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    Halford on the Dry Fly: Streamcraft of a Master Angler
    Halford on the Dry Fly: Streamcraft of a Master Angler
    Halford on the Dry Fly: Streamcraft of a Master Angler
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Halford on the Dry Fly: Streamcraft of a Master Angler

    By Paul Schullery

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    • The champion of the dry-fly ethic developed on British chalkstreams in the late 1800s
    Now acknowledged as the symbolic father of modern dry-fly fishing, Frederic M. Halford was known during his remarkable fishing career as the "high priest of the art," the man whose milestone books codified the entire world of the dry-fly angler more than a century ago. Halford on the Dry Fly excerpts the core wisdoms from the original Halford book that launched the "dry-fly revolution" --and has influenced every generation of serious fly fishers since--Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice. Halford on the Dry Fly shows a first-rate angling mind at work, a gifted naturalist who witnessed an historic moment in the development of fly fishing. "No place else in the literature of fly fishing have the original basics been so clearly laid out," writes Paul Schullery.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateJul 25, 2007
    ISBN9780811751469
    Halford on the Dry Fly: Streamcraft of a Master Angler

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      Book preview

      Halford on the Dry Fly - Paul Schullery

      COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF FLY FISHING, MANCHESTER, VERMONT

      Introductions and back matter copyright © 2007 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

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      First edition

      All illustrations in this book except for the author’s portrait opposite the title page are taken from Frederic M. Halford, Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1899 and several later editions). All are captioned except the ornaments of mayflies on pages 7, 48, 69, and 99, which are representative of the superb quality of entomological illustration at the time. The original Halford book featured a frontis showing an angler landing a fish; this has been replaced in the present edition with a portrait of Halford.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Halford, Frederic M. (Frederic Michael), 1844–1914.

      [Dry-fly fishing in theory and practice. Selections]

      Halford on the dry fly: streamcraft of a master angler / Frederic Halford; selected and introduced by Paul Schullery.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0272-0 (hc : alk. paper)

      ISBN-10: 0-8117-0272-3 (hc : alk. paper)

      1. Fly casting. I. Schullery, Paul. II. Title.

      SH456.H315 2007

      799.12'4—dc22

      2007006432

      eBook ISBN: 9780811751469

      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: Floating Flies and Sunk Flies

      Chapter Two: Where to Cast

      Chapter Three: When to Cast

      Chapter Four: Studies of Fish Feeding

      Chapter Five: Circumstances Affecting the Angler’s Sport

      Chapter Six: Hooking, Playing, and Landing

      Notes on Further Reading

      Underhanded Cast—Backward Position, from Halford’s book, demonstrated a sidearm technique especially useful on windy days. Halford’s mentor George Selwyn Marryat served as the model for all the casting illustrations in Halford’s book, which was also dedicated to Marryat.

      Introduction

      Ienvy you your first reading of this book. I can’t think of many fly-fishing texts that did more to shape the sport than did these few short chapters.

      Like most human endeavors, fly fishing is the product of many minds and many generations. New techniques and tackle, and even new value systems, tend to arise gradually and often in the shadows, so that by the time something becomes widely known it is difficult to tell exactly where it came from.

      But there will often come a moment when each new thing—whether as simple as a fly pattern or as complicated as a philosophical viewpoint—finds its own voice. Few developments in the long, colorful history of fly fishing had such an eloquent and effective voice as the dry fly had in Frederic Halford (1844–1914).

      Halford is generally acknowledged as the symbolic father of the modern dry fly. It is important to emphasize the symbolic nature of his role, because the dry fly rose to popularity for many reasons, including technical advances in rods, lines, leaders, and hooks, and similarly significant advances in understanding both stream entomology and trout behavior.

      Indeed, as several angling historians have shown, smart anglers had been fishing with flies that floated on the surface of the water for centuries before Halford. And during those same centuries, countless anglers had worked hard to imitate the emerging insects on their streams. Even Halford himself was part of a community of smart dry-fly anglers—some of whom are said to have been more skilled and inventive than he.

      But from 1886, when his first book appeared, until his death twenty-eight years later, Frederic Halford was the world’s leading writer on and promoter of a modern style of dry-fly fishing that even today remains remarkably unchanged in its fundamentals. Halford was, in the words of angling historian Andrew Herd, the high priest of the art.

      Halford’s first book, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886), was a concise and beautiful fly-tying manual and fly-pattern reference book, but it contained only a brief chapter on how to actually fish with dry flies. So his second book, Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889), became the foundation treatise in what Halford biographer Tony Hayter has called the Dry-Fly Revolution. As Hayter said, Even today, with many new inventions and techniques available to us, we are struck by its essential reasonableness. In clear and logical language it sets forth the main lines of the subject.

      The book you hold excerpts the key instructional and theoretical chapters from this milestone work—the core chapters that guided and even created generations of dry-fly anglers. Halford defined a dry fly (a very important thing to do at the time), where and when to deliver it to a trout, how fish feed and how to read their rises, the common factors that influence angling success, and how best to handle a fish that is fooled by your fly. Angling historian John Waller Hills said that never was a reform worked out with greater ability or presented with greater lucidity.

      These chapters are only a selection from the original book’s full contents. After considerable dithering, I decided not to include his extensive casting instructions, as interesting as they were. In the chapters that I have included there is an abundance of advice on presentation, and the modern fly fisher is blessed with a wealth of wonderful guidance on the mechanics of casting. I have also omitted chapters on tackle, trout anatomy, specific insects encountered on Halford’s streams, how to autopsy a trout, and other matters. These were certainly important for their time and place, but they lack immediacy for the more focused purpose of this little book.

      I suspect that you will read and enjoy this book best if you see it not merely as a polished tract by a master angler, but as the foremost catalyst of a terrific and far-reaching dialogue about the very nature of fly fishing. Tony Hayter’s term Dry-Fly Revolution is not at all an overstatement. As Hayter put it, "Dry-Fly Fishing was not just a practical guide, it was the manifesto of a movement."

      To the great credit of Halford and the other dry-fly pioneers, their movement led to significant improvements in many technical aspects of the sport. And to their lasting debit, it also led to a narrowness of mind that still amazes historians. Ultimately, the Halfordian dry-fly revolution would become important not only for what it accomplished but for the reaction against it. But that’s another story, to be pursued another time, in other books.

      Halford spoke a somewhat different angling language than we do today. You will encounter some unfamiliar terms here and there. A switch cast was used for casting when a normal backcast was not practical; the under-handed cast equated to our sidearm cast; the half-drift involved casting across or even slightly downstream and then doing whatever it took, including walking along the bank, to get a credible drift of the fly. A sedge might be either a tall water plant or a caddisfly. A smut was an exasperatingly small insect. The reel-line was simply the line normally stored on the reel. Gut was the silkworm gut used for leaders before monofilament came along half a century later. Like modern leader materials, sections of gut were tied together in a taper, to produce a collar, or full leader. Halford’s 0 hook equates with today’s size 15, his 00 with our 16, and 000 with our 17. Several terms, like hatch, weir, and trunk-carrier, had to do with the intensive management of the flow of the stream.

      In fact, stream management may be the biggest surprise for modern American anglers accustomed to today’s wild-trout fishing on public waters. Halford fished on exclusively held private waters, such as the famous Test, whose every feature was scrutinized and manipulated by professional riverkeepers for the sake of fastidious angler-owners. The killing of so many large fish will also grate on modern sensitivities, but fish stocks were likewise carefully monitored and augmented, again in contrast to many of today’s most famous wild-trout fisheries.

      Readers will also notice Halford’s occasional historic misstep, such as his conviction that nymph fishing

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