Fishing Flies

Thread: Dark brown.

Body: Tying thread.

Hackle (called ‘wings’ by Pritt): Reddish feather from the back of a grouse.

Plate 8 from T. E. Pritt’s Yorkshire Wet Flies – note that in the 1880s, fly hooks were eyeless.

BLUE PARTRIDGE

Hook: Size 14.

Thread: Blue.

Body: Tying thread, dubbed with a little blue lamb’s wool.

Hackle (called ‘Wings’ by Pritt): Partridge back.

These styles of flies reached maturity in the Victorian era, at the height of British imperial power. As they travelled the empire, so the British took with them the brown trout that they loved to catch back at home – and to catch those trout they took their flies.

Captain G. D. Hamilton first visited New Zealand in about 1845 and he moved there in about 1860 to farm sheep, turning 40,000 acres of virgin country into ‘English grasses’. In his book Trout-Fishing and Sport in Maoriland (1904), Hamilton relates how he stocked the river that flowed near to where he settled in the early 1870s, with brown trout. Ova were transported by ship on ice halfway round the world – with their journey completed on the backs of pack-mules. Others stocked the watercourses of New Zealand with rainbow trout from North America. Some of these stocked fish became migratory, swimming down to the ocean and returning to spawn as sea trout; others migrated into big lakes. The trout grew much bigger in New Zealand waters than they did back at home: ‘It may be taken as a rule that all streams with sufficient water contain some exceptionally large trout, up to 8lb., 10lb., 11lb., and 12lb. in weight.’

Hooks for tying flies were imported from England, but the hooks sent out to New Zealand were not strong enough to hold these big trout. So Hamilton wrote to manufacturers in the then capital of hook-making, Redditch, requesting they make especially strong hooks for him. These, together with the five fly patterns that Hamilton came up with, were all that anyone needed to catch New Zealand trout.

These flies are commonly known as red hackle, hare’s-ear, black hackle, black spider, hare’s-ear spider.

No. 1, red hackle, light-brown mallard wing, yellow-silk body, is the most easily seen when the water is discoloured, and therefore best for use at that time.

No.2, turn of brown partridge hackle, hare’s-ear body, light woodcock wing, put together with yellow silk: A killing fly when the weather is clear and low.

No. 3, black hackle, grouse wing, brown-silk body, put together with brown silk: Easily seen when the water is clear and low, and kills well then.

No. 4, spider, black hackle, tied with brown silk, brown-silk body: Easily seen when the water is clear and low. A good fly to use as a tail fly when the trout are getting into high condition and shy, and when there is bright sunshine.

No. 5, spider, brown partridge hackle, hare’s-ear body, put together with yellow silk: Very killing, when the water is clear and low, among high-conditioned and shy trout. Used as a tail fly this is perhaps the most reliable of the whole, particularly among large trout of 2lb. and upwards.

Colour plate from Captain Hamilton’s Trout-Fishing and Sport in Maoriland, showing his five fly patterns.

A similar influx of fly-fishers occurred into the United States and Canada, though, because they had their own indigenous rainbow and cutthroat trout in the west, and a char that the colonists thought was a trout and that they called brook trout, the introduction of brown trout was later than many other parts of the English-speaking world. The first arrived in about 1880 – the fly-fishers had arrived much earlier. Paul Schullery provides excellent evidence that Richard Franck, author of Northern Memoirs, lived (and fly-fished?) in the United States between 1660 and 1687. Schullery also showed how many others took fly-fishing to the New World and that, until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, most fly-fishing tackle was imported from Britain. But then, because of the vast array of river, lake and saltwater habitats; the far larger number of fish species that can be caught with artificial flies; and a wealth of natural materials available for tying flies – fly-fishing and fly-tying in North America mushroomed. And because fly-fishers in North America have never been as constrained as fly-fishers in Europe (and especially England) by rules about what flies can or cannot be used, they eventually developed flies and techniques that could hardly have originated elsewhere. Can you imagine fishing a sculpin or minnow imitation on an English chalk stream? Or one of Gary LaFontaine’s DEEP SPARKLE CADDIS PUPAE (see here (#litres_trial_promo)) on the Derbyshire Wye, where the rule is ‘dry fly only’ and even emergers are banned?

Thus far we have looked mainly at flies that imitate insects; flies that are designed for catching trout. Now we will look to some of the earliest flies for catching other species of fish.

