I love tying flies, and I occasionally tie a fancy-winged salmon fly that I may never fish and will only look at. I do it for practice, to improve my skills. Yet like many of us, I spend most of my time at the vise designing and tying flies that I intend to use for bait. And as a bait maker, I can’t deny the versatility and effectiveness of the simple wingless wet fly or soft-hackle design.
Some type of body, straight or tapered to a cigar shape, with a hackle wound at one end to simulate both wings and appendages, was probably the earliest type of trout fly. English and Bavarian texts dating from the medieval period describe this type of fly, which was already in wide use in Europe at that time, and evidence suggests the similar Japanese kebari flies were in use prior to the 1500s. Some early developments, the wheel, for example, just made sense. And needing to capture and bring home the groceries, our ancestors no doubt spent some time in developing effective lures to that end.
These simple designs reached high development in the dales of Yorkshire and southern Scotland, where they were known as “spiders” — for their appearance, not for what they might imitate — and records of the flies and how to fish them have been published from the 1500s onward. Though several Yorkshire terrestrial patterns in use prior to 1900 come to mind —– the Bibio, meant to imitate a beetle; a silk Ant (of course); and the Palmer Worm, forerunner of the Woolly Worm — most of the early Yorkshire spiders were tied to simulate adult mayflies, stoneflies, and “sedges,” as caddisflies are known in the British Isles. It wasn’t until Frank Sawyer and G. E. M. Skues began writing in the early 1900s that we started to consider imitating the nymphal stages of stream-born insects. And there are those who even now refuse to fish anything else but the Yorkshire spider patterns popular prior to 1900.
To each his own pleasure. But if we like the excitement and satisfaction of getting a lot of grabs, it may serve better to dissolve the confining construct of a fragmented time line partitioning “old” and “new” as separate values and instead consider a connective time line whereon there is no old or new, only the continuing archive of what works, the living tradition of our game. We stand on the shoulders of all who came before us, particularly designers of flies.
I believe the effectiveness of the soft-hackle design is that its elements coalesce three major tenets of good wet-fly design. The first, movement, is provided by the soft hackle; the second, obfuscation, also is provided by the lively hackle, and in addition, most soft-hackle designs are simulative (impressionistic), which makes them more apt to pass inspection, while a muffed or overly plastique imitative approach tends to receive more suspicious scrutiny from our quarry. The third, light, serves to create the illusion of life, because light is able to pass through the sparse design; also, the natural materials dominant in most soft-hackle patterns absorb and reflect UV light the same way living things do — and any number of synthetic dubbings and other materials now available are combined with natural materials to create light or flash.
I can think of no design as versatile as the wingless wet fly, which may be presented using a number of methods: upstream, like an upstream dry fly; high-sticked; suspended under a bobber; swung (I particularly like this one); fished anywhere in the water column, top to bottom; or dressed to float. Dead-drifted, stripped, jiggled.
Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia and a soft-hackle fan, has so much faith in the design that one year he used one pattern, a soft-hackle Pheasant Tail tied in sizes 4 to 20, to catch bonefish, barred perch, snapper, trout, sea-run brook trout, Atlantic salmon, steelhead, and king and sockeye salmon. “Only once or twice did I feel I could have done better with a different fly,” he wrote.
Ever notice that good ideas are fractal? When observed, they grow and are expanded upon.
History, as it is written down, is a thin narrative at best. As is this one, which is seen through an American glass, not accounting for simultaneous fly development taking place across the entire world, where it surely is taking place, and that greatly influences fly design on our side of the pond as many of us emigrate or travel, while others of us keep our eyes on what’s going on in the greater fly world. I don’t mean this article to be a treatise on fly history, but rather a line of examples representing the evolution of wingless wet-fly design in North America and mainly to present some examples of what is possible working within the framework of a simple design. There has been continuous development of wingless wet flies in the New World, though what we know of past progression comes from what is written or from the fading echoes of what has been said or rumored. The story is far broader than the developments I’m presenting here.
We know that the Yorkshire-style spiders were in use in America by the mid-1800s and possibly earlier, considering the heavy colonization of the eastern part of our continent by immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland. By the 1700s, wingless wet flies were undergoing considerable development in Ireland, resulting in the unique, multi-hackled wingless wets still popular there today and also gaining popularity today with American practitioners of trout Spey, because the elegant Irish designs work well as swung flies. For an example, see the image of the Gosling fly on the previous page.
After surviving the storm of Turkish machine gun fire in the slaughter at Tripoli during World War I, Colonel Thomas Carey, a British soldier from Yorkshire, migrated to British Columbia seeking the Holy Grail of trout flies. While camped at an interior BC lake holding giant Kamloops rainbow trout, Carey developed a design that came to be known as the Carey Special, meant to be fished as the large dragonfly and traveling sedge nymphs that trout in the lakes were feeding on. It’s rumored Carey’s design was inspired by an earlier fly known as the Monkey Faced Louise, tied by a local Indian fly fisher whose name and fly dressing are lost to history. (And we can only wonder what inspired the name of his fly — I’d like to know that story.) Though much larger than the wee flies of Yorkshire, in Carey’s design we can discern a Yorkshire influence in the soft-hackle collar wound in the round, though expanded upon with the application of multiple hackles (from two to four) to create the illusion of mass needed to simulate the large nymphs of the BC lakes. Carey’s design proved killing and was eventually picked up by BC steelheaders, who expanded upon the original body of woodchuck dubbing, employing yarns of various colors attractive to steelhead. It’s possible the Carey Special informed the similar wingless Comet steelhead flies rising to popularity in the 1960s. In our time, the Carey Special is very popular in the Pacific Northwest and beyond for both lake and river fishing, having become a “type,” rather than a single dressing, defined by the original tailing and hackle collar of pheasant rump, with varied bodies composed of herls, floss, yarns, dubbing, and tinsels.
