The Dry Fly and Fast Water by George La Branche

Author:George La Branche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Derrydale Press
Published: 2000-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

THE IMITATION OF THE NATURAL INSECT

WITHIN a very recent period, it has been asserted, upon scientific authority, that fish are colour-blind. If this be true, though it is difficult for the mere angler to understand how it may be proven, the theory of those who believe that it is necessary to imitate in the artificial fly the colour of the insects upon which trout feed must be abandoned.

Writing upon the subject no longer ago than 1904, Sir Herbert Maxwell, certainly a competent observer, said: “My own experience goes to convince me that salmon, and even highly educated chalk-stream trout, are singularly indifferent to the colours of flies offered to them, taking a scarlet or blue fly as readily as one closely assimilated to the natural insect. Probably the position of the floating lure, between the fish’s eye and the light, interferes with any nice discrimination of hue from reflected rays.”

Cotton and the many angling writers who followed him all dwelt with insistence upon the necessity for close imitation, especially in relation to colour. In 1740 John Williamson stated the principle in the following words: “. . . as the great Difficulty is to obtain the Colour of the Fly which the Fish take at the Instant of your Angling, it is impossible to give any certain Directions on that Head; because several Rivers and Soils are haunted by peculiar Sorts of Flies, and the Flies that come usually in such a Month of the Year, may the succeeding Year come almost a Month sooner or later as the Season proves colder or hotter. Tho’ some Fish change their Fly once or twice in one Day, yet usually they seek not for another Sort, till they have for some Days glutted themselves with a former, which is commonly when those Flies are near Death, or ready to go out.” Then, giving some simple instructions in regard to tying flies, he quotes Walton: “But to see a Fly made by an Artist is the best Instruction; after which the Angler may walk by the River, and mark what Flies fall on the Water that Day, and catch one of them, if he see the Trouts leap at a Fly of that Kind. . . .” Williamson’s book was practically a compilation, containing the best of what had been written by anglers before him, together with his own observations.

From Williamson’s time no work on fly fishing seemed complete unless instructions were given in the art of fly making, with a description of the sorts and colours of furs, silks, feathers, etc., suitable for the imitation of the natural insects held to be so necessary; but until the appearance in 1836 of Ronalds’s “Fly Fishers’ Entomology,” it cannot be said of any author that the instructions given by him were the result of scientific study. Ronalds was most thorough in his investigation, and his experiments in regard to the senses of taste and hearing of trout are extremely interesting and instructive. While his

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