Just when man first discovered that feather-covered hooks could be very effective fishing equipment is shrouded in the mists of time. Archaeologists believe that the fishing hook was discovered sometime around 30,000 years ago in southern Europe. The hooks, which were eventually provided with barbs, were first manufactured of bone and probably also of different wooden materials.

This mosaic shows fisherman of the Ancient world using flexible bending soft rods not the stiff stick rods you would imagine. Look at the design of his landing net. This mosaic was amongst others discovered in1933 at the Leptic Magna site in Tripoli and dates back to the 1st or 2nd century AD. It is the first ever record of a landing net.

In AD 200 the Roman Claudius Aelianus, his book On the Nature of Animais, described how people fished with a fly in the river Astracus in Macedonia. The prey is presumed to have been trout, since it had a "spotted exterior ".

The Macedonians "fastened red wool around a hook, and fixed onto the wool two feathers which grew under a cock's wattles, and which in colour are like wax. Their rod is six feet long, and their line is the same length. Then they throw their snare, and the fish, attracted and maddened by the colour, comes straight at it, thinking from the pretty sight to gain a dainty mouthful; when, however, it opens its jaws, it is caught by the hook, and enjoys a bitter repast, a captive." These feather creations presumably were more reminiscent of today's jigs than of flies, but we have no reason to doubt their fishing ability. Although they probably fished mainly for their daily food, that does not mean that the Macedonians did not find pleasure in fishing with a rod and flies.

Whilst on a recent holiday to Seville in Southern Spain I called into the Archeological Museum and in the roman section there was a display of fishing hooks used on a rod. These are amongst the earliest known examples of fishing hooks.

In the beginning of the 13^th Century a German romance written in about 1210 by Wolfram von Eschenbach mention the catching of trout and grayling using a "feathered hook" The hero of the novel wades barefoot in a stream to catch trout and grayling with a fly. From 1360 onwards, across a vast area reaching from the Swiss plain to Styria, other texts identify fly fishing as the chosen method of commoners.

In the early 15^th Century a manuscript, kept at the Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, lists at least fifty different fly patterns for catching carp, pike, catfish, burbot and salmon as well as trout and grayling.

These are some late 15^th Century fishing hooks found in Southern England. 500 year old fishing tackle. In 1496 we find the proof that people fished with flies for the sake of the sport. In her Book of St Albains, Dame Juliana Berner described fishing methods of the time in an article entitled "A Treatyse of Fysshynge Wyth an Angle".

This shows different hook patterns and that feather-clad hooks were also used as prey. Dane Juliana Berner is believed to have been the abbess of a Benedictine nunnery in Sopwell. Her article, written in 1425 and subsequently hand-copied by monks until it was printed seventy years later, is absolutely decisive for the early development not only of flyfishing but of sportfishing in general. It is the earliest known printed work in English on fly fishing. It described, in detail how fishing for trout and salmon was conducted with artificial flies. She had discovered, among other things, a seasonal regularity in the insects which she observed on her fishing waters. Her conclusion was that the fish's choice of diet depended largely on the supply of swarming insects. With her observations of insect life as a starring point, she developed twelve different fly patterns, one for each month, which are so well described that a flytier today can tie them without much trouble. The Book of St Albains was devoted to the greatest arts of the age, such as heraldry and hunting, and that it was written for nobles and gentlemen. Thus to the great arts was now added fishing with a rod, line and hook for the sake of pleasure and as a source of recreation.

March The Dun Fly: the body of dun wool and the wings of the partridge (? March Brown)
Another Dun Fly: the body of black wool; the wings of the blackest drake; and the jay under the wing and under the tail.

April The Stone Fly: the body of black wool, and yellow under the wing and under the tail; and the wings, of the drake.
In the beginning of May, a good fly: the body of reddened wool and lapped about with black silk; the wings, of the drake and the red capon's hackle.

May The Yellow Fly: the body of yellow wool; the wings of red cock's hackle and of the drake dyed yellow.
The Black Leaper: the body of black wool and lapped about with the herl of the peacock's tail; and the wings of the red capon with a blue head.

June The Dun Cut: the body of black wool, and a yellow stripe along either side; the wings, of the buzzard, bound on with hemp that has been treated with tanbark.
The Maure Fly: the body of dusky wool, the wings of the blackest feathers of the wild drake.
The Tandy Fly at St. William's Day : the body of tandy wool; and the wings the opposite, either against the other, of the whitest breast feathers of the wild drake.

July The Wasp Fly: the body of black wool and lapped about with yellow thread; the wings, of the buzzard.
The Shell Fly at St. Thomas' Day : the body of green wool and lapped about with the herl of the peacock's tail; wings, of the buzzard.

August The Drake Fly: the body of black wool and lapped about with black silk; wings of the breast feathers of the black drake with a black head.

