Below is a thorax flymph tied by Pete Hidy. When Dave Hughes and Rick Hafele visited Pete in Boise (shortly before he died), Pete showed them how he tied it, and gave them each a Clark Spinning Block.Trout Flies: The Tier’s Reference by Dave Hughes. Stackpole Books © Copyright 1999. Page 25
A fly doesn’t need to look pretty when taken out of the vise, but it needs to look like something alive, and if it’s tied to imitate some food form, then it should also look at least a little like whatever it’s designed to make trout think it is. I don’t tie flies to be pretty, but somewhere in the equation, the flies that work wind up being pretty in some way.
I’ll give an example. Years before writing my book Wet Flies (Stackpole Books, 1995), I began research in two directions. The first was into literature, where I discovered that the most promising wet flies throughout history seemed to be the most roughly tied. The second was into entomology, where I discovered that aquatic insects, when emerging upward or when drowned, and therefore when in a condition to be best imitated by wet flies, were treated roughly by nature. They were tangles, tossed by the currents.
I began tying spiky dubbed bodies, with lots of loose tendrils of fur and guard hairs, based on the works of James Leisenring and Pete Hidy in their book The Art of Tying the Wet Fly (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1941). Then I began palmering the hackle over the front one-third to one-half of the body, rather than tying it in a few tight turns right at the head of the fly. Finally, I added wing materials that were either tattered to begin with or else became quickly separated as soon as the fly got wet.
These flies took fish. They were ragged compared with a beautiful traditional winged wet fly, emerging in its perfection from the tying vise. To me, and I suspect to the trout, the rough flies looked more like the real things down there awash under the water. What surprised me was that these roughed-up versions of prim wet flies had a beauty of their own. I can’t honestly tell you if they became beautiful to me because they caught trout, because I tied them myself, or because they looked more like something in nature than the neater flies. I can tell you that their form follows their function, and the accomplishment of that is often the surest way to create beauty. In the case of the wet fly, in my mind, perfection and prettiness became two different things. To me, the perfect wet fly is rough and looks like a disheveled insect. It has a form of beauty of its own.
Lance
, A few buddies and I would sit around the kitchen table on Fridays tying flies and drinking beer preparing for the Saturday outing. The best flies came off the vise after the 3rd beer. Disheveled and ragged, "creative", and in reality poorly tied. They were however always the best fish catchers.