REVISITING THE CLASSICS
For a number of years I have wanted to go back and revisit some of the classic fly fishing literature that I had read years ago. Much of the material in those books I had merely skimmed for information during the years that I was attempting to gather as much useful information about fly fishing as possible. As a more experienced and hopefully a more mature angler I wanted to go back and compare what the old masters had written and compare it to my personal experience. Since I was planning on wintering in Arizona this winter I could only bring a limited number of books from my angling library so I chose to bring two volumes written by G.E.M. Skues and one volume written by his angling opposite F.M. Halford.
George Edward MacKenzie Skues was born on August 13, 1858 and was nearly 91 years old when he died on August 9, 1949. He authored numerous books on fly fishing including Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream in 1910, The Way of a Trout with a Fly in 1921, Side-Lines, Side-Lights & Reflections in 1932, and Nymph Fishing for Chalk Stream Trout in 1939.
Paul Schullery characterizes Skues as the father of nymph fishing, and as the greatest fly fisher who ever lived. [Skues on Trout – Edited by Paul Schullery – Stackpole Press – 2008]
Dr. Andrew Herd, a British Fly fishing historian said that “Skues was, without any doubt, one of the greatest trout fishermen that every lived. [https://www.flyfishinghistory.com/contents.htm]
While Skues was a proponent of the wet fly, and often crossed swords with F.M. Halford the avowed father of modern dry fly fishing, Skues was a keen observer and wrote on all types of fly fishing. Recently I have been rereading Skues The Way of a Trout with a Fly, an eclectic collection of observations on all types of fly fishing techniques. It is here that I think we find the true genius of Skues as an all-around fly fisher.
In his forward to The Way of a Trout with a Fly he called into question the idea of angling authorities. I love the following quote:
“Authorities darken counsel. An authority is a person engaged in the invidious business of stereotyping and disseminating information, frequently incorrect.”
Skues related that before he began to study and analyze the various writings and comparing them to actual field conditions that he had been “swallowing, wholesale, all sorts of fallacies and inaccuracies, alike in the matter of dressings and their use, and what they were intended to represent.”
From that point forward Skues began to use the writings of others as merely a starting point or, as he put it, “an author became merely a suggester of experiment – a means of testing and checking my own observations by the water side, and no longer a small god to be believed and trusted as infallible.”
Skues saw fly fishing as a “progressive art’ and authors that are putting forth their ideas in print are “merely a suggester of experiment.” Since Skues was actively engaged in a running debate with the dry fly only crowd that was sweeping over the English trout streams, he found it necessary to be rather blunt in his assessment of angling authorities. To that end he wrote:
“An authority who lays down a law and dogmatizes is a narcotic, a soporific, a stupefier, and opiate. The true function of an authority is to stimulate, not to paralyze, original thinking. But then, I suppose, he wouldn’t be an authority.”
Certainly this language did not endear him to the dry fly only crowd that had taken Halford’s doctrine of ‘upstream and dry” to the extreme. Skues concluded that:
“Since the very beginning of things men have talked fish and fishing, just as they have talked religion and metaphysics, without progress commensurate with the amount of labour and energy expended, and with as many divergencies to right and left and as much slipping back and floundering in morasses of error.”
With his forward setting out the intent of his own writings he launched into a careful discussion and defense of the use of the wet fly in combination with the dry fly. He explored such diverse areas of trout behavior as the motives for a fish taking an artificial fly, sense of taste and smell in trout and how trout see. While we have advanced in our overall knowledge of trout biology and behavior Skues conclusions in most of these areas remains sound.
Skues devoted a considerable section in this book to the how and why of trout behavior as it relates to trout taking flies, both real and artificial. The questions that he asked are as pertinent and perplexing today as when he first penned them nearly 80 years ago. He was asking, and attempting to answer, what do trout see and how do they see it. Do fish [trout] see things like man sees them, do they see color, do they see detail, and all the similar questions that anglers have been asking themselves for centuries. His conclusions are well reasoned but Skues was faced with the same problem that we are faced with today.
While scientists can examine the eye of a trout and tell us that based upon that examination that a fish [trout] has rods and cones in its eye, just like us, and that based on those examinations the fish [trout] should be able to see colors, shapes, tones, etc., just like we do. However, the one important question that no amount of scientific investigation can uncover, unless we can find a talking fish, is how does the fish [trout] perceive what it sees?
When we are driving a car and we approach an intersection controlled by a traffic light we know, that is we perceive, that a green color means that we have the right of way, an orange color means the light is about to change to red, and red means that we are to stop before we enter the intersection. We see the color and we perceive what that color means in that context. If a fish [trout] sees color, and it seems clearly that they do, how do they perceive that color as it relates to their behavior, especially when it relates to feeding behavior? As Skues relates in his book, The Way of a Trout with a Fly, trout often rise to artificial flies that do not remotely resemble anything found in nature, especially in color.
In revisiting the classical fly fishing literature we quickly discover that the questions that those angling pioneers were dealing with continue to be that same questions that we are dealing with today. We have made tremendous strides in the technical end of fly fishing; fly rods, lines, and leaders are light years advanced from the equipment that those angling pioneers used, however in many ways we are still dealing with the same issues that they struggled with. The discussions are still on-going about what fish [trout] see and how they see it. We are still wrestling with the questions surrounding why fish [trout] eat certain flies, questions about selectivity, color, and a plethora of other trivial issues that make fly fishing such an enduring and thoroughly fascinating pursuit.
Like Skues and a host of others right down to the present time we are still looking for the talking fish [trout] to tell us why they do what they do. Until then we will continue to speculate on all the age old questions raised by the pioneers of fly fishing. While we strive to answer the questions I believe that we secretly hope that they will never be answered. Our sport is richer for the mystery. Long live the debate.