Breaking with Tradition
It was like stepping into the Garden of Eden. After a decade of reading about Theodore Gordon, Edward R. Hewitt, and others who had shaped the course of American fly fishing, I was finally on their river, the Neversink, in the Catskills, the cradle of angling civilization in the New World. This is the water where Gordon invented the first American dry fly, where Hewitt conducted his experiments with nymphs, and where Preston Jennings collected many of the insects for his seminal Book of Trout Flies.
It is, of course, no longer the Garden as God made it. Only a few miles upstream from where I cast my flies, the Neversink Reservoir, having drowned so many pools once favored by Hewitt and Gordon, siphons much of the water off to Gomorrah at the mouth of the Hudson. What’s left is a relative trickle, a tailwater flowing clear and cold from the bottom of Neversink dam.
But what a trickle it is. Good fortune and two friends, Torrey and Aaron, brought me to a stretch of water that, surrounded by miles of private land, is protected from the worm dunkers that plague the rest of the river. Joining us was the landowner, Steve, who had known nothing of the river’s bounty or its storied past when he purchased his piece of Paradise. Here, well below club waters stocked with hatchery-bred “trophies,” we found only wild, mostly brown trout. They ranged from fingerlings, proof of natural reproduction, to crafty seniors of 20 inches or more that taunted us with infrequent rises behind fallen logs against the far bank. Here the river sweeps over fertile riffles, plunges into deep pools, carves prime lies for big trout under brushy banks, and relaxes into long, slow reaches where trout sip emergers and spent spinners and just dare you to cast a matching pattern over them.
Emergers? Spent spinners? These aren’t the high-floating flies of the Neversink pioneers, or of their English mentors. To consider such novelties on the river where the Quill Gordon first floated high and proud felt like heresy. Although I place a high value on tradition and history, I came here to catch fish, not kneel at the altar of the Catskills dry fly. I came to exercise our freedom from the tyranny of Old World patterns and techniques, and to embrace the Americanization of fly fishing.
Beyond building dams that upset the natural balance on many of our best trout streams, much has changed in the past half century. What has evolved is our understanding of the creatures that inhabit the streams, especially the aquatic insects that put the word “fly” in “fly fishing,” the patterns that we use to imitate those insects, and the peculiar nomenclature that we use when relating the imitations to the naturals.
My evening on the Neversink served up several striking examples. Aaron promised blanket Sulfur hatches and spinner falls so dense that wing tips would touch; but neither hatches nor rivers come with iron-clad guarantees. Instead we had a series of sparse, overlapping hatches, similar to what I encounter at home on the freestone streams of northern New England. That leveled the playing field somewhat. Even though my presentation skills lag far behind those of my two companions, I have a slight edge when it comes to matching the hatch.
First to come off was Epeorus vitreus, known in some circles as the Gray Fox and in others as the Little Yellow Quill, despite the female’s earthy, orange body. The March Brown, Maccaffertium (formerly Stenonema) vicarium,made a brief appearance, followed by a few Sulfurs (Ephemerella dorothea), Light Cahills (smaller, lighter relatives of the March Brown), and a mating swarm of olive-dun caddisflies (Brachycentrus americanus) that showed little interest in making contact with the water. I also saw a few Blue-winged Olives; there are almost always olives, of one sort or another.
Epeorus vitreus is the late spring cousin of E. pleuralis, listed in every angling entomology since Jennings’ Book of Trout Flies as the Quill Gordon. The pattern looks nothing like the dun, and Jennings admitted to having no proof that Gordon designed his fly to match that particular hatch, but he was “well satisfied that a well-tied Gordon will be taken by the trout for this natural fly.” His use of pattern names as subheadings for the scientific names was an editorial indiscretion that firmly established the tradition of using the two interchangeably. In modeling his “Q. G.” after the set of dry flies he received from Frederick Halford in 1890, Gordon had forged a link with English methods and materials that would remain unbroken for decades.
We’ve since learned that Epeorus mayflies, including pleuralis and vitreus, cast their nymphal shucks on the bottom of the river and swim to the surface in their winged state. Fish eat more of them during the ascent than at the surface, and a rising wet fly takes more trout than a high-floating dry, especially during warm weather when the insects take off quickly. My favorite tactic during a vitreus hatch is the lift devised by Jim Leisenring in Pennsylvania, using a soft-hackle variation that I call the SASH (Spectrumized Amber Soft Hackle). I used it to catch my first Neversink trout by working the edges of the current where it poured into a deep, slow pool. I still fish a Quill Gordon on occasion but never for hatching Epeorus.
Both the Eastern March Brown and the Light Cahill derive their common names from Old World patterns that the Catskills masters appropriated and modified to imitate New World mayflies. The imitations are fully-hackled relics that work well in riffles and in fast pocketwater where clinging nymphs abound and where fish are conditioned to make quick decisions. But the biggest fish are in slower water that allows them to feed more efficiently, with less effort and greater scrutiny. They target the emergers that are most vulnerable while transitioning from nymph or pupa to winged adult. When hatching Sulfurs blanket the water, the bigger fish conserve energy by targeting the flies most likely to still be there when they reach the surface.
The emphasis on emergence didn’t gain momentum until the late 1970s when two anglers from the upper Midwest, Doug Swisher and Carl Richards, determined that the selective trout of their more placid rivers often refused high-floating flies in favor of low-floating ones and that all of that hackle failed to provide the proper silhouette. Their radical fly design, the No-hackle, joined a growing number of new and innovative patterns engineered to sit in, rather than on, the surface film. Many of these new flies incorporated naturally buoyant materials, including deer body hair, snowshoe hare’s fur, CDC, and closed-cell foam.
The bulk of innovation in American dry-fly patterns over the past 25 years (and the revival of the soft-hackle fly) has focused on the period of emergence. It has also shifted to the West, where the bonds of tradition are even more tenuous. The pattern that I now use for spring emergers, especially during overlapping hatches, combines the characteristics of at least two Western patterns, the X-Caddis and Harrop’s Hairwing Dun, with a thorax blended of synthetic fibers to imitate what I call the “cellophane effect” caused by the separation of the nymphal skin just before emergence. I use a biot, the modern replacement for the stripped quill, to form the abdomen.
Of all the Old World nicknames used in American angling, none is more abused than “Blue-winged Olive.” We’ve applied it to the Baetis hatches of the early spring; the late spring and high summer emergence of Attenella, Drunella, and Serratella species (all from the family Ephemerellidae); and the autumn menagerie of tiny Acentrella, Procloeon, and other Baetidae. It is a collection so varied in size, shape, color, and most important, behavior, that it could hardly be represented by a single pattern. The nickname comes from the English imitation of the three-tailed Ephemerella ignita, a distant cousin of our Eastern summer olives and Western Green Drakes. We’ve got specialized patterns for all of those now that emphasize the bright-green bodies of the freshly emerged duns.
For both the spring and tiny autumn Baetidae, it seems each year brings at least six new variations on the Blue-winged Olive, so forgive me if I offer just one more. It caught its inaugural trout during an emergence of Acentrella, a month before the disputed presidential election of 2000. The Hanging Chad is a hybrid of an English classic, the Sawyer Pheasant Tail, and a thoroughly modern concept, the so-called deep-hanging surface emergers typified by the Klinkhamer Special. These patterns present a foreshortened perspective to the trout, thereby reducing the need for exact sizing. They also provide a wing post that is easy to see.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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