you’re tying in a new way, you need to focus on each step, and putz with it, and make mistakes, and start over, and wonder why you ever thought you could tie flies in the first place, and calm down, and finally get it right, and then move on to the next step. You can’t do that while Clarke, in the video, is blithely tying away, producing a perfect example of the pattern. Pausing the video still leaves you struggling to keep up and to overcome the gap between what your fly looks like and his. Books and videos exist in two different temporalities. A video can stopped and started, but what it captures is evanescent, while a photograph and its caption are always just there, waiting patiently for you to get your act together. The book and the videos together make it easy to move from one to the other as needed.
On the other hand, in the videos, there are a few twists that are just mentioned in passing and that you don’t get in the printed pictures and text. A basic principle of tying, for example, is that unless otherwise specified, you need to keep materials on top of the hook as you tie them in. Clarke has a way to guarantee this happens by wagging the material from one side to the other as each wrap is applied. I’ve been watching fly-tying demonstrations live and online for thirty years, and I’ve never seen that done before. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”
There is nothing conventional about The Feather Bender’s Flytying Techniques. From Clarke’s All Hackle Dry all the way to his belief that instead of a collection of tying threads in a variety of sizes, materials, and colors, all you need to tie flies is a spool of Dyneema (gel-spun polyethylene) and some marking pens, there are innovative approaches to a pursuit that dates back to Dame Juliana Berners in the 1400s and beyond. From the perspective of that tying room in Norway, Barry Ord Clarke has come up with interesting new ways to think about and practice the art and craft of fly tying.
— Bud Bynack
The Corbina Diaries: A Fly Fisherman’s Obsession — Sight Fishing Southern California’s Shallow Surf for the Elusive Corbina
By Al Quattrocchi. Published by Luv2FlyFish Media, 2020; $24.95 softbound.
Dammit, Al Q , you’re making my life difficult.
Here I am, settled 21 years in Truckee, a contributing member of the community, in love with this little vale in the mountains, and you come out with a book full of pictures of happy anglers on SoCal beaches who’re holding fly rods and corbinas. How did you know that the one thing I still miss, after moving from San Francisco to the Sierra, is the beach? The thought of walking wet sand at the edge of the world, scanning the surf for signs of holding water or fish, then laying out casts to tempt one to a fly, remains darn attractive.
And I’m certain that with the help of your book, I will (probably) hook and land this finicky species, which has long been known for its reluctance to take the bait. You cover everything a fly fisher needs to know if he or she hopes to catch a corbina. It seems so simple. One of the corbina’s preferred foods is the sand crab, and the fish will use waves and a rising tide to move into shallow water and feed on this small crustacean. Because corbinas are thus in the shallows, the angler often doesn’t need to cast more than 30 feet to get a fly in front of them, and my trout gear will likely be adequate, as long as I have an intermediate line and at least one of the leader setups and fly patterns you recommend.
That sounds pretty straightforward, except you make clear that it isn’t. You and your fly-fishing compadres spent many, many hours sight casting to visible fish, comparing notes, and conversing with surf-zone anglers of every type until you all “slowly started to gain ground and consistently land[ed] corbina in large numbers each season.” Hard-wrought lessons are found throughout your book and especially in the chapter titled “Corbina University,” which presents the tactics that I and others will need to apply when we spot these fish.
Thank you, by the way, for the abundance of photographs and illustrations that depict what we need to look for, how we need to rig, the approaches we need to take, and the flies we need to use. Your talents as a graphic designer, photographer, and artist ensure that The Corbina Diaries is an exceptionally clear instructional manual. Heck, it’s even an exciting one, making me want to get out to the ocean and fish! Now all I have to do is find a town south of Point Conception, close to the beach, where the housing’s affordable and maybe there’s a funky saloon with a decent burger and the music I like. It might be time to trade the cabin for a cabana.
(Note: The Corbina Diaries is self-published and might be difficult to find. If your favorite fly shop doesn’t carry it, visit https://love2flyfishmedia.bigcartel.com.)
