Most of us have surely seen fly fishers absorbed in tying a fly, so engrossed as to seem in another time and place. And, for some, it even appears that fly tying is more important than fishing.
Although, like many fly fishers, I am not a fly tyer myself, as a member of a fly-fishing club I see the hundreds of hours that other invest in this activity, including attending classes, tying flies for waters soon to be fished, tying patterns to be sold or used in fundraisers, creating new patterns, and maybe just tying for its own rewards, whatever these might be for each individual. Irrespective of purpose, the attraction of fly tying runs deep.
It goes without saying that the overriding reason for this endeavor is to fool and hookfish. Most impressive, for instance, is the fly fisher who, while actively engaged in fishing, identifies precisely what insect the trout are taking at that very moment. The angler then retreats to a stash of fly-tying materials, perhaps in the back of a truck, and quickly ties up an imitation. Such a scenario seems to represent the acme of fly tying.
For some, tying good flies is the ultimate secret to fishing success. One associate told me that “it’s important that we have the best of flies when we fish.” His unspoken message was that excellently tied flies, which also include the quality of the materials, catch more fish than inferior ones. This assumption undergirds many serious fly-tying efforts.
My own experiences, including a limited foray into fly tying, leave me a little skeptical of this premise. And what does “well crafted” really mean? I have seen artificials that are exact duplications of an insect or bug, say, a hellgrammite or beetle or stonefly. But I am reminded of what Charles E. Brooks, the author of Larger Trout for the Western Fly Fisherman, uncovered from his underwater observations on how wet flies turn and twist in the current if they have flat bodies, just as the real bug does. Fish rejected this unnatural movement, since live insects don’t twist and turn in the water as they get swept down. The fly that didn’t scare off fish had an unflattened or rounded body, as the Woolly Worm does — Brooks’s favorite fly. Unlike the natural, it looks the same from all angles, but it acts like the real thing in the water. So how a fly behaves in the water also counts.
Although I have avoided any serious fly tying, I do have a couple of strong biases regarding the flies that I use. First, I prefer durable flies that don’t come unraveled after a few hookups. For example, one highly effective fly for me has been the Prince Nymph. It seems to catch fish as well as or better than any fly in my fly box, regardless of water type. But from my experiences, this pattern is not built to last, regardless of who tied it. In contrast, I have hooked fish after fish, possibly as many as 20 or so, on random flies that seem magnificently indestructible.
Another personal preference is to use hooks bigger than the body size of the fly, for example, a size 14 hook for a size 16 body. Whenever someone ties flies for me, I stipulate this variation. I’m convinced this tactic produces fewer lost fish that struck, but that didn’t get hooked. It works best when the water is not gin clear, as it is in spring creeks, and when the water or the fly is moving and fish have to strike quickly.
That sums up my personal experiences with fly tying as participant and consumer, but to delve deeper into the lure of this activity, I checked with persons who actually devote significant chunks of their lives to tying flies.
Reports from Tyers
To get a better grasp on what fly tying is all about, I solicited responses from a number of fly tyers, a few of whom are quoted below. (Some of these individuals will be demonstrating fly tying at the Fly Fishing Expo at the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding in April. See the sidebar.)
The dominant refrain and unarguable presupposition is the thrill of catching fish with one’s own creations. But surely there must be more going on here.
On the craft of fly tying, Roy D. Powell from Burney reports: “The Great Master tyer Andy Puyans once said, ‘A well-tied fly, catches a well-deserved fish!’ and I stick to that! I love tying something new that no one has and seeing how it fishes. I get a great satisfaction in seeing a fish slowly move up to the surface and gulp down my dry fly and wonder why, because some of the materials I use you’d think wouldn’t catch anything! I guess it all comes down to size, shape, color, and movement in a fly, but tied well — meaning proportions, size, color, and shape are all right.”
Norm Domagala of Alpine, Oregon, spoke about the rewards of creating one’s own flies: “Fishing with flies I design is a major part of my fishing and life. It didn’t take me long to put a twist on standard old patterns. To me, it’s so much more rewarding than buying a fly that someone else has tied. It’s definitely not the cheapest way to go, as my wife will confirm.”
