One Hook At a Time

My dad taught me to tie flies. I began learning by watching him do it. He would sit in his favorite chair, with a coffee table pulled up to his knees. Laying on top of the table and extending just over the edge was an old fashioned washboard. In its troughs of corrugated tin lay a confused jumble of feathers and patches of fur or hair, jars of model paint and tangled yarn. Clamped to the washboard was a beat up vise. Its grip was not as powerful as it once had been. The hooks it held often slipped but dad was a slow, patient tier. Straightening the hook and re-tightening the vise's jaws was as calm and practiced a move as any other his hands made while they orbited the hook, turning it into a fishing fly.

His bobbin was my favorite tool. It looked like a wind-up toy mouse with a blue plastic knob rather than a twist key coming out of it's back. The spool of thread it held inside its body looked like the mouse's wheels. The thread came out it's nose.

Dad leaned back as he tied, to compensate for being farsighted. When he concentrated he held his breath. In total silence the mouse would travel around the hook binding a bit of fluff to it. The thread made small bowstring sounds as it played across his fingers. The vibrations were amplified through the hook and vise. Around and around the mouse went, dad watching its every move intently, as if it wasn't entirely trustworthy.

Eventually, in a magnificent flourish, he performed an intricate two handed head knot tying maneuver. He looked like a symphony conductor because he put his entire upper body into it. It was never clear whether dad was in control of the knot or whether it was just a little bit ahead of him. Sometimes everything would sort of explode and the head would begin unraveling before he could stop it. When a fly was finished, dad was always triumphant. With a great, satisfied gasp he exhaled and snipped the tying thread. Then he fussed with his new fly until he was sufficiently re-oxygenated.

Dad's flies were usually rather clumsy looking. He made them about the right size and shape, either cream colored or dark, gray or tan. That was about as far as his design theories went. They had bulky, ugly heads that always had remnants of imprecisely trimmed hackle and hair around the eyes. He said this was okay, that it made them look like they had feelers. If the flies were big, it meant that the heads might have eyes painted on them. He liked painting eyes. He felt that they helped attract fish. Yellow and black was his favorite combination. I wonder now whether painting eyes was also a clever way of camouflaging how big some of his heads got. Dad was not an artist at the vise. He knew it and didn't much care. All of his tying stuff was kept in plastic trash bags and he didn't have feather greed. His flies were a means to an end. They just had to catch a fish.

I wanted to tie flies more than anything. Maybe when you are a little kid you want to do everything more than anything. It's a time of extreme enthusiasms but fly tying was special, the more so because he wouldn't let me do it. So I watched and asked to and watched and asked to and he kept saying, 'No, I'm afraid you will lose a hook in the carpet.' He may have been right about that. He also knew that the best way to teach me was to build up my eagerness. Finally he began giving me hooks. They came from a small, white cardboard box which he opened very carefully. He would wiggle one free from the jumble that lay inside and hand it to me saying, 'Let's see what you do with that.'

One big hook, nothing else. No tools, no materials. So I went off and stole thread from my mom's sewing box and I pulled yarn out of the fringe of my bedspread. I made these very crude things and took them back to him. I remember the conversations. It was shop talk, which to me was very mature. He brought me into it so slowly, and with such a great desire to do it, that when he actually began teaching me to tie flies I was already passionate about it.

I still have a few of my very first flies. I'm biased but I'm charmed by them. They each have a baby blue bedspread fringe yarn tail extending handsomely beyond their hook's bend, followed by a thoroughly wrapped thread body tapering in thickness towards the front. Some of the flies are tied with medium white sewing thread, others are done in heavy green buttonhole silk. When I made them I liked green flies best. Now I prefer the white ones which, over time, have become attractively segmented as the gently rusting hooks stained the thread. They look like naked Woolly Buggers.

Faking out a fish by faking a fish food is a fine example of how irresistible human nature finds a simple act of deception that requires ingenuity. Ingenuity hooks the fly fisher long before the fly fisher hooks a fish. The minute I started scrounging for fly tying materials I fell to the lure of it. I fell in love with fishing by first tying flies to fish with. I learned the philosophy of economy from a crude fly tier but my earliest lesson, which came with my first hook, was to be inventive. Occasionally, I take out one of those small, ancient, yellowing cardboard boxes. I treasure them. Some are held together with rubber bands. I have to open them with great care. I've got several vises I can put a hook in now and more tools and materials than I need. There is still plenty of room on a big hook to experiment. I've tied some monstrously extravagant, impractical flies. When I've finished one I keep it around for a bit. Eventually, after trimming everything off it, the hook goes back in its box.