— Richard Anderson
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Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
In the Ring of the Rise
By Vincent Marinaro. Published by Crown Publishers, 1976.
The first instructional trout-fishing book I ever read was almost my last. It was a book so daunting, it’s a wonder it didn’t put me off fly fishing altogether. Vincent Marinaro’s In the Ring of the Rise was a work for postgraduates, not a beginner’s guide, but I was too dumb and green to know that back then.
The year was 1978, and I had just taken up fly fishing. I lived at the Jersey Shore, and fly fishers weren’t exactly thick on the ground there. Not in those days anyway. Saltwater fly fishing wasn’t a big thing yet, and good trout rivers were a long drive away. Back when I was starting out, I didn’t know a single fly fisher. I was without instruction, but eager to learn. I thought I might get it from books, so I was on the prowl.
I found the Marinaro volume in an Atlantic City bookstore that I had been frequenting for years. It was a tiny bookshop, but full of literary treasures. Here’s where I discovered Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, and the paperback mysteries of Raymond Chandler, in the 1971 Ballantine Books run, with the brilliant cover art by Tom Adams, surely the most accomplished book illustrator of his era. He did all the Agatha Christies, too, and along with the Chandlers, they are collectibles today. The cover price on those paperbacks was 85 cents, the same as a gallon of gas. It was a great decade for reading and driving.
I found the Marinaro book in a box along with a few other discounted fishing titles from publishers with names such as Crown, Winchester, Stackpole, and Derrydale, all players in the field, but I didn’t know that back then. In the Ring of the Rise caught my eye because of the many fine photographs taken by the author. It was of recent vintage, too, and had been published by Crown in New York. Nick Lyons was at Crown, acquiring and editing fishing titles such as the Marinaro book and laying the cornerstone for a library of angling classics that he would foster later on at Winchester Press and then at his own publishing house, Lyons Press, but I was unaware of his significance at that time.
I took my purchase home and started reading with great anticipation, confident that this was the trout-fishing primer that would set me on the right path. The first chapter brought me up short. There seemed to be a frightening amount of technical detail in its pages. As Huckleberry Finn said of Pilgrim’s Progress, “The statements was interesting but tough.”
And the author’s prose style caught me off guard as well. He sounded a little like the Roman poet Virgil describing the apiaries in The Georgics. If style is the proof of a writer’s seriousness, then this guy was the most serious fly fisher who ever lived. He seemed so focused. If this is what it takes to catch a trout, I thought, I’m doomed.
“A trout lives in a secret world. It is a small world in which many dramatic events are played out in watery obscurity, veiled from the keenest eyes. And even though he is stalked and pursued relentlessly by the most attentive land creature on earth, his life-style remains much of a mystery.” So begins the book. And then he gets serious. He starts out talking about riseforms. These are the concentric rings you see on the water when a trout is feeding on insects on or near the surface. This is what he meant by “the ring of the rise,” which I thought was just poetry. It turned out there are many different kinds of rises, and each is significant to an angler. There are “simple,” “compound,” and “complex” rises, “sipping” rises, and even an “after-rise.” The author even goes into “the mechanics of the swivel,” which I take it is the trout’s final pas de deux at the end of his strike. I had an icy feeling in the pit of my stomach when the author assured me I would need to know all this. “For the trout fisherman it is as important as a fingerprint or footprint in human affairs.”
I read on, hope being “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson said. Trout station themselves strategically in the stream to pick off moving insects that are drifting toward them. The “ring of the rise” is the trout’s place at the dining table, so to speak. The concentric rings tell us where trout are stationed (ahead of the ring, because they drift back backward to take a fly and then return to their holding place.) The small differences in those rings are clues as to how the trout are behaving and responding, not only to the insects, but to the nature of the currents. That is if I got that right. Marinaro made me feel like Bertie Wooster.
Then the author launches into a highly technical discussion about what a trout can and can’t see through its “cone of vision.” It’s all terribly complicated and involves mirroring and reflected light. But by understanding what a trout actually sees, a fly fisher can decode the different feeding patterns going on and from that figure out exactly what he or she needs to do to present an artificial fly to the fish without being seen.
