If it is true that fly tying and cooking have a lot in common, then this book equates to cooking class.  This book belongs on the table as you unwrap your first tying vice.  No frills, no esoteric crap, on the first page of text you begin to learn how to tie flies.  Well appointed with step-by-step instructions and accompanying photographs, this text begins at the beginning and walks you through 15 core techniques common to most fly patterns.

The tools and their usage are covered first.  Next is a great explanation of the tools and their respective uses.  The third section begins with the core techniques.  If you never master anymore tying techniques than the 15 outlined, you will always have flies to match any fishing situation.

In covering the core techniques, each is well defined in text and photographs.  Often with similar texts the reader is left with gaps left to be filled by presumption, speculation or imagination.  With Fly Tying for Beginners, no detail is too small.  There are a sufficient number of close-up photos, each with a narrative, to walk the reader through the technique. Additionally, each photo is subtitled with helpful hints.

Should the reader find some fly tying jargon that is not understood, there is a glossary of terms located in the back of the book.

The next section is a Fly Directory.  This contains the 50 patterns defined in the remainder of the text.  These patterns represent multiple forms of both dry and wet flies.  This allows the reader to go straight to a desired pattern.  Once a pattern is chosen, go that page and begin.  A brief overview of each fly is provided, along with the recipe and photo arrangement of the materials needed.  Each pattern and the steps to tie it are described thoroughly and have step-by-step photos showing the progression of steps to the finished fly.

This may sound silly but the text and layout are only a small part of why I like this book.  The physical engineering of this book puts it head and shoulders above the rest of its competitors.  The hardcover is nice.  Beyond that, the cover is pre-creased to lay flat when opened.  WOW!  I wonder where that great idea came from.  Just like the great cookbooks, it is straight spiral bound with square slots on the heavy gloss pages.  When learning to tie it will lay flat on a table top or book perch offering its’ contents to the tyer for immediate referral.  Additionally, in this configuration, the book is easily advanced or turned back to the previous page.  Ergonomically, this is how all “Beginning” books should be constructed.  Fly Tying for Beginners is meant to be used heavily and is most “user” friendly.

Were I to render one complaint, it would be with pattern order.  Then again this book is not laid out in the manner that I teach fly tying.  I like to start with putting a hook in the vice, move to starting thread, then to whip finish.  With these three core techniques, common to every fly known, add catching material and you have a San Juan Worm.  With now four techniques, add a piece of countered wrapped wire and you have a Zebra Midge.  I like for people to master a technique then have a fly.  In my classes this instructional method keeps growing one technique at a time until students can tie just about anything.  All that being said, this is still the very best beginners’ book I have found to date.

Tying your own flies is fun, cost effective and oh so rewarding on the water.  As I have said before, it is a skill “that will put more and larger fish to film and memory.”  Fly Tying for Beginners is a must have for anyone considering learning to tie.  After the core techniques are mastered, a great book of recipes is all that’s needed to have flies for anywhere in the world. 

Lefty Kreh’s Ultimate Guide to Fly Fishing

By Lefty Kreh, Lyons Press, available at www.lyonspress.com

Those of us beyond a certain age remember going to a much treasured collection of encyclopedias to get our first views of the world.  We used these books for school in the form of reports and such.  We also got great entertainment value out of them in a day when TV was black and white.  Today there’s Wikipedia and everything can be found online.  But with all the digital information out there, there’s still a need for the hardbound text.

Lefty Kreh’s Ultimate Guide to Fly Fishing is a 424 page text that every angler should have.  This book is truly a modern day Treatise.  Every aspect of fly fishing is covered within the pages and I mean every aspect.  Starting with the basics and progressing through every thing you’ll ever want or need to know.  It is full of well thought out diagrams.  One thing I have always liked about anything written by Lefty is the diagrams.  Sometimes a text leaves you wondering a little bit when studying “how to” illustrations.  Lefty’s are as clear as standing on the river with him.  The book is well appointed with wonderful photographs both for illustrative purposes and just pure art.

Salt or fresh water, running or still, warm or cold, or any combination of water types, Lefty covers it all thoroughly.  No species is safe either.  From bluegill to tarpon, Lefty covers nearly everything with fins.  You literally could take this book alone and fish your back yard or the world.  This truly is an Encyclopedia for our sport and a genuine Treatise that reflects all the changes since the original was penned.     

Nature of Fly Casting-A Modular Approach,

By Jason Borger, Shadow Caster Press, available at www.jasonborger.com

Hook & bullet writing, as it is known in the trade, usually falls into one of three categories: how to, where to, and stories from the field.  C.B. McCully’s book, “The Other Side of the Stream,” incorporates each of these types, and yet it manages to elude them all.  If it must be categorized, it might be described as a why to.  McCulley takes the reader on a quietly epic journey. It begins with his days as a rough, eager youth out for small trout in a small stream along with his boyhood friend, Owen. From there, he progresses through his days as a sophisticated angler and entomologist for whom knowledge comes to efface joy, to an eventual return to the mysteries of hope, luck, and legend. 

Following Irish tradition, McCulley’s work has melancholy overtones that color his words in sepia like old photographs, evoking memories of places and people known intimately long ago. He writes of the becks and rivers that run through his past, of his child self, barefoot and dirty, carrying a plastic bread bag of trout, encountering the well-heeled authority who subsequently revoked the lad’s fishing privilege at a beloved place. On page 17, he shares the memory, and the reader senses the boy’s barely withheld tears.

