Dry-fly fishing is easily the most popular form of the sport, while not always the most effective.
Fortunately, it's sufficiently productive that those who embrace the puritan ethic don't become victims of their own asceticism.
And I do not use the term ethic in the moral sense. Despite what a certain faction within the fly-fishing fraternity might think, choice of angling method has absolutely nothing to do with either ethics or morality.
The truth is that dry-fly fishing is just sheer Joy. I do a lot of subsurface fishing with all sorts of creations, but if I had my druthers, I'd be fishing dry all the time. The fact that I don't reflects my Dutch-German practicality.
The most common design of dry fly — what many refer to as the classic, or Catskill, school — consists of four basic components: wings, tail, body, and hackle. This is where we encounter hackle in its purest and most hallowed form: the stiff, glossy fibers that imbue our beloved dry flies with form and function.
A brown Bivisible tied palmer-style. |
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In the broadest definition, however, any fly that is fished on or in the surface can be considered a dry fly. Some of these do not, and are not intended to, imitate a winged form in either the subadult (dun) or adult (imago) stage.
The Eye of the Beholder
Rather, they are intended to suggest an insect struggling to reach that stage, and perhaps doing so unsuccessfully. Hence the floating emerger and stillborn dun schools. And we use imitations of terrestrial insects as well.
There is also a very fuzzy dichotomy between so-called imitators and attractors. Actually, with the exception of virtual laboratory models tied as objects of art, the dry flies we fish with don't look a whole lot like the real bugs.
However, the visual distortions caused by water and the manner in which light interacts with it, and the effect of the movement of currents, compensate in a very real sense for the dissimilarities.
These factors also discipline fly design and the selection and use of materials. It's not so much what the fly looks like in the vise; it's how it performs on the water.
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