Larry Lack from Novato presents a unique take on creating your own pattern. As he relates: “Tying almost all one’s own flies also affords the opportunity to be creative and discover new combinations that work. For example, I fish the Hex hatch on Lake Almanor and on Butt Lake, usually every late June. Well, if you go into any fly shop to buy a Hexagenia limbata pattern, you’ll mostly find a yellow fly. Only problem is, since these large yellow mayflies usually emerge just after dark, you and especially the fish can’t see the color yellow. And since most fly fishers know that the best, most vivid color in the dark or in cloudy water, providing the most distinctive silhouette, is black, I started tying a Hex emerger in black. I now use it exclusively during the hatch, which usually occurs from 9:15 to about 9:45 p.m. I wind up catching two to three times more fish than other folks in their kickboats or float tubes near me.”
Walt Cole from Redding also cites how tying allows one to make adjustments. He states: “It gives you the freedom to mix your dubbing to modify the color or sparkle of your flies when you take into consideration light penetration into the water you are fishing. Sometimes you may choose a hook different from the one called for in a pattern. It may be a larger gap on small flies that have a bead, or making a bend in the hook to offset the point to improve hooking ability. Sometimes, for instance, you may tie a size 22 chironomid on a size 20 hook to obtain the above.”
In reviewing the reports from fly tyers, I was somewhat disappointed not to hear more about the mental aspects of this activity. James H. Fenner, from “a small town” in Oregon, alluded to this element when he said, “I really enjoy the relaxation of tying flies.”
Relaxation surely must be a fine byproduct of tying flies, although one responder did cite “frustration” as another. I wonder if most fly tyers don’t think of the mental aspects of this activity (irony intended), as though only the tangible elements count. But then again, I constantly see tyers seemingly lost in thought and totally engaged with what they’re doing at the vise. Perhaps I’m witnessing the Zen of fly tying.
Another element I expected to hear more about is one’s “immersion into the world of trout,” knowing the places where they live, what and how they eat, tying flies that resemble this food, presenting an imitation to where trout hold and feed, and finally watching a trout take your offering. I’ve always believed, from a distance, that one of the benefits of fly tying is becoming a student of entomology, striving to understand the world of insects, down to their most minute physical and behavioral characteristics. Trying to duplicate these organisms makes the tyer more attuned to their particular features, leading to more appropriate representations and more hookups.
Ed Morphis from Grants Pass, Oregon, touched upon this when he said: “There is something ineffable about the experience of presenting an exact duplicate of an insect to a fish in just the right place, in just the right way to give the impression of living prey, seducing him to accept it. Enhance that experience with the joy of having produced the fly that helps accomplish this, and it becomes even less expressible. The more complete the involvement in the total process of catching a fish with a fly, the greater the gratification.”
Don Wieseman of Palo Cedro, California, also said that fly tying gives him “greater awareness of my surroundings when I’m on the water that helps me choose the right size, color, and shape of fly for more hookups.”
Larry Lack expands upon these elements: “To be really successful as a fly fisher, you have to be an entomologist, know the physics of a fly rod, be learned about the hydrology of a flowing stream or river, and be informed enough about meteorology to understand the effects of weather, temperature, as well as zillions of other factors that may affect the feeding behaviors of trout.”
For some fly tyers who routinely present at fly-tying expos and shows, it’s also about fellowship, teaching, and recruiting others into the fold. One such notable fly tyer is Stew Stewart — creator of the Stewie fly — from Shingletown, California. He says that “fly tying is more than just designing and tying flies that will fool fish. It is about friends, family, the great outdoors, and helping to preserve those places we so like to fish. These are some of the reasons why I have enjoyed participating at many expos across the Western United States.” Another regular instructor is Charlie Schillinsky from Bend, Oregon. He states: “While demonstrating fly tying at expos, my main focus is to show how easy fly tying is so others, especially youngsters, so that they understand they can do it. Explaining each technique without inferring mysterious skills encourages others to try for themselves. Making mistakes, not getting something ‘perfect,’ and not making a ‘show-quality fly’ are just fine. Kids are apt to be much less critical of their efforts, as well they should be. Adults have to overcome the feeling they have to ‘measure up’ and understand that practice and experience will bring them to the point they want. If I can entice just one person per day at shows to start tying their own flies, then I feel really good. If someone comes to a subsequent show and shows me a fly they have tied because of my efforts, I am ecstatic!”
