Posted on Sat, Jan. 15, 2005

The fine art of fooling fish with flies

By Don Sapatkin

Inquirer Staff Writer

Pete Hoover looked intently at his woolly bugger-to-be, just a size 6 hook held by a vise and wrapped in black thread.

"Now get a nice, long feather," Ed Emery instructed, holding one up for show. "See the sheen on it? We talked about that last week. Tie it on by the tip."

Hoover selected a marabou - turkey under-feather, dyed black - and pressed it against the hook's shank. A few windings of black thread secured it in place.

To an observer, the feather looked like nothing more than a clump of hair. To a fish, however, it could form the tail of a leech or a crayfish wriggling in the water. Food.

"Fooling a trout on his terms," the teacher explained with the pride of a fly-tying fly fisherman, "you have to go into his world."

This was the last of six classes taught in the fall by the Main Line Fly-Tyers, a club that takes tying flies as seriously as catching fish with them. Another series begins next month.

Why tie a fly?

"It gives us something to do in the wintertime," said Emery, 50, who has been tying his own for 15 years.

"Flies" imitate bugs or other fish food, and an experienced tier can fine-tune stores' standard patterns to reflect local variations.

"When you catch a nice trout on a fly you tied yourself, it's really satisfying," Emery said. "And some guys will say, 'I'm not even going to fish this fly, I'm going to put it in a frame.' "

Hoover signed up for the course largely because he was tired of spending a couple of dollars on every fly, most of which is lost before drawing a fish. Bulk purchasing of feathers, hooks and other materials cuts costs to about 25 cents apiece. An experienced tier can dress a fly in under a minute - after years of practice.

Good fly fishing requires thorough knowledge of the biology of predator and prey, and how they interact as seasons and water conditions change. Faced with thousands of possibilities, an angler must know which fly to choose at any given time and place; how the fish would expect it to behave above, on or under the surface of the stream; and how to give it action - to make the knot of thread and feathers and hair come alive.

The woolly bugger is easy to learn, and its striking underwater movement seduces a variety of fish. Dozens of variations are employed.

To make a basic black-and-olive bugger, Hoover clamped a fly-tying hook in a fly-tying vise and wound some black thread around the shank. Next came wraps of thin lead wire, secured by a few windings of the thread. The lead causes a woolly bugger to sink head-first, then rise in an undulating motion as an angler strips the line in short retrievals.

In a laboratory mimicry of metamorphosis, a "fly" began to form among the alternating layers: marabou feather for the tail, saddle hackle (feather from a rooster's back) to suggest legs or gills moving in a blur, olive chenille for color, black thread wound around and around near the end of the hook to hint at a head and secure the whole shebang.

The same basic wrapping-and-layering technique is used for all flies, many of them far more complex. Only the materials change.

Hoover had worked quietly all evening. Now the environmental consultant from Lafayette Hill, Montgomery County, showed some of the eight flies he'd learned to tie as Emery's only pupil. (A half-dozen others learned more advanced techniques from a teacher across the room.)

"That's a hard one," he said, pointing to a tiny deer-hair caddis - a club specialty - whose tan rabbit fur, black-and-brown deer hair, and brown rooster hackle were tied to imitate an adult insect lighting on the water's surface to lay eggs.

Hoover, 37, fly-fished with his father as a child but gave it up because all of his friends had spinning rods. He came back five years ago, appreciating the challenge yet still buying the flies.

"I never realized how much went into it," he said, vowing to practice through the winter and upgrade his skills in the Main Line Fly-Tyers' next course. "I'll be really happy when I catch a trout on one of these."

As class ended, he offered up his woolly bugger for appraisal.

"It's a little long," Emery said. "But you know what? It will go like crazy in the water."

Contact staff writer Don Sapatkin at 610-313-8246 or dsapatkin@phillynews.com.