A River Never Sleeps

But I became a fly-fisherman and a fly tier. And over the years of practicing these pleasures have developed, in the back of my mind, some doubts as to just what fly-fishing is and just what constitutes a fly.

I first fished with a fly in 1942 at Lac Lejeune, a famous Kamloops trout lake in British Columbia’s Interior. I was with my father and one of his best friends, "uncle" Med. In those days the flies used were often English flies like the Dusty Miller, the Black Gnat and a fly they once tried to ban because it was so deadly - the Alexandra. Mingled in the fashionable fly-box of that era were patterns by the well known Paul Lake guide, Bill Nation. If one were to compare that fly-box to the modern one, the conclusion would be that in days of yore flies weren't meant to look much like anything a trout might encounter on his constant search for food. But the old flies worked and I often wonder how they would do today. Is there some mysterious evolutionary process where fish learn, in time, to look down their noses at a Black O'Lindsay, or a Nation's Special and insist upon a Shaw's Mayfly Nymph or Brian Chan's Red Butted Chironomid, both at least impressionistic representatives of the real critter?

I supposed what I clumsily seek in this rambling discourse, is some sort of boundaries that contain what is fly fishing and what is not. And this question is scarcely new. Poor old G.E.M. Skues, still perhaps the most famous nympher of his time, was driven from the Test for using a nymph where Halford and his disciples demanded that the then relatively new technique of fishing "dry" be exclusively employed.

Perhaps the best way to start the discussion in earnest is to look at what a fly was 30 years ago when I started to tie with some seriousness. There were roughly three main categories: dry, that is to say surface flies; wet, which is to say winged flies that sank, and nymphs. These subdivided into three overlapping categories: those that simply attracted; those that gave the impression of an aquatic dweller, and those that would have the real thing trying to mate with them. Some wet flies, those for Atlantic Salmon especially, distinctly did not imitate food forms since their quarry didn't feed on anything in the places they were used. Some wet flies were, it was supposed, representative of an emerging insect but nymphs ranged all the way from what was really intended to be one thing only, to offerings that fish might take as looking like a number of foods.

Dries were interesting. If one is to believe the literature out of the Catskills, the dryfly presented to imitate a hatch simply had to be a Hendrickson not a Quill Gordon and then it had to be perfectly constructed with all the proper ingredients and the right size. On waters in the North American West, somehow the fish weren't so selective and such imprecise offerings like the Humpy or the Tom Thumb seemed to do just fine no matter what was hatching. There was, then, a lot of leeway as to what a fly was but most fly-fishermen could tell you what it wasn't.

I think the problem started, as so many do, in England with the popularity of reservoir fishing for enormous, often recently planted, semi tailless, stew pond raised Rainbows. This brought into the Fly Pattern books such monstrosities as Dog Nobblers and Baby Dolls which could only, I suspect, catch fish because they pissed them off. But soon thereafter came the real change from the traditional as scarce traditional trout fishing drove fishermen after other fresh water species like bass and onto the oceans for bonefish and other exotic species.

While we had always accepted that a "fly" might include a leech or a fresh water shrimp, now it could imitate a crab, a squid or, perhaps, a bullfrog. It was a short step from this to the use of non traditional materials such as gold beads, squiggly, ready-made hunks of plastic or what has now become so fashionable, epoxy, a nauseating witches brew of two sticky globs that must be mixed then molded into rock hard parts of what we still call a fly and bits of coloured wood which we call a fly because we've attached a feather to it.

I started this article without the faintest idea as to where it would end. I still don't know. But I do know that some things placed before this aging fly fisherman by the best of fly fishing magazines are simply not flies. I don't know why they aren't but, dammit they're not.

No one I'm sure would want to make fly-fishing what some people think it is - something akin to a college fraternity or secret lodge where funny raiment and mindless mumbo jumbo determine who's in and who is not. We certainly don't want to go back to the days when Skues, forced off his river because he used a nymph, then forced others off, because they didn't fish their nymph upstream to a feeding fish. But surely we must set some minimum standards.

I have such a standard for consideration. A fly must be tied in the traditional sense and with traditional materials. It cannot be manufactured by sticking a hook into a piece of balsa wood with a feather glued on. And it must, with the exception of the Atlantic Salmon fly, reasonably represent an aquatic food endemic to the water being fished.

Why exempt Atlantic Salmon flies from the last rule? Because of tradition. And tradition is all important for it is that which ties us to Haig-Brown, Sparse Grey Hackle, John Waller Hills, Lee Wulff, Frank Sawyer (the inventor of the original Pheasant Tail Nymph), Theodore Gordon and on back to Frank Cotton and Dame Julia Berners.