Fishing equipment in those days was described as consisting of relatively simple tied flies, long rods of ash, hazel and willow, and lines braided with horsehair. The rods, which are assumed to have been about 15 feet (4.5 meters) long, were made of two parts joined by iron or tin links. The line was twisted horsehair fixed to the top of the rod - no reel was used. It is unlikely that fifteenth century fly fishermen used lines much longer than twice the length of their rod. You can imagine that it could be problematic to play large fish with this primitive equipment.

In medieval times fish was a very important part of the diet. Fish was cooked in a pastry case in the ashes of a fire. It was stuffed with breadcrumbs, sultanas, fruit, herbs and spices. It was like a sweet and sour stuffing. The poorer people would have eaten fish. It was not just the preserve of the rich. Salmon was incredibly common. Everybody had salmon and they were probably very sick of eating it.

In fact in the late 14th century early 15th century there was legislation that stated you could not feed your apprentices salmon more than three times a week.

15th Century Salmon recipe Gut ye the Salmon. Take 12ozs of white breadcrumbs, 4oz apricots (roughly chopped) 4oz raisins, salt and pepper, 1 or 2 eggs to bind the stuffing. milk teaspoon of dried mixed herbs. Mix all the ingredients together, but don't have it too wet or sticky. Push all this in the belly of ye salmon. To make the salt doe that encases the fish. 3lbs of flour, 1 lb of salt and some water. Roll it out. Put your fish in the middle and seal it up. Put it into a hot open fire until the pastry is black. Do not eat ye the pastry.

In 1620 the first mention of casting a fly was made until by Mr Lawson in the form of footnotes to a poem by John Dennys The his notes suggests that he was an expert fisherman: "... a line twice your rod's length of three hairs' thickness, in open water free from trees on a dark windy afternoon, and if you have learned the cast of the fly".

In 1652 The Compleat Angler, (not a spelling mistake) was written by Isaak Walton, then aged 60. It listed the twelve flies from the Treatyse. Through the conversation between the book's two characters, Mr Piscator and Mr Venator, we get a good view of how fishing with a rod and hook was done at the time. The tradition from Dame Juliana Bernet is clear: fishing was done for enjoyment.

The Compleat Angler may also be called the first true handbook of sportfishing. It describes not only the eating habits of fish and their resting places, but also how to go about luring them onto the hook with all manner of baits, as well as how to serve up the catch. Today this book has been published in about 400 new editions on numerous languages.

Izaak Walton was undoubtedly one of the leading caracters in the history of sportsfishing. The etching to the left shows him sitting with his fishing rod. His tombstone can be seen in Winchester, Hampshire. The bag on the picture is Waltons personal fishing bag. This bag can be seen today in Flyfisher's Club in London.

In 1676 it was expanded with a section on flyfishing by Charles Cotton. He listed sixty five trout flies. By now the book has seen almost 400 editions and been translated into many languages. With time it has become one of the real classics in fishing literature. By Cotton's day, there were already marked regional variations in fly patterns, and it seems likely that much development had taken place in the 16th Century. Charles Cotton's flyfishing section is regarded as very significant for the progress and diversification of flyfishing until the beginning of the nineteenth century. He can therefore be called something like the founding father of modern flyfishing.

Fishing equipment during the 17th century was simple and not very different from that employed in 15^th Century time. The rods were often made of jointed wood, long and - by our standards - very clumsy. The lines were made of twined horsehair and, since no reels were available, they were top-knotted. Progress in improving fishing equipment was quite slow. In the mid-1660s, however, hooks began to be made more durable by hardening them. Plagues and fires forced needlemakers, among others, to move out of London. Redditch soon become a center of hookmaking, and the old handicraft of smithing was transformed into a large-scale operation. Industrialization also brought with it improvements in the quality of hooks: they became thinner and lighter, though still thick and unwieldy compared with those of today. Running rings first appeared on rods towards the end of the seventeenth century. The invention gave anglers much more control over the line while a fish was being played, but it didn't have much effect on casting distances, because of the nature of the lines in use at the time. Early rings were extremely unreliable, and had a strong tendency to pull out of the rod when under pressure, which no doubt contributed to their slow uptake.

Even if both Bernet and Walton/Cotton showed great interest in the insects taken by fish, it was first in 1747 that the initial book on flytying first appeared, The Art of Angling by Richard Bowlker. This is widely regarded as the first handbook on the subject and something of a trend maker. He not only presented a list of his own flies, indicating some knowledge of entomology, but gave direct instructions for special types of fishing, such as upstream fishing.

By the eighteenth century, the tackle trade was well established and selling every conceivable article a fisherman might need, as well as many that they didn't. One firm called Ustonson, which began trading in the 1760s and supplied tackle to King George IV. Small primitive reels began to be manufactured, with room for storing a small amount of line. At about the same time, it had been discovered that the lines could be tapered by twining in more horsehairs at the middle than at the end. The new machines of the industrial revolution produced a variety of tapered manufactured lines. The new lines were tapered, and could be cast with greater accuracy than hand-woven horsehair. The mid-eighteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the use of level lines which incorporated both the running line and the fly line.

