Home Waters Fishing with an Old Friend (Reviewed)

The Illustrated Fly Fisher’s Dictionary
Darryl Martin
The Lyons Press, 2000, Hardcover, 269 pp.
ISBN 1-58574-053-5.

This is a dictionary that is meant to be read, cover to cover. After you read it, it will become a reference but the first time through it is a revelation. Fly fishing has been with us since the second century. No other sport has a literature which is so rich in books of method and technique. The evolution of the sport is measured in centuries not decades and some elements have changed or lost their original meanings as they are resurrected or more often reincarnated. Darryl Martin has done those of us who aspire to try true duplicates of the original the service of digging out the facts.
It is a highly selective dictionary. Its focus is the fly but not to the exclusion of other tackle elements or fishing wisdom. Which is the right and which the left bank of a stream is defined by looking downstream. With the right or the left side of a feather it depends on whether you are a tier or a scientist. Unraveling and pronouncing the scientific nomenclature for stream insects is covered. Fly proportions with varying tying styles is finely illustrated. But it is with the historically obscure that this book really comes into its own.
Pig‘s wool has always annoyed me. No one stocks it. Older ties used it extensively. The older writers just assumed everyone knew how and where to harvest it. Now I know that you comb it out of a hog‘s belly. Coq de Leon has been a bother as well. I have a half dozen cellophane envelopes of these feathers but never an inkling of how or when to use them. Small wonder now that I understand that there are two basic groups of Coq de Leon feathers each with ten color/ pattern variations definitively described in a 1624 Spanish manuscript with patterns defined in a later (1825) manuscript.
For those of you who wonder if any of this will make me more successful on the Au Sable, well I doubt it. But, without hesitation, it enhances my enjoyment of the sport. As does knowing that Potts of Potts Mite fame was a wig maker, and that Bob Barlow, an English engineer working in Australia, invented the gallows tool. This is not to say that the Dictionary lacks relevance to a day astream. Try the spinner knot. You can tie a tippet to a fly with it in the dark, which means an old man without magnification can do it as well.
Flax is the fiber which is processed to linen. It also is the descriptor for hare‘s fur. Different between an end of the season Jack hare and a "crazy" March hare and different if from a leveret rather than a doe. (A leveret is "a young hare, especially in its first year; the soft dubbing, lacking some of the dense and thick guard hairs, from a first year hare;...") If you believe, as I do, that trout see natural colors differently than aniline dyes this may be a clue to the success of older ties of older flies.
Everything you could want is not here. After all we have been fishing the fly for 1800 years. What is here is readable and entertaining and thoughtfully selected. One can only hope for a second volume. Until then if you savor the history of the sport you need this book. RWOL

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