Welcome Peter Hayes!

[Paul Arden]

Do you fish floating tippets on slow calm stretches of river, Peter? I don't want to get into this discussion too much because while I think you are wrong in this regards, I have learned a great deal from your book in many ways!! Much much more so than this one error (IMO).

Personally i really liked your penultimate chapter the most. Who do you write for?

Cheers, Paul

[jphasey]

Do you fish floating tippets on slow calm stretches of river, Peter? I don't want to get into this discussion too much because while I think you are wrong in this regards, I have learned a great deal from your book in many ways!! Much much more so than this one error (IMO).

Personally i really liked your penultimate chapter the most. Who do you write for?

Cheers, Paul

It's no error Paul. Actually at least two thirds of my 125 best fish on floating tippet last season were taken in laminar flows. Show me a rising fish in a calm flat flow, give me some clue as to what it's eating and a half decent imitation, and I'll show you a hooked one! (well mostly, ahem, subject to my usual level of operator-error). With the tippet floating.
But of course, confidence is everything. Halford didn't, couldn't, fish the nymph because he was certain it couldn't be done as he told Skues in their final argument in the Flyfishers Club in 1910. Skues did, and outcaught everybody at Abbots Barton by a merry mile.
It's all to do with the floating tippet being in the window and not in the mirror to the upstream-facing fish as it rises to the fly, and to it's not being in its face and sliding past its eye as the fish takes, as it is when sunk.
Glad you like the philosophy chapter. Got a poor Third Class degree in philosophy BTW, but it's making more sense to me now that I'm past Man's traditional bury-by date!
I have been writing for Trout And Salmon, Salmo Trutta, Gamefisher, Flyfisher's Journal, Fly Fishing and Fly Tying over recent years, but I'm currently "resting" as actors say, except for writing the odd book...the latest of which is just out, published again by my good friend Paul Morgan at Coch-y-Bonddu Books: "Imitators of the Fly, a History". (I took that as an invitation for a bit of puff, thanks!)

[Graeme H]

Hi Graeme. Interesting. Is it then a waste of time to tie blue versions of your normal flies, because the normal colours work just as well?

Cheers, Massew

It's only a waste of time if you've never caught a fish with a blue fly ...

Cheers,
Graeme

[Paul Arden]

That's great Peter I will try floating tippets in rivers this year. So tell us about your latest book? It sounds entriguing.

Cheers Paul

[jphasey]

That's great Peter I will try floating tippets in rivers this year. So tell us about your latest book? It sounds entriguing.

Cheers Paul

Well if you're curious about how the good old boys got started into what we now consider to be developed imitative flyfishing, but when you look inside the big fat books about angling history you shy away— simply because there is such a lot of it—this is probably the book for you. What it does is to concentrate on the main storylines in the same kind of style that a journalist would – there's plenty of detail in it and some new stuff as well, but if you bear in mind that I originally wrote it for my own purposes as a kind of "Bluffer's Guide to Fly Fishing History", you'll get the idea. Then, the more detail I went into, and the more revealing were the extra facts and angles that I uncovered, the more it grew, and the more I enjoyed adding viewpoints and illustrations to it. It's not a big book, just 100 pages, so the investment in reading time isn't too forbidding; and there are lots of illustrative pictures. It shows how inventive people were, and how quickly and creatively they got into the mass production and mass marketing of both flies and tackle from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s; how flyfishing grew astonishingly, fed by the growth of the middle classes and the aspiration to be a gentleman. It looks in some detail at the characters and the personal relationships of the leading players. And it has some revealing facts about our sport and how perceptive and clever were our progenitors. For example the issue of selective trout was being discussed over two centuries ago, and fishing a lead-weighted nymph on a short line with an indicator section in the leader was recommended by two fly fishing writers in the late 1600s. It has got published as the lead book in a series of "Angling Monographs" that Coch-y-Bonddu Books have launched this spring, the same publisher as "Fly Fishing Outside the Box".
In some ways it's a specialist book, but it's also an easy and readable way to fill in a "history gap" such as might be inhibiting your progress to being the fully rounded fly fisherman that you really want to be!

[John Finn]

Did many ordinary flyfishermen tie their own flys back in the day or were they for the most part reliant on commercial production. What unusual materials were used that would no longer be available or considered ?......John

[Paul Arden]

It would be very interesting to try fishing with the tackle they used in those times. I'm quite sure it's perfect for nymphing! When I was French Nymphing in Bosnia on the Ribnic I overhead one guy tell another that I wasn't "fly fishing" - in fact he obviously wanted me to know

I'll order up a copy of your book when I'm back in the UK. It sounds like the sort of thing I need!

[alex vulev]

Halford's not on your list then?

Halford ... chose to preach to the world (and largely succeeded) that what was beneath the surface was beneath contempt for a gentleman. Gentlemen would only use floating flies. Only a cad would use a nymph. Nymphing was in fact not fly fishing.

Marryatt, the greatest fly fisherman of the time and a total charmer whom everybody looked up to, could not dissuade him
And he was, relatively to others, an unsuccessful angler.
He set back fly fishing for several decades.

Fish with him? And learn what? How to have a closed mind?
No, at that time, Marryatt would be my man, and I'd expect a mind-expanding day of laughter and discovery.
Cheers Paul.

[/quote]

i like that answer thank you very much Sir!

Halford's not on your list then?

[/quote]
who was halford

[jphasey]

An aside, but many people don't get the double entendre there: a fly was a fast two-wheeled carriage, and people used this expression to refer to carriage driving skill being more important than having the best carriage--which of course is equally true of fly fishing !

[jphasey]

Did many ordinary flyfishermen tie their own flys back in the day or were they for the most part reliant on commercial production. What unusual materials were used that would no longer be available or considered ?......John

Well we don't really know John, but I think tying your own will have been the default until about the 1830s when commercially tied flies became widely available and the Royal Mail got started soon after(Penny Black stamp, 1840). A major part of fly fishing books was the recipes for flies and instructions how to tie them.
Many exotic feathers were used, but mainly for salmon flies--though the use of bustard was common enough!