By the end of the century, many fishermen were buying their flies from tackle dealers, rather than tying their own. Trout and salmon flies saw very little change in the eighteenth century. In 1790, a fisherman could turn up with Cotton's selection in his fly box and few would have remarked upon it; forty years later he would have been laughed at. It was the calm before the storm.

Apart from the development of the multiplier, reel design had barely altered since Walton's day and early nineteenth century reels were inadequate: the wide drum, narrow diameter reel continued to dominate the market. The British reels of this period that survive are of low quality. In America, a separate line of reel design was beginning to emerge. The majority of American reels were home-made affairs having crude wooden spools with iron seats. In the early nineteenth century many Americans were still importing their reels, or making their own. Old timers often fished with discarded wool spools, bound into frames by the local tinsmith.

But the native industry was gearing up, and single-action brass or German silver reels with curved handles soon became common. George Snyder, a watchmaker and silversmith from Paris, Kentucky, is believed to have made the first quality reels in the United States, sometime between 1805 and 1810. Snyder realised that there was a need for a reliable multiplying reel, and he set down to invent one. Within a few years, other firms had started up, including Meek, Hardman and Milam, between them responsible for the further perfection of the design of the multiplying reel. These "Kentucky reels" were distinguished from British multipliers by the fact that they worked, and it wasn't long before designs emerged that were capable of casting a line directly from the spool; a trick that you didn't try twice with a British reel. Several innovations were first seen on American reels, among them the balanced crank handle and the first free-spool mechanism .

By the outset of the nineteenth century, the rod's length had been considerably shortened from 16-18 to 11-12 feet (around 5 to 3.5 meters). There were frequent experiments with different kinds of rod materials such as greenheart, hickory and bamboo. In the mid-1840s, an American violin-maker managed to construct the first split-cane rod by gluing bamboo ribs together. This was a real breakthrough, as a perfect rod material had now been found along with a superior method of construction in order to build really strong, practical rods.

Split-cane rods, compared with earlier types, were light and pliable. In addition, they cast significantly better than their predecessors. However, they were still heavy and hard to handle as casting tools. Despite their overall advantage, it was to be some years before their production could streamlined to make mass manufacture profitable. The Americans Charles Orvis, Hiram Leonard and an Englishman named Hardy began production of quality rods. By 1850, tapered reel lines were pretty much standard issue and it was quite routine for fishermen to reverse a fly line when one end had worn.

It was not only the development of the fly rod which started things moving in the mid-nineteenth century. Lines were also greatly improved. Thanks to the introduction of oiled silk lines, the casting length could be as much as tripled. More or less simultaneously the horsehair was replaced by silk gut. Today's modern flyfishing had thus begun to take shape.

Flyfishing underwent extensive changes during the nineteenth century. The development of equipment, the interest in entomology the creation of new fly patterns and all helped. Flyfishing was, and remained, a way of fishing surrounded by a certain mysticism - an attitude which has indeed persisted far into out own century.

Flyfishing tended ever more to become a science. Alfred Ronald was the first author to point out the relevance of insect breeding. His book of 1836 was, in fact, the first entomological description of insects in nature and their imaginary equivalents. Ronald's book inevitably increased the interest in insect studies. It suddenly became a matter of great concern to tie exact insect imitations by carefully observing all sorts of flying creatures at the water and recreating these faithfully for the fish.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a lively debate blossomed about how the fly should be laid out. Upstream casting, downstream casting, and casting more or less across the stream were important questions. It was C. Stewart who made himself the champion of the upstream cast in his book Practical Angling (1857) which presented the technique and its advantages: by approaching the fish from the rear it is easier to imitate the insects' natural route downstream, and playing can occur without disturbing the fish upstream Stewart was also of the opinion that it was mote important to show the insect's size, form and appearance than to tie exact imitations.

Visit the English Fly Fishing Shop for dry flies www.flyfishing-flies.com

 The dry fly

Around 1860, dry-fly fishing began to be popular in southern England. This new technique gathered more and more enthusiasts, not just in English chalk streams. In the wake of this innovation, there followed a total devaluation of all that wet flies and wet-fly fishing stood for It was regarded as unsporting and virtually immoral to fish with any kind of wet fly. It had long been noticed that fish gladly took a wet fly just when it had landed on the water surface or had broken through. The new technique started by trying to get wet flies to fish dry. The fly was dried by means of a number of air casts, then landed on the water and floated until it eventually got soaked and sank under its own weight.

(Although dry-fly fishing is thought to have been "discovered" in England there is proof that the technique was used in Spain during the seventeenth century, according to the Manuscrito de Astorga 1624.)

