By Dennis Smith –
Fly-fishing is confusing enough. So I don’t get why many fly tiers, vendors, shop owners and outfitters make it even more confusing by arbitrarily assigning catchy new names to slightly-altered old fly patterns and then marketing them as if they were the latest and greatest, must-have creations.
There are no industry-wide standards for naming fly patterns, so fly tiers and suppliers are free to tag a fly with whatever clever label they choose and then foist it off as some brand-new, razzle-dazzle killing pattern, when in all probability, it’s just an old standard tied with a different tail, rib or body material or new hook.This Skykomish Sunrise, named for its pretty colors, mimics absolutely nothing in the natural world but catches fish like mad. Go figure.This Skykomish Sunrise, named for its pretty colors, mimics absolutely nothing in the natural world but catches fish like mad. Go figure.
Case in point: On a vendor’s website, a fly recently advertised as a brand new partridge and olive emerger turned out to be the venerable hare’s ear soft hackle tied on a short-shanked grub hook with olive-dyed rabbit fur and copper wire ribbing instead of the natural rabbit fur and gold wire used on the old classic. It’s a good-looking fly and no doubt effective, but it’s still just a modified hare’s ear soft hackle. That’s what it should be called, don’t you think?
Equally confusing to me is that a single fly can be known by several different names depending on where you find it. For example, what might be called a bionic midge in one fly shop could be called a disco midge in another, a crystal chironomid in another and the flash dancer in yet another. Why do they do that? It’s all the same fly. Grrr.
Fly shop owners who recommend store-specific fly patterns (or house flies, as I call them) on their website fishing reports and fail to mention they can only be purchased at their stores just add to the confusion. You can’t blame them for plugging their own products, of course, but it’s frustrating to anglers who may find themselves running from shop to shop in Colorado looking for a one-eyed flying purple people eater only to find out no one’s ever heard of the darn thing except the shop owner in Montana who’s selling it.
To be fair, there are a number of extremely innovative fly designers out there producing genuinely original fly patterns and they deserve to be recognized for their talents. They trademark their creations, license professional fly tiers or jobbers to market them and then collect royalties on the sales.
Not all flies are tied to imitate aquatic insects either. They might mimic minnows, frogs, leeches, snails, mice or, sometimes, nothing at all. To further complicate matters, a fly can be tied to replicate any of the several different life stages of a single aquatic insect: its nymph or pupal stage, its emergent or actively hatching stage, a fully hatched adult or even a dead or dying one. All have tricky names, some of which have nothing to do with the bug itself, but they just sound good to the designers. Fly fishermen eagerly embrace all this nonsense, but a lot of folks just use worms. It’s a lot less confusing.