Keep It Simple

With the new season just around the corner, this is the time to clean out the rubbish from our fly boxes and start tying. Spring in the UK can be a pretty miserable affair, and while we may dream of those fine spring days and trout rising profuse hatches of olives, 20 years in Scotland has taught me that it pays to be prepared for the worst. Although I always go fishing in the hope that the fish will rise to a surface fly, I’m prepared for this not to be the case. Even at the prime time on prime dry fly water, I’ve often found the trout ignoring surface flies. I always hope this means that they are feeding sub-surface, and sometimes it is the case. The trout are sometimes preoccupied with the ‘pre-emergence’ movements of a hatch, or the periodic ‘invertebrate drift’ that happens in the very early morning. At these times the good old wet fly is good medicine.

The literature on the wet fly is long but thin. The Art of the Wet Fly, an excellent book by W.S. Roger Fogg, Magee’s, Fly Fishing: the North Country Tradition, and Dave Hughes’ Wet Flies are probably the best of the few books that deal specifically with the wet fly, and they place the early classics of Edmonds and Lee, and Pritt into a contemporary context. In The Art of the Wet Fly and Fishing the Flymph, VS Hidy promotes the use of James Leisenring's nymph-like, soft hackled wet flies. Hidy called them ‘flymphs’ with a straight face, but I can’t. Fogg bases his approach on WC Stewart’s somewhat prescriptive one, although his preference for the sparse soft-hackle ‘spider’ dressings is not the result of conventional thinking, but the result of a close personal study of the habits of trout and their prey.

The important thing to know about wet-fly fishing is that simple fly designs are truly all one needs, the rest is down to the way they behave when fished. Most nymphs and pupae are pretty simple in form, and except for some colour variations within a particular family are very similar. Size and basic form are the main things to shoot for, but colour is always due some consideration in a sub-surface fly. Some simple Hare’s Ear or Pheasant Tail variations and a handful of skinny spider style wets are enough to approach any water with confidence.

Old WH Lawrie also gave us a very fishy group of wets and ‘floating nymphs’ that are sadly neglected these days. His Rough-Stream Nymphs are based on the phases of specific hatches. Lawrie designed his flies to be fished barely submerged in the surface, more like modern emergers than classic nymphs. His nymphs led directly to his 'hatching dun' series. Lawrie’s designs are unnecessarily complex for my taste, but this is the kind of thinking I like in trout fly design, clearly the result of years of experience on the river, observing the behaviour of trout, rather than speculating in front of a word processor.