The basis of today's dry-fly fishing was developed in the south English chalk streams so near our English Fly Fishing Shop. There were plenty of hungry - although sometimes quite selective - trout and loads of insects. As the fish "learned" to see the difference between real and imitation prey, the wet flies which were dried out by air casting fished less well. The "true and proper" dry fly therefore came as a fresh start, not only because it was a new fashion in itself but because it fished more effectively.

Who was the first to introduce the dry fly? That is a controversial question. Some maintain that it was Pullman in his Vale Alecum of Fly Fishing for Trout (1851), while others claim that it was a professional fly tier, James Ogden, who made the innovation. It was an article in an issue of The Field during 1853 called "The Hampshire Fly Fisher" where the first mention of the dry fly is seen. It said: "On the other hand, as far as fly fishing is concerned, fishing upstream, unless you are trying the Carshalton dodge and fishing with a dry fly, is very awkward." (Carshalton is now a suburb of London, but in those days it boasted some good water and the 'Carshalton dodge' was the first name by which false casting was known.) Dry fly patterns became commercially available around this time. Foster's of Cheltenham was selling dry flies with upright split wings as early as 1854. It is,unclear who actually developed the first dry fly. James Ogden, another Cheltenham tackle dealer, claimed to have been the first to use a dry fly, stating that he used dry patterns during the 1840's. But although Ogden certainly fished patterns that floated, others did so before him, without making any claim of being the first..

Ogden and Foster were certainly part of the generation who began the transformation the floating fly into the hackled dry fly during the years 1840 to 1850. The article in The Field spread the principles of dry-fly fishing beyond a rather small circle of fishermen. In America Thaddeus Norris was using a dry fly on the tumbling streams of Philadelphia as early as 1864.

What then of Frederic M. Halford, widely considered the indisputable father of dry-fly fishing? He did not attempt dry-fly fishing until 1868 - that is, several years after the "discovery" of dry flies. Yet what Halford did do was to perfect the technique with floating dun hooks.

One reason why the dry fly took so long to catch on was that it wasn't very easy to fish it. The dry fly of the 1880's had several deficiencies. When cast, traditional dry flies frequently landed on their sides, or even upside down. Another problem was that the flies became waterlogged and sank.

The last decades of the nineteenth century brought a strong upsurge in flyfishing, not least due to Halford and a group of English passionate flyfishermen. Enormous pains were taken to develop both equipment and techniques. The oiled silk lines were improved, body materials were tested which did not draw water, and new techniques were sought for tying more durable flies. Halford became a dry-fly fisherman by profession. At the age of 45 he retired in order to devote all his time to the sport. Together with his fishing friends he developed a standard in regard to rods, lines and flies which maintained its relevance long into our century.

His first and best-known book, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886), presented, after years of intensive insect studies in the chalk stream district of Hampshire, nearly 100 duns and spinners. (The county of Hampshire is where our head office is based.) Three years later came his Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889): here Halford described all the phases of dry-fly fishing. It was a comprehensive work on fishing with dry flies in the English chalk streams. On certain waters, such as slow flowing streams with selective trout, it is still of great value.

We can say without exaggeration that Halford released an avalanche: interest in dry-fly fishing grew at a raging pace. It became modern to collect insects and make naturally faithful copies with Halford's theories of imitation and his flytying technique as a basis. However, the other side of the coin became a fanatical attitude that only dry-fly fishing was the correct way to seek contact with the fish. True believers would never have picked up a wet fly with a pair of pincers.

For this tragic development, Halford bears great responsibility, since in his later days he became quite intolerant of divergent opinions. The "father of dry-fly fishing" was unimpressed by wet flies and nymphs. Rather he tried to combat them as if they were a dangerous nuisance in the fly box. Fishing with dry flies for standing fish was the only proper method for him, while downstream fishing with a wet fly was not only ineffective but also a destructive and immoral form of flyfishing.

See Nymphs at the English Fly Fishing Shop at www.flyfishing-flies.com

With equipment improvement and American fishing tackle coming to England around 1900, nymph fishing slowly began to arise. George Edward Mackenzie Skues was the nymph fishing technique's inventor and chief theoretician. Born in 1858, he died in 1949, a full 91 years old. Like dry-fly fishing, nymph fishing was developed in the English chalk streams. This is because such streams are fine to experiment in, with their clear water, abundant insect life, and selective fish which have become familiar with hooks due to the active flyfishing.

Skues is said to have been a clever dry-fly fisherman, although not a narrow-minded or fanatical one, in contrast to Halford. Despite, or perhaps because of the predominance of dry-fly fishing in the chalk streams of the late 1800s, Skues began to experiment. He asked himself why fish with dry flies when the quarry take food in or just under the water surface?

