Martyn White | Thursday, 7 November 2024
The other day I was tying up some Stenness Stingers for an imaginary Hebrides trip that I’m imagining more and more. A mate of mine was saying he reckoned they were variants, because I’d finished the head with globrite 4 to match the tail. I don’t know if it’s in the original dressing of the fly or not, but it got me thinking about how we categorise flies. Although I‘m talking about wets here, it holds true for most fly tying for freshwater at least.
In the 1990s the people I fished with always referred to wet flies like the bumble, the teal & green or the Kate McLaren as “traditionals”. It was a kind of distinction from modern patterns but could include newer patterns in the same style. It certainly didn’t include anything that was functionally EXACTLY the same but had a marabou wing! It’s an odd bit of categorising that I still find myself using at times, and I often wonder about where we draw the line as far as what’s a fly pattern and what’s a variant when it comes to wets. I see a lot of pictures of Doobry variants for example, I even see the originator regularly commenting to bemoan people calling similar patterns variants of the Doobry rather than patterns in their own right. To me the Doobry is a variant of a bumble and could just be called that, but it’s an established name for what it is. Certainly, a lot of the variants are at least as different from the original Doobry as it Doobry is from what went before it, that is to say, not very. The great majority of these things are essentially all the same, but in a different colour. I mean if you showed a non-angler a claret bumble, a Stone Goat, a Clan Chief and a Watten Warrior, it’s unlikely that they think they would classify them by anything other than colour.
So, what is a variant? I increasingly don’t know, they’re all derivative. If you look at a lot of modern wets that have sprung up in the last 30 or so years, they’re either just direct derivatives with swapped materials - the POD fly is clearly just a teal, red & silver but with mirage and globrite. OR they are something stylistically new like hogs, snatchers and cripplers which often get labelled based on the colour scheme of an older pattern that they follow, so you can have a Doobry snatcher, an Invicta sedgehog, a bibio crippler or any other combination you like. I’m not sure where this leads, but I do like the idea that these supposed patterns are becoming seen more like colour schemes. And for the naysayer traditionalists, it is fairly traditional, look at Kingsmill Moore’s flies; they’re all bumbles but they show more difference from each other than a lot of things that some people demand be called a variant. Fortunately the nomenclature doesn’t matter and people keep messing around with materials, colours and shapes as they try to come up with the next deadly pattern. But for my money, it’s going to be a new shape or style of fly that makes a lasting impression, not just a different coloured hackle!