So I’ve been reading the classic, Trout by Ray Bergman and it has really got me not only thinking about how we’ve come to do things, but also about how fishing methods can become down right canonical. I’m not sure if this is just an American problem or if we’re all doomed to follow the piper of modernity, but it seems for all of our enthusiastic acceptance of the “newest thing”, we’ve somehow simultaneously sacrificed traditional methods. The new canon of fly fishing seems to leave out a lot of the old good stuff. I guess it really hit me when I was reading the introduction to Trout, by the modern innovator Gary Lafontaine. Mr. Lafontaine recounts a story of fishing Yellowstone a few years back, wherein he comes across a group of expertly outfitted ‘modern’ fly fishers, decked out from head to toe in the newest space-age commando gear. The trouble with these fellows is they couldn’t seem to catch a fish to save their lives, while all the while, Gary was…in the vernacular of the commando, “slaying them.” Turns out that Gary was fishing to the bank with a classic Bergman wet fly called the Light Polka. The commandos were of course impressed, and in gentlemanly fashion Mr. Lafontaine provided them with a couple of extra Light Polkas he had on hand. Apparently brown trout can’t resist the color white.   

What intrigues me about wet flies is that that their application is not intended for the purpose of imitation; rather their use is one of approximation. We’ve become so entomologically obsessed, no doubt due to our need to make things as “high tech” as possible, that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water--so to speak. Science is good. Science belongs in fishing. Obsession with matching the hatch is the worst kind of “angling-science”--because it is too focused. Trying to imitate the exact insect is a kind of strange reductionism. Myopic reductionism is not creative. If we are going to be good scientists out there on the water, we have to think vertically and make sure that we are using all available tools in box. Tom Rosenbauer has said that Trout are a lot more interesting than bugs. It is his opinion that we’ve been spending too much time thinking about bugs and not enough on trout behavior. I couldn’t agree more, which brings me back to the discussion of the wet fly. 

The wet fly is a lot of different things to a trout, depending on how you fish them. Take the Hornberg (a winged wet fly) for example; this fly when fished dry, at the start of the swing, can be a caddis, a hopper, or a salmon fly. As it drowns, again it could be a caddis, and then when stripped back to you—it’s a baitfish. It is this kind of versatility that make a lot of wet fly patterns great. Our friends across the pond in the UK have never stopped using wet flies. In fact the patterns we are now calling “soft hackle” are derived from the wingless North Country Spiders.

 

These patterns are deadly in so many situations…again not because of what they are, but rather because of what they could be. A spider or soft hackle is any number of emerging insects. The English and some open-minded Americans have caught many a large trout on these patterns. In fact there is a very interesting fellow keeping tradition alive down on the white river of Arkansas by the name of Davy Wotton. Davy a British transplant to the U.S. advocates fishing wet flies in a side dropper rig formation. He like many other English anglers fish a “cast” of flies, which is usually about 3-4 flies rigged off of the sides of one’s leader. I must confess, I have not yet attempted this method, as I still just fish two flies one off the bend of the other. The multi spider or soft hackle set up is really interesting as it again does a lot of different things at once. Fishing these general-attractor-emergers all together in the water column approximates the natural phenomenon of aquatic bugs rising from the riverbed to the surface. This setup seems to increase ones chances of catching fish, as it not only presents flies at multiple depths, it presents that irresistible and vulnerable emergent form to each level of the column.