A Golden Age
Third, communication. Instruction is, of course, a form of communication, but I’m speaking about the less formal exchange of ideas among amateur tiers. And here, nothing has served fly tying more productively than the Internet. Some of this online material inevitably has a blind-leading-the-blind quality about it, but a great deal more has enlarged the tier’s world of fly design and material use.
I’d say that one of the biggest single sources of energy in American tying has been the infusion of ideas from Europe (CDC, for example, or bead heads, or approaches to midge and emerger design). Some of these ideas are in fact quite old, but their grafting onto American tying has furnished a real vigor and accounts in part for a kind of hybridity in fly design that I think is conspicuous in the craft today. (American tying has had its influence in Europe as well, though I think to a lesser extent.)
Fourth, necessity (or at least perceived necessity). Like it or not, since the mid-twentieth century American fly fishing has marched steadily toward hatch-matching, in principle if not always in practice. But it’s the principle that matters here. Imitating the specific life stages of particular aquatic insects has given fly tying a highly focused direction, much more so than the often arbitrary, hit-or-miss nature of concocting attractor patterns. Tiers, I believe, see themselves as having a well-defined goal, and the process of getting there has stimulated imaginations and encouraged innovation.
Lastly, The Movie. I hate to drag out this poor horse and flog it again, but humor me; it’s something of a pet theory. The release of A River Runs Through It in 1992 coincided with, and is widely believe to have caused, a sudden influx of new people into fly fishing that was generally vilified by pre-Movie anglers for crowding the rivers with well-heeled, unmannered dilettantes who drove up the price of gear and guides, bought up trout streams, and then just as abruptly fluttered off to take up heli-skiing and cigars. But some of these folks stuck with fly fishing, appreciated it, and grew passionate about it for exactly the same reasons that the rest of us did. A portion of them, inevitably, were drawn to fly tying. While their presence as anglers was immediately felt—all that takes is a rod, reel, a fistful of credit cards, and an increasingly scarce spot on the water—their presence as tiers necessarily took more time to make itself known. A little over a decade later, we’re seeing a kind aftershock as this generation or wave of tiers is now hitting its stride. Just a speculation, but the timing adds up.
It’s tempting to ask if any of this makes a difference, if the new design ideas or the technical sophistication in tying are necessary. Are the new patterns better than old ones? Will they help us catch more fish?
Perhaps a handful of them will, but probably just a few. The answer though is really irrelevant because the question is. Fly tying is not fly fishing. And though there are obvious and important points of contact between the two, fly tying has always led a parallel life, semi-independent of fishing. Think of full-dress Atlantic salmon flies—the extraordinary uses of materials, the fantastical designs, the flawless technique. All of it has very little to do with catching fish, and the same is true, in part, of trout-fly tying. A dimension of the craft exists for its own sake, purely from intrinsic interest.
A failure to appreciate the difference between fishing and tying perhaps represents the biggest potential downside to the golden age. If you see fly fishing and fly tying as more closely allied than they really are, then the direction to head is always toward the new pattern, the secret fly, the magic bullet. Imitating the appearance of living food forms is the trout-fly tier’s task, or most of it anyway. The angler’s job is to present it in the most lifelike way possible. There is no pattern so good, no fly so excellently tied that it can outweigh the imperfect technique with which, alas, some of us seemed destined to live.
But that doesn’t diminish the particular species of hope that comes with fishing a new pattern or the satisfaction taken in a well-tied fly. Nor does it overshadow the pleasure of observing, or participating in, this new vitality in tying. Industry insiders bleat endlessly these days about the lack of new blood, new life in the sport. Seems to me they’re looking in the wrong place.
Ted Leeson is coauthor of The Fly Tier’s Benchside Reference (Amato Books). He lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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