Fly Fishing History

I BELIEVE THAT between the early 1960s and early 1970s the light tackle club members and the Met Tournament in South Florida were responsible for more improvements and innovations in light tackle and saltwater fly fishing than at any other period in this sport.

I was so lucky to be in the right place at the right time. As manager of the MET (there were no major tournaments in South Florida in the mid-60s — and none in the Keys), I would guess that less than 80 or 90 guides worked the Keys at that time. And maybe there weren't that many.

ONE DAY LAST SUMMER, I was fishing a small, undistinguished local trout stream, and as I released one of its small, undistinguished local trout, I noticed that the hackle on my Adams had unwound and was trailing loose. But when I reached for my fly box to replace the ruined fly, I found myself wondering: Did the fish I was releasing tear that hackle loose, or was the loose hackle the reason the fish took the fly? The trout wouldn't tell me, of course, and rather than launch what I knew would be a quixotic attempt at empirical study by continuing to fish with the damaged fly, I put on a new one.

But the experience got me thinking about one of angling folklore's most intriguing and persistent minor narratives. Spend a little time out on the shadowy margins of fly-fishing propriety and you're sure to encounter the tale of the ratty fly.

IN THE EARLY 1700s, after anglers had been using horsehair lines for more than a thousand years, they finally discovered that nature had a better idea. It was a natural leader material that, by comparison with horsehair, was so remarkable for translucence, flexibility, and strength that it would eventually dominate the sport. It was silkworm gut. Gut was the raw material from which the larvae of Bombyx mori, a species of Asian moth, spun silk. When this larva ( commonly called the silkworm) reached the growth stage at which it would start spinning its cocoon, it contained two long, thin sacs or "envelopes" running longitudinally nearly the length of its body. Each sac held a tightly bundled mass that when unwound, stretched, and properly treated would make a single strand about twelve to fifteen inches in length — just right for a tippet, or, if several were knotted together, a whole leader.