It was a small step to take fly tying away from fishing altogether. Others led the way. Bill Blackstone, Yaz Yamashita, Bob Mead and Paul Schmookler are all contemporary tiers who have explored realistic tying. These gentlemen enthusiastically share their ideas with others. Some of Paul's photographs grace both this article and several of the most stunning fly tying books I've ever seen. It was one of Mead's Praying Mantises that inspired my first realistic fly. Once again I had no idea how to start. I felt just as I had as a small boy, clutching my first, miraculous hook. The odd juxtaposition of knowing how to tie flies and yet having no clue how to tie the fly was perplexing. So often we look back at our memories from the vantage point and maturity of the present. We think if I knew then what I know now it would have been different. Hindsight didn't help. I found myself in the starting gate again with both perspectives beside me.

For twenty seven years, I'd tied flies which were good enough for the fish, just as my father had. They were simple patterns, made austere by speed and necessity. I tried to tie them from a fish's viewpoint. Tying realistic flies reversed the equation. I'm learning to analyze an insect and allow it to show me how to proceed. You may think this sounds ludicrous but it is the foundation of my tying style. Never adapt a body part to a tying technique. For instance, the segments of an insect's abdomen don't spiral around it's body. Why tie them by spiraling or weaving material around a hook? Instead, find a way to tie each segment separately, perpendicular to the main axis of the body. Then figure out how to connect them!

Insect mechanics and engineering captivates me. It also poses bewildering problems. Wings have stumped me for years. It's one of the reasons I've only tied nymphs, though honestly, I've had my hands full with them. Try this sometime: cut an insect's wing in half crosswise and look at it end on. You will see that it is much like a partially opened fan. The veins alternate high and low. This makes the wing a triangulated, three dimensional object and gives it rigidity. Otherwise it would be like a piece of floppy plastic. If you want to really give yourself a headache, cut a wing in half lengthwise and tell me what you see. It compounds the problem still further.

At long last, I'm close to having it licked, but not by thinking like a fly tier. I know that sounds cryptic. Inspiration can come in the most unexpected of ways, at any time. You've got to keep alert. The beginning of the solution for making wings hit me as I was wrapping a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up in aluminum foil! Ingenuity, great daring, and imagination are needed when you start tying realistically.

Almost certainly, you will become confused by what is or is not fly tying. What materials can you use? What techniques are fair? All I can tell you is to form your own conclusions, then take a stand. Don't let others decide for you.

My belief is that fly tying, in its purest form, is a rigid discipline, grounded on a single precept. By definition, all materials must be attached with tying thread. So simple. So achingly frustrating at times. The temptation to cheat when you begin tying realisticly is strong. Don't do it. Be a purist and accept the challenge. Tie a few flies, then allow yourself to be a little human. That's what I've done. One, small, inconsequential thing on some of my flies is glued on. Aside from that, I absolutely hold the line. I'll be damned if I tell anyone where I've cheated! It is my reward for perseverance!

The hard facts are that each bug takes me about 150 hours to tie, after I've done the field work and research, if I know all the moves. Often I start a fly having no idea how to complete it. By the time I'm half way through it's a labor. I'm often discouraged. Sometimes I hate it.

That's when I remember my dad's patience at the vise. He rose to the occasion, ascended beyond his own ability when he began teaching me. He showed me how to tie a fly, set me in a river and taught me how to use it. He also told me that fly fishing was as much about the going there and coming back as it is about the fish. The same is true of fly tying.

If I go looking for my soul it is the most invisible thing there is. Yet it's not with ability only that I tie a fly. Dad helped me to understand that all actions can define, expand, bespeak and stand in proof of a soul. Time spent beside rivers, all that I've learned or experienced along them and at the vise, are bound with every turn of the tying thread around a hook. A fly may become the token of a failure or, in success, a predecessor of other successes. Either way, it's always more than a counterfeit insect.

As tough as it sometimes is, I complete each fly. Partly out of bravery and because I have a work ethic, but also because I try to put the sum total of what I am into each attempt. I don't like coming up short in my own eyes. When a fly is finished and I exhale, I realize that I too hold my breath a lot. Memories are wrapped around my fly. They make it more beautiful than I could possibly have. I've come a long way from being a sewing box thief, one hook at a time.







This article first appeared in the Winter 1999 issue of Tightloop, A Japanese fly fishing magazine.