From there, the author goes into the need for a long drift and the ways to overcome drag on the leader. He discusses a few specialty casts, such as the “puddle cast,” that will allow the angler to drop the leader in a pile of loose coils, thus extending the drift of the artificial fly in tricky currents. He has a lot to say about rod function and design, very little of which satisfies him about commercially available models, so he builds his own.
From there, he goes into his adventures at the fly-tying vise, fashioning itsy-bitsy mayfly and terrestrial imitations to match the insects he sees on his creeks, coming up with new patterns for that Eureka moment when he finally wins the “game of nods” with the fish and hooks and lands a particularly wily brown trout. He has many things to say about “emergers,” “spinners,” and “hidden hatches,” the last of which involves the world’s smallest mayfly, known by its Latin name, Caenis. It all seemed rather esoteric and more than a little intimidating. I later learned that a lot of this was the author expanding on stuff he had written in an earlier book he called A Modern Dry Fly Code. It was widely considered to be a landmark and a great game changer.
When I got to the part of Ring he called “Trout Rivers in Profile,” it finally dawned on me that the freestone trout streams I was fishing near the Delaware Water Gap were nothing like his spring creeks in the Cumberland Valley of south-central Pennsylvania. His spring creeks moved in slow motion. My freestone streams were rather swift. His creeks were choked with water weeds and rich in nutrients that nurtured lots of buggy life. I was fishing riffles and pocket water over a rocky bottom. His creeks were as clear as windowpane. Mine were more opaque. His trout had all the time in the world to inspect a fly. Mine did not. Was the author making fly fishing more complicated than it needed to be?
Marinaro fished almost exclusively on limestone spring creeks in the heart of the Cumberland Valley. His specialty was Letort Spring Run, at the time widely considered to be the finest spring creek in America. His limestone rivers were similar in nature to the fabled chalk streams of Hampshire, England, that Izaak Walton made famous.
It seemed a kind of Arcadia, and Marinaro wrote about it in a kind of high and formal style that seemed well suited to his kind of fishing. His intense and original approach to his subject made it feel rather remarkable, maybe even profound. He was romantic, but in no way sentimental.
Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, indeed, most of the Elizabethan poets and playwrights, portrayed the countryside as beautiful and lively, but also knew it could be harsh and unclean. Marinaro saw things much the same way — for instance, when he found trout gorging on houseflies on Letort Spring Run. “Their presence on the water in large numbers was a bit of a mystery until I traced the fly-bearing current upstream to the most obvious housefly source in all the world — namely, the dung heaps of a barnyard on a bank adjacent to the water. There was a convenient watering place too, where cattle were accustomed to linger, switching contentedly at houseflies during the hot summer days.” He matched the hatch by tying his own housefly imitations.
Marinaro was famous for being as irascible as he was innovative. He loved a good argument. He made his living as a corporation tax specialist, a discipline known for its rigor. He was also a classically trained violinist, a self-taught streamside naturalist, and a designer of
bamboo f ly rods. The high-speed color photographs he took of rising trout that grace the pages of Ring were considered remarkable at the time and a breakthrough in understanding trout feeding patterns. He left behind quite a legacy.
Above all, his classical prose made me want to fish his creeks. And was Letort Spring Run really that hard? Would I really need a law degree just to fish it? After all, it was only water. So one weekend I drove out to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to see if I could prove Vincent Marinaro wrong. I left his creek feeling like a fouryear-old defeated by his shoelaces.
Worth Watching: Il Pescatore Completo
As fly fishers, we have much to gain by learning how anglers in other regions approach our sport. Il Pescatore Completo, a short film from Patagonia, presents the simple-in-appearance, elegant form of fly fishing long used in the Valsesiana area of Italy. It’s also an elegy of sorts to a way of life, and utterly beautiful. Use this QR code for YouTube access.
— Richard Anderson
