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    Stewart on the Wet Fly: Lessons from a Master Technician
    Stewart on the Wet Fly: Lessons from a Master Technician
    Stewart on the Wet Fly: Lessons from a Master Technician
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Stewart on the Wet Fly: Lessons from a Master Technician

    By Paul Schullery

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    About this ebook

    • A key influence in modern soft-hackle and emerger fishing
    • Insight into the natural world combined with fly pattern theory
    William Stewart's writings burst upon the angling world in 1857 in a flurry of acclaim and controversy. In a provocative mixture of traditionalism and iconoclasm, Stewart aimed to reshape the angling habits of his day in the most fundamental way. His forceful arguments on behalf of upstream fishing and his advocacy of shorter, stiffer fly rods were an important early influence in the rise of dry-fly fishing in the later 1800s.
    Schullery brings together Stewart's key fly-fishing writings in this first American edition. Many of the rationales behind practices that we take for granted today were first and best expressed by Stewart, and his strong opinions on fly pattern theory still have the power to make us reconsider principles and habits we have perhaps grown too comfortable with.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateAug 18, 2008
    ISBN9780811753395
    Stewart on the Wet Fly: Lessons from a Master Technician

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      Book preview

      Stewart on the Wet Fly - Paul Schullery

      Introductions and back matter copyright © 2008 by Paul Schullery

      Published by

      STACKPOLE BOOKS

      5067 Ritter Road

      Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

      www.stackpolebooks.com

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

      Printed in the United States

      First edition

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Stewart, W. C. (William C.)

      Stewart on the wet fly : lessons from a master tactician / selected and introduced by Paul Schullery. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0438-0 (hardcover)

      ISBN-10: 0-8117-0438-6 (hardcover)

      1. Trout fishing. 2. Fly fishing. I. Schullery, Paul. II. Title.

      SH687.S769 2008

      799.12'4—dc22

      2008016290

      eBook ISBN: 9780811753395

      SERIES INTRODUCTION

      We fly fishers are rightly proud of our long and distinguished literary tradition, but too much of that tradition has slipped out of reach. It is unfortunate enough that most of the older books are unobtainable, but as the sport’s techniques, language, and even values change, the older authors become less accessible to us even when we do read them. Fly fishing’s great old stories and wisdoms are often concealed in unfamiliar prose styles, extinct tackle terminology, and abandoned jargon.

      The lessons and excitement of these older works will only survive if we keep reading them. By presenting the most readily accessible material from these authors, this series invites you to explore the rest of their work. Whether the selections in each book are instructive, entertaining, or inspirational, it is our fondest hope that they will whet your appetite for more of this lovely sport’s literary adventures.

      It is one of fly fishing’s greatest attractions that the actual fishing is accompanied by a vast and endlessly engaging conversation. We have been conducting this conversation in print for many centuries now, and we seem always to have more to say. In this series, we invite you to sit back, turn the page, and give a listen. The conversation has never been better.

      Paul Schullery

      Series editor

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Chapter One: Introductory

      Chapter Two: Fresh-Water Trout

      Chapter Three: Artificial Fly-Fishing

      Chapter Four: Flies, Fly-Dressing, Etc.

      Chapter Five: On Trouting with the Fly

      A Note on the Text

      Suggestions for Additional Reading

      Note on Illustrations

      INTRODUCTION

      Fishing literature has been blessed with many authors who celebrated the sport in lofty meditations on rivers, fish, and the inexhaustible joys of the fishing experience. Not particularly concerned with fishing technique or even with catching a lot of fish, they honored the sport for its gentler aspects—its arts, its crafts, its companionships, and its intimate connection with natural beauty.

      William Clouston Stewart (1832–1872) was not one of them. He was instead their antithesis, the definitive type specimen for the title of his book: The Practical Angler. It wasn’t that Stewart was unsympathetic with the sport’s poetic chroniclers; his opening chapter revealed a naturalist’s love of the beauty of wild scenes. It’s just that his angling passion lay elsewhere—in being the most efficient and successful fish-catcher in the land.

      By all accounts (including his own), he may have been just that. Fiercely competitive and relentlessly determined, Stewart exemplified the angler as harvester. The outspoken young Scotsman, reportedly a tea merchant by trade, was an energetic 24 when his book was published, and to read him one would imagine that he attacked trout streams rather than fished them. A contemporary is said to have complained that a day out with Stewart was 24 hours of creeping and crawling.

      His gut-’em-and-eat-’em view of fishing wouldn’t endear him to modern trout-fishing conservationists, but it was those very skills that earned him his place in history. Anyone who regarded 12 pounds of trout as his minimum tolerable daily catch on even the hardest-fished streams must have something useful to tell us.

      Some fishing books take a long time to soak into the public consciousness. But in 1857, when The Practical Angler appeared, it was immediately acclaimed as a significant milestone. The reviews were filled with superlatives reserved only for milestone works: the best we have ever read on angling for trout with the artificial fly, worm, minnow, and other baits; the probable inauguration of a new era in the art of angling; decidedly the most successful effort which has hitherto been made; by far the most complete and practical work which has yet appeared on the subject, and there is little probability of its being superseded by any other treatise of the kind; and the most practical work in the language. By 1921, when the book had had at least a dozen printings, angling historian John Waller Hills ranked Stewart—along with the anonymous author of the Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, Charles Cotton, and Frederic Halford—as one of the four names which stand above others in the history of the fly.

      Stewart is now most famous for his advocacy of upstream fishing. Indeed, despite the best efforts of angling historians to explain otherwise, Stewart is often simplistically credited with inventing upstream fishing, as if he was the first fisherman ever to notice that the river he stood in went both directions. And historian Andrew Herd has pointed out that for all the acclaim Stewart’s book received, a combination of outright opposition and natural conservatism meant that although the argument about upstream fishing was three centuries old, Stewart’s ideas took many years to take a firm hold.

      But Stewart’s contribution to fly-fishing technique wasn’t as simple as convincing the downstreamers (as they were called) to turn around and cast the other way. It was in his disciplined challenge to traditional practice. I suspect that many readers of his book were converted by Stewart only to the extent that they broadened their fishing style to include both downstream and upstream fishing. And though he didn’t personally care whether his flies floated or sank slightly, his upstream methods—and his advocacy of stiffer, shorter rods than the 12- to 15-footers of the day—helped lay essential groundwork for the rise of the dry fly in the next few decades (see Halford on the Dry Fly, in this series, for more on that development).

      The great fun of Stewart is to read each of his pronouncements and test them against our own experience. In the face of today’s fabulous proliferation of highly specialized fly patterns, his philosophy of fly selection is almost shocking. His idea of proper imitation of stream insects had little to do with entomological accuracy and a lot to do with general bugginess and simplicity of form.

      Stewart was what we might today call a presentationist, far more concerned with the careful stalk and the delicately placed cast of flies than with any rigorous theory of fly pattern or color. The small engraving of three flies on page 69 has provoked and mystified generations of anglers, many of whom may at first disregard Stewart’s reliance on so few patterns as naïve—but then find themselves returning for another look at those simple, perfect, seductive little flies and thinking troubling thoughts about their own overloaded fly boxes.

      Stewart was an all-round angler; his advice on worm and minnow fishing was as cogent and revealing as his fly-fishing instruction. But for this new edition, I’ve selected only the fly-fishing material, and because many things have changed in the century and half since Stewart wrote, a little interpretation might help you get the most from it. One recent writer said of Stewart’s book that it is as modern today as when it was written. That will certainly not seem true at first glance. Heavy solid-wood rods, snelled flies, silk lines, gut leaders, and huge kills of fish hardly seem modern. But the

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