Few things capture the spirit of fly fishing quite like the school of thought that directs us to flies that look like nothing seen in nature. Once you forsake bait, of course, all angling becomes an abstraction — an artificial game that provokes the imagination because of a set of rules that limit the means by which we’re allowed to attack the goal. Just as fly anglers have all agreed you don’t affix living creatures to the hook or fly to help catch fish, we’re all pretty much in agreement that certain mechanical devices — small explosives, say, or even a cleverly arranged gill net — are, if not illegal, at least beyond the pale. As for the snagging capabilities afforded by small hooks dangling behind beads or the body of a fly, I’ve settled on the notion that fish attack the head of their prey, not the tail, bringing into question whether I actually fooled any fish that ends up pinned to a trailing hook.
Fooling fish, need I argue, is at the heart of the game. This is in large part why the dry fly — or any surface presentation, for that matter — is the quintessential and no doubt most satisfying aspect of our pastime. When a fish moves to the surface and eats your fly, there’s no question that you fooled it, although the reasons it fell for your ruse may remain very much in question. By way of contrast, watch, say, on video or in an actual stream, a trout holding near the bottom and plucking from the current this and that, bits and pieces that are immediately eaten or rejected as food — plenty of time for a tiny hook inside the interesting morsel to end up embedded in the fish’s flesh.
But I’m not here to split hairs; readers should know by now that I’m a big fan of doing whatever it takes. Instead, my interest here lies in flies that make little or no pretense of replicating anything that inhabits the real world as we know it, but that are somehow intended to fool fish by power of an of alchemy we can, at best, only intuit. Of course, followers might also note that I often argue the fly is the least important aspect of the game. True. Still, you do have to knot something to the end of your line.
Atlantic salmon flies, we know, have long epitomized patterns that seem concocted out of the imagination of tyers without regard for anything that exists in river or stream. Steelhead patterns can be much the same. Most experienced steelheaders eventually come to recognize that egg patterns, representing the spawn of various Pacific salmon, match the hatch, so to speak, better than any other type of steelhead fly. Yet few dedicated or ardent steelheaders stop there. Odd as it may sound, simply catching these elusive fish is rarely enough to keep us engaged over the long haul.
It’s hard to say, however, what we’re really after. That may be part of the appeal of a genuine steelheading career: if you are unclear what you’re looking for, chances are you’ll never claim to have found anything that leaves you with the sense of having arrived, of completing some finite goal, the sort of popular bucket-list mentality that prompts so many of us to wipe our hands of one thing and move onto the next, as though what we were doing, in the past, was somehow not good enough, too shallow, or worse, not really what we wanted to be doing in the first place.
That’s a long way from fishing with flies that don’t represent anything fish eat — or flies that might work when fish have little or no interest in eating at all. But I’ll contend, vigorously, that it’s the angler interested in fashioning baits or lures that have no apparent equal in the natural world who comes to fishing with the kind of creative energy that lasts a lifetime. There’s always a new idea — or a long look back at what’s worked in the past for reasons we might only now begin to glimpse or understand.
The Rusty Rat is an old, proven Atlantic salmon fly, especially popular in Canadian provinces along the Eastern Seaboard. It has several elements, however, that have found their way into steelhead patterns I’ve had my share of success with over the years. I actually first tied the fly to fish for landlocked migratory trout in water best covered with two-handed rods — more or less steelheading without the cachet of fish returning from the sea. The history of the pattern offers the sort of origin story, often apocryphal, common to so many old-timey flies. The first Rat-style flies, claim Dick Stewart and Farrow Allen in Flies for Atlantic Salmon (Lyons Press, 1991), were tied by Roy Angus Thompson — R.A.T. — in the early part of the twentieth century. The development of the Rusty Rat, goes the story, fell to the New Brunswick tyer Clovis Arseneault after Joseph Pulitzer (whose dad the prize was named after) had a Black Rat, tied by Clovis, begin to disintegrate following several hooked fish. This same fly, claimed Pulitzer, became even more effective when the rusty orange thread used beneath the black body started to show. A 40-plus-pound salmon, taken that same day from the famous Restigouche River, no doubt helped support Pulitzer’s claim.
By the way, if you’re interested in this kind of historical context, you might want to get your hands on one of the original 105 copies of The Ristigouche and its Salmon Fishing, with a Chapter on Angling Literature, by Dean Sage, first published in Edinburgh in 1888, with etchings and engravings and page decorations that combine to make some experts call this “the rarest and most beautiful book on salmon fishing.” A copy sold in 2007 by Bonhams, of London, went for $18,000. Another copy is currently available at James Cummins Booksellers for $50,000. Or you could read a scanned copy online at https://archive.org/details/cihm_13110/page/n17/mode/2up.
