Nobody would suspect me of being a purist. When it comes to food, I’m as happy with a burrito as with the tasting menu at a place like The French Laundry, where a glass of top-shelf Bordeaux costs $55. A seat in the bleachers at Oracle Park pleases me as much as a box at the opera. If someone offered me a new car, I’d gladly accept, but I don’t mind tooling around in my vintage Toyota. With fly fishing, though, it’s a different story. On a stream, I’m inclined to take the high road, choosing a dry fly above all others, even it if means catching fewer fish.
My attitude could be construed as perverse. Some friends have implied as much. Why would anyone fish an Elk Hair Caddis when no insects are hatching and the trout are feeding subsurface? It’s a fair question, and I’ve arrived at a tentative answer. Even in the absence of a hatch, I harbor a stubborn belief that a dry, if perfectly presented, will look so tempting that a decent trout will be seduced into striking it. The challenge is whether I’m a clever enough angler to make that happen. Seductions can be tricky, unless you’re a maestro like Pablo Picasso.
It’s a matter of aesthetics, as well. A dry fly afloat has a poetry all its own. When I cast a dry, I become hyperalert and in tune with nature, aware of the dappled light and the ripple of the water, the flight of a damselfly, and high above, the circling of a hawk. But I lose that sensation when I’m forced to admit defeat and switch to a nymph. Even though I know it’s the right decision, technically speaking, I resent it. I hate leaving the radiant universe to probe the lower depths.
Once upon a time, dry-fly fishing as such didn’t exist. Until the 1850s, anglers preferred wet flies and long rods with very soft action. They started at the head of a pool, cast down and across, and raised the rod tip as the fly continued downstream. But in 1857, a young Scot named William C. Stewart broke with tradition in his book The Practical Angler. Still in his early twenties, Stewart liked to brag that any good fly fisher should net at least 12 pounds of trout per day, to which a ghillie once replied, “Aye, on one of Stewart’s days — twenty-four hours of creepen’ and crawlin’.”
“The great error of fly fishing as usually practiced,” wrote Stewart, “is that the angler fishes downstream, whereas he should fish up.” And he went on, “They [the anglers] never think of fishing in any other way, and never dream of attributing their want of success to it.” Stewart cited four advantages to the upstream method. The angler isn’t visible to the trout; the fish are more easily hooked; it’s then easier to play a hooked fish downstream; and the fly looks more natural. Stewart’s brashness galled fly fishing’s blue bloods, especially coming from such an upstart, and they were slow to embrace his suggestions.
That was true at the prestigious Houghton Fishing Club of Britain (est.1822), where the 25 elected members were often dukes and lords. They wore fancy topcoats and black top hats to the stream and dispatched their servants to scour the banks for insects. (I owe a thanks to Andrew Herd’s wonderful book The Fly for that information.) During a mayfly hatch, they dapped with naturals, using blow lines that feathered out from their 14-foot, two-handed rods. If conditions were too blustery, they switched to minnows. Only in 1883 did the members cave in and admit Stewart had a point.
The dry fly’s development was an evolutionary process. James Ogden, an early pioneer, used dries on the Derbyshire Wye in 1865. He caught so many trout that the envious anglers nearby drove him off the stream. Other advances followed quickly. H. Cholmondeley-Pennell’s Fishing with the Dry Fly (1870) made a case for matching the hatch, advising that dries are “most killing when the particular natural imitated is on the water.” Anglers could soon buy upright split-wing f lies at shops and started soaking their flies in paraffin oil or kerosene for a longer float.
John Hammond ran the most prominent fly shop in Winchester, England. There, in 1879, the angling writer Frederic Halford met George Selwyn Marryat, reputed to be a formidable dry-fly fisher, possibly the most skillful ever. The pair would, in Herd’s words, “change the face of dry-fly fishing out of recognition” by shepherding it into the modern era. Halford’s definitive work, Modern Development of the Dry Fly (1900), included a clearly identified, color-coded pattern for thirty-three flies, one for every common smaller English mayfly, three for caddisflies, and one each for the black gnat and brown ant. He taught his readers how to false cast to dry a fly and urged them to swap their heavy, two-handed rods for shorter, lighter single-handed ones.
Dry-fly fishing didn’t thrive in America until brown trout were introduced. Brook trout, who love cold water, were dying out in the eastern United States due to a rise in water temperatures caused by the rampant clear cutting of forests after the Civil War. Browns can cope with temperatures above 75 degrees, so Fred Mather, a fish farmer and angler, arranged to import some from Germany. In 1883, the German steamship Werra docked in New York harbor with eighty thousand brown trout eggs on cool, moss-lined trays in the hold.
Anglers didn’t fall in love with browns right away. They were tougher to hook than brookies or rainbows, hence the pejorative “German browns.” But the challenge appealed to some fly fishers, notably Theodore Gordon of Catskills fame. He put his mind to the problem and wrote to Frederic Halford, who sent him a complete set of dries that the Angler’s Club in New York now owns. Halford’s flies were ill suited to Gordon’s local streams, so he designed duns and spinners based on his studies of North American insect life, the Quill Gordon among them.
Fly fishers endured a couple of setbacks in the late nineteenth century. For starters, good-quality hackles became difficult to f ind. With the growth of cities and suburbs, farmyard birds were scarce, and anglers turned to butchers and poultry markets. Dealers had to search far afield, buying capes from China and India. Only around 1900, when Gregor Mendel’s work on genes and heredity found wide acceptance, were commercial breeders able to meet the demand by raising genetically modified birds.
The other blow came from G. E. M. Skues, the inventor of nymphing, who took issue with Halford’s laudatory claims for the dry fly. Being a purist, Halford thought wet-fly angling was unsporting and should be forbidden on chalk streams. Skues disagreed and believed his technique was superior. While fishing the Itchen in 1908, he’d caught a trout with a dark-olive nymph in its mouth and tied an imitation. The next morning, he cast attractor dry-fly patterns to six fish rising in the shallows. He had a few strikes and missed them all, but when he tried his nymph, he soon brought five of the six to net.
The Skues-versus-Halford contretemps reached its flashpoint in 1938, when the Flyfishers’ Club, still located at 69 Brook Street, London, organized a debate on the subject of nymph fishing in chalk streams. Though Halford was dead, his followers were out in force. They defended the dry fly and accused nymph fishers of catching too many undersize trout. Skues took a more scientific approach. He poked holes in Halford’s theories, relying on the studies he’d made in an observation chamber sunk into the side of a pond, where he confirmed that fish do most of their feeding on nymphs below the surface.
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, dries and nymphs coexist peacefully in most fly boxes, as they do in mine, although when trout season opens, I’ll no doubt reach for a dry first, probably the old reliable Elk Hair Caddis or maybe a Parachute Adams, with some Stimulators and Rusty Spinners in line as backups. I can almost picture the moment when I step into a river in the warm spring glow and cast to a riffle just under some budding willows, where I suspect a trout may be lurking. The trout wakes from its slumber, alert to the beautiful presentation, and rises and then. . . .