Through the first half of the 1900s, James Leisenring, a machinist from Allentown, Pennsylvania, with a reputation as a good stick, also a fan of the Yorkshire spiders and a correspondent of G. E. M. Skues in Britain, became convinced (like Skues) the Yorkshire spider design could be improved with a more realistic profile, tapered and with a thorax, rather than with the straight bodies prevalent in the Yorkshire designs. Leisenring also furthered Skues’s idea of dressing soft-hackle flies to simulate the nymphal stage of specific insects, particularly the emergent stage, which Pete Hidy, Leisenring’s friend and coauthor, termed “flymphs,” meaning a nymph in the act of becoming a winged fly. One might say Leisenring’s The Art of Tying the Wet Fly, published in 1949, is the seminal work on the American soft-hackle style, and I still consider it among the most influential and truly useful angling books I’ve ever read.
James Leisenring passed in 1951, leaving a growing number of devotees of his approach, notably a Californian, Cal Bird, originator of the killing Bird’s Nest Nymph; also Charles Brooks, a gifted angler and fly designer, whose book, Nymph Fishing for Larger Trout, catalogs a number of soft-hackle designs dressed to simulate the large mayfly drake and stonefly nymphs important to big trout on Western rivers. Also, there was Jack Gartside, a New Englander who knew no boundaries when it came to wingless wet-fly designs. Gartside, like all good fly designers, was a bait maker — that is, his flies were designed to catch fish. During that same era, Gartside stretched the soft-hackle design to include a minnow imitation, Zen simple, dressed with trailing marabou wound around the hook shank and trained back into an elongated teardrop shape, then fronted with some type of soft hackle wound as a collar behind the hook eye, identical to the Popsicle designs used for steelhead. While on a trip to Yellowstone, Gartside kenned he’d like a bigger fly, something that would simulate a number of larger food forms — big nymphs, sculpins, and crayfish — all in one fly, resulting in the Gartside Sparrow, a truly killing pattern and one of my favorites. Like the Carey Special, the Sparrow is an effective design that can be dressed with a variety of body materials to suit. (In contrast to the fly shown here, try a version with a peacock herl body and tail of golden pheasant tail tippets.)
Interest in wingless wet flies broadened and accelerated with the publication of The Soft-Hackled Fly Addict by Sylvester Nemes in 1975. Less an innovator like Gartside, Nemes was more a neoclassicist, following closely in the footsteps of Leisenring and Hidy. Nevertheless, he added an impressive number spider and flymph designs to the soft-hackle catalogue, and his books introduced a new generation of the wee f lies. While on a year-long trip to Scotland and wanting to try a soft-hackle fly for Atlantic salmon, Nemes developed Salar’s Nemesis, possibly his most creative design and one I’ve found to be a good lure fished over anadromous fish and trout.
Syl Nemes certainly was not the first to dress a softhackle fly meant for sea-run fish, because the idea had long been trending among West Coast steelheaders pursuing summer or low-water steelhead. Though they are dressed larger than the wee spiders of Yorkshire, generally size 4 to 8, they are also called “spiders” or “steelhead spiders.” Notable among these were the Spade flies of Alec Jackson, so called because they are hackled with a domestic hen body “spade,” a British term for a body feather. These need not be limited to steelheading, because they work very well fished as trout lures, particularly as swung flies, filling the gap between wee flies and streamers. The Rootbeer Spade shown below is not an Alec Jackson fly, but one of my own patterns. What characterizes a spade-type spider as tied by Jackson, however, is not just the spade feather, but also an underbody of deer or elk hair, which is intended to give the fly some buoyancy (it’s visible at the tail of my fly).
Those of you who’ve been around for a while probably remember the Renegade, a fore-and-aft design with hackle at both ends, fished both wet and dry. The Renegade is a killing fly in the inland Northwest and was much beloved in the days before the rise in popularity of indicator nymphing. It’s a fairly simple dressing, with a peacock herl body, a brown hackle at one end, and a white hackle at the other, usually tied small, size 10 to 16. Jeff Cottrell, a talented fly designer from Whittier, California, who had spent some years in Tierra Del Fuego guiding on the Rio Grande for sea-run brown trout, told me the Renegade, dressed in size 6 or 8 and fished as a swung wet fly, is a killing pattern for those fish. That news lit my bulb, and I started experimenting with the fore-and-aft design as a larger wet fly to swing for trout, resulting in some productive patterns, such the Brahma and Blue pictured below.
I once fished a brook in Vermont where deerflies were so thick I had to keep one hand busy murdering them on the back of my neck while trying to fish, swatting them onto the water with such frequency that the floating bodies kept brook trout rising just downstream of me. The fishing was good, but the pesky biting deerflies eventually ran me off. Yet it got me thinking about all of the stripey, banded bugs we observe around trout streams — deerflies, wasps, sweat bees, false bees, hover flies. Check a trout’s stomach contents in summer, and you’ll likely find some of these. Yet other than the ancient McGinty, we rarely see imitations of these insects. I suspect the dearth of imitations is due to a natural aversion we have for bugs that bite and sting. Regardless, they are very worthwhile to fish, particularly in summer and into fall, when they will always be present in the upper water column. I tie them in size 8 to 12 with bodies of UNI yarn, two colors wound together over the hook shank. On smaller versions, I use size D rod-wrapping thread for the body.
As we tie and fish, we come to see there really is no limit to the options we have for creating effective lures and imitations, working within the wingless wet fly design. It might be centuries-old, but it still draws the attention of our quarry.
Dressingsforthefliesdiscussedinthis article, as well as over one hundred others, are available in Steven Bird’s latest book, Trout Spey and the Art of the Swing, available from Swing the Fly Press.