The idea of fishing with a wet fly when the quarry did not take insects on the water surface was, at the time, heretical to many flyfishermen in conservative England. But this did not prevent Skues from pursuing his research: he developed methods and patterns on the theory that fish were occasionally more interested in the hatching insects than in the already hatched ones. Thus soft-hackled, unweighted nymph flies became the alternative to dry flies.

In 1910 came Skues' first book, Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream. It meant a revolution for the chalk streams, in view of the overwhelming adherence to dry-fly fishing. His concepts were widely regarded as logical, well thought out, and in some respects obvious. Yet the most doctrinaire dry-fly fishermen choked on their whiskey at the mere mention of Skues. It these attitudes existed only in the chalk stream area. People in northern England for centuries had fished upstream with wet flies, this being sometimes necessary to make the fish take at all - and Skues received a ready audience there.

Many sportfishermen, particularly outside England, regarded the debate as a storm in a teacup. Still, the events in England were important due to the country's leading role, during much of our century, in the theoretical and practical development of fly-fishing, as well as in generating new ideas and in publishing much of the best literature on the subject.

Skues' nymph fishing was refined further, in the face of long opposition from England's numerous old-fashioned fly-fishermen. Frank Sawyer and Major Oliver Kite, also acute observers of nymph behaviour in the water, were main proponents of the method in the mid-1900s. Skues had concentrated on fish that took hatching nymphs near the water surface, calling for a vigil - whereas Sawyer and Kite focused on fishing with imitations of swimming and drifting nymphs in deeper water. The weighted Pheasant Tail is the fly most closely associated with Sawyer's name. Kite, one of Sawyer's own disciples, was soon fascinated by nymph fishing and wrote Nymph Fishing in Practice (1963), which is still considered the most complete treatment of the Netheravon school of fishing.

The embroiled controversy about dry versus wet flies must have accelerated the development of nymph fishing in England. Things went more slowly elsewhere in the world. Classic wet flies were long the obvious alternative when the fish did not rise, creating no great need for nymphs. In Scandinavia, for example, nymph fishing did not see a breakthrough until the 1960s, and it was primarily done with Frank Sawyer's method.  

Salmon flies at the English Fly Fishing Shop www.flyfishing-flies.com

Salmon fishermen have probably been the driving force in regard to reel development, obviously because the rushing of salmon demanded an ability to store a reasonable quantity of loose line as easily windable as possible. Line and reel had to be powerful because of the large size of the fish.

Even though Isaak Walton described some sort of prototype fly reel for salmon fishing already during the seventeenth century, it was not until well into the eighteenth that the development of equipment began to get under way. Rods were still heavy and clumsy, while the few existing reels were very simply constructed and quite small in comparison to the rods. The rotating spool lacked a brake and actually had only one function - to store the line on.

Salmon fishing wasn't a popular sport before the nineteenth century and as a result early salmon fly patterns are hard to find, although we do know that they existed, because salmon fishing is mentioned in the Treatyse on Fishing with an Angle. It is believed that salmon flies until the mid-eighteenth century consisted primarily of the same fly patterns as those for trout, except that they were tied on larger and stronger hooks. Salmon flies are commonly associated with the large, colourful, feathered creations which seem more attractive to the flyfisherman than to the salmon. A typical example is Jock Scott, which reputedly first saw the light of day in 1845 on a boat between England and Norway, and which in its original form probably contained 42 different parts. Its opposite is the American hairwing fly - tied simply, often with only a few ingredients, but no less effective for that.

During the nineteenth century, interest in salmon fishing grew. At the end of the century fly reels were more or less fully developed. Soon afterward, the equipment firm of Hardy began to produce "The Perfect", which became one of the world's most desirable fly reels.

Capitalising on the brisk rise in popularity of salmon fishing which started in the 1840s. William Blacker born in Newry, County Down, Ireland, emigrated to England where he set up as a fly tyer and tackle dealer, Where the salmon fly is concerned, Blacker was the torch that illuminated the night; the patterns he created suddenly made anything seem possible. Blacker's fame spread so far and wide that it wasn't long before he could afford to charge £3 for a month's tuition of four hours each day at trout and salmon fly tying. His trout flies were very traditional, and are largely derived from earlier works, but nothing like his salmon flies had ever been seen before. Sadly, Blacker died of TB in 1856, depriving fly fishing of a genius at the height of his creativity - he was only 42 years old.

Blacker is strongly associated with the rise in popularity of gaudy salmon flies in Britain, but the trend had started before he was born, with the import of so-called 'Irish' flies into Scotland. We know that gaudy flies weren't completely new in English and Scottish fishers' books, but by and large the majority of salmon flies in the early nineteenth century were pretty dull. The flood of colourful new patterns upset many in the fishing establishment. They received a frosty reception from many experts, despite the fact that anglers loved them. Competition became intense, and it wasn't long before there was an enormous variety of patterns on offer.

