Catskill Style Alive??

[Byron haugh]

Hi,
My fishing buddy in Utah is more "old school" than I am. On a fishing trip a year or so ago, he asked why the shops no longer carried the Catskill style flies. I recently sent him some flies and included a couple Catskill style flies I am hoping he can use for the Fall Mahogany Duns.
I must say that his observation is fairly accurate. In the West shops, you don't find such patterns much at all anymore. Nearly all flies are either CDC or Deer Hair style. Now, I do understand the preference for lower riding flies, but also enjoy the old style.

This one is intended to represent a Mahogany Dun.

[TyroneFly]

Nice fly.

I got my intro to Catskill style from a video series CATSKILL TRADITION DVD SERIES. The DVDs include tyers: David Brandt, Floyd Franke, Bert Darrow, and Ralph Graves. Good stuff.

[Chuck441]

Byron, they still catch fish! I've fished them here in the upper Midwest with a fair amount of success. Sure, the low riders catch a lot of fish, but why abandon tried and true styles because "they don't look natural"- to our eyes. Catskill flies are new to lots of trout, and seem to look like food to them, if not to us. I love 'em all, and fish 'em all. Variety keeps us fresh, no?

Chuck

[Byron haugh]

All very true Chuck. I fish them too! And, frankly, they look natural to me..............

[texfly]

Quill body , upright divided wings , hard fly to beat. I'm a long way from the Catskills but the patterns from that area are just poetry to me. There are many great styles of flies out there but the simple elegance of the Catskill style fly is something special. Maybe its the hard working people like the Dettes and Darbees or Cross and Flick , just to name a few , and the rich history they made in that region that will always make there style and patterns endure or maybe because they can still take trout on just about any stream. Either way the Catskill will always have a place in my fly box.

[Allan]

Just my observations and readings over many years: A few pragmatic reasons, albeit they are a relection of the 'general' tying community and the 'general' community of fly fishers. Catskill style style dry flies and wet flies: Require a greater variety of natural materials; Are more expensive to tye; Are more difficult to tye; Take more practice to learn to tye properly; Require more time to tye; Do not have a good 'return on investment' for the tyer. Are Catskill dries and wets as effective as other styles? Whatever is said here and elsewhere will not sway you one way or another. Regardless of whatever style, if you don't have faith in it and use it, it'll never be as good as your 'tried and true' or 'go to' fly. As a renown fly tyer/fisher/author told me(and he may have heard it from someone else), "Sometimes you have to sell the fisherman first and then the fly" (or something to that effect).
Anyway, does anyone think that the trout have gotten smart about flies and those that worked in the past no longer work?

Allan

[pittendrigh]

I went to a few local Bozeman MT fly shops a few weeks ago. I was curious about the idea of forgotten fly patterns--flies that used to be popular, that no longer are for some reason. Most such shops have open-top bins for the best selling flies. But they also have drawers with smaller, less visible bins for flies they still stock, that don't sell well.

Can't even buy them anymore (at least not around here):
Bi-Visble
Blonde Wulff (and all other Wulff flies, not counting the Royal Wulff, which does still sell well)
Zug Bug
Picket Pin
Bloody Butcher
Missoulian Spook
Montana Nymph
Gray Hackle Yellows and Professors
Pott Flies (haven't been available for decades)
Brown Bear Black and Brown Bear Brown

Flies they still stock, that don't sell well anymore include:
Humpies (The local stores all stock Humpies--formerly Goofus Bugs--but they are no longer big sellers).
Traditional Muddlers (there are lots of hot-rod Muddler variants, but traditional Muddlers no longer sell well)
Girdle Bugs (they all stock a few of these, but no longer with white rubber legs....all have brown, black or barred legs)
Twenty Incher (a Zug Bug variant shaped like a big stone fly...used to sell like hot cakes)
Bitch Creek
Renegade
Joe's Hoppers (still for sale, but usually hidden somewhere, because nobody asks for them anymore)
Spuddlers
Spruce Flies
Matukas
Classic Catskill dry flies (every store has a few, but they're not big sellers)

Pretty interesting. The Bi-Visible used to be my favorite dry fly. Now you can't even buy them. Something tells me the evolution of fly pattern popularity has little to do with fishing, and more to do with magazines and Sellebrity Marketing. Classic Catskill dry flies probably sell better back East. But West of the Great Plains they're old hat.

Magazines:
Magazines still exist. In fact there are now more fly fishing magazines for sale than ever before. But their power and influence is waning. Rapidly. Advertising revenues are down. As a result, most magazines are now visibly thinner than they used to be. Fees paid to writers, which have always been embarrassingly low, are now even lower, and authors are now required to keep their articles short, pithy and concise. The rise of the internet has hammered the magazine and newspaper world hard. How much longer they can last is not clear. Magazines and sellebrity marketing used to steer the industry. Now the internet is taking control of the steering wheel. How that pans out remains to be seen. Pretty interesting stuff when you think about it.

Internet content tends to be even shorter than the new micro-articles now published in the magazines. What will happen to fishing books? The book publishers may well be headed to retirement comeraderie with film cameras and tape recorders. Nobody really knows.

[Byron haugh]

Interesting. You know, I have specifically asked shops out west "Any Matuka Patterns?" NONE AVAILABLE!!!

[planettrout]

Byron,

I still find Matuka patterns around. Brock's in Bishop, CA has 'em, but you must look through the drawers and so do these guys:

http://www.flyfishusa.com/flies/matukas.htm

They still pick up nice Browns on the Lower Owens River...

PT/TB