A friend dropped off a box of flies the other day. He’s a jeweler who likes close work, bass bugs, and creative approaches, so among these were poppers and divers, carefully carved, with unusually shaped heads and gorgeous finishes. Winter work, as yet untested. He is sure they were based on original concepts, or at least on ideas adapted to fly fishing for the first time, and is eager to try them this spring.
I suspect they’ll work well. I’m sure that his first strike will provide him a “Eureka!” moment — an “It works!” followed by “I knew it would!” and then, if the fish is over three pounds, by an outburst that will likely begin with “Holy” and proceed to a word describing the process or product of solid waste elimination, as if either of these is suddenly special.
A fine moment, however expressed. It’s great to get something right, original or not. Most adults don’t have causes enough to celebrate virgin triumphs, especially as we advance in age, when a first bike ride, kiss, graduation, or introduction to spawning devolves into first mortgages, fender benders, and insulting, but obligatory medical exams. C’est la vie, but in time, “O boy!” experiences occur less often than those justifying groans of “O Lord.”
So, if at the age of 66, you invent a new fly, and it works?
Such events help keep longtime fly fishers excited and engaged. They also explain why folks who enter the sport later in life are willing to appear less than the experts they are at important life tasks — a skilled cabinetmaker, successful lawyer, or science teacher who’s willing to wear loops of fly line around his or her ears, tilt at willows to retrieve flies, fiddle with knots seemingly Gordian, and waddle around in waders that make everything south of the neck look fat. Frustrations and mild humiliations are a fair exchange for firsts of so many kinds: fish, bluegill or stocker; trout on a dry (and again, when it’s a fly you tied); brown over 16 inches; native golden . . . steelhead, striper, bonefish, surfperch, corbina, permit, or tarpon. And let’s not skip firsts such as a truly dead drift, upstream mend in the air, double haul, or a pair of quill wings that both stand upright at the angle they should. Heck, if they’re so inclined, fly fishers could keep the same kind of stats as baseball fanatics whose data feeds let announcers fill airtime with minutiae.
The difference is, what those stats represent would be ours.
That said, there’s a potential peril that Firsters face, a hazard for enthusiastic tyros, also for advancing intermediates starting to feel sure of themselves, sometimes even for master anglers who lose track of the game’s evolution.
When somebody believes one of his or her firsts is “A first,” new not only to him or her, but to the fly-fishing world. . . things can get tricky.
Sometimes their claim holds up, and I’ll happily return to that fact. But here’s a caution before we celebrate these.
However committed to tradition, fly fishing offers extraordinary opportunities for innovation and invention. For that very reason, the sport attracts people eager to explore, from high-tech types, to artists, to tinkering sorts who just love to solve problems. Because that’s been true for centuries, a great many clever men and women have developed and refined tackle, tools, and techniques, along with armadas of fly patterns. Many fine minds have been at work for quite awhile: their observations, instructions, and recipes reside in thousands of books and countless articles. The majority of this information — and remember, we’re talking only about what’s been written and published — resides in archives so extensive you’d need a lifetime to research them thoroughly. As a result, except when it comes to incorporating new materials and technology, the odds of discovering something wholly original are a little bit long. That’s something to keep in mind.
Some folks don’t. About twenty years ago, I received a book to review from an Eastern fly-fishing icon who, unaware of or oblivious to decades of Western practice, insisted he’d “discovered” that trout would hit fly patterns imitating an adult caddis. Not only that, he’d “invented” a technique to twist yarn into extended bodies — a method already incorporated into dozens of commercially sold flies and taught for decades by tying instructors, including André Puyans.
I was nonplussed. Also a little annoyed. But not so much as the author, I discovered, when he called me demanding to know why I’d not touted his groundbreaking book in a column. I gave my reasons, politely, but firmly. His response went beyond dismissive: he claimed to have never heard of Al Troth or his Elk Hair Caddis, or Gary La Fontaine and Caddisflies, or the other authors and books I brought to his attention, ergo, none of these was of consequence. He pressed his demands, not politely, and when these failed, added accusations.
Talk about hubris. (Or maybe, to be generous, incipient dementia.) Here’s the thing, however: what I did not do was roast his book, because I figured it would die on the vine, also because to do so would waste space I could dedicate to another work and writer that readers might want to discover. That omission played to the author’s advantage, saving him embarrassment from fishers who’d have scratched their heads at his assertions and maybe scratched out dissents on paper, in letters to publishers and editors, and perhaps directly to him, with ire.
Mild embarrassment, relatively speaking. Contained. In those days, few people had access to print and large audiences — I don’t remember knowing about Amazon back then — so even vigorous critiques at that time would pale beside the scope (and sometimes savagery) of criticism posted today, deserved or not. That was true also for the average pilgrim who might proudly announce the birth of a brainchild that turned out a clone, a faux pas limited to friends and maybe a fly club — say, that he’d discovered ant and grasshopper patterns work well when fished subsurface, an insight “that will change the way everybody fishes terrestrials forever.” But today, with the Internet, people can and do insert hooves into mouths before large horned herds with bullish sorts who gore.
The obvious intent of the above it to suggest caution. I do. But that is not, ultimately, the aim of this essay.
Sometimes a solo pilgrim’s invention is indeed new to the fly-fishing world, or at least as far as we can tell. “New” doesn’t always mean improved, of course. “Improved” doesn’t assure popular acceptance or that if an idea catches on, the identity of the original source will attach.
