Musing # 9

Why are manufactured flies so large….why can I not easily buy size 22’s?

In mid Summer 2003 the Mair/Fraser annual trip took in a Tri-State visit to New England in the US. Our first port of call was the Farmington River in Connecticut, where we hooked up with local guide, Pat Torrey.

Pat was astonished by our size 14’s and 16’s. “Is that the smallest you have?” he enquired. Luckily we were still in the car park of the wonderful UpCountry Sportfishing Home - UpCountry Sportfishing on the Farmington River shop in West Hartford, where we were introduced by Pat, to the ‘micro caddis’….size 24!

This makes Pat a Halfordian, and Halford’s book, ‘Floating Flies and How to Dress Them’ received plenty of attention in books and articles in America when it was published in 1886. Maybe that’s ‘why’!

But…when you did you last look in a water butt in your garden, mid Summer?

If you had, then you will know that nymphs are one quarter of an inch long. At least, most of them.

So why do shops insist in marketing stuff that is twice the size of the natural? (look at the latest Fishtec catalogue, Main Season 2011, page 95, and onward, to verify my concerns)

And dry flies…Mays excepted…they are all tiny.

Just scoop a couple of olive duns into your hand when next wading. And which dun precisely has a white plume emanating from its thorax, then?

Well the answer is obvious.

When I was 47 years of age, I began struggling to tease the leader through the eye of a fly, and a visit to my Optician produced this supercilious comment – “Mr Mair, the time has come….”, and most fly fishermen (it is still not truly a young man’s past time) are similarly (in)capacited by the ravages of anno domini, so we need a little help! And to hell with the imitative art.

But less so in the States. In America anglers are just as voracious fish catchers as anglers are in the rest of the world, and catching, is everywhere, sadly, still more important than the art associated with doing so, and the real benefit…just ‘being there’.

However, Americans fish much lighter than Europeans. Two weight rods are common….three and four weight, typical. UK fishermen are brought up in ‘put and take’ ponds, and reservoirs which are stocked with lunker rainbows requiring something rather sturdy, and they seem reluctant to abandon these fish for the smaller indigenous species, because they are more difficult to catch, I suppose. They don’t know what they are missing or may be they think they cannot afford to switch (how much is a day ticket at Rutland Water, anyway?)

I sense that anglers in America are more instinctive fishermen than we are, and, more adept at the imitative art than we are….I enjoy fishing with them, and always learn from them.

So…….please…..would Farlows and Orvis start stocking many more small flies….?

Because I am a Puritan.

(And…. I prefer the five day version to the one-day, too)


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