Dee Improvisation

I improvised this fly based on collected impressions from my first day with John Shewey's book Spey Flies and Dee Flies: their history and Construction.  It is a synthesis of Miss Grant (pp. 98), Dave McNeese's  Un-Named Circa 1977 (pp.120) and in some odd way, the Dessaigne LaPatriote and La Touque patterns (pp. 131).  Of course my tying skills are meager in comparison to the cited examples, I simply claim they are inspiration.

Dee Improvisation
Hook: TMC 7999 #2
Body: Gold tinsel with a brown copper rib, Claret and Fiery Brown Angora
Hackle:  Golden Pheasant flanks, Red and brown and Fiery Brown Schlappen
Collar: Red Golden Pheasant
Wing: Golden Pheasant (Dee Style)

The Golden Pheasant wing fiber would not stay married and I dabbed some flexament in the middle or each wing to hold them together - heresy! Aside from the tying, there's plenty that I think is not right with the pattern, but this fly contains some core or essence that appeals to me. I imagine that it might prove itself in low water.

Books: Spey Rods, Spey Casting and Spey Flies.

In recent weeks, when I have a free moment, I have been planning for Steelhead fishing. Christmas in Oregon will give plenty of opportunity to swing flies for these beautiful big sea run rainbow trout. Before my trip to Scotland in 2008 I purchased a modern salmon rod; a Scott ARC 14' 9 weight for casting in the style developed on the Spey River in Scotland. The term "Spey casting" is toponymous like the distinctive Telemark turn in skiing which was also named after the place where it was developed, the Telemark valley in Norway. Spey casting is equally distinctive, as are the flies originally tied for fishing the river Spey.
My way of planning a trip to Oregon includes pouring over 130 year old British fly fishing books. I started looking for copies of Arthur Edward Knox's book Autumns on the Spey. This book is the first that gives explicit tying instructions for a selection of original Spey patterns. Low and behold, the future is here, I discovered that Google Books has scanned a rather astounding collection of rare and important titles from the Fly Fishing literature. The link above points to the online copy of Knox's book online. The scanned copies are available to read on the internet and for free download as pdf or epub files. To read the epub files you can download a free reader from Adobe which does not appear to include any print capabilities. Unfortunately, the google pdf files do not include figures, you have to look at them online or you can clip them from the online text individually using the clipping tool on the Google site.

Another title relevant to Spey casting and Spey flies is an 1895 edition of George M. Kelson's book The Salmon Fly: How to dress it and how ot fish it. Also, there are numerous editions Francis Francis's book titled A book on Angling: being a complete treatise on the art of Angling in every branch. The link it to the fourth edition of 1876. The images above of the Spey and Loop cast are from Frederick George Shaw's The Science of Dry Fly Fishing and Salmon Fly Fishing. Although the Knox, Kelson, and Francis titles are of significant historical interest to Spey casters and steelhead and salmon fishers who tie and fish classic flies, many titles, even old ones, by better know authors do not seem to be available for full download e.g. for trout fishing, no title by G.E.M. Skues is freely available.

Jackson WY, Snake River

Took Peter, a colleague and visitor from Scotland, to Jackson for the weekend and Garrett and Sarah met us there too. Garrett and I got out to fish the Snake for a few hours. It was overcast and warm with the occasional view to north to the Tetons clearing enough for a nice view. The fishing was not great, we each caught a whitefish, not the big trouts were were hoping for. There was a small hatch of midges, I took my fish on a Griffith's Gnat and Garrett fished small nymphs.

We drove home Easter Sunday by heading north through the park and then down to Dubois and through Lander where we had lunch. East of Lander, at Sweetwater Station. is a rather amazing bookstore variously know as Mad Dog and The Pilgrim Books and the Sweetwater Book Barn. I've passed it before but it was never open. A faded sign out front on the highway says "Fresh Eggs Old Books". Rather amazing bookshop and worth a visit. After we left I was rather disappointed to realize I did not take any photos inside ... next time.

Proper Impetus

Datus Proper was a retired Foreign Service officer who wrote What the Trout Said: About the Design of Trout Flies and Other Mysteries, one of the best books ever published on fly tying. That's saying something since fly fishing and fly tying literature are some of the earliest books published in the English language. The Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle, attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, was published as part of the second edition of The Boke of St. Albans in 1496.

Sometime in the late 1980's, browsing the shelves in the Ben Franklin Bookshop in Nyack NY, I ran across a copy of Proper's Pheasants of the Mind: A Hunter's Search for a Mythic Bird; until I held it n my hand, I did not know it existed. I did know that beside his fly tying book, Proper had written a travel book about Portugal but I was completely unaware of his bird hunting book and, in a real way, it changed my life.  It was reading Proper's Pheasant book that was the impetus for me to buy a shotgun and hunt game birds; for fly tying materials and to eat wild meat.