We can date the arrival of gaudy flies in Scotland quite precisely. According to Younger, the first contingent of 'Irish' flies were seen on the Tweed around 1810, and the interlopers were so successful that they swept the old patterns away within a few years.

Many now well-known classic salmon-fly patterns can be traced back to that time. Just like Jock Scott, the first classic salmon flies were colourful and elaborately dressed. The connection between over dimensioned salmon flies and the Victorian era in English history is not hard to see. Ladies' interest in showy clothes and feathered hats made the importation of exotic feathers a profitable business. Salmon fishing gentlemen did their part to expand the area of use. Patterns such as Thunder and Lightning, Silver Doctor, Black Doctor, and other fully dressed salmon flies derive from the same period, when over dimensioning was in fashion. These flies are still good producers and are on sale in the English Fly Fishing shop.

The introduction of the Railway had a dramatic effect on the development of the salmon fly. With increasing numbers of fishermen heading for Scotland, the demand for new patterns of fly skyrocketed and the dealers were only too happy to oblige. This put the traditional salmon fly under attack. Many local anglers saw the increasingly popular gaudy salmon fly as an Irish interloper, which displaced perfectly good local patterns. During the middle years of the nineteenth century the strong links which had existed between patterns and their rivers of origin began to be lost

Before 1850, anglers were content to fish with a mere handful of locally named flies for that particular river. There was still a conviction that patterns of salmon flies were likely to be more successful if they were developed for specific rivers, on the grounds that local fish 'understood' them better. After 1850 Fishermen took them abroad and caught huge fish in places like Norway, so why link one fly with one river in Scotland when they produced big fish elsewhere.

In the space of a fifty years the salmon fly had been transformed from a workmanlike object into a jewel - and there was more to come. By the 1890's, a vast selection of patterns was available, and the well-equipped salmon fisherman's fly-box was a riot of colour. The selection of materials in use was quite breathtaking: tying silks, floss silks, seal's fur, pig's wool and mohair, chenilles of various kinds, and tinsels; then the hackles: white, yellowish-white, white furnace, white and other shades of coch-y-bonddhu, black, blue dun, blue furnace, red furnace, cuckoo and kneecap ; feathers: golden pheasant, blue and yellow macaw, scarlet macaw, blue and red macaw, toucan, Indian crow, jungle cock, green parrot, chatterer, bustard, florican bustard, guinea-fowl, mallard, teal, pintail, widgeon, summer duck, jay, scarlet ibis, turkey, swan, peacock and ostrich.

Some literary milestones of that period are George M. Kelson's The Salmon Fly: How to Dress it and How to Use It (1895) and Pryce-Tannatt's How to Dress Salmon Flies (1914). But the pendulum soon swung back, and fishermen began to undress the "Victorian" salmon flies, in particular making the wings much simpler Ernest Crossfield was the man who led this new orientation. He appreciated simplicity and practicality in flies - the qualities which he thought were responsible for their fishing ability. Flies like Silver Blue and Blue Charm are good representatives of this school.

It was not only in England that new winds were blowing. In the USA around the turn of the century, fishermen began to experiment with new patterns and flytying materials. Hairs from bear, fox, mink, beaver, hare, squirrel and other animals became the "new" stuff of salmon fly wings. Today the American hairwing type is more common than traditional feather wing flies on salmon rivers all over the world. American influence in fly material has even pushed out deeply rooted English traditions. Nowadays even classic British flies in simplified variants are tied with hairwings. The change which has occurred in salmon fly materials is profound and the trend is quite clean Hairwing materials have come to stay among flytiers. The reason is plainly that it is easier to tie hairwing flies and they fish at least as well as the classic salmon flies.

The inter-war years 1918 - 1939 saw another revolution in fly fishing technique, with the widespread use of floating lines and floating flies. Salmon fishing in Britain finished at the end of spring, with a brief resurgence in autumn. A.H.E.Wood's ideas at the time, were revolutionary. After Wood, summer fishing became not only possible, but profitable. Wood's system of fly fishing demanded the presentation of the fly to the fish just awash and "sidling past him and floating downstream" like a dead leaf. "Greased line" fishing is frequently misunderstood as referring to any presentation of a sunk salmon fly on a floating line. Wood regarded any pull on the fly by the action of the stream on the line as fatal, and would mend the cast obsessively to achieve the effect.

After Wood, the focus of salmon fishing development moved to America. Three men were to pioneer a new breakthrough, dry flies for salmon. La Branche proved that salmon would take just about any dry fly, he developed a special series of palmer hackled flies for the purpose, which rode high on their hackle points Soldier Palmer, Pink Lady Palmer, and the Mole.

