Match the hatch?

Despite the hype from tackle merchants, most artificial flies only ever catch humans. Trout, it seems, don’t share our obsession with fly patterns

- RICHARD WILSON

TROUT fishing is a battle of wits, pitting wily angler against crafty fish. It is an undisputed fact that it takes a canny fisher to catch a canny fish. We know this to be true because clever fisherfolk write books and articles in which their sophistication and guile always win the day. For the rest of us there are no bragging rights in dumb failure, so we scour magazines and the internet hoping for enlightenment. This quest for wisdom amounts to just one all-important question. It’s the one we  ask of every angler we meet on the bank. And it’s the first thing we say to anyone who’s just caught a trout: “What’s the fly?” Not “How long is that rod?”, “Nice waistcoat” or “That’s a cool net”. Nor do we ask about spiritual incantations or performance-enhancing drugs. Just the fly.

So when it really matters and the chips are down, the summation of centuries of piscatorial knowledge can be distilled into one universal question: “What’s the fly?” There’s nothing wrong with the question, but the answer has caused endless human misery. Look around you. Magazines promote fancy patterns and bloggers tie sensational flies made with just the hair of their dog. The omnipresent Mega-WebaStore offers click-bait flies distinguished only by their pornographic names (trout are suckers for sexual innuendo). This fly-choice conundrum lies at the heart of fly-fishing’s collective neurosis: if we make a bad decision and fish the wrong fly, we will go home empty-handed on a day when everyone else is catching fish on alternate casts. This is the worst humiliation a fly-fisherman or woman can suffer.