how do you define a dry fly?’ The hair-splitters and devil’s advocates, the leg-pullers and the ayatollahs were out in force. The Worrifers and Worrabouters had their hands up in a flash.
Frederic Halford is to blame. Up to the late 19th century, the flies anglers used on rivers were motley collections of feathers that were mostly cast out across the current in the hope that a fish would make a grab as they swung around, below the surface.
Then, in the 1880s, Halford and his pal George Selwyn Marryat embarked on an intense study of the kinds of winged flies most often taken by trout. Two books resulted. The first, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886), described how these winged, natural flies could be imitated more precisely on hooks. The second, Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889) described how these imitations could best be fished to individual trout that the angler could see.
The advantages of Halford’s new ‘dry fly’ strategy over the old, random, underwater ‘wet’ approach, caused a sensation. Halford found himself at the head of a ‘dry fly cult’ – a position he reinforced by eventually declaring that dry fly fishing was not only more effective than wet fly fishing, but more sporting. Before long, extensive reaches of rivers became restricted to ‘dry fly only’.
Then G.E.M. Skues bobbed up. Whereas Halford and Marryat had studied the adult, winged flies at the surface, Skues studied the underwater nymphs that the adults had hatched from – and developed wonderful imitations of several species. Like Halford, Skues cast his flies only to fish he could see and he, too, attracted a large following. The Halfordians were unmoved. They classed Skues’ underwater nymphs with the old-style wet flies, declared they were just as ‘unsporting’ – and banned them from their waters. Battle was joined between the two camps and raged for decades.
The cordite still hangs on the air. Even today, some fisheries restrict angling to the dry fly in the belief it is more sporting. Hence the short fuses on the web-site when someone asked what is and is not a ‘dry fly’ – a question complicated, of late, by the arrival of new flies designed for fishing not on the surface film or under it but actually in it, part in and part out of the water. Could emergers be fished on dry fly-only waters, as well?
Internet hackles were up in a flash. We had this response, that response, the other response, some of them extraordinarily acrid. They went on and on. The high point for me came when someone decided he could cut through it all. When is a dry fly a dry fly? No problem. You dropped your fly into a glass of water. If 50 percent of it floated above the surface, then it was dry and okay to use on dry fly-only streams. If not, it should be kept for wet-fly waters.
Cyril Pybus would have groaned. He’d have seen it coming a mile off. Worrif, someone said, a fly is 50.1 per cent above the surface in the tumbler test and 49.9 per cent below – or, if it comes to that, vice-versa. Where did these flies stand – or in the latter case, sink? Worrabout eddies and flows, another wanted to know. There were none of these in a glass but they were all over the place on rivers and these could influence the way a fly appeared. Exactly, said someone else – and worrif the glass itself influenced the thickness of the surface tension, and made it different from the surface tension in open water? That could affect a fly, too. And, and, and.
The debate went on for pages and pages, but I eventually fell asleep at my terminal. Many of the contributions – they ran well into three figures – were inordinately long and split every previously splat hair, several times over. Thousands of visitor-hits had been recorded, leaving many readers – no doubt like me – variously fascinated, appalled and amused.
My own view? In my experience, the best fisheries are those that have no rules at all and where the rods can be left to fish as much in the interests of the river and other members, as in their own results on the day. These waters tend, however, to be in the hands of small syndicates whose members are carefully selected and who get to know one another well.
Most other waters do have rules. It is clear that an owner or fishery manager can make any rules he chooses and that if an angler doesn’t like them, he can go elsewhere. There are excellent reasons on some rivers – reasons not connected with prejudice but with conservation – for limiting techniques and catches and the pressures on the water. Restricting fishing to dry fly-only is one of them, but there are others. Finally, where a rule like dry-fly only does exist, it is incumbent on the fishery to make any special refinements crystal clear.
Speaking personally, I carry no tumblers of water and no measuring devices. Where an unelaborated dry fly rule exists, anything I can see on the surface is a dry fly and anything I can’t is a wet. That’s it.
And as to angels on a pin head, who said they can dance, anyway? I mean, sir – worrif they’ve all got two left feet?
FISH will, on their day, take pretty well anything. There is scarcely a comestible you can think of that has not, at some time or another, caught them. Undeniably, though, some baits are more consistently successful than others and we all have our favourites.
Many of the best baits can be bought from tackle shops and lots of others come free from the wide outdoors. Acquiring the former is straightforward. Getting our hands on the latter can lead to excitements and delights, not all of them obvious or expected. I once risked the censors to write about them – and in a family newspaper, at that.
ONE of angling’s weeklies marked the opening of a new coarse season on rivers with a supplement devoted to the ‘Top 50 Baits’.
The supplement was structured rather in the manner of the dance-of-seven-veils. The revelations came little by little. They were made from the outside in. It was only at the very end that the Top Two – the tit-bits, so to speak – were revealed. Before them came as extraordinary a smorgasbord of fishy temptations as can have been served up in one place at one time.
Squid was Bait No 50. Marshmallows, the ‘Floating Kings of Confectionery’ as the weekly described them, came in at 49, elderberries at 46, beef steak and mince at 45. Potatoes came to the boil at 35, artificial spinners and spoons wobbled into view at 34 and cheese got a sniff in at 19. As might be expected whole fish, fillets of fish, bits of fish littered the list of delights for the carnivores and plenty of cereals, fruits and cooked pulses were there for the veggies.
When the last veils were whipped aside, we found ourselves ogling The Big Two. Top Bait No 1 was maggots, Top Bait No 2 was bread. It was the lack of detail on Top Bait No 3 that was surprising. Top Bait No 3 was that anaconda of the lawn and vegetable patch, the lobworm. What was missing was an appreciation of the sporting opportunities the lobworm offers in its own wriggly right. It is an omission I want to make good, now.
Only a masochist digs for worms. Every angler knows that lobworms aplenty will be found lying right out in the open, on top of the lawn at night. All that is required to catch them is a torch, a tin, the stalking skills of a Kalahari bushman and the fastest forefinger and thumb in the west.
I don’t know why lobworms come up at night, but I can guess. Some say it’s because they are attracted by the cool night air. Others say they want to drink the dew from the grass. More likely, I suspect, is the prospect of getting up to what nature expects all of us to get up to on the grass under the cover of darkness at some time or other – only faster and more cheaply.
When it comes to courtship, remember, lobworms have little use for chat. When pursuing their wriggly ends, they have no need to splash out on drinks and dinner, quite possibly wasted. There are no clothes to be fumbled off. All they have to do is lie out there in the buff, waiting for a touch from another pointy