Again, this happens with flies most often — hundreds or perhaps thousands of times a year — and more rarely with styles of flies that make a major impact. Somebody came up with the idea of slipping metal beads around hook bends, but oddly enough, an Internet search doesn’t tell me who that was, though one source suggests they might be descended from the “Mormyshka” style, which soldered drilled metal balls onto hook heads, a technique apparently invented last century in Russia. I wish I knew more than that and am surprised that I don’t.
A site called Angler’s Heritage credits, jointly, “the creative talents of Richard Walker (of the Moncrieff Rod Development Company), Leslie Phillips of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, and The House of Hardy” for developing graphite rods, though I had to look that up.
Foam for poppers and larger dry-fly bodies, synthetic dubbing . . . a lot has changed. That’s more certain than who deserves the credit and profits, if any were made. To assure that end, people sometimes attach their names to flies or apply for trademarks. A few even get patents, like Thomas Hnizdor, owner of B-17 Flies, whom I met at the first of ten International Fly Tackle Dealer Shows I attended, beginning in 1992. That was back in the day when tiny start-ups could afford booths — were even allowed to share them — and many customers came specifically to examine items produced by innovative cottage-industry start-ups.
Tom’s show-space presentation was simple. No stand-up displays or elaborate banners. He plunked down a card table, covered it with velour, and arranged creations that I came to consider sculptures that fish. Most were built on cork bodies encased in a superior type of epoxy coating — think “Simonized” — but later, he’d add others woven from plastic fibers into creatures that included crabs and one eleven-inch squid pattern that I like to display, but cannot imagine trying to cast. Some looked like miniature bass plugs — one of the first used a guitar pick for a diving lip. Tom took flies into realms I’ve not seen before or since, from flies designed to roll over when stripped to plastic sinkers that wobbled on plastic fins. My favorite was a tiny, shiny, hard black ant that floated low and outscored anything similar I’ve ever used.
Tom sent me prototypes for years. It was impossible not to open a box without imagining his grin as he packed it, and without smiling back.
Pretty exciting times, for those of us bringing new products to market: lots of dreamers, hustling new ideas, a few of whom became players. Most didn’t, partly because not everything original is an improvement, partly because not all improvements catch on, and often because, as in other industries, dreamers are snacks for sharks, domestic and international.
One of the most interesting items I encountered, however — and possibly the one with the most potential — was a strangely shaped f ly-rod handle I exhibited as a favor to an engineer who had been introduced to me by an English pal, Dave Stocker. The Maniform Grip was designed to shift the stress of holding firmly from the thumb and pointer finger — manipulators — back to the index, ring finger, and pinkie — digits designed for strength. (To test this, try hanging from a pull-up bar using your thumb and pointer finger, then with the other three.) In theory, this reduced stress to ligaments and tendons, aiding anglers with arthritis and other impairments. In practice, I found, the shape made it almost impossible to flop your wrist while casting — you can cast only in a single plane — and I still use mine to teach tyros, for whom it helps to speed learning.
Unfortunately or not, Mel Krieger’s reaction after casting a Maniform said it for the market: “I get the idea, it makes sense, and it works . . . but I can tell you right now, after all these years with standard handles, I’d never get used to it.” (Fisher made a few custom rods with Maniform grips, but I’ve not seen any since that builder went out of business.)
Other products took off, or did for awhile, usually to modest heights.
But even more now than then, success typically rides on skills and financial resources beyond those of tinkering types.
Which brings us back to “Eureka” — to the joy of discovery and accomplishment, the decidedly cool feeling of working something out or mastering a process through effort, creativity, sometimes just through an accident that you recognize has value, achievements that exist independently of what anybody else has done before or will do tomorrow. Finding that a greased Muddler Minnow makes a fine imitation of an ovipositing crane fly (I think) when ripped across the surface of Lake Temescal; that a black Woolly Bugger doesn’t imitate just “anything and everything” on the Trinity River, but juvenile lampreys; and on the same river, that the nearly mythic Brindle Bug does a fair job imitating salmon fly nymphs (but you can tie better); that Loch Leven browns coming up from Lake Shasta to spawn will take big streamers ripped across large pools; and that on some creeks a three-inch-long, black-and-red tiger moth caterpillar pattern is a killer for trout in the fall. . . .
Original ideas? Somebody’s, I’m sure, though not to this guy I know, even if several seemed to come to him from out of the blue. Sure, he likes to think himself clever and to imagine that one day he’ll make a discovery worthy of our traditions. But of this he’s sure: an accomplishment doesn’t need to be “new” or “unique” in the world to qualify as a triumph earned by your own smarts or persistence. It’s even better if you’re lucky enough to take pleasure in a friend’s achievement or a stranger’s who you recognize has done something special.
That’s Pollyanna talk, to some. They might be right, in a world as competitive as ours, though I’m not sure they’re the lucky ones. But even fishers who compete fiercely in other aspects of life will often exclude fly fishing from this race, folks who abandon — or relax, anyway — the need for biggest and most and best. On a river, they choose to ease out of the cultural mainstream. It’s enough to push themselves to get better, rather than to outfish an angler downstream, to accept their own judgments of progress, the verdicts of fish, to find satisfaction in their own efforts — inspired, if not holy.
And then there’s my jeweler friend, who now thinks he has a distributor for his carved flies.
Presuming, of course, they catch fish this spring.