“I turned from him with as much politeness as I could muster and went home, joy shattered. That night, I ruled two thick lines in my fishing diary under the last entry for Harden Beck.  I never fished it again.”

He writes of this loss and of many others, and of the steady disappearance of the fish he loves most, the sea trout. His is not just a tale of loss and regret, though.  Interlaced with images of fading innocence, his own and that of the Irish waters he fishes, is the frequent gleam of hope.  The hope is what keeps McCulley fishing. Even the smallest likelihood of success is enough for those who fish and dream and write. With every cast and every stroke of his pen, (or keyboard, as is more likely these days) he connects with anglers and writers who have fished and hoped before. 

As the reader progresses through the book, allusions and quotations slip onto the pages one after another, until the work is deeply layered in meaning and mystery gleaned from centuries of literary imagery.  What seems at first to be a simple pastoral becomes a philosophical work. McCulley raises questions that go far beyond choice of tackle and presentation of fly.  He writes of the angler’s relationship to the fish and to the land, and of the dialectic that connects it all like a line that runs through the ages, adding richness and resonance as the language and lore of fishermen evolve.  On page 113 he writes:

“Stories, instruction, a workable set of ethics. . . . all help us to explain ourselves to ourselves and to each other, and that attempt at explanation is – since we are inescapably dialectic - one of the prime requirements of being alive, and human.  We may not catch fish, but we are able to say why we tried to catch them in the first place.” 

In the final chapter, titled, “The Haunted Country,” McCulley gives his readers a magical experience that leaves questions unanswered but quests justified.  This book brings anglers to cast into enchanted streams encountered briefly but never forgotten, fishing with the author for glorious sea trout and meaning.  This is a book to be read and wondered over many times. 

- Brenda Layman

We are proud to announce the guest writer appearance of Brenda Layman.  Brenda is a free-lance writer who lives in Ohio with her husband and resident fly-tier, Mark.  Between fishing trips and other forays into the outdoors, she writes for a variety of magazines, including Ohio Game & Fish and  Ohio Valley Outdoors.  She is also a regular contributor to online magazine, Greenmaple Wellness and is Hunting & Fishing Feature Writer for the online informational site, Suite 101, where her articles appear weekly.
 

The Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle
 

The Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle is largely accepted as the first text on leisure angling.  Written about 1388 by Dame Juliana Berners, this Treatyse may not be the first fishing text but it’s as far back as I can find.  A treatyse, treastise or treatise is basically defined as a dissertation or “how to” book.  Funny, more than six centuries ago, there was a need or desire for texts on the “how to” of things.  As we see bookshelves in our stores filled to capacity with instructional materials of all kinds, in the Treatyse we should feel a link to those came before us.  This commonality is at the very root of why the Treatyse is part of our fishing heritage.

In order to see the importance of the Treatyse, we must understand that fishing was largely a commercial venture until very recently.  The common man had no time for leisure angling or anything else done for leisure.  At its beginning, leisure angling was the pastime of only the wealthy.

The Treatyse is a short book consisting of less than sixty pages including illustrations.   Reading it can be difficult in its original form.  Old English can be tough to get through.  There are many modern English versions available and it can be found on the internet for free.  Should you wish to try reading the older versions, try reading it aloud.  This is a tactic recommended by literary scholars.  It is important to note that rules of spelling and grammar did not exist when originally penned.  People wrote phonetically, hence the benefit from reading aloud.

I find it humbling, with all the modern text available on fishing, the Treatyse is still cutting edge.  We all try to find a new angle or more descriptive way to pen or present advice on fishing.  In the end, we simply are re-interpreting a six hundred year old text.

The Treatyse begins with the spiritual value of angling then works through every stage of the sport.  The technical topics include how to make a rod, how to make a line, how to make hooks and how to make bait and flies.  Advice is given on matching the hatch, hatch cycles, drift, fighting big fish, line colors, getting a good hook set and more.  Arguably, the Treatyse even covers the foundations of catch and release showing great deference for the harm of over harvesting to the advised angler as well as his unknown brethren of angling.  The end of the Treatyse is almost political, giving the reader some of the responsibilities of being a now knowledgeable angler.

I have often written and spoken on the value of Nymphing.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a dry fly bite!  In all my words, I can think of no better way of giving value to effective Nymphing than the words written more than six centuries ago: 

“For the bigger the fish, the nearer he lies to the bottom of the water; and the smaller the fish, the more he swims above.”

This is the essence of the Treatyse, good advice to becoming a successful angler.  “The twelve impediments which cause a man to take no fish” are just as relevant today as in the beginning.    

In many writings, I have cautioned readers on the seemingly forgotten true values of fly fishing.  Many in the “Post Movie Crowd” appear entirely consumed by the “How” of our sport as they seek profit and prestige from it.  Ironically, “The Movie” was really about the “Why” of our sport.  It would do us all good to remember the words of the Treatyse:        

“Also, you must not use this aforesaid artful sport for covetousness to increasing or saving of your money only, but principally for your solace and to promote the health of your body and specially of your soul.”

The Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle is a short but enlightening read.  In a very few pages it really defines our sport both technically and spiritually.  Enjoy!