Fishing Flies. Smalley

      But nothing can compare with the moment that a fly of your own making … is accepted by the fish.

      Preben Torp Jacobsen, in Judith Dunham,

      The Art of the Trout Fly, 1988.

      This Encyclopedia examines the whole range of fishing flies, from the smallest trout dry fly to the largest bait-fish imitation for catching huge predators. It also goes back in time to the first fly ever recorded for catching fish, almost two millennia ago, and includes some of the most recent fly designs. It also includes flies designed to catch fish in all the far-flung corners of Planet Earth: from the United States to New Zealand, from the British Isles to Patagonia, from Norway’s North Cape to South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Yet, though a fly may have been designed for one purpose (for example, catching peacock bass in an Amazon tributary), it may well be that the same fly might be useful in other situations (to continue our example – catching pike in a cool northern lake). So although a fly may be included in, say, the section on saltwater patterns, it may also be useful for catching freshwater predators, like pike and Nile perch. Thus, while this book is separated into sections, it is essential to remember that, to catch a particular species of fish, there may be relevant flies to be found in more than one section.

      The great problem has been the selection of flies to include here: for it is impossible to include every fly that has been published somewhere (in magazine articles, books or on video/CD). The total number of published flies is quite likely to exceed 100,000 – it would be near impossible to account for them all – and the number increases every month. In his book Flies, published almost 60 years ago, J. Edison Leonard gave nearly 2000 different tyings that would catch most species of fish swimming in the rivers and lakes of the United States. But he was completely outgunned in 1960 by Donald Du Bois in his The Fisherman’s Handbook of Trout Flies. Some 5939 trout flies are listed … add to these the trout flies published since 1960 and the plethora of flies for catching salmon, steelhead and sea trout, bass and pike, and the full array of saltwater fish … and the list could become endless.

      One game played by many an amateur and a few professional fly-tyers, is to claim a fly invented by someone else as their own invention. Another is to change the dressing of a fly just slightly and then to rename the fly. When done deliberately, this is tantamount to theft. Lefty Kreh complained of such behaviour in the Introduction to his Saltwater Fly Patterns:

      During the past ten years many fly patterns, some developed generations ago, were renamed. Or someone sticks an extra feather on a new pattern, or changes the color slightly, and calls it by his or her name. This is something many people, including myself, find distasteful and unfair.

      I agree.

      One effect of this tendency has been that the number of published patterns has mushroomed needlessly. Consider just one category of fly, the Irish salmon shrimps (see here): there are now in excess of 130 published tyings, many of them only slightly different from earlier ones, with new ones being invented every year. Do we need so many? I don’t think so.

      Ed Jaworowski and Bob Popovics described (in their quite revolutionary book on saltwater flies, Pop Fleyes) how a trout angler had approached them to sing the praises of a new nymph he had invented. Its virtue was that it caught trout. ‘Well, then, we probably don’t need it,’ they replied to the angler, who seemed taken aback by their response. ‘If you had said that your fly sinks, floats, or casts better, acts differently, absorbs water, sheds water, anything, that’s something else.’ Ed and Bob continue:

      Thousands of flies are created annually, and it’s only natural that their creators fall in love with them. But the fact remains that flies like Lefty’s Deceiver, the Clouser Deep Minnow, the Muddler Minnow, the Dahlberg Diver, the Wulff drys, and some others are classics because they broke new ground. They redirected the course of fly tying and, as a result, fly fishing. They have a common element. They evolved from a need – a need to do something better. Note, we did not say they simply did something differently, rather, they answered a need. New fly designs should always strive either to do something previously not possible at all or to do something better than was previously possible, be it ever so small a difference.

      By all means invent ‘new’ patterns for your own use, but don’t go to the press and tell them that your ‘new’ fly is essential unless it is really different in its tying or the way that it fishes!

      Even worse is the publication of flies that have never caught a fish. There is one professional fly-tyer who has invented several salmon flies and published their tyings. That fly-tyer never goes salmon fishing! Some years ago a semi-professional fly-tyer had published, in a book, an imitation of a pale watery dun, but the following year, when pale wateries were hatching out from a river, he asked his host what they were! He had invented a fly to match a real insect that he had never seen! Such flies are untruths.

      The flies that have been selected for this book have all made a major contribution to the progress of fly-tying. They are proven catchers of fish, are good examples of a category of fly, and can be tied because the materials they incorporate are readily obtained. Above all else, the selected flies are for fishing and because many fishing flies have a short life span (sometimes only one cast in a piranha-infested river!) – they should not take too long to tie. Someone once said that if a fly takes more than five minutes to tie, time has been wasted! That may be a little hard … but imagine if you were to spend half an hour tying one fly, and the loss whilst out fishing was ten or more flies per day. Each day’s fishing would require a full day spent in tying.

      There are, of course, many books of fly-tying recipes. This Encyclopedia goes further, and includes details of the history of the flies, of who invented the different styles and categories, and where and when. So contained within it are many of the world’s greatest fly-tyers. It also gives some brief notes on where and when and how flies should be fished. There are also many books, videos, CDs and DVDs on how to tie flies. The beginner should use them and join a fly-tying class, for there is no better way to learn than in the company of someone who is a good tyer and a qualified teacher of fly-tying.

      Above all else this Encyclopedia is a celebration of the world of flies, an important part of the finest occupation that anyone in the world can have – that of a fly-fisher.

      WHAT IS A FISHING FLY?