Fly 'Evolution'??

All about flies Fly Tying
1

Here’s a bit of a twist on the whole ‘new fly’ concept…

Has anyone noticed that many of the what I like to call ‘standard’ flies tend to evolve into more complcated versions?

Many flies used to use yarn for the bodies, now ‘dubbing’ is the norm for a lot of them.

Simple tailing of just a straight small bunch of fibers or hair is being replaced by divided tails…

Stonefly nymphs, normally fished along the bottom in waters where snags are prevalent, have gotten more and more complicated…I’ve seen some with thirty or forty ‘steps’ in the tying process for a fly intended to be ‘fished’…

Things like that…

One fly that I’ve sort of ‘followed’ because I have it in several books spanning a course of well over thirty years is the Bitch Creek Nymph…it’s also one that I like to fish a lot.

What started out, as far as I can tell, as very simple stonefly imitator, something that took only a few minutes to tie and was very effective in that guise.

The way it’s tied ‘now’ barely resembles the first simple tie I saw (even though the finished fly looks just about the same…certainly close enough not to matter to the fish). It’s turned into something with a woven body, a wide range of materials used in it, now something that takes quite a bit longer to tie.

I still use the ‘simple’ tie for my flies…I know how to ‘weave’ but find it not required for a fly such as this…I fish this fly heavily weighted in boulder and rock strewn fast waters…tend to lose a few of them to the bottom every day…can’t see doing that with a fly that takes ten to twenty minutes to tie when the five minute one is just as effective on the fish.

Are the flies geting more complicated because the fish demand it? Or are we just showing off? (Nothing wrong with that, I make my living doing that…but does it explain why we have more and more ‘complicated’ ties?)

Buddy

2

My take, cynical though it may be, follows. Dubbing sells for more than yarn is isn’t available as dubbing in your local knitting shop. Therefore fly shops can make more money off dubbing and tend to push that over the cheaper alternative. That is just one factor.

One the other hand, owning a fly shop probably isn’t the equivalent of taking a sports car down the Road to Riches.

Ed, who needs to watch less “Top Gear”

3

I agree.

If you are making flies to catch fish, they don’t need to be complicated.

If you are tying flies to catch fishermen, they need to be complicated.

As I stated in another thread. Fish aren’t smart no matter what people want to think.

Case in point just this past week. We fished 2 days with some ‘fancy’ flies(nothing crazy mind you). We caught plenty of fish but no big ones. I was walking out and saw a guy with a 21" rainbow and looked at what he was using…Power Bait balls. Ugly, yellow balls that looked like…BALLS! No, they didn’t look like eggs. They were about the size of peanut M&Ms only round. I bet they smelled good(to a fish) though.

4

could it be that materials today are so much different that materials of years ago making flies more precise than what the old masters tied with?? better materials make better flies??

5

My opinion says that we are on personal trips hoping that we can contribute to a design by adding or changing something. The material marketeers are more than willing to assist us in providing varieties of materials and colors ad nauseum.
The whole scenario depends on your interests. Are you principally a fly tier or a fly fisherman? Whatever rows your boat.

6

I think you are on to something. I have a little nymph I tie that uses vinyl ribbing for the body. I look at catalogs and I see similar shapes done with dubbing and fine copper wire, chenille, and other stuff, but nothing like it with vinyl ribbing.

I can tie these things in about 2 minutes if I am goofing off. I couldn’t do that with the older materials that would wind up imitating the same critter.

7

Not sure I buy the thesis. Dubbing has been around since Walton’s time. Vince Marinaro argued for split tails in 1950 (and I doubt it was a new idea then).

I’d bet that nine times out of ten, if you asked an angler on the Madison what he’s dragging on the bottom, it’s a Brown Ugly.

8

Steven,

I really doubt there are few, if any, ‘new’ ideas in fly tying that aren’t materials related…lots of THAT going on over the last half century.

That’s not my point.

What I’m ‘seeing’ is a trend towards more complication and addition of ‘steps’ to, for want of a better term, the ‘same’ fly.

There are significant differences, in both type of material, number of steps involved, and the overall ‘complication level’ of many patterns.

