In a scene almost identical to one I wrote about in these pages last year, I was tying flies this past fall in Bob Hoyt’s Whale’s Tale Inn in Magdalena Bay, replenishing supplies after two weeks getting knocked about by big roosterfish, when guide Jeff DeBrown showed up at the bar and immediately assailed me from across the room.
“What the hell are you doing?” he hollered, beer bottle in hand.
What I was doing was securing the eyes on the sides of the heads of several baitfish patterns, fiddling with five-minute epoxy dribbled onto the flies with a wooden match. This tiresome task was followed by the laborious and clumsy job of forming the heads of the fly, which required a second and sometimes third batch of epoxy, then lifting and turning flies this way and that while at the same time adding more of the runny goop to another fly, juggling everything in hopes of creating two or three fair heads, free of unsightly drips, bulges, or eyes knocked askew.
“Five-minute epoxy?”
DeBrown, incredulous, approached my table, stationed alongside the front window for adequate light.
“I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but don’t you have better things to do with your time than working with that shit?”
I twirled another fly, its sides held flat by a pair of needle-nose pliers with a rubber band wrapped around its handles. “Come on, man. Join the modern age.” This isn’t the first time it’s been suggested to me that I drag my sorry ass into the twenty-first century. Immediately on arriving home, I ordered the appropriate UV light and quick-cure resins. Voilá.
I began to think about coming to terms with a smartphone.
Before I went that far, however, I decided I finally had one of the most important tools for getting serious about fabricating any number of the quintessential Euro nymphs such as the Perdigón, so popular in the sport today. I was ready to become a Perdigónero.
In another development from last year, the esteemed publisher of the magazine in your hands had asked if I would share my thoughts about Euro nymphing. The piece I wrote, “Czechish Nymph,” argued that the technique actually points back to short-line nymphing techniques practiced long ago before the reliance on indicators impeded the development of so many anglers’ presentation skills.
Anglers now, of course, associate a particular style of fly with Euro nymphing techniques — flies that grew out of rules governing fly-fishing competitions especially popular in Europe. The most important rule states that you can’t add anything that floats or sinks to your leader — that is, no floating indicator or bobberlike device, as well as no split shot or similar aid. The job of getting the fly down to where fish are holding falls to the fly itself — and to the skill of the angler. If you’re fishing small flies, often the most effective way to move pressured fish on pressured waters, you look for flies that offer every possible advantage to penetrate the water column as quickly as possible while also helping you maintain that all-but-taut line so important in this kind of nymphing.
Rules, like scorecards and standings, are anathema to many fly fishers. What’s competition got to do with how the sport enlivens or enriches my soul? Yet fly fishing itself is a set of specific, if loosely defined rules, the likes of which provide parameters for innovation and, in some cases, grounds for arguments about cheating.
It’s hard to claim any moral high ground. Robert Frost, who loved the rules of formal poetry, claimed that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Sailboat design, on another tack, has often been marred by attempts to find loopholes in handicap rules. Closer to home, we now have rules on Oregon’s North Umpqua that were initiated in part because of Californians who showed up and, with big black weighted flies, nymphed the bejesus out of those famous and previously hard-to-fool summer steelhead.
And just this past year, I might add, while swinging flies for big river trout, I had the best one-fish day in memory, losing more than a half dozen other fish after my friendly guide reminded me of the rules and pinched down the barb on my fly.
The point, of course, is that some rules can make you a better or more skilled angler and in that way increase the enjoyment you get out of the sport. Three decades ago, when Bill McMillan published the essays he had been writing the previous dozen years in reaction to a school of thought that claimed that sinking shooting heads were the most effective way to catch steelhead, many steelheading careers — mine included — were invigorated by the notion that the best all-around tool for catching these elusive fish was, instead, a floating line. In Dry Line Steelhead and Other Subjects, McMillan rejected the idea of the socalled mechanical advantage of sinking or lead-core lines, especially in the face of evidence that at times, surface presentations are the most effective way to move steelhead to the fly. There was also the question, never stated, but implied, of how often steelhead were snagged by anglers using quick-sinking shooting heads, even fish hooked in the mouth after they were “flossed” by a swinging, deep-running line.
Innovation or cheating? One of the things I like about the latest and greatest Euro nymphs is the way they marry technique and technology. There’s no other way, to my knowledge, that you could get tiny flies that sink so quickly without the UV-activated resin that creates a smooth, hard-bodied nugget ready to penetrate the water column with little in the way of extremities to resist its descent — the difference between, say, a drop of frozen rain and a snowflake drifting down from the sky. That’s clever. Whether it’s actually a jig, not a fly, is an argument I refuse to entertain. What does the Fool say in Twelfth Night? “For, what is ‘that’ but ‘that,’ and ‘is’ but ‘is’?”
I’m reminded, finally, of a conversation I had recently with a young fellow, an ex-student of mine, now a teacher himself, who was convinced his recent and newfound success on the home river we share is a direct result of his discovery and practice of Euro nymphing techniques.
