I’m always trying to improve my game in the off-season. There’s a reason for that. I hope to solve the age-old problem confronting every fly fisher. How do I catch more trout? Ask around and you’ll hear a dozen different tips. “It’s all in the presentation,” or “Never stay in the same spot for more than five minutes.” Gearheads will put it down to the right rod or reel, while weather watchers cite the need for cloud cover or a southwesterly wind. But after considerable research, I’m inclined to think the correct answer is, “Master the art of nymphing.”
I say that reluctantly as a dry-fly enthusiast. In the great debate of 1938 at the Flyfishers Club in London, I would have sided with the disciples of Frederic Halford, a purist who published one of the first pattern books for tying dries and lobbied against angling of any other kind on England’s chalk streams. Nymph fishing was so new and such a radical departure from tradition that its proponent, G.E.M. Skues, was regarded as an infidel, although Halford had once been his mentor, invited him to join the club, and helped to arrange a beat for him on the Itchen River in Hampshire, perhaps the finest chalk stream in the country.
George Edward Mackenzie Skues came late to f ly fishing. Born in Newfoundland in 1858, he was brought to England as an infant. His parents parked him at a boarding school and sailed off to India, where his father served as a military surgeon. Skues didn’t pick up a rod until he was well into his teens, when he tried casting a Wickham’s Fancy with a stiff eleven footer fitted with silk and horsehair line. Needless to say, he didn’t catch a thing. It would be many years before he tried again, going on to practice law. He enjoyed his first outing on the Itchen in 1887 courtesy of a client, and fished the same beat, Abbots Barton, regularly for the next four decades.
At first he adhered to Halford’s dry-fly-only code of angling. But Skues was shrewd, and he realized there were a lot more trout in the Itchen than Halford and company were catching. He described his breakthrough in his first book, Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream (1910). (Skues became such a prolific writer he felt compelled to use comic pen names like A Liminty Dincombe, Spent Naturalist, and Unspoiled Child.) He explained how he hooked a wild brown one afternoon, examined its mouth, and found a dark olive nymph. He had brought his tying materials and whipped up a rough imitation.
The next morning, he saw six trout cruising in the shallows. He cast a variety of dries with no takes, but his dark olive nymph produced immediate results. He landed all but one fish. Skues had recognized what we now know to be the case: nymphs form an integral part of a trout’s diet, and the feeding occurs subsurface. The traditionalists were infuriated, and not only by his book. They couldn’t stand it that Skues fared so much better. His technique, they complained, was just wetfly angling by another name. In his own defense, Skues claimed to be fishing by sight as dry-fly anglers do. The Itchen is very clear, and he could see the trout feeding a few inches below the surface. That was probably true, although in letters he wrote to his friends, he admitted to adding a bit of weight to reach the lower depths.
You’d think the controversy would blow over, and that the dry-fly coterie would thank Skues for a technical advance and take advantage of it. But that isn’t what happened. Instead, they banned him from his beat on Abbots Barton when he was almost eighty. The charge against him? He was catching too many trout. In a sense, Skues never recovered. When he retired from the law, he moved to the Nadder Bank Hotel on the Nadder River, another excellent chalk stream, but he seldom fished, in part because of his age. He continued to write for the sporting press and answer letters from his admirers.
One such correspondent was Frank Sawyer, a riverkeeper on the Avon in Wiltshire. He began his career in 1925 by managing the six miles of stream at Lake House, an Elizabethan estate now owned by Sting, who recorded his album, Ten Summoner’s Tales, there. (It’s unclear if Sting ever cast a fly, but he did meditate and grow organic vegetables.) Three years later, Sawyer signed on with the Services Dry Fly Association, a club for British military officers, and looked after its holdings until 1980. The Avon was in terrible shape, clogged with mud, silt, and untreated wastewater from the surrounding farmland. Sawyer had some success by stocking the river with wild trout, but only when he dredged the stream bottom in the 1950s, returning it to chalk and gravel, did the Avon regain its health.
Sawyer was an avid fly fisher and tyer, as well as a first-rate conservationist. He made the next advance in nymphing when he invented the Pheasant Tail as a generic pattern to imitate any dark colored nymph. He used the tail feathers of a cock pheasant and fine copper wire instead of thread, which added some weight. The wire also gave off a hint of translucent color when fished. He liked to let the fly sink and then drew or “swam” it toward the surface, retrieving line or lifting his rod tip. It proved to be deadly. Sawyer had read Skues’s books, of course. He found a few faults and compiled “some notes of criticism” he enclosed in a letter to the old man at the Nadder Bank Hotel. To his surprise, Skues replied promptly without any enmity. He approved of Sawyer’s innovations and offered to help Sawyer publish his writing. (Sawyer’s Keeper of the Stream: Life of a River and Its Trout Fishery is a classic.) They met only once, when Skues was almost ninety and could barely see, propped up in a chair wearing a black skullcap “to cover his extreme baldness.” He died soon after, his ashes scattered at Abbots Barton on the Itchen.
The Pheasant Tail is still popular in various iterations. But what other nymphs are essential for fly fishing in California? I’d never claim to be an expert, but I’ll name a few that have stood the test of time. The Prince, for instance, with or without a bead head. Doug Prince of Oakland developed it in the 1940s, adapting an earlier pattern, the Brown Forked Tail, that originated in Bemidji, Minnesota. The Zug Bug is another nymph that’s lasted. Cliff Zug, a Pennsylvania angler, tied it in the 1930s to imitate a caddis larva. Not much else is known about Cliff, although a blogger has suggested his name sounds like “an Alabama sharecropper in a Faulkner novel.”
The origins of the Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear are not so distinct. Almost certainly it is an English creation, but different sources cite different dates between 1880 and 1910. Halford dressed the pattern as a wet fly, and anglers later fished it as a wet fly before its transformation.
The Woolly Bugger isn’t so old, and some might quibble that it’s a streamer rather than a nymph, but Russell Blessing, who invented the Bugger in 1967, fished it like one. He’d start it at a dead drift, then jig it back at the end of the drift. Whatever category the Woolly Bugger belongs to, it catches trout.
Among the newer nymphs, I’m partial to Higa’s S.O.S., a baetis imitation Spencer Higa, a Utah-based guide, first tied. It’s a good all-purpose attractor. Pat’s Rubberlegs has been around a little longer, and you can count on it to produce if any stoneflies are in the vicinity. Pat Bennett began tying the pattern in 1995 at a cabin on Henrys Fork of the Snake that his grandfather had built.
When I get back on the water again, before the big hatches of summer, I hope I’ll be sensible enough to reach for a Higa’s S.O.S. or a Pheasant Tail instead of sticking with a dry fly. I’ve convinced myself nymphs are the ticket if I want to catch more trout.