The art of selecting the right fly

By Jonathan Cherneff

From 40 cents to $4,000, from super-realist to impressionist to post-modern, from Catskill flies tied in Sri Lanka to the flies of the English peerage to those of an American pioneer, there is a fly for every budget and for every fly fisher, but do the fish really care?

Tied to the end of a fly line, the fly is where fly fishing begins. Flies imitate the insects that live in rivers and are the main food for trout. They are made mostly with materials found on the farm: chicken feathers, animal hair, thread É and of course, the hook.

The fly makes all the other gear necessary. Because the fly is so small and light, you need the heavier fly line to carry the fly through the air to the fish. To cast the line you need the rod and the reel. To carry the flies you need a box. To hold the boxes you need a vest. To keep from getting seriously impaled you need hats and glasses. Before you know it you need waders and boats and then guided trips with chilled Chardonnay lunches to discuss what flies the fish are biting.

Fishing with flies seems to date back to ancient Greece. A vase dated 300 A.D. depicts a citizen and his son relaxing after a hectic week spent in town inventing democracy. They are catching fish on flies.

The first how-to book came out in 1496. Dame Julianna Berners's "Treatysse on Fysshinge with an Angle," describes a dozen flies: when they hatch and how to imitate them. Her recipes are mostly grey and black. She used wool and crow feathers to represent the bodies and wings of the natural bugs.

The idea that "fly imitates life" took a major detour during the Victorian era with the emergence of the full dress salmon fly. A full dress salmon fly is a gaudy thing that can incorporate two dozen different materials and take hours to make. Using bold colors and layers of exotic feathers like jungle cock and golden pheasant crest, a full dress salmon fly looks more like a heraldic emblem than a bug. Perhaps that is appropriate for what many call the "sport of kings." But salmon fishing is quite different from trout fishing. Since the salmon do not feed during their spawning runs in the rivers, the salmon fly does not need to represent food.

Around 1900, in the Catskill mountains of New York, Theodore Gordon was pushing the envelope of realistic representation. His innovative "Quill Gordon" fly used a feather stripped to its quill and wrapped around a hook to show the individual segments of the body of a mayfly. This kind of detail may seem silly, but when you have watched a trout swim alongside your fly, carefully examining it, before rejecting it, you might change your mind.

A contemporary fly tier, Bill Logan, is taking realism to the extreme. He spends upwards of 150 hours making a single fly. His bugs not only show segmentations on the body, they show segmentation, shape and texture on the legs! His bugs even have the microscopic hairs on their legs. Logan's super-realistic creations cost in the neighborhood of $4,000. Each. The hook is included.

But realistic detail is not the only way to fool a trout. It is equally important to give the impression of life. My favorite example of this kind of impressionism is the elk-hair caddis. Where the traditional caddis uses lacquered turkey feather to create realistic, but stationary, bug wings, the elk-hair caddis uses a shock of elk-hair to give the impression of motion and a blur of wings. The buoyant elk-hair also helps the fly skip and dance on the surface of the water, as the real caddis flies do. Fish find the impression so compelling that they often strike the fly with a force that carries them clear out of the water.

Now some fly fishers are more interested in the history of the sport than in the detailed entomology. Imagine fishing with an original Carrie Stevens Grey Ghost Streamer on the very spot where Ms. Stevens caught the record brook trout in 1926. Ready the checkbook, because a real Carrie Stevens fly, with provenance, might run several thousand dollars at auction (if you can locate one). A less expensive alternative is to use an "authentic reproduction." For around $30, you can get a recreation, of a Carrie Stevens original, tied by Leslie Hilyard of Ipswich who owns the Carrie Stevens trademark. A third alternative is to buy a run of the mill Grey Ghost streamer from just about any fly tackle store in the world. For only $2, the fly will be short a few feathers from the original design, but odds are you will lose it before you catch your second fish anyway.

Today the cutting edge is the post-modern fly. These flies use manufactured materials and unnatural colors to create abstract forms. Some have nuts and bolts that make them look like tiny robots. The Foam Sandwich grasshopper, for example, is a minimalist construction of three angular pieces of foam rubber fastened to a hook. Yet I have witnessed the most picky brown trout try and eat it without hesitation. Perhaps it captures the essence of the grasshopper?

With so many styles and patterns to choose from, how does a fly fisher go about deciding what fly to use? The accepted science is to "match the hatch." This can be hard, on fertile rivers like the Housatonic, the Farmington and the Deerfield, when three or four different species of flies are hatching at once. You often have to catch a real fly and examine it to know its size and color. The presence of stocked trout throws a monkey wrench into hatch matching, because stockies may never have seen a wild insect before.

But even when the target insect is known, there will be many choices of pattern and style of fly. Ultimately, the selection is about the fly fisher's self-expression.

Certain fly fishers have a predilection towards nymph fishing. Unlike traditional dry fly fishing in which you can see your fly, in nymph fishing the fly is underwater and out of sight. Nymph fishers talk in mystical language about seeing the strike that you cannot see, or feeling the take that feels like nothing, as if nymph fishing were a Zen riddle. Yet few disagree that nymph fishing is the surest way to catch fish.

On a recent June evening, I stood at the edge of the Diamond Pool on the Deefield River in Western Massachusetts. Caddis flies came off the water in sheets and flying their low zig-zag pattern just above the water surface. Occasionally driven to madness, a fish would leap out of the water and try to grab one in flight.

I tied on a sparsely constructed number eighteen deer-hair caddis with a charcoal-grey body. My friend Jimmy is a natural nymph fisherman. He was using a tan caddis larva with a dark brown head tied on a curved hook. Jimmy fished his fly downstream waiting until he "knew" that the fly was in front of an unseen fish, then he would lift the fly up as if it were swimming to the surface. I fished mine up and across the current making it dance across the riffles. We were both feeling confident.

Just then, a large ruddy-complexioned man came splashing into the water just a little too close to us. Immediately, he hooked a fish and in a crude attempt to be neighborly, he called out "Red Humpy!" Now the Red Humpy is an oversized bright red fly with unruly tufts of deer hair. Frankly, it is a fly that serious fly fishers won't admit to owning. It doesn’t look anything like a caddis fly. I would have thought the fish would object to such an intrusion during their dinner hour. But then, maybe this guy was a telemarketer?