Life of a Chalkstream: February 2023

Greetings!

You rather inundated us with your hundreds of nominations for The Greatest Fly of All Time – thank you. I have to tell you the range of your choices was as wide as the scale of your responses was unexpected with some patterns I, for one, have never fished.

Here in the office Sarah lovingly dissected your emails, which included some fascinating commentary and insights, to tabulate the nominations. From that I have picked the top five for the vote, but before we get to that here are some that didn’t make the final cut.

To begin with I have to mention in dispatches Alistair Robjent with his eponymous Stockbridge shop and fly he claims to have invented, the much debated Daddy Long Legs. It is a bit of a marmite fly, too much on the edge of being a lure for some but for others the go-to fly. The Robjents Daddy was just outside the top five as were assorted sedges, the Kite’s Imperial and Tups Indispensable. For the specific disciplines, for stillwater and grayling there were no overwhelming nominations though for salmon the Willie Gunn stood out as way the most popular choice.

So, to the nominations in alphabetical order, which originate from three different countries, include three dries and two nymphs with patterns invented as late as the 1980’s and maybe as far back as the 1500’s.

Adams

Invented in the USA by Leonard Halladay, it takes its name from Charles E Adams who fished it with great success on the Boardman River in Michigan on the evening of the day in 1922 when Halladay first tied it. It has a host of variants, the most popular being the Parachute, imitating a small or medium-sized dun.

Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear

This nymph doesn’t make it onto the list for its looks – it is a mess of a fly but deadly when fished in the surface film. Its origin is unknown, but it is thought to be over 500 years old. Halford relied on it heavily in his prime years at Mottisfont Abbey on the River Test around 1885-90 and it came to prominence again through the writings of Frank Sawyer half a century later.

Greenwell’s Glory

Another fly invented by one but named after another in this case the former being James Wright and the latter Canon William Greenwell in May 1854. This olive dun imitation has rather fallen out of fashion in recent years, but it still has a cohort of aficionados including one River Test keeper who fishes it all season to the exclusion of all other flies.

Klinkhammer

This is the only fly where the creator is alive today, namely the Dutch tier Hans van Klinken who invented the fly in the 1980s originally to catch char and the occasional salmon, on the rivers of Norway. The secret of his original Klinkhammer Special is a large, curved hook with an extra bend behind the thorax.

Pheasant Tail Nymph

The original tying, which comprises of simply the fibres of a cock pheasant tail feather and very fine red copper wire. It was created by the Wiltshire Avon river keeper Frank Sawyer around the 1940’s when he observed that a dry Pheasant Tail Red Spinner attracted fish when bedraggled and sinking. Like many of those in the list it has inspired many a variant, but the original remains the fly to deceive trout eating any small nymph.

Vote by clicking on one of the nominations below. Voting closes 10th February.

Vote for the Greatest Fly of All Time

Adams

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Greenwells Glory

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Gold Ribbed Hare's Ear

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Klinkhammer

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Pheasant Tail Nymph

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More bad news for English salmon & sea trout

Some of you may have read the recent report on how warming rivers present an existential threat to the British salmon population by the end of this century; I explain the science behind this report in greater details in the March edition of Trout & Salmon.

However, separate to that, and judging by the latest data from the Environment Agency even an end-of-the-century time horizon might look overly optimistic.

Is the image of fly fishing changing?

I was recently asked by our friends at Sportfish and Farlows to write a piece for their blog examining how the image of fly fishing is changing. I must admit, I went a bit off piste in answering the question wondering whether our image has changed that much, the challenges of being a niche activity and trying to understand why participation numbers are falling.

You can read the full article here plus some of my solutions for arresting the decline.

Photo courtesy of Sportfish customer Noake and his daughter!

Photo of the Week

Jamie Pankhurst, the newest recruit to Fishing Breaks and fresh out of Sparsholt College with a Degree in fishery management, is a keen photographer. Here’s an amazing image he captured on a smokin’ Wallop Brook one morning last week.

You can follow Jamie and Fishing Breaks on Instagram.