There must, by now, be far more fishing flies than there are the insects and sub-aquatic life forms they are meant to imitate.
There are literally millions of them. If ever mankind was offered a locus for the exercise of imagination, it is a small, sometimes minute metal hook waiting to become a fishing fly, to be painstakingly dressed in scraps of feathers, wools, furs, deer hair, otter’s whiskers, silks and cottons and any amount of other haberdashery.
The only limit to what can be created in the way of these fanciful inventions is ideation, inspiration, or creativity itself — in other words, there ain’t no limit. In a recent edition of the magazine Trout and Salmon, there is an article devoted to explaining the merits of no fewer than 12 infinitely subtle variations of a single basic still-water nymph pattern, the Diawl Bach. Similar discussions take place in the same edition of at least another two dozen flies.
The taxonomy of fishing flies is another matter. Thinking up a new fly must invariably be followed by thinking up a suitable name for it. Will it be a Pink-Cheeked Blagdon, a Pay Dirt, a Mountain Hopper, a Duckworth’s Dargle Delight, a Red-Arsed Bastard? Those, incidentally, are all in existence.
To a beginner fly-fisher, even the very limited choice of flies offered in an angling shop must be baffling. What I would like to do, now and then in this column, is to round up the opinions of established maestros/maestresses of the fly-rod and
reveal what they believe are basic necessities in any fly-box.
I begin with a fly-fisherman and fly-tier of repute: Eddie Herbst, a linchpin member of the Cape Piscatorial Society. If you want to know what Eddie looks like, refer to SABC television news, where he makes regular appearances.
Eddie is what might be called a miniaturist. He has refined his fly-fishing to the delicate, the analytical and the shrewd.
He never uses more than a one-weight rod — a toothpick in a world of heavy branches. His flies are all at the lilliputian end of the scale. He’s forgotten more about fly-fishing than you’ll find in a dozen tomes, and he know how to express his knowledge with style.
I asked Eddie, if for the rest of his fishing days, he was allowed only six flies, which would they be. If based on only commercially available flies, he would choose: as attractor dry-flies, the Royal Wulff and Carabou Spider; as a mayfly
imitation, the Adams; as a caddis imitation, the Elk Hair Sedge; as a wet fly, the Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear; as a nymph, Frank Sawyer’s Pheasant Tail Nymph. All of these in size 16 hooks or smaller.
From his list it can be seen that Eddie is principally a dry-fly man. Remember the opening of Norman Maclean’s small classic A River Runs Through It, where Maclean reflects on how his father, a Presbyterian minister, spoke of Christ’s disciples being fishermen: ‘and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favourite, was a dry-fly fishermanâ€.
While not suggesting Eddie Herbst is of discipular compass, it has to be acknowledged that dry-fly fishing is generally regarded as the quality street of the art, though some will hold that fast-water nymph fishing is an even more rarefied art.
An ‘attractor†fly is something which evolved from English fly-fishing protocols of the 1800s when gentlemen fishermen only cast to trout they could see and used only strict imitations of the insects the trout were feeding on. The attractor fly was for those occasions when the fish weren’t feeding on anything.
The Royal Wulff is a slightly jazzed-up version of an 1820s English fly pattern; the Carabou Spider was invented by the late Mark MacKereth, once a double-bass player in the equally late Cape Town Symphony Orchestra.
‘As a strict imitation of mayfly hatches, nothing beats the American Pattern, the Adams, a superb salt-and-pepper-coloured creation of genius,†argues Eddie.
He goes on to say: ‘In the later afternoon when sedges return to the water to lay their eggs, and moths emerge from their hiding places, an American dry-fly pattern, Al Troth’s Elk Hair Caddis reigns supreme. Nor is its effectiveness limited to twilight hours.â€
The last two flies on Eddie’s list have both been popular choices since the 1950s. They have fooled innumerable fastwater fish.
As they refer to a practised end of the fly-fishing art, Eddie Herbst’s choices for ‘Six Indispensables†might seem a bit esoteric. In future columns I’ll get the opinions of lesser fly-rod mortals.