If you have to be in a room full of mentally ill people, I recommend a fly tying demonstration. Sure Nymphomaniacs Anonymous may seem like the better choice initially, but, ask yourself, if a complete stranger offered you their ChapStick® would you use it?

A group of fly tiers is a collection of parts that don’t seem to fit together. You have the guys who approach it as though it was a science; others who treat it like an art, and possess all the annoying habits of the “artiste.” Some guys are almost obsessed with being as thrifty as possible bragging about how much they saved at the craft store to perhaps the only audience who knows damn well that no one ever saved any money by tying their own flies. You have the traditionalist and the innovators; guys who think a perfect fly is a simple tie and the guys who seem to make things as complicated as possible. Fly tiers are a wonderfully diverse group.

I apologize for this paragraph, and I find it a bit sad that I feel a need to defend my use of the word “diversity.” Diversity is a popular word these days, and like many popular words a lot of its original meaning has been boiled away by heated arguments. Today diversity refers more to a person’s “stats” than to the person himself. Ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, skin tone and the other facts that may describe people but can never describe a person. Companies, colleges and communities are strongly encouraged to promote it with special programs and other artificial means. The Flyosopher finds this laughable. Not that he is opposed to diversity – quite the opposite. Rather, I believe forcing people to be diverse is like forcing them to use oxygen. Social barriers should be torn down, but bridges need to be built. Ironically it is personal similarities that will build these. My best friends when I was younger formed a motley crew that had we been old enough to enter a bar could have been the opening of a bad joke: a Jew, a Korean, a black guy, and a white guy. The common thread was fishing.  We may have had little else in common, but that was enough.

The diversity of fly tiers is easiest to see when they are imitating the same forage. No two guys tie the same fly the same way. I used to think this was due to skill or lack thereof, but like most things it is not nearly that simple.

Nearly every fly tier has the ability to copy a recipe.  If they really wanted to they could make flies exactly like the original.  But they don’t want to.  If a tier wanted a fly exactly like some original pattern, he could buy it.  I think there is a deeper process at work, and like all artists tiers want to express themselves.  Maybe not to other people but to the natural world itself.  To find a way to communicate with nature on its own terms without the need for the filter of a human audience.  In that regard, a fly tier may be the purest artist of all, speaking directly to nature in its own language.

Or maybe there is just some driving need to bastardize fly patterns.

“Illegitimi  non carborundum”

Unknown - British Intelligence WWII

I love this quote.  Everything about it is bastardic.  Essentially it means, “Don’t let the Bastards grind you down,”  which is a nice sentiment.  First the language…sounds like Latin, looks like Latin but it’s not Latin.  It is a bastardized language.  Next who said it?  Historically it seems to have come from British intelligence during WWII, so naturally there is no way of really knowing who.  The American general,  ”Vinegar” Joe Stillwell, adopted it as his motto, and later Barry Goldwater popularized it during his presidential campaign.  I was first introduced to the expression at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy - it was painted on the wall of a company dorm.  There the Flyosopher’s little sister was taught that the motto came from the Iliad, specifically the words of Odysseus to Achilles as he was sulking in his tent.  So what we have is a B.S. Latin expression made up by an Anglophone from the 20th century being attributed to a Greek Epic, and, the best part of all, it fits perfectly.  

Thats the key to bastardizing a fly pattern - it ought to fit.

Take a look at this squid pattern.   In it I can see at least four other patterns that I “borrowed” from to create it, and ideas taken from Bob Luce, David Skok, Ray Stachelek, David Ruddock, as well as a few stray thoughts of my own.  There is a pretty good chance that the guys I mentioned got ideas from other guys, there could be the thoughts of dozens of tiers represented in that one fly.  Now that it is on the web there could be dozens more.

My squid patterns differ from many others in that I do not make individual tentacles - several patterns will use saddle hackle to represent the “arms” of a squid.  I also refuse to use long-shanked hooks.  I have my reasons.  The squid I observe hold their arms together when they swim, and long-shanked hooks offer an advantage to a large fish in a fight.  There are plenty of tiers that use them, and I’m sure they catch plenty of fish. 

This squid, however, is mine.  Sure his eye assembly is Captain Ray’s, the color pattern is Luce’s, the spine is Skok’s, and the tube component is Ruddock’s, but make no mistake the fly is mine. 

Copy this fly, and it will be yours.

If there is a down-side to working with tiers, it is the strange need many (though certainly not most) tiers feel to invent, innovate, and impress.  As though their ideas came to them from the vacuum, or that they were their ideas in the first place.   Art and fishing are bigger than any of us, perhaps even all of us.  I don’t believe that nothing is new in fly tying, and I certainly don’t think that nothing will ever be new (four negatives make a positive).  I just believe that ideas grow best in the company of other ideas, and that as a fly tier you are an individual, so there is no need to try to be different.  Trust me, you already are. 

It makes me happy to think years from now when the Flyosopher is naught but a skull on the ocean floor hermit crabs stick their asses in the eye-socket of to make a home, or mayhaps a bogeyman-like tale mommy stripers tell their fry so they will behave, right before she tries to eat them - that somebody may use a squid fly without saddle hackle because he saw a fly that “some guy” tied that he got the idea from “some other guy.” 

As a tier, I know I may be buried a 100 bastards deep in the history of that fly…but I’ll be there.