Читать книгу Fishing Flies - Smalley - Страница 26

During the 200 years following the publications of Barker and Cotton, three different styles of trout fly became established. The first was a winged fly that was an attempt to imitate real flies. This and the second style, the ‘buzz’ fly can best be seen in Alfred Ronalds’ The Fly-Fisher’s Entomology, which was first published in 1836 and was still in print in a new edition as late as 1921. His book was also the first to have fairly good illustrations of both the natural fly and corresponding imitative fly. The following are typical examples.

Plate 1

Plate 2

Plates from The Fly-Fisher’s Entomology, showing some of the earliest coloured illustrations of real and artificial trout flies.

STYLE ONE – THE WINGED IMITATIVE TROUT FLY (SEE PLATE 1, LOWER-LEFT FLY)

Example: Little Yellow May Dun

Hook: Size 15.

Thread: Not given; presumed yellow.

Tails: Two whisks from a dun hackle.

Body: Pale ginger fur from the back of a hare’s ear.

Rib: Yellow silk.

Hackle (Ronalds called this ‘Legs’): A light dun hackle lightly dyed yellow-green.

Wings: Drake mallard lightly dyed yellow-green.

STYLE TWO – THE BUZZ TROUT FLY (SEE PLATE 2, SECOND FLY FROM BOTTOM)

This was a fly with a palmered body hackle, like the Palmer flies of Cotton (see here). The term ‘made buzz’ indicated the palmered hackle.

Example: Marlow Buzz

Hook: Not given; size 12 suggested.

Thread: Red.

Body: Black ostrich herl and peacock herl twisted and wound together.

Wings and legs: ‘Are made buzz with a dark furnace hackle.’

STYLE THREE – THE NORTH COUNTRY SPIDER (ALSO CALLED THE SOFT-HACKLED WET FLY)

Two Yorkshire men were instrumental in establishing this style, Michael Theakston, author of British Angling Flies (1853), and Francis M. Walbran, who edited a later edition of Theakston. This style of fly was later catalogued by T. E. Pritt in Yorkshire Wet Flies (1885), reprinted the following year as North-Country Wet Flies. These are still often fished today, on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Antipodes – they are therefore described more fully here.

Spider wet flies have the simplest of bodies, often just of tying thread (silk), perhaps with a wisp of dubbing, and they have only two or two and a half turns of a soft hackle; a few also have very slender wings . They therefore suggest a fragile nymph or a waterlogged adult fly close to the surface.

Plate 8 of Pritt’s book includes six that are not included in the later section on North Country Spiders, and they have been included here to illustrate this style of trout fly.

OLD MASTER

Hook: Size 14.

Thread: Ash coloured.

Body: Tying thread, wrapped over with heron’s herl.

Hackle (called ‘Wings’ by Pritt): Woodcock underwing covert.

STONE MIDGE

Hook: Size 15.

Thread: Ash coloured.

Body: Tying thread, dubbed sparely with heron’s herl.

Hackle (called ‘Wings’ by Pritt): Pewit’s [lapwing] neck, breast or rump.

Head: Magpie herl.

GREY MIDGE

Hook: Size 15.

Thread: Yellow.

Body: Tying thread.

Hackle (called ‘Wings’ by Pritt): Woodcock breast.

Head: Peacock herl.

KNOTTED MIDGE

Hook: Size 15.

Thread: Ash coloured.

Body: Tying thread, dubbed heron herl.

Hackle (called ‘Wings’ by Pritt): Back of a swift or a martin, or pewit shoulder.

Head: Magpie herl.

SANDY MOORGAME

Hook: Size 15.

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) 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.