The dark side

Most weekday evenings I am to be found at an old desk in my digs here in the boggy Irish midlands. As the winter weather swings between sodden gales and pin-sharp frosts, I am inside making flies for the coming season. Dabblers, bumbles, Wulffs and the rest of the usual suspects have rapidly filled my existing fly boxes and also a few new ones which have come into my possession. The rows of mayflys which had been so badly depleted have been fully replenished, the experimental failures removed and replaced with proven killers. It was now time to look around for anything else that could conceivably be useful or had previously been omitted. I cast my mind back to the heady days of my ’32’ project, and that was when the trouble started.

Attempting to catch a fish in every Irish county required a degree of flexibility on my part and so various coarse species were targeted and even stocked rainbow trout. As a much younger angler I did a fair bit of stillwater rainbow fishing and the remnants of those flys from nearly 50 years ago were dug out and used to reasonable effect on loughs from Derry to Waterford. Even I had to admit the 2 boxes of lures presented a sorry sight though, so I decided the other week that I would make some new rainbow trout flies in case I ventured out after those Yankee imports in 2024 or beyond. Not being very close to the whole UK reservoir scene for half a century meant I was almost totally blind to the developments there in. No worries, I’ll just watch a few YouTube videos and be up to speed in no time, or so I thought.

While I had heard of bungs, blobs, FABS and the like, I had not paid them any attention until now. After a very short time digesting the not-so-fine points of making and fishing the latest creations I decided I had better make a few up for the box. Peter Driver down at Piscari-fly in Kilkenny sorted me out with a few hooks and so I got cracking at the vice last Monday evening. These ‘flies’ are so simple I figured that 50 would rattled off the vice in no time.

After a dozen of so I felt ‘underwhelmed’ shall we say. By the time I had made twice that number I had lost the will to live. Hook in vice, start the silk, run it to the bend, tie in fritz, wind back to the eye and finish. Sorry now, but that is NOT fly tying!!! It was so damn boring just wrapping fritz around the shank and tying it off. The foam tails on FAB’s is the work of seconds with a length of booby cord and an old pair of scissors, so they hardly stretched my skills any more than the blobs. I kept going for about an hour but after that I had to tie a few dabblers to get my brain to function once again.

The next evening I steeled myself and plunged into the murky depths of mop flies. ‘Deadly’, Can’t fail to catch on them’, ‘best fly ever’. I had read the accolades in the angling press but now it was time for me to make a few. I will admit there is a little bit more to tying a mop fly than a blob, but there is not a lot in it. I added a bit of dubbing and even dared to wind a couple of turns of hackle on some of the dozen or so I made. Still it was hard going, monotonous and boring. If, at the end of it I was looking at a few aesthetically pleasing creations I could find some solace but no, they are horrid looking things. I expect the trout will indeed eat them and all will be well, but for me it has the feel of a race to the bottom. How far are we from machine produced ‘flies’, stamped out on a machine in China? We already have multiple fly tying businesses in developing countries where underpaid labourers tie flies for sale in the west. If I owned such a business I like to think I would be the one to invent the blob or the mop fly.

At least I now have some of these monstrosities to be going on with, which had been the whole point of this journey to the dark side in the first place. I’ll leave it for a while then force myself to make some more in different colours. I’m toying with idea of adding a tag and a hackle to my next batch of blobs, not in the hope they will catch more fish but just to make tying them a bit more interesting to tie.

I wanted to make some of these fritzy things specifically for potential trips to stocked fisheries next summer, the kind of sessions I want for a change from the loughs. I’ll try them out but if they are as boring to fish as they are to tie it will be a very short lived experiment. I am just not ‘wired’ to find the lowest common denominator too haul out the most/biggest fish. I strongly suspect that the meagre catches of wild trout I prize so highly would not interest most FAB exponents. Each to their own.

With the explosion of rainbow trout lures now available I’ll attempt to tie some of the more interesting ones to fill the last of the boxes. As for my old lures, rusty and dull now but once my beloved slayers of pink sided trout, they will be consigned to the bin. Of old, I had faith in goldheads, damsels and muddlers, so no doubt they will proliferate once again.

Along with the lures I am planning on replacing most, if not all, of the box of nymphs I used for stillwater rainbow trout. Again, this is age related as I don’t trust those old hooks any more. Stick fly, assorted Damsels and that type of thing were my favourites back in the day. It will be enjoyable making a few of these up again after all this time, even if it just for old sake. I tie very quickly anyway, bit these simple patterns take no time to whip up and will refill that box in no time. I get a lot of comments about the speed I tie flies. This is a hangover from my teens when I tied on a semi-commercial basis, and making a few pounds depended on churning out flies at a respectable pace. It just became a habit, one which has stuck with me all my adult life.

I’d rather fish the float and maggots for tench than fly fish with blobs if I am honest, but for a change of scene I will try for rainbows on the odd occasion next year. I do wonder how my angling would have developed over the decades had I remained in Scotland? The fishing over there sounds like it has changed too with vastly reduced salmon runs, the sea trout all but wiped out and in their place more put-and-take fisheries. Perhaps I would by now have become an expert rainbow trout angler, happily extoling the virtues of the latest colour of boosted fritz while leering over the carcass of my latest double figure stockie. We will never know because I opted for a different life many years ago, a life which has been very good to me in so many ways.