EARLY ATLANTIC SALMON FLIES

It was only when the reel and rods with rings became readily available in the second half of the seventeenth century that fly-fishing for salmon became really possible. With a fixed, short line attached to the end of the rod, playing a salmon would have been well nigh impossible. Leonard Mascall pointed out the problem in A booke of fishing with Hooke and Line (1590): ‘The Salmon is a gentle fish, but he is cumbrous to take.’ Gervase Markham agreed, in The Second Booke of the English Husbandman (1614):

Now, lastly, as touching the angling for Salmon, albe he is a fish which in truth is unfit for your Travaile, both because hee is too huge and cumbersome, as also in that he naturally delighteth to lie in the bottomes of the great deepe Rivers, and as neare as may bee in the midst of the Channell.

But with a rod and reel, a longer cast could be made and a large fish could be allowed to make long runs and tire itself out.

In his Barker’s Delight, or The Art of Angling (1659), Thomas Barker described a rod with a ring at the tip, the reel and how to tie a salmon fly. The fly, he wrote, ‘must be made of a large hook, which hook must carry six wings, or four at least’. The fly also had a palmered body hackle. Other than that, Barker’s salmon fly was really an overgrown trout fly.

Colonel Robert Venables was perhaps the first person who could really be described as a salmon angler. He fought in the English Civil Wars and then, in July 1649, was sent by Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Parliamentarians, to subdue the Confederate-Royalist alliance in Ireland. From October 1649 to 1654 Venables was governor of Ulster and he took the opportunity to fish that province’s many great salmon rivers. Alas he did not tell us, in his slender book The Experienc’d Angler (1662), the patterns of the flies he used, but gave tips that apply to this day:

The title page from The Experienc’d Angler. This was among the first published illustrations – albeit poor – of the artificial fly.

If you angle in a river that is muddied by rain, or passing through mosses or bogs, you must use a large bodied fly than ordinary … If the water be clear and low, then use a small bodied fly with slender wings … when the water begins to clear after rain, and is a brownish colour, then use a red or orange fly … In dark weather, as well as dark waters, your fly must be dark.

Captain Richard Franck was another Parliamentarian, who wrote his book Northern Memoirs in 1658, though it was not published until 1694. He had not enjoyed the salmon fishing of Ulster, but had remained in Britain where the idea developed that salmon fed like trout but preferred much larger flies, especially dragonflies, also then known as the devil’s needles because they could sew up people’s mouths. So Franck invented a dragonfly imitation:

FRANCK’S GLITTERING FLY

… the body composed of red twisted silk, intermingled with silver, and eye of gold … the wing of a dappled feather of a teal.

Today, many Pacific as well as Atlantic salmon, sea trout and steelhead fall to a fly that is the combination of red, silver and barred teal (or mallard or wigeon).

Following the restoration of the British monarchy and the coronation of Charles II in 1660, many leading figures of the English Commonwealth fled the country. Paul Schullery (American Fly Fishing: A History) provides evidence that Franck fled to the United States, remaining there until sometime in the 1680s. Assuming that he did, he would almost certainly have fished there, and probably with his Glittering Fly for salmon.

In 1681, in The Angler’s Vade Mecum, James Chetham came up with hackle pliers for winding a hackle, and the Horseleech Fly. Horseleech flies were nothing to do with leeches, but derived from a common name for dragonflies – the misbelief being that the flies would drink the blood of horses. They were still in vogue almost 90 years later, when Richard Brookes stated (in The Art of Angling, 1766) that they ‘are of various colours’ and ‘have great Heads, large Bodies, and very long Tails [abdomen], and two, some have three, Pairs of Wings, placed behind each other.’ Incidentally, Paul Schullery also provided evidence that Brookes visited North America, and again, if he did so then perhaps he would also have fished there for salmon, with his Horseleech Flies.

Brookes wrote 20 years after the first edition of Richard Bowkler’s The Art of Angling (1746) in which we are given the precise dressing for two dragonfly imitations designed for catching salmon.

DRAGONFLY

The wings are made of a reddish brown feather from the wing of a cock turkey, the body of auburn-coloured mohair warped with yellow silk, and a ginger cock’s hackle wrapped under the wings; the hook No. 2 or 3. Or it may be varied thus; the wings of a rich brown feather from a heron’s wing; the body drab, or olive-coloured mohair, a bittern’s hackle under the wings, and a forked tail. This fly is about two inches in length.

KING’S FISHER, OR PEACOCK FLY

The wings are made of a feather from the neck or tail of a peacock; the body of a deep green mohair, warped with light green silk; and a jay’s feather striped blue and white, wrapped under the wings; the hook No. 2 or 3. It may be thus varied; the wings of a dark shining green feather from a drake’s wing [in drake mallard the speculum is blue, in the teal it is green] the body of green mohair warped with chocolate silk; and a bittern’s hackle under the 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 (#litres_trial_promo)) and then the sudden explosion of gaudy, what we now call ‘classic’, salmon flies (see here (#litres_trial_promo)).

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 (#ulink_79708303-a053-592f-bbd9-d8ec9a531667)).