We reeled in lines at dark. Joe was cold, shivering some, and when we waded the fast water between the island and the cottonwoods, I could see he was stiff and maybe even a little clumsy, hanging onto his wading staff with his legs spread like a guy riding a big wave in 1962.
But I had some scotch in my bag back at his truck, because it was March and I had figured one of us was bound to get chilled. It seemed too early in the year, anyway, to go trout fishing, at least on this stretch of the river, which, for as long as I could remember, had always been closed until about the time the Salmon Flies grew restless. Yet when the new regs came out, there it was: open year-round for trout all the way up to the dam.
Joe was fine, of course, by the time we climbed through the sage and crossed the railroad tracks and leaned our rods against the juniper alongside his truck. Younger by 15 years than I am, he could pass for my son — if he didn’t tower over me like an NBA power forward. The real problem turned out to be that he had a hole in his waders — the same pair with a hole in them last time we fished.
He got into dry clothes and came around to the tailgate, rubbing his hands.
“What about next week?” he asked.
I pointed to the flask while I tugged at my waders.
“Can’t. I’m going to talk to this guy about some new flies to write about.”
“New flies?”
Joe held the flask up to the light inside the camper shell, checking what was there through the glass above the leather sleeve.
He pulled the cork.
“Or you mean just more about the same ones.”
Maybe he was cold.
Or maybe, more than sloshing around in a wet sock all day, Joe had seen enough trout dancing at the end of my line that he had to say something.
But that was only part of his point. True, we hadn’t had much of a day. The Blue-Winged Olives never came off, and the only thing we saw resembling a March Brown was in our fly boxes. Yet now and then we did spot this funky little brown stonefly, a Winter Stone, if you like, no bigger than a 12, maybe even a
14. Not a single rising trout, mind you — just now and again one of these little cinnamon-colored guys fluttering through the air, positioned vertically, like they are, their two pairs of wings beating furiously so that they appear to be spinning, as though a miniature seed pod from a maple tree spiraling toward the water.
Which is why I had tied on a medium-sized brown f lymph and kept it swinging, most of the day, through likely-looking water.
A few trout whacked it hard.
The one fish Joe got, he got the same way.
Soft hackles enjoy a lot of press these days. The attention is well deserved. The flies are simple, effective, pretty, and they appeal to a school of angler who believes that suggestive flies outfish attempts at precise representation 9 times out of 10, placing demands on streamcraft and presentation more than the finery tied to the end of one’s line.
The flymph, on the other hand, remains the overlooked cousin of the traditional soft-hackle fly. It’s probably not just the silly name. A lack of understanding about the design of the flymph might well be the reason for its inferior status. “On any soft-hackle fly,” wrote soft-hackle guru Sylvester Nemes, “it is obvious that the hackle is everything. It must do all the work to make the fly so successful.” Yet where the soft-hackle fly relies on the movement and coloration of feather fibers for its guile, the flymph makes use of a loosely dubbed fur body to suggest the movements and mottled play of colors so effective in flies fished across and down on a well-mended line.
Joe’s gripe, of course, was that a fly like a flymph has been described in the literature many times before. Fair enough. Yet on the river, I’m surprised how rarely I see anglers fishing subsurface patterns in any manner except dead-drifted under an indicator, which means they can’t possibly be fishing a soft hackle — or at least not fishing one effectively — and thus the chance that they’ve refined their wet-fly game to include the subtleties of the flymph seems remote at best.
Shame on them.
Still, I want to believe these are matters of ignorance, not a lack of insight. For while the traditional soft hackle has found a place in many modern fly boxes, offering important options to any trout angler intent on entering a river with something approaching a “compleat” game, the flymph, as mentioned, remains an outlier, a style of fly rarely applauded and perhaps less frequently tied as originally designed. “The main feature of the wingless wet fly, or flymph,” wrote Dave Hughes in his definitive Wet Flies, “is the body.” Hughes, as most readers probably know, was passing along what he learned from Pete Hidy, who in turn had fished with and chronicled the patterns and tying methods of the famed wet-fly master, James Leisenring. Leisenring and Hidy coauthored The Art of Tying the Wet Fly in 1941. Thirty years later, that same book was republished, along with several chapters added by Hidy titled The Art of Fishing the Flymph.
It’s through Leisenring, then, that we were introduced to the notion that when it comes to subsurface flies, it’s all about the body. Seventy-five years ago, that meant natural furs spun onto waxed silk threads.
Today, it means exactly the same thing.
Hidy showed Hughes how it’s done. To create the bodies of their flies, both Leisenring and Hidy used a spinning block, a simple tool that makes it easy to spin fur onto waxed thread. The spun fur body is then removed from the spinning block and set aside — Leisenring and Hidy attached their prespun bodies to stiff note cards — where it’s ready for use when, later, you actually tie your flymph or other subsurface fly.
If you follow the instructions, what you end up with is a stash of prespun bodies that go a long way in helping you create flies with far more life to their bodies than anything you can fashion by starting with the typical twisted dubbing loop. Such loops have a hard time reaching the same degree of spiky sparseness — or sparse spikiness — that makes the technique presented here so useful in creating as effective a fly as the flymph. It’s worth the effort.
