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A Brief History of Fly Fishing

People have known for thousands of years that there is nothing on this earth quite as sublime as spending many a happy hour luring a wily, old fish from the depths of a stream with a rod, a line, and an artfully tied fly. The first clear description of fly-fishing appeared in De Animalium Natura, nearly two thousand years ago, when Claudius Aelianus reported that “fishermen wind red wool around their hooks and fasten to the wool two feathers that grow under a cock’s wattles.” The first English book on fly fishing was written by Dame Juliana Berners in 1496: Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, which contained a wealth of practical angling advice and details on equipment. As the Abbess of the Sopwell Priory, Berners cast flies and wrote between prayers. She described the rod as having two parts: a ‘staffe’ or butt, and a ‘croppe’ or top. The butt was made of hazel or rowan, cut between Michaelmas and Candlemas (that is, in the winter), and was six feet long or more.

As thick as your arm and evenly tapered, it was tied to a straight piece of wood and heated in an oven until it had thoroughly dried in the smoke. The pith was burnt out with a hot iron rod, and the finished butt was hollow and evenly tapered inside, with a broad ferrule of brass or iron at each end. The top of the rod–another six feet or so–was carried inside the butt, and generally had a lower part of green hazel spliced to an upper shoot of blackthorn, crabtree, medlar or juniper.

The line was no more than twice as long as the rod, attached to a loop at the rod’s tip. Without a reel, you play the fish with the bend of the long, light, flexible rod to relieve the line of the strain: if the fish is not kept under the curve of the rod, the line breaks. Lines were made of twisted or braided horsehair, and Juliana advocated varying thicknesses from a single hair for a minnow to fifteen hairs for salmon. Avid fly fishers made lines that tapered from 12 or 15 hairs down to a casting line of one, two, or at most three hairs thick, and for the next two hundred years or so, the required thickness of the horsehair line was hotly debated. “A man who could not kill a trout twenty inches long with a double hair deserves not the name of angler.”(1651) www.fishingexpo.com

Of all the equipment described in Treatise on Fishing with an Angle, only the flies–which were designed to match the hatches throughout the season–are unchanged. Of the twelve flies described by Dame Berners, some are still used today. Those first dozen flies, codified on the banks of the River Ver in Hertfordshire, were adopted by Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler (1653, with over 400 editions to date), who breathed life and soul into the fine art of fly fishing. Walton wrote at a time when trout were fished with a single or double handed rod up to 20 feet long and made of six to eight pieces spliced together. The rods tapered like a switch and played with a true bend down to the hand, and the length was required until reels allowed anglers to use more modest lengths.

Plain barrel winders of brass were known in the 1600s, but reels didn’t become common until the line itself improved. Fishing line was made of braided horsehair or horsehair and silk until the 1800s, when braiding machines were refined and cotton and flax lines were made. The reels of that time were versatile and unspecialized: a big one held 200 or more yards of heavy line, and leaders were generally made from silkworm gut. Drawn from the bowels of a silkworm, gut made fine, extremely strong leaders that were four to nine feet long, readily available by the 1800s. By the turn of the century, oiled-silk line had become standard flyfishing equipment. The taper in the line was usually produced manually, with one woman watching six to eight braiding machines that took several hours to make a line. When the line was complete, it was soaked in linseed oil, dried in an oven, roughed up by hair brushes, polished with stone wheels, again and again: sixteen times for good line and up to 24 times for superior line… a process that took six months from start to finish. The line had to be dried after use and required periodic oiling, but compared to horsehair it worked miraculously well. As soon as the line was perfected the choice of reels became very broad, from reliable workhorse reels to reels of exceptional beauty and precision.

Homemade rods of hazel, crab tree and juniper disappeared when the British colonies started shipping such limber exotics as greenheart, lancewood and bamboo. The separate parts of a rod were generally spliced together with a little hemp string wound around joint and anchored to pins on each part until the 1800s, when metal working was industrialized and ferrules became common. About the same time, British rodmakers noted that the outer layer of bamboo has very high fiber density, and by splitting the canes and taking long thin strips of the outer layer, six or eight strips can be glued together to make a rod that completely outperformed the heavier wooden rods for anything less than a salmon. The rods were typically wrapped every inch or so with a few turns of red thread to reinforce the glue, and the handle was usually cork. With the arrival of heavier silk lines and lighter cane poles, the fly fisher of a century ago was casting with great finesse, and tournament casters regularly hit eighty feet or more.

Fly fishing equipment and casting technique was generally designed to float the fly above the water in a manner that imitates nature closely enough to fool an old fish. Flies were often designed to mimic specific insects, but some useful flies bear no recognized resemblance to any living creature. The Victorian era was renowned for their exuberantly hued fancy flies. At times the position of the fly on the water, its action, the size of the fly and its form are seen to be more important than the color and shape of the fly, so the flies themselves have long ranged from drab to gaudy. Most important, they caught fish!

By the turn of the century modern fly fishing theory was being debated in England through the observations and experiments of fly fishermen like Halford and Skues. Fiberglass rods became available in the 1940s, first built of fiberglass over a wood core. A variety of solid and hollow rods followed, and hollow became standard rod construction. Graphite rods were introduced in 1973, and the new rods caused a sensation: lighter, smaller in diameter and stronger than fiberglass, they added to the average anglers casting distance. Synthetic materials revolutionized the fly line as well. After WWII, a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) coating was applied to a core of braided nylon (now the most common), dacron or even fiberglass. First the core was tapered, then the coating itself could be tapered, and there were virtually limitless possibilities in line characteristics. Weight-forward lines, with the front ends heavier for distance casting, have been around for generations, but now there are a greater variety of tapers, including very blunt, fast “saltwater tapers” for large flies. Nylon has completely displaced horsehair and silkworm gut for leaders. Better equipment has opened new vistas for fly fishing. The power of fiberglass and graphite rods, along with stronger reels, line and leaders, now allows anglers to catch and land very large fish, regularly. It was probably in the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, that interest in fly fishing virtually exploded. Books, videos, classes, magazines and catalogs brought instant knowledge to a new generation of fly fishers. The school of hard knocks approach to learning fly fishing was replaced overnight as specialty fly fishing shops introduced newcomers to the sport. Improved fly tying materials and methods became commonly available and a growing understanding of insect behaviour began to demystify some arcane aspects of the fly fishing challenge. Modern equipment has enhanced fly fishing, but the essence of the adventure is the same today as it was in Roman times: a rod, a line and an artfully tied fly cast to an elusive fish. But the adventure is not always the same. The explosion of knowledge and interest in fly fishing is not without its consequences. More leisure time, more discretionary income, and greatly improved transportation have led to overcrowding on some of our finest trout streams. Overfishing, pollution, river obstructions, and fisheries mismanagement have produced a situation in which we often find more people sharing in a diminished resource. We should all remind fellow fly fishermen that we individually need to play a role in preserving the fishing experience, that indefinable quality that helps to fill our spirit.