Okay so I used to teach a fly fishing course at the Sandhills Community College a long time ago…ok, seems like a long time ago. As part of the course, I taught a brief history of fly fishing. I did it for two reasons; first, because I wanted folks to know it has serious roots and that is where the “prestige” comes from. Secondly and more importantly, I wanted the women in the class to feel more at ease to know that they were not participating in a “mans” sport.
I urge all who love history and fly fishing to research the roots. New evidence comes available quite often enough to keep it interesting. I will not go into too much detail in this article but if you are interested, email me and I will get the links and research sources for you.
As far back as I have been able to find, the first true written words about fishing with a “fly” began with AElian, an Italian naturalist from Rome in about 200 A.D. Admittedly, AElian never traveled outside of Italy so at best, we have a third hand account.
AElian wrote; “…I have heard of a Macedonian way of catching fish, and it is this; between Boroea and Thessalonica runs a river called Astraeus and in it there are fish with speckled skins; what the natives of this country call them you had better ask the Macedonians. These fish feed upon a fly peculiar to the country, which hovers on the river…”.
“…they do not use these flies at all for bait for fish; for if a mans hand touch them, they loose their natural colour, their wings wither, and they become unfit for food for the fish. For this reason, they have nothing to do with them, hating them for their bad character; but they have planned a snare for the fish and get the better of them by the fisherman’s craft. They fasten red (crimson red) wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cocks wattles, and which in colour are like wax. Their rod is six feet long and their line is the same length”.
From the time of this writing, there is a huge gap of time. However, one of the first true works on fishing with a fly belongs to Dame Juliana Berners.
Dame Berners was a noble woman and head of a Benedictine nunnery in Sopwell, England. It was in 1496 that she first described the mayfly life on the waters that she fished as well as how to tie flies to imitate them.
The title of this work was “A Treatise of Fishing with an Angle”. It was published in a collective work on outdoor sports of that era titled “The Book of Saint Albains”. Dame Berners discovered a seasonal regularity of hatching insects on the waters she fished. This discovery led her to the conclusion that a fishes diet is made up in large part of the supply of swarming insects.
It is with these observations that Dame Berners developed twelve patterns of flies, one for each month. The patterns that she described were so well defined, that fly tiers are actually able to tie the same patterns today.
So, this will conclude the short lesson in the modest beginnings of fly fishing. It is a spectacular research if you are in for such things but it brought about a completely new respect for the art of fly fishing for me. I can only hope that some of you may be interested enough to research more on your own or at the very least, have a new perspective on what is thought about as a whimsical way to catch a fish.
Tight Lines!
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