There’s more. In addition to lifelike movement and the air-trapping properties of the traditional prespun body, you also have that core of silk thread spiraled through the center of the fly. The silk thread remains visible because of its oversized gauge, especially in comparison with modern tying threads and also because of the light touch of fur you’re able to use while still attaining the spiky untidiness that gives the flymph its impressionistic suggestions of life. Few things that come out of a vise offer the effect you get from that spiral of silk thread resonating inside your dubbing fur. To my eyes this internal patterning suggests a later stage of an insect that so often follows the stage we’re trying to replicate. It’s as though you can see the makings of that imminent stage taking shape inside the other.
Do the trout see it, too? We may never know. What we can be sure of, however, is that as long as guys like Joe and I fish for them, trout will continue to eat a scruffy flymph that offers the general impression of any insect on the water. And as long as we keep making claims about new and better flies, someone’s going to have more to say about an all-but-forgotten pattern that has often saved the day.
How to Make a Spinning Block
You can make a spinning block in minutes. Mine are scraps of hardwood with dimensions of 5-1/2 by 3-1/4 by 1/2 inches. Orient the block in a portrait layout and round off the top edge. Draw a center line top to bottom. Centered at the top edge, stick in a brad or small finishing nail and with a razor knife cut a fine slit centered along the bottom edge. Now place a pair of brads side by side straddling the center line about an inch from the bottom edge. Place another pair of brads the same distance from the top edge. Because my blocks are dark, I ran a strip of masking tape — blue on one, tan on the other — along the center line before placing my brads so that I have a better background for seeing my thread and dubbing material. Finally, using your razor knife again, cut a slit about halfway down one side of the block — the right side, as you face it, for right-handers.
Using a Spinning Block
Wax the first five or six inches of your silk thread. Hook the end in the slit at the bottom of the block. Run the thread between the two pairs of brads and pass it around the brad along the top edge of the block. Hook the thread and bobbin in the slit along the side of the block.
Dap your body material along the waxed thread between the two pairs of brads. The trick, of course, is getting just the right amount of material, plus, you’d like to have longer fibers somewhere forward of the middle, so that your body shows something of a taper when you wrap it on the hook shank. With the dubbing material sprinkled and spread evenly on top of the waxed thread, free the thread and bobbin from the side of the block. Wax this portion. Keeping the thread looped around the brad at the top of the block, lay the thread between the pair of brads and on top of the dubbing material. Hook the thread into the slit at the bottom of the block with the end of the thread where you started.
Now it’s simply a matter of getting hold of the two pieces of thread in the slit at the bottom of the block. Keep tension on both lengths of thread; spin them between your thumb and forefinger. The waxed thread will hold onto plenty of dubbing material. As the twisted thread lengths shorten, the dubbing fibers will draw together to form a spiky fur rope — just what you need for the body of a flymph.
Store these prespun bodies on 7-by4-inch pieces of white foam board. Cut short slits one-half inch apart, aligned along both sides of the foam board. The opposing slits will hold each end of a prespun body. You can fit 18 bodies on each piece of foam.
Hare’s Ear Flymph, Dark
Hook: TMC 3761, size 12 to 16, or similar 2X stout hook
Thread: Crimson Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk
Hackle: Dark dun hen
Tail: Dark dun hackle fibers
Rib: Narrow gold tinsel
Body: Hare’s mask
Hare’s Ear Flymph, Pale
Hook: TMC 3761, size 12 to 16, or similar 2X stout hook
Thread: Yellow Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk
Hackle: Medium dun hen
Tail: Medium dun hackle fibers
Rib: Narrow gold tinsel
Body: Hare’s mask
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook and start the thread. Because silk thread is so much thicker than modern threads, you need to use a judicious number of thread wraps. Select a hen hackle feather with fibers about twice the length of the hook’s gap. Clean the webby fibers from the lower portion of the stem. With the concave side toward you, tie in the feather directly behind the eye of the hook so that the tip of the feather points forward.
Step 2: Wind the thread to the bend of the hook. Take six to eight fibers from one of the bigger feathers of the hackle neck. Align the tips of the fibers and tie in the tail.
Step 3: Tie in a length of tinsel at the root of the tail. Pull aside for use later.
Step 4: Select a prespun body from your card or foam board. Tie it in at the root of the tail so that your first body wraps are not as heavy or dense as in the middle of the body. Advance the thread to just behind the hackle tie-in point. Wind the prespun body forward. Secure it behind the hackle tie-in point.
Step 5: Spiral the tinsel in three or four evenly spaced warps to the front of the body. As you make the wraps, try to work the tinsel between the spiky body fibers, rather than matting them flat. Tie off the tinsel at the front of the body and clip the excess. In wide turns, spiral the thread back to a point just ahead of the halfway point in the body.
Step 6: Attach hackle pliers to the tip of the hackle feather. Start the first turn of hackle directly behind the eye of the hook, making sure the hackle f fibers curve back toward the body. Working front to back, make two complete hackle warps, side by side at the eye, then make one or two more spiral wraps back so that the hackle covers about the front third of the hook shank. Then work the thread forward through the hackle wraps, making sure you don’t mat down the hackle fibers. Forward of the hackle, create a tidy head, wax the thread, and whip finish. Saturate the head with lacquer or head cement.
