Some trout flies

Mainly river and stream patterns at the top and some lake patterns below. Dressing flies is not unlike cooking: one begins by following recipes in books and learning the techniques until branching out and creating variations and original patterns incorporating new materials to meet specific needs or conditions. more

A number of patterns are named after women, for example the traditional Mrs Simpson is named for Wallace Simpson, others refer to my favourite places, people I know, life events and may incorporate reference to the types of fly such as b.h. for a bead head or simply wet or dry.

I designed a salmon fly pattern called Elsa Garrett to honour a Blue Mountains girl who dressed flies for Zane Grey in the 1930s.

I have also like to design and name individual flies or sets as memorials to anglers who have gone to rest, note the Purple People Eater is in there somewhere. I wonder how an all black fly would go, maybe with a flash of silver, called the Johnny Cash or simply the man in black.

Fly fishing problems are essentially aesthetic problems that lead to aesthetic solutions: colour, visibility, shape, size, sparkle, motion, drag, movement, silhouette, sink rate, how a dry fly sits upright on the surface and catches the light at sunset, how an emereger pattern sits just so in the surface film. As John Goddard and Brian Clarke have remarked in The Trout and the Fly, the trout fly is a clean device that lends delicacy, mobility, lightness and elegance to the pursuit of trout.

In recent times there has been a terrific expansion of fly fishing in Australia to include salt water tropical species such as bone fish, barramundi, golden trevally, saratoga, mangrove jack, sooty grunter, jungle perch and temperate species such as bream, mullet and whiting, as well as warm water native species including bass, cod and perch. Some of these critters have big razor sharp teeth and can pull like a horse - delicacy and lightness are inmost cases best left at home. more

It does however demonstrate how successful the fundamental principles of fly design have been over the last 500+ years since first described in print in the "Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle" by Dame Juliana Berners in 1496.

Finally we may turn to Isaac Walton, from The Compleat Angler first published 1653, wow what a language:

O sir, doubt not that angling is an art. Is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly? a trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled merlin is bold; and yet I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow for a friend's break­fast: doubt not, therefore, sir, but that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? for angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice: but he that hopes to be a good angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practised it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.