As far as I can tell, aside from a blurred and tiny reproduction of the same image, the photograph above may be the only  photograph  of Datus Proper on the web. I photographed the back flap of his Designing Trout flies to get it.

Datus Proper died on July 27 in 2003 while fishing near his home in Montana at age 69. It was a kind of freak fishing accident; fishing with a friend, but alone at the moment, he apparently fell, hit his head on a rock and drowned in shallow water. He had an erudite appreciation of sporting traditions, fine firearms, hunting dogs, good cooking and fine food. Although I never met him myself I miss him.

Tiny Flies

It can be difficult to comprehend how small a fly really could be. The photo shows a few of the flies out of my midge box (click on the photo for an enlarged image.) They are really really small. With my eyes, I need a magnifier to tie them and reading glasses and a hemostat are almost required to tie them on a tippet to fish them. I forgot the reading glasses the other day on the South Platte and managed to tie them on without them, but it wasn't easy.

In the tailwater fisheries of the west, tiny flies are essentially required. These are the streams that flow out of bottom release dams and therefore offer the fish a year round consistent water temperature. In the summer it's nice and cool and in the winter it is relatively warm. The bottom release temperatures may actually be too cold to be optimal for trout, say as cold as 39-40°F. But some dams, like the one at Flaming Gorge in Utah on the Green River are designed to mix water from various levels to provide optimal temperatures for trout growth, around 50°F. And indeed, there are more trout per mile in the Green below Flaming Gorge than any other river on the continent. These dams simulate the great spring creeks like the Henry's Fork of the Snake and Silver Creek both in Idaho. Other great tailwaters beside the Green include the Bighorn in Montana below the Yellowtail dam, the San Juan in New Mexico below the Aztec dam and the North Platte below Grey Reef. There are more. I think of the Big Horn, the Green and the San Juan as the big three.

Because these waters provide such uniform temperatures, they grow huge trout. On the other hand, the aquatic bug life is pretty much restricted to smaller bugs; Chironomids (the midges), and a couple of species of smaller mayflies; Baetis (Blue Winged Olives) and Tricorythodes (Tricos).

Since these tailwater rivers have so many fish, they're fished hard and generally have mostly catch and release regulations in force. On the North Platte, you can keep one fish over 18" (I think) and similar rules apply on other rivers. That means that in a lifetime, most of these fish are caught many times, and that makes for so-called educated fish. They stick to eating the natural foods that are in the stream and maybe once can be tempted to take a bit of some larger buggy thing that they've never seen before. When they do, they learn quickly not to. They key into the natural foods available, and that is pretty much all they will take. They'd eat a real worm, but regulations in these places usually restrict the choice to artificial flies or flies and artificial lures only. Some places even make a restriction that the hooks must be barbless.

Anyway, there are lots of big fish, and they're feeding constantly and exclusively on the tiny aquatic insects; on the nymphal (mayfly) or larval (chironomid) forms underwater and on the winged adults when there is a hatch and they come to the surface.

I was on the San Juan a few years ago and when I started fishing, around 9 AM or so, there was a older guy fishing in the best spot on Texas Hole. This is a deep hole just by the parking area with an astounding number of really really large trout; mostly rainbows. Texas hole fishing is done combat style, shoulder to shoulder, and altough it's less than an acre in size, all the drift boats stop to fish it for a while too. Anyway, this older guy was in perhaps the best spot to fish the hole; in the braided water that flows in on the south side. I fished upriver most of the day and around 4 PM I was wandering back to the parking lot and saw the same older man wading out of the good spot. He'd been there all day. I decided that, well, since the best spot was opening up, why not fish it for a bit. As he walked out, I asked him how he'd done. He was disgusted. Amazingly, with huge trout continually feeding literally right at his feet, he hadn't caught a single fish all day! People all around him were regularly catching them, and he hadn't hooked one. He was about to explode. I asked him what he was using. "Oh, my best fly." He showed me a pattern called a halfback which is a brown fly about an inch and an half long. A great stonefly imitation, but useless on the San Juan. He added hopefully, "It always works on the White River back in Arkansas." I showed him some of the tiny midge patterns, and gave him a couple to use the next day. "But how the hell do you tie 'em on?" He asked. I just shrugged and told him that if he wanted to catch a fish, he'd have to use what they were eating. I stepped into his spot and hooked up right away with a 20" rainbow and caught a half a dozen more before I decided it was time to quit and go get some dinner.

My favorite reference for tying tiny flies is Ed Engle's book Tying Small Flies. Even on these small flies different tiers exhibit different styles. I like Ed's style.

Sometimes it's only the teeny tiniest of flies that will enable you to catch a big trout.