I beleive that using yarn for a body on a fly is less complicated than dubbing the same body, especially on larger nymphs and dries…yet some that once routinely, say back in the 60s-70s-80s, called for yarn or chenille, now seem to call for ‘dubbing’ (I know dubbing has been around a long time, but many flies didn’t ‘use’ it).

Many ‘western’ style dry flies, some that have been around for years, used to call for a simple straight tail of moose or deer hair fibers…now, on the same pattern, I’m seeing the same material, but indications that it’s divided…not talking about whether or not that is better or worse, just noticing the change.

I’m seeing flies that used to use one or two materials now showing four or five…lots of cutting off and retying in things that used to be just one material that was used for a couple of ‘steps’ (for example: Humpy back and ‘wings’…the old pattern showed the ‘hump’ was formed and the remaining fibers made the wing…now I see patterns calling for ‘separate’ wings…another step or two…).

I’m seeing lots of this kind of thing.

Don’t know that it’s good or bad, I’m just pointing it out.

Maybe it’s a factor of time…while most of us won’t admit it, a lot of us have way too much time on our hands…maybe this is what comes from that…don’t really know.

Buddy

9

If you’re going to back to the 60s, then what you’re most likely describing is the evolution that occured during the golden age of “Match the Hatch.” Yes, flies are very different today than they were during when the Dette family was the be all and end all of all that was fly tying. (And of course, Mary Dette Clark is still a wonder).

Going back to split tails, for a second, I do believe there is a realization that the typical straight, thick tail may not be seen as a tail by the trout but rather as just more body - making our flies twice as long as they’re meant to be. I have seen this reasoning and it makes sense.

With the growth in popularity of tailwater and spring creek fisheries in the West, where floatation is not a huge issue, you might be seeing the increasing use of split tails.

But I’ll be honest, I don’t see much that has changed in patterns (as opposed to materials) in the last 20 years. I do think some tiers have a natural tendency to add things - either because “more is better” or to make a pattern their own.

10

My most effective flies, over the past four decades, have been the soft hackle GRHE (the rattier the better) and the McCafferty ant. Flies don’t get a whole lot simpler. I think a lot of detail is mostly about showing off or boredom for those who really like to spend a lot of time at the vise. I’ve tied some realistic flies, just to see if I could, but I don’t have any faith that they’d catch fish, and they certainly aren’t worth the time and aggravation. If precise imitation were necessary for most situations, those molded rubber/plastic Burke’s “flies” that used to be sold in tackle shops would still be widely available. When I see those now, they always look about ten years old, pinned to their yellowing cardboard displays.
-CC

11

Buddy, I tie a lot, not for a living, but for my own use. I like to fish, but I like to fish more with flies I’ve tied. The simpler the better, thus I don’t use a lot of different patterns, just ones that work. This doesn’t mean I don’t try some of the patterns that call for more steps, but I try to avoid them. The only exception is when tying flies for use on my favorite spring creek. Those fish have a looooong time to look at my imitation in that extrememly slow-moving and gin clear water, so I have found that careful imitation of the natural makes a huge difference, but they sure seem to take a lot longer to tie - the reward though is worth the extra effort. So, I have to gauge my tying to my expected results, but a good old reliable Gold-ribbed Hare’s-ear or Sawyers Pheasant-tail still catches a lot of fish for me.
The evolution of tying seems to be a result of numerous tyers striving for something a bit different based on a tried-and-true pattern, thus adding steps to something that seemed to work just fine in the first place. One of the simplest flies I’ve tied and used is a thread midge that I first learned about in preparation for a trip to the San Juan River, and very similar to John Scott’s t.c.t.k thread midge. I couldn’t believe I could catch a fish on such a simple pattern, until I did.
The artist in me wants to always make my contribution to something that has come up through time, but the fisherman in me just wants something that will catch fish, consistently without a lot of work to create.
I’ll keep on trying to improve upon perfection, but I want my quality time to be on the water trying to crack the code of that day with whatever creation is in my box.
Thanks for the chance to think about this idea and to verbalize a little about how I feel about it. Keep 'em coming.

Kelly.