Lee Wulff revisited the whole problem of floating flies for salmon, and indulged in some major design work. The result was the Gray Wulff, a pattern which was so successful that it encouraged the inventor to develop the White Wulff and the Royal Wulff. The three patterns still form the mainstay of many fishermen's dry fly boxes. The dry fly method works well for salmon, anywhere where fish are present in large quantities, where a sighted fish can be accurately fished to, or in water temperatures over 60° Fahrenheit, which may explain why it is not so successful in Northern Europe.

The exact origins of the hair-wing salmon fly are obscure, but it seems to have originated in the late nineteenth century in North America. Bucktail flies were first used for bass fishing as early as the 1890s. As far as is known, the originator of hairwing flies was an Idaho rancher called A.S. Trude, who first fished his patterns some time between 1886 and 1890. Colonel Lewis S. Thompson saw the flies and had them adapted for trout fishing, trying them much later for salmon on the Restigouche (in 1928, or even a few years earlier.) The motive behind this radical departure from tradition is not recorded, but it isn't hard to guess. Many of the materials used for tying "standard" fly patterns were becoming hard to find in Europe, never mind America, and the temptation to experiment with local materials which were abundant and cheap must have been hard to resist. The major development of the hairwing was undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s on the East coast of North America. The fully-dressed wet fly was in widespread use in America at the time, and a group of fly tiers began experimenting with simpler conventional patterns. They worked so well that it wasn't long before they abandoned the use of feathers in the wing and started to tie with local materials such as bear, squirrel, wood chuck and deer. The success of these patterns elbowed out the traditional British salmon flies, and led to a new and innovative school of North American fly tiers.

In a sign of growing American dominance in the field, hair-winged patterns didn't take long to make the transfer across the Atlantic. The hair-wing had become a significant influence on British patterns by the 1960s, with many traditional patterns being adapted to allow hair-wing ties.

The origins of the tube fly are less certain. We know that North American native people tied lures for salmon on quills as long ago as the nineteenth century, but the idea seems to have entered mainstream salmon fly fishing during the 1940s. As ever, the stories conflict. One says that the tube fly was originated in around 1945 by a fly dresser called Winnie Morawski, who worked for the tackle firm of Charles Playfair and Co. at Aberdeen. To begin with, Winnie used hollowed out sections of turkey quills, with the treble strung inside the quill. To begin with, she used this unusual base to dress traditional patterns. Then a doctor called William Michie called at the shop, and suggested that she used sections of surgical tubing as a substitute for the quill. Later development resulted in the wing being dressed in a collar right around the tube, perhaps inspired by the Waddington, and the treble was left entirely outside the tube, so that the fly could "escape" up the line when a fish took. A variation says that during the 1940s, an Edinburgh surgeon was so struck by the possibilities of surgical drain tubing that he took some home with him and tied some dark stoat's hair onto it, before attaching a treble and created the Stoat's Tail. Whatever the truth may be, this new development meant that every aspect of salmon fly design was up for grabs, and a new era of invention followed.

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The English colonists who reached the North American continent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries naturally brought with them a knowledge and interest in, flyfishing to their new land. The sport had taken root by the end of the eighteenth century, and it is even thought that special shops then existed for flyfishing materials and equipment.

Serious fishing with a fly began in the United States around 1850 mainly in the eastern parts of the country. In 1887 the book Fly-Fishing and Fly-Making by John LI. Keene came out. Its main interest is that it shows that people in the USA had come farther in the development of flyfishing than Europeans had tended to believe. Despite the late entry into flyfishing history in relation to England, the refinement of rods, spools, reels and lines was steadily driven forth. It was an American violin-maker who, in the mid-1800s, made the first split-cane rods. After about 25 years, they began to be mass-produced and the rods were improved in features like casting ability and weight - so much that the English began to import them around the turn of the century. English rods at the time were long, heavy and stiff thus gradually the English took over the American type of rod, which many have seen as a prerequisite for the development of nymph fishing.

The American equivalent of the chalk streams in Hampshire became the Catskill rivers in the state of New York. Rivers such as the Neversink and the Beaverkill. Today they are classic waters in the history of American flyfishing.

In Europe and England, the brown trout was the target for flyfisherman. This species, however, did not originally exist in the USA. There, people fished instead for brook trout in the eastern states, and for steel-head or cutthroat in the west.