Even if you aren’t inclined to delve so deeply into the history of flies and fly-fishing techniques that, surprisingly enough, still prove relevant today, you may find the Rusty Rat a step along the path toward a more expansive view of steelhead flies. Why one pattern works and another one doesn’t will no doubt remain a mystery; it’s also likely that when a steelhead does end up on the end of your line, it has little to do with the actual fly you chose to tie to your tippet. In the face of what can often seem like variables beyond our control — a sense, even, that you’ve descended into a game of chance — the best advice I know is to fish flies that please you and leave it at that. The Rusty Rat is a fly I always feel good about; it looks like nothing but a fly that will catch fish. It’s hard to go wrong with a feeling like that.
Materials
Hook: Bartleet Salmon, TMC 7999, Alec Jackson Steelhead Iron, or similar, size 2 or 4
Thread: Fire Orange 8/0, or similar
Rib: Small oval gold tinsel
Tail: Peacock sword fibers
Rear body: Rust orange rayon floss, pumpkin Uni-Floss, or similar
Underwing: Same as rear body floss
Forward body: Peacock herl
Main wing: Silver fox guard hairs, gray squirrel, or similar
Hackle: Soft grizzly
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise. Start the thread directly behind the eye of the hook. Cover the entire hook shank with an even layer of thread wraps. Stop wrapping the shank where the thread hangs even with the point of the hook.
Step 2: Measure a point midway up the hook shank. This helps delineate the two halves of the body. Cut a generous length of tinsel, which will be both the fly’s tag and its rib, and secure the tinsel directly above the hook point. Make 8 to 10 thread wraps over the tinsel toward the bend of the hook, then advance the thread back to the tinsel tie-in point. Now form the fly’s tag with five or six wraps of tinsel. Catch the tinsel with a turn or two of thread, then pull forward the long leg of the tinsel alongside the hook shank. Advance the thread forward to the midpoint of the hook shank, covering both the short length left when you wrapped the tag and the long leg. At the midway point of the shank, fold the long leg of tinsel back along the hook shank and start back with the thread until you reach the forward edge of the tag. The remaining tinsel, dangling aft, will be used later to rib both parts of the body of the fly.
Step 3: For the tail, use five or six peacock sword feather fibers. Take advantage of the curl in the fibers, securing the bunch just forward of the tinsel tag so that the tail sweeps upward. The tail should end just shy of the bend of the hook. Trim excess.
Step 4: Tie in a length of floss just ahead of the tinsel tag. Advance the thread to the midpoint of the hook shank. Wrap the rear half of the body with floss; try to get the floss to lie flat. At the midpoint of the hook shank, catch the floss with a turn or two of thread. Clip the floss, but leave about a three inches. Pull the floss forward and cover with even thread wraps up to the forward end of the body. Then pull the floss rearward and cover with thread wraps back to the aft half of the body.
Step 4: For the front half of the body, secure two or three lengths of peacock herl. Clip the tips so that they reach the forward edge of the rear body, helping to keep the entire body balanced. Advance the thread. Then wrap the peacock herl forward, in the opposite direction of your thread wraps, to the front of the body and secure with thread wraps.
Step 5: Rib the body. Pull the floss underwing material out of the way (you can pull it forward and catch with a temporary turn of thread) and make three or four evenly spaced wraps of tinsel around the back half of the body. Then pull the underwing rearward and make three turns of ribbing through the peacock herl forward body.
Step 6: Clip the underwing to length; it should end at about the midpoint of the tail. Certain flosses look a better if you comb out and separate the individual strands.
Step 7: For the main wing, clip a tuft of fur with plenty of guard hairs from the skin of a gray or silver fox. Hold the guard hairs by their tips and pull away the underfur. (Save the underfur for dubbing other flies.) Align the guard-hair tips in your hair stacker. Clip the butts of the guard hairs so that the wing, measured from the tie-in point, will end up just shy of the floss underwing. If you clip the guard hairs to length beforehand, you can catch the butts with your thread and, working your way aft, secure the wing with a smooth transition between the hook and the thread holding the wing.
Step 8: For the hackle, choose a soft, webby feather from the top or outside edge of a hackle neck. You want the hackle barbs to be about half the length of the main wing. Directly in front of the root of the wing, tie in the feather by its tip, tip pointing forward, convex side of the feather facing you. Pull the hackle fibers rearward as you wrap the feather forward. Make three or four wraps, secure with your thread, and clip the excess.
Step 9: Tidy up any errant hackle fibers with thread wraps. Create a fair head. Whip finish. Saturate the head with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
