Do you tie your own fishing flies?
I’ve never been one for tying my own flies except for a period in 1975 when I was recovering from a bad bout of pneumonia no doubt exacerbated by my fishing forays in the English winter climate.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t a good thing … in fact its probably one of the true pre-requisites for ongoing fly fishing improvements. But I don’t mean tying flies according to the beautifully colured and photographed books of which there are so many. I mean tying flies the proper way … tying based upon what the trout tell you.
Datus Proper, in What the Trout Said
He tells the story of himself and Ned McGuire fishing an Irish stream and it goes something like this …
Datus Proper when he first started fishing Large Dark Olives for trout found his flies to be “trout-proof” but he persevered and over the ensuing 4 years managed through trial and error and by listening to what the trout told him to get to the stage where the trout said more often than not that these Large Dark Olives looked good enough to eat. He knew this only because the trout said so.
In Ireland one season while fishing the Kells Blackwater with Ned during a Blue-winged Olive (BWO) hatch he discovered the trout did not like his BWO imitations, as perfect and uniform and diligently-crafted as Datus considered them.
Time and again he failed to get rises to his BWO in either nymph or dry fly form until eventually he asked Ned if he would like a go … Ned had, in the words of Datus Proper “a big stupid brown fly” tied to his line.
Yet Ned’s first cast of the stupid brown fly rose the trout who suspecting nothing other than a real BWO gulped down the fly without any rush whatsoever. There was no fuss no bother just another rise that was no diferent to any other rise to a natural Blue-winged Olive floating down the stream. The trout had spoken. he thought Ned’s fly was a BWO just like any of the others taken in that lane.
The big stupid fly was too big for a BWO, had neither blue nor olive nor even a wing anywhere near it. In fact it had a “drab brown body of pheasant-tail herl, ribbed with gold, plus a shiny sparse hackle of mahogany red”. It was in fact what was known as a Fancy Fly … it was a Pheasant Tail Red Spinner.
The lesson the trout provided that day (and it was a way Ned frequently fished and caught trout during BWO hatches … it was not a fluke) was as follows …
What you and I think are imitations is irrelevant. Only the trout can truly judge whether a fly is an imitation or not. In this case there was no doubt that the Pheasant Tail Red Spinner imitated a hatching Blue-winged Olive because that’s what the trout said.
This is the best reason why tying you own flies is so important … you can feed the trout tiny variations on a pattern over a period of time until one day the trout says that your fly now looks good enough to eat.
Fly Pattern Imitations
I like the definition from What the Trout Said
“When ‘educated’ trout, proven to be selective, consistently take a given artificial fly with the same rise-form they use for naturals, that fly must be considered an imitation.”
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