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Date: July 08, 2004 at 22:23:23
From: ken, [pool-64-222-45-217.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: Re: The origins of the flatwing. Lineage
Tying flies is a lot of fun and it is pleasing and peaceful to do. Catching a fish on your own hand tied fly is a big part of fly tying and fishing. We all have favorite flies and that is how it should be. The more flies and methods of fishing we know about and try the more options we have in our fishing.
Every change in fly tying has been resisted unless it was a change of pattern that conformed to norms that already existed.
There have always been political battles between experts on flies and the relative value of their discoveries. The battles between Halford and Skues in the 1800’s were vicious I have been told. Halford, who was the establishment at the time, was very negative towards Skues’s flies and ideas and had their use banned on the fashionable rivers of his time. He did not want them to become known and used by the angling public.
Skues wrote about nymph fishing and other methods of fishing with flies that were not Halfords dead drift dry fly tactics and he used the title “Minor Tactics on the chalk stream,” as a title that would allow his book to be published in that environment of suppression of his methods and his book was published and reviewed by the angling press of the time. Halford wielded great influence in that world.
Sometime fishing discoveries are resisted because they threaten the established masters of the time.
Fly tying has a very long history. There are many good ways of creating worthwhile flies. In traditional fly tying in fresh water there are hundreds of patterns and perhaps thousands of them. There are an enormous number of techniques and styles of tying flies.
There are many ways to tie a dry fly and all of them work.
There are many ways to tie a nymph or a wet fly. The same is true in salt water fly tying.
People are always pushing the boundaries and creating new flies and styles of tying. When new ways of tying appear and the new flies that come along with them appear they are often resisted by the establisment not always but they often meet with resistance.
The muddler minnow was a giant step in trout fishing tying. Western fly tying techniques once were unknown. Nymph fishing is a relatively new development that became popular in the second part of the last century although it was known and poo pooed by dry fly purists before that time.
There was no dry fly fishing until the invention of the greased silk line and up to that time wet flies and droppers were the only flies seen. The dry fly was a new development at one time. Streamer flies and bucktail were an American invention and the invention and use of them for trout fishing was resisted at first by the fly fishing establishment of the time.
Theodore Gordon who was called the father of the dry fly in America also created the first striper streamer fly called the Bumble Puppy. He was very innovative in his fly tying and methods. He did a lot to expand fly fishing knowledge in his time.
Flies develop and are added to the mix in spite of the resistance and ridicule of them by influential leaders who do not like times to change and evolve eroding their political influence and control. The fish are the final word on flies.
The next generation of anglers have a habit of finding the good ideas and celebrating them without the politics of dead men influencing their choices.
Halford lost and Skues won.
We all benefited.
Thank God that he did or we all would be tying Halfords flies and fishing his methods exclusivly
and there would never have been any innovation in methods or fly tying or fly casting since his time.
There would have been no Deceivers, no Clousers, no Crease flies, no Pop flyes, no bucktails, no streamers, no poppers, no shrimp flies, and no epoxy, no lead, no man made material flies, no worm flies,
no tarpon flies, and on and on and there would have been no Flatwings, no Nine three, no Joe's smelt no Eel punt and no Razzle dazzle.
Politics could have prevented all of it.
Thank you Mr. Skues
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