Norm Domagale: “I really like passing on some of my small knowledge of tying flies and fishing at the fly-fishing expos, especially to the younger crowd. Most of us who demonstrate at the shows are old gray-hair guys. If I can just get one or two youngsters at a show interested in the sport of fly fishing, I feel like I’ve done a good thing.”
Insights from the Sages
The above responses from tyers in the field help to clarify some of the captivations of fly tying. But to uncover yet more, I checked the works of a few writers who have been able to express some of the deeper nuances of our sport.
In his classic book Trout Magic, Robert Travers addresses what constitutes a “favorite fly.” He compares it to Calvin Coolidge’s revelation that when a lot of people are out of work, unemployment results. Travers concludes that “any fisherman naturally favors the fly he once had all that fun with. And fun to a fly-fisherman means above all means getting action.” So Travers reinforces the hard-to-dispute belief that lots of action translates to a “good fly.”
Few authors have captured the subtleties of our sport better than John Gierach. On the mastery of entomology that many fly fishers strive to achieve, he reports in Dances with Trout that he kept running into guys who were catching big fish on the apparently simple-minded premise that “if the bugs on the water were, say, small and dark, you had to use a small, dark fly.” One old-timer told Gierach that “learning more about bugs than the trout know is a waste of time.”
Gierach writes, “For most of us, making our own flies is just a comfortable part of the process of fishing, a way to get inside of things in a nonscientific, somewhat intuitive and maybe even artistic way. The object is to do as much of the work yourself as possible, thereby becoming self-sufficient and gaining the kind of nonlinear understanding that spreads in a circle around what seems, at first glance, to be the soul of the matter.”
So, is there a “soul” in the act of fly tying? In fly fishing?
Gierach continues, “There was a time when fly patterns were pretty much fixed and unassailable, but it’s not like that anymore. Now it’s perfectly okay if your patterns are a little different from anyone else’s. Maybe it’s even preferable, because the flies you tie are seen as a kind of self-expression.”
Another sage observer of this sport is Ted Leeson. He writes in The Habit of Rivers: “As a craft, fly tying is really the most conspicuous example of the general propensity among fly fishermen to build their involvement in the sport from the ground up. They tinker incessantly, making tackle or modifying it, inventing and experimenting, tailoring and improving to increase the usefulness, pleasure, or beauty of the things they use. Fly fishing contains a strong vein of do-it-yourselfism that allows each angler to fashion his own most satisfying version of the sport.”
Perhaps the most profound insight I found came from renowned fly fisher and writer Ernie Schwiebert, author of Death of a Riverkeeper and Remembrances of Rivers Past. In a speech at the 2005 opening ceremonies at the American Museum of Fly Fishing, near the end of his life, he observed that “People often ask why I fish, and after 70 years, I am beginning to understand. I fish because of beauty. Everything about our sport is beautiful.” He goes on to note the beauty of rivers and riverscapes, of the codes we fish by, our literature, our gear, our sporting art. Schwiebert concludes with flies and fly tying, saying:
The delicate artifice of dressing f lies is beautiful. Such confections of fur, feathers, and steel are beautiful, and our worktables are littered with exotic scraps of tragopan and golden pheasant and blue chatterer and Coq de Leon. Our sport is awash in such things, with bright rivers tumbling swiftly toward the salt, the deft choreography of swifts and swallows working to a dancing swarm of flies, and the quicksilver poetry of the fish themselves.
If we let it, the tying of flies can help open us to the world we find ourselves immersed within.
Fly Tying Expo in Redding
On April 11 and 12, the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding is hosting the fourth annual Northern nership with the Shasta Trinity Fly Fishers, the Northern California Council of the International Federation of Fly Fishers, and the International Federation of Fly Fishers. More than 50 fly tyers from Northern California, Oregon, and Nevada will be demonstrating fly-tying techniques. There will also be special exhibits, programs, and handson activities for visitors, including fly tying, casting, entomology, and stream restoration projects. Some activities will be especially geared to youth.
For more information, visit http://www.shastatrinityflyfishers.org/tyexpo.html.
— Bob Madgic
