Fountains of Youth – Classic trout flies that have withstood the test of time … flies that remain “forever young”

by Rusty Dunn

We take for granted the axiom that successful flies should imitate natural foods of trout.  “Match the hatch” is, after all, a foundation of our game.  But how far should we take the concept of imitation?  Should we replicate every aspect of color, shape, and texture down to the minutest detail?  Or, should we just slap some fur and feathers on a hook and let the trout fig­ure out the rest?  Many distinguished anglers through the centuries have concluded that flies need not rep­licate all details of a natural to be effective.  Rather, an approximation of size, silhouette, color, and behavior is sufficient to fool a trout. 

John Atherton, an often overlooked American angling author of the mid-20th century, was perhaps the most eloquent and thoughtful advocate of impressionistic fly design.  “Impressionism” is rendering a perception of reality rather than its true form.  Impressionistic flies are those that trout perceive as naturals, even though a close examination shows them to be only rough approxima­tions of the real deal.  Atherton’s insightful 1951 book The Fly and the Fish elaborates principles of fly design that all fly anglers should take to heart.  He was a pro­fessional artist whose paintings in the style of “magic realism” drew worldwide acclaim.  Atherton brought an accomplished artist’s under­standing of light, color, and visual perception to the design of flies, and he identified features of an artificial fly that are the most important for success.

Atherton was not the first author to emphasize approx­imations in fly design.  G.P.R. Pulman, for exam­ple, did so a century earlier in his 1851 book The Vade-Mecum of Fly Fishing for Trout.  Pulman de­scribed size, color, and form as “the character” of an insect, and imitation as “not a slavish copying of de­tail, but an expression of the general character.”

Atherton revised and extended Pulman’s beginnings with his detailed discussions of impressionistic fly de­sign.  He advocated use of mixed colors blended to achieve a desired tone, because a mottled color is more vibrant and lifelike than a uniformly dyed one.  He understood the physics of reflection, refraction, and color absorption underwater, and how these phenom­ena affect the appearance of a natural or ar­tificial.  He described the effects of wind and wave on illumination and perception, causing insects to ex­hibit a “changea­ble, indistinct and soft outline which is further broken by frequent movements of the fly’s legs and wings”.  He then chose fly tying materials that render a similarly indistinct appearance by their textures and colors.  Atherton’s investigations led to the design of 15 pat­terns that he described as “not exact imitations of any one insect but an approxima­tion of several“.  Most of his patterns imitate mayflies, but Atherton did not relate specific flies to specific in­sects.

Atherton may have been a creative genius and ob­servant fly designer, but he was a dismal failure at mar­keting.  Rather than snappy, memorable, or descriptive names for his flies, Atherton called them “Number One”, “Num­ber Two”, “Number Three”, etc.  How could such flies compete with the likes of a “Royal Coach­man”, “Tup’s Indispensable”, or “Greenwell’s Glory” for the hearts and minds of fly anglers?  Inter­est in Ather­ton’s flies faded rather quickly, likely caused at least in part by their tedious names.

Atherton’s Nymph Number Two is similar to a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear, but with two notable distinctions.  It sports a collar of soft partridge hackle for increased movement underwater, and the wing case is made of a bright blue feather.  Atherton’s justification for the bright blue is that mayflies often have brilliant accents of color (pink, yellow, blue, violet, etc.) somewhere on the body.  The blue wing case provides that splash of color and makes the fly seem alive to a trout.

Copyright 2020, Rusty Dunn

Atherton Nymph Number Two