Before, as a novice fly angler, he’d struggled to catch anything on a river I know, from experience, does not offer up secrets freely, especially to beginners. Now, however, my ex-student was whacking plenty of big trout. He was flush with success. He had the latest Euro nymphing rod; he’d learned to tie the right flies on the appropriate hooks; he had tossed aside his indicators and learned to stay connected to the fly, line lifted off the water, eyes trained on his leader throughout each drift. “I’ve got three good spots along the road. I get fish at one until it slows down, then I drive to the next spot and get some more. One day, in less than two hours, I hooked —”
I turned away, inspecting the rush of clouds riding the wind above the river below. When my ex-student was finished recounting his exploits, I found my best teacher voice, free of the patronizing tone that eventually spirited me out of the profession, and I suggested that maybe he was simply learning to fly fish — that his success wasn’t a result of discovering Euro nymphing techniques at all, but instead, about learning to read the water, where the fish are, how to handle and manipulate subsurface presentations.
He wasn’t buying it.
“You make it sound too simple,” he said. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”
I nodded in agreement. There is a lot to it — more than you can learn in a lifetime.
“So tell me,” I added. “With that nymphing rod in hand, what do you do when the fish start rising?”
My ex-student gave me a look; he’d heard me enough times in the classroom to know something was up.
“You know what?” he said. “I don’t even worry about dry f lies anymore. Those fish won’t eat dries. The evening caddis hatch? I put on a dry fly and it never works. I get all my fish on nymphs.”
I nodded again.
“Do you ever try a little soft hackle? Fish it just like a dry fly? Fish don’t like to stick their noses out of the water if they don’t have to. It’s like crossing the threshold into an alien world.”
My ex-student gave me another look. “What’s this?” he asked, all but sniff-
ing. “Sounds like some kind of old man wisdom.”
We soon shook hands, parted ways.
Who can argue with reasoning like that?
Materials
Hook: Gamakatsu J20 jig nymph hook, Firehole 317, or similar, size 12 to 16
Bead: Copper or gold tungsten, size 7/64 inch or 1/8 inch (2.5 millimeters or 3.5 millimeters)
Thread: Fluorescent orange Veevus 14/0, or similar
Tail: Coq de Leon
Underbody: Tying thread
Body: Gold medium holographic tinsel
Rib: Stripped peacock herl, small darkedge Magic Quills, or similar
Collar: Tying thread or hot red Loon UV Fly Finish.
Finish: UV-activated clear resin
Wing case (optional): Black sharpie dot covered with drop of clear UV resin.
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Slip the bead onto the hook. Secure the hook in the vise. Brush a dab of quick-drying glue right behind the eye of the hook and then slide the bead into position and let things sit for a couple of minutes. You can also take a few turns of .010-inch lead wire to help secure the bead and add weight to the fly. Start the thread directly behind the bead.
I’ll note right here that for all their alleged mechanical advantages, I’m still not a fan of jig hooks. Whatever they might do in the way of helping the point of the hook ride upward, with less chance to hang up on the bottom, I find the finished f ly sort of homely, not nearly as graceful as a standard bead on one of any number of curved hooks available today. When I reach into my fly box, I invariably grab the prettiest fly of any pattern, and I fish that fly with greater confidence or at least commitment. Aesthetic appeal remains a big part of the pleasure I get from the sport.
Step 2: Wind a layer of thread back to the bend of the hook. Those wraps of lead directly behind the bead, if you used them, help to build up the taper you eventually want to run from the bend up to the bead. At the bend of the hook, tie in 10 to 12 fibers from a Coq de Leon feather.
Step 3: Build up the appropriate taper, working with even layers of thread wraps up and down the hook shank, each layer ending, at the aft end, farther and farther down. Once you’re happy with the overall shape of the body, tie in tinsel for the underbody. There are a million different materials you can use for this step, if you’re aiming to suggest a specific species of insect, including just the tying thread. Holographic tinsels, used in this example, are especially popular. Wrap it with the thread all the way up to the bead, maintaining the even taper.
Step 4: Now wind the thread back to the root of the tail. Secure the tip of your stripped peacock herl. You can make your own or buy them, real or synthetic. A variety of other materials also is available to give that two-tone effect we associate with abdominal segmentation. And since you’re eventually going to encase the entire body in resin, you don’t need to worry about your segmenting material coming unraveled after your first fish.
Step 5: Wind the thread up to the bead, then wrap the tinsel body, followed by the stripped herl, leaving small a gap between turns of herl so that the body shows.
Step 6: Directly behind the bead, create a narrow band or hot spot with your tying thread. You can also get the same effect with the various colored UV-curing resins now offered by Loon Outdoors. After f inishing the bright band, whip f inish and clip the excess thread.
Step 7: Cover the entire body of the fly with a thin coat of UV-curing resin, being careful not to overdo it and end up with bulges or drips. As soon as things look good, zap the fly with the UV light.
Step 8: The classic Perdigón features a wing case, a spot of black, made with a Sharpie or other marking pen that’s then covered with a single drop of resin, immediately cured, so that you end up with a small black bulge where, on a mayfly nymph, the wings develop. Does it matter? If you think it does, you should also consider how the fly will ride in the water. Should the wing case be on the point side of the body or on the side we typically think of as the back of the fly?
