I always like the way that the fly fishing industry markets with buzzwords. The latest one being “tactical”, having been preceded by many others over the past three decades.
I started before the days of Roger Hill’s classic little book on
Fly Fishing the South Platte River: An Angler’s Guide.
Having fished with Roger, and after becoming good friends with his son, Jeff Hill, who was also a former commercial tyer, I was intrigued by the dozen or so rather impressionistic flies that Roger listed in the book, many of which were popular renditions available at that time from local fly shops, not necessarily anything he claimed to be his own inventions. Roger is a rocket scientist by trade and no dummy at the fly tying bench, yet the South Platte Classic flies that he mentioned in the book were filled with very simple images and dressings such as this one:
Others included the Brassie, which was brass wire with a black thread head. Or the Buckskin, which was a little buckskin wrapped as the body with a thorax of a couple turns of peacock. Or, the Black Beauty, black tying thread, ribbed with brass wire, and a little dubbing for the thorax. Other flies came out of this simple South Platte Style, including the Miracle Midge (same as the Black Beauty, only white or cream thread, and later with the addition of a glass Mercury bead head). You might say they are more of semblances of insects rather than exact imitations, as Rim Chung often says of his famous RS2 (which, by the way, is not a super easy fly to tie, at least not in the segmented way that Rim ties it, not that it should discourage you from trying it).
Many other flies come out of this same simple impressionistic style. The Yong Special which is sewing thread on a hook. Or the Killer Bug, which is Chadwick’s 477 Yarn on a hook, with a wire underbody. The list goes on and on.
Now we have lots of exact imitation tyers and materials D-Ribs, dyed goose biots, micro tubing, and every kind of synthetic imaginable. But I think a lot of that original dubbing, wool yarn and other matterials have a natural shimmer (by the way the UV light perception theory of trout has been debunked by Dr. Iñigo Novales Flamarique, a leading salmonid researcher), water absorbing and shedding factors (i.,e., created the trapped air bubble effect that emerging insects also have), and translucency factors that we didn’t realize at the time, but are now becoming known as explanations as to why these simple materials were so effective. I have fished with the best of both worlds, and I am decidedly in favor of impressionistic flies with exact presentation methods, rather than the other way around, or both.
And those same simple patterns still work great when in the hands of master presentationists such as Pat Dorsey, Rim Chung, Andy Kim, the Sawyers, etc. So, I have always striven to become a master fly fishing presentationist or to have arrived at what is now called a “Tactical Nymph Fisher” by the magazines.