With the growing popularity of fishing, the supply of brook trout in particular decreased drastically. During the 1880s, trout consequently began to be imported from Europe. The first fish were taken from Germany and the species is thus called the "German trout

As brown trout, and later rainbow trout, were implanted in rivers, the waters became harder to fish. The traditional downstream wet-fly fishing proved ineffective. These trout were simply not as easy to fool as the brook trout, and fly-fishermen were slowly but surely forced to reconsider. One of those who perhaps came to mean most for the development of American flyfishing was Theodore Gordon. He was something of a loner who, in 1905, settled on the Neversink in order to be able to tie flies and do his fishing in peace and quiet. His literary production was primarily a number of articles in the journals Forest and Stream (USA) and Fishing Gazette (England). He also corresponded fluently with Halford and Skues. Through this lofty correspondence with two of the great men of flyfishing, he acquired a fine insight into the development of English flyfishing.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Gordon obtained some 50 dry flies from Halford. However, these were tied according to English conditions and were therefore poor imitations of the insects which existed in Gordon's home waters. As a flytier, though, Gordon began to tie his own dry flies with Halford's technique, but modelled on local insects. He created many original patterns, the best known being Gordon Quill, and he also developed the so-called "bumble-puppies" in the Neversink. These flies were the predecessors of the bucktail patterns, subsequently so much used.

Gordon laid the foundations for the Catskill School, which came to have a huge impact on American flytying. The fanaticism which marked English dry-fly fishing never reached the USA and there were thus larger possibilities of experimenting. The results were significantly more sparingly dressed flies than the typical dry flies from England.

Another American who has acquired a leading place in the history of flyfishing is George LaBranche. In 1914 his first book came out: The Dry Fly and Fast Waters. He is regarded for this and other reasons as the man who made American dry-fly fishing really popular. In the book was presented a technique for effective dry-fly fishing even in relatively rapid waterways. It differed in various respects from Halford's theories, which were primarily suited to the English chalk streams.

LaBranche's fishing technique was distinctive in many ways from the Catskill school, one essential difference being the size and bushy appearance of the flies, which made them float high and remain easily visible to the fish. LaBranche also belongs to those who developed the technique of fishing salmon with dry flies as previously mentioned.

In general a different style of flyfishing and flytying arose in the USA as compared with England. An example is the special type of wet flies called bucktails and streamers. They grew up in America during the 1920s and are refinements of the classic wet fly. Observant flyfishermen had discovered that wet flies with silver or gold bodies could be identified as fry by the fish. Gradually there arose a whole lot of different patterns of bucktails (hairwing flies) and of streamers (featherwing flies) which, in one way or another, imitated fish fry in different species and stages.

In addition to those authors already named, Edward R. Hewitt had a great influence on this progress. He was a contemporary of LaBranche, and was one of the great flyfishing authors between the two World Wars. Today he is perhaps best known for his division of flyfishing development into three phases: (1) as many fish as possible, (2) as big fish as possible, (3) as difficult fish as possible to catch. Hewitt also advanced the view that the presentation of the fly was extremely important: the main thing according to him was not to have as great a range of flies as possible, but to have a smaller number and be able to present them correctly.

In the same way as Gordon, through correspondence with Halford, became something of a pioneer in American dry-fly fishing, Hewitt continually corresponded with Skues and thereby gained impetus for trying nymph fishing in the USA. But it was, of course, essential to adjust the English nymphs to suit American conditions. Much of this work took place in the Neversink River itself. The English Fly Fishing Shop sells traditional English Flies as well as new American patterns.

Yet another pioneer in American flyfishing was James (Big Jim) Leisenring, who also corresponded with Skues. In the middle of the war, he published The Art of Tying the Wet Fly (1941). Although in many ways it had a more up-to-date attitude towards wet-fly and nymph fishing than did earlier authors, Big Jim's book received no wide recognition until much later. The flymph (something in between a dry fly and a nymph), which tries to copy the insect in the transition between nymph and flying insect (actual hatching), was among other things a result of Leisenring's intensive observations on the water.

The Catskill rivers continued long into the twentieth century to be a principal centre for the development of fly-fishing. Besides the Catskill school's typical lightly dressed flies, the American imitation doctrine also got its nourishment from that area. Louis Rhead, Preston Jennings, Art Flick and several other devoted flyfishermen collected insects in the Catskills for a long time, resulting in two standard works on trout flies and the natural prototypes which they imitate: AmenVan Trout Stream Insects by Louis Rhead (1916), Preston Jennings' A Book of Trout Flies (1935) and Stream-side Guide to Naturais and Their Imitations by Art Flick (1947).

The basis of the American imitation school was now laid, and the outcome was an improvement of the traditional patterns and a reduction in the number of necessary imitations to about ten patterns.

There is no doubt that the cradle of modern fly-fishing was in Britain, but much has been added to the sport from the countries colonialised by the British. Australia, New Zealand, India and parts of Africa and North America. Early flyfishing in Scandinavia and USA was also much influenced by the British traditions, as was the patterns used. Greenwell's Glory, Butcher, Teal and Red, and Zulu just to mention a few of them. Modern travel and communications make new method spread like a wind, and that gives birth to new ideas. Now fly patterns like Bass bug from America are being experimented with in Northern Europe. The next 50 years should be interesting.

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The English Fly Fishing Shop
Estate and Country Sports Equipment Ltd, 5 Woodland Way, Morden,
Surrey SM4 4DS, England (Established 1978)