Fishing Flies. Smalley
wings.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the idea that salmon ate dragonflies held sway, George C. Bainbridge arguing, in The Fly Fisher’s Guide (1816), that ‘those [flies] made in imitation of the Dragon flies are the most to be depended upon …’. But then that century saw two major changes in the approach to flies that would catch salmon. The first was the establishment of a core of perhaps half a dozen drab patterns that could be used to catch salmon anywhere (see here) and then the sudden explosion of gaudy, what we now call ‘classic’, salmon flies (see here).
However there remains one more, old salmon fly to be described here, for it hails back to the eighteenth century.
In his Salmon Flies and Fishing (1970), Joseph D. Bates Jr. provided the following fascinating tit-bit:
A plate of salmon flies from G. C. Bainbridge’s The Fly Fisher’s Guide. Besides dragonflies, it was thought that salmon ate other bright insects, like wasps and butterflies!
Herbert Howard, a renowned angler, fly-dresser and angling historian, states that he has seen a family Bible which belonged to a Newfoundland family named Stirling in which are handwritten entries dating back between the years 1720 and 1896. One of the entries, dating 1795, described a hair-winged fly called the Red Cow Fly and says that salmon were caught on it.
RED COW FLY
Tying not known, alas. Perhaps a body of red cow underfur, and the wings from guard hairs or tail?
Although hair-winged flies had probably been in use for some time, this is the first published use of hair for winging flies.
ANCIENT PIKE FLIES
Like trout and salmon, pike are great fish to catch on rod and line, and (despite the many bones) they are very good to eat. So it is not surprising that early attempts were made to catch them on ‘flies’. The earliest was a fifteenth-century fly from Bavaria (see here).
PIKE FLY
The fly must be larger than even those used for salmon; it must be made with a double hook formed of one piece of wire fastened to a good link of gimp; it must be composed of very gaudy materials, such as the feathers of the gold and common pheasant, peacock, mallard etc. With the brown and softest part of bear’s fur, a little dark reddish mohair, with yellow and green mohair for the body, and four or five turns of gold twist slanting round the body; the head must be formed of a little dark brown mohair, some gold twist, and two small black beads for the eyes; the body about three inches long, and made rough, full, and round; the wings not parted, but to stand upright on the back, and some smaller feathers continued thence all down the back to the end of the tail, so that where you finish they may be left a little longer than the hook, and the whole to be about the thickness of a tom-tit, and near three inches long.
Alexander Mackintosh, The Driffield Angler, 1806.
ANOTHER PIKE FLY
… pike rise tolerably freely to flys dressed very largely & of gaudy peacock feathers, sho’d be made up on large double, or even sets of hooks.
The Journal of A. J. Lane (1843, published by Medlar Press 1995).
ANOTHER PIKE FLY
… large size, with a pair of big, outspreading hooks, the body composed of divers coloured pig’s wool, blue, yellow, and green as thick as a man’s little finger, with a large heron’s or other hackle for legs; for the wings two eyes from a peacock’s tail, with a few showy hackles, wide gold or silver foil, and a tail of various coloured hackles; at the head two glass beads are strung on to represent eyes. This which is more like a good sized hummingbird than anything else, is cast and worked like a fly.
Francis Francis, A Book of Angling, 1867.
THE FIRST SALTWATER FLIES
Flies dressed specially to catch saltwater fish are as old as the most ancient flies described here for catching freshwater fish. Again, we go back to Claudius Aelianus, in the second century AD (see also see here): ‘… one of the crew sitting at the stern [of the fishing boat] lets down on either side of the ship lines with hooks. [Each hook is] wrapped in wool of Laconian red, and to each hook attached to feather of a seamew [sea gull]’.
This is a very simple fly; but it would still take mackerel, pollock and even species like bluefish and striped and sea bass.
But though these are flies for catching sea fish, they were not flyfished, and one of the difficulties when it comes to the early days of saltwater flies and fly-fishing is differentiating between ‘feathering’ and ‘fly-fishing’. A good instance of this is found in a book Fly-fishing in Salt and Fresh Water, published in 1851 anonymously (though reputedly by one Mrs Hutchinson). Five patterns are given:
HUTCHINSON FLY ONE
Tag: ½-inch-long, oval gold tinsel.
Tail: Red feather of cock-of-the-rock.
Body rear half: Red wool.
Body front half: Blue wool.
Rib: Oval gold tinsel.
Body hackle: Orange or crimson.
Wing: Underwing of cock-of-the-rock tipped white; overwing mallard dyed yellow.
Head hackle: Blue jay.
HUTCHINSON FLY TWO
Tag: ½-inch-long, oval gold tinsel.
Tail: Strips of red, orange, blue and green swan.
Body rear half: Red wool.
Body front half: Blue wool.
Rib: Oval gold tinsel.
Body hackle: Orange or crimson.
Wing: As tail, with white-tipped brown turkey over.
Head hackle: 0.