Added on 5/25/04
By Jeffery Kurz, Record-Journal staff
The art and passion of fly tying, by the man who wrote the book
The whole idea is to fool a fish.
To do that, you make something that looks like something a fish would like to eat, or something that will annoy a fish so much that it will be inclined to poke at it. Since the only thing a fish has to poke with is its mouth, the result is basically the same.
You’ve got him on your hook.
At least that’s the idea.
Fly tying is all about making these lures that fool fish. It’s an art and a science, and an obsession, say those afflicted by its charms. And it’s been around at least since a Roman writer named Aelian watched Macedonians doing it about 200 A.D.
On a warm, mid-spring afternoon in his Wallingford home, G. Randolph Erskine is tying a fly he calls a marabou, named for the feather that’s used.
“Fish will think it’s a minnow, because it’s going to vibrate on the water,” he explains. To illustrate, he shakes a hand in the air. Long fingers tapered by long fingernails, able tools for the intricate business of fly tying.
We describe a person as having a gleam in the eye, but Erskine is that rare someone who is in near constant possession of one. He punctuates many of his comments with a short laugh, and generally displays an alacrity enviable at any age. You can’t help but think that it at least partly explains his longevity.
At 91, Erskine is about to have a book published. It’s a meticulous, hands-on guide to fly tying, the result of eight decades of experience and learning. The work is about as comprehensive as it gets.
Erskine includes detailed step-by-step instructions for making 165 flies.
It’s that attention to detail that impressed his publisher, Ragged Mountain Press, a division of McGraw-Hill.
“Here’s a guy whose proposal was about what he learned tying flies in the 1920s, so you thought here’s a guy who knows what he’s talking about,” said Jonathan Eaton, an editorial director who spoke by phone from a Ragged Mountain office in Camden, Maine.
“I liked the fact that he had done a fairly extensive survey of the existing fly tying literature and his book was very different,” said Eaton.
Erskine has completed the first draft of his book, which is scheduled for release in the spring of 2005. He’s matter-of-fact about his prospects of seeing it on bookshelves.
“I recognize very clearly that according to the actuary tables there’s a good chance that I won’t be around to see it published,” says Erskine, that laugh ever present. “But I do hope that the good Lord will extend my lease until I can get this done.”
Erskine’s book is not the result of a long-held dream, not the planned fruition of retirement years. In fact, ask Erskine when he retired and it’s clear he’s not certain that he has. He spent most of his career as a lawyer with a general practice in Wallingford.
“I haven’t had any active inquiries recently,” he says.
His book is instead the result of an evolution, and of his ability to see opportunity where most people would find disaster.
A couple of years ago Erskine needed a hip replacement. “The right hip had just plain wore out,” he says. Complications ensued, and included five operations and stays at Yale/New Haven Hospital and the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven. Erskine, who lost more than 40 pounds during the process, notes dryly that you don’t recover at 90-something “as you do at 19.” He’s still using a walker to get around.
“The business of the book was a God-send because I was bedridden for quite a while,” he said. Though he had started the book before his operation, the period of recovery gave him the opportunity to focus.
The book was also the suggestion of two of Erskine’s students from Wallingford adult education classes, where he had taught fly tying. Frederick Monahan and Paul Gouin are also lawyers and on Monday evenings they’re in the habit of gathering at Erskine’s home. Erskine calls them “the boys,” even though they’re in their 40s and 50s. While there’s some discussion of lawyerly matters, most of the talk focuses on fly tying.
It was when Erskine began writing down instructions to help his students that the idea of parlaying those efforts into a book came to light.
“His book is going to fill a niche that hasn’t been filled,” said Monahan. “There are a lot of books about fly tying but nothing as encompassing as what he’s doing.”
Monahan, a trial lawyer who works out of Rocky Hill, says Erskine’s attorney skills also remain sharp.
“You get lawyers together and you talk cases,” he said. “Randy’s done a pretty good job of keeping up.”
Fly tying is something you can do without being particularly interested in fly-fishing. And fly-fishing is something you can do without fly tying yourself. But naturally the two tend to go hand in hand.
“There’s something so much fun about catching a fish with a fly that you’ve tied,” said Monahan, who also has a ready sense of humor. “But you’ve got to keep in mind that you’re matching wits with something with the brain size of a pea. You’ve got to keep it in perspective.”
For Erskine the passion developed early fishing the waters of Cheshire, where he grew up. He says he started learning to tie flies in the early 1930s, “partly because I needed some flies with which to fish.”
As well as adult education classes, Erskine taught fly tying for years for the Housatonic Fly Fishermen’s Association. Erskine, says Monahan, “is a wonderful teacher.”
“He always thought of something new to do,” he said. “He also knows the old, old techniques, so it was fun working with him and very educational.”
To gain insight into why some find fly tying so intriguing it’s useful to go back to Aelian, the Roman writer who observed the Macedonian way of catching fish around 200 A.D. The Macedonians, observed Aelian, knew that a particular kind of fish, with speckled skin, went in a big way for a certain type of insect, one that looked like a wasp and hummed like a bee. The problem was that if you caught this insect, with the intent of using it for bait, it would lose its color and the wings would wither, thereby rendering it of little interest to the fish.
To solve the problem, the Macedonians, in effect, recreated the insect by tying red wool around a hook and fastening feathers to the wool. This, as they say, did the trick.
This is precisely what fly tiers continue to do today. There are insects and other useful fish-enticing creatures that are simply not going to hold up to being impaled on a hook. The solution is to fake it. Sometimes that involves working in miniscule dimensions.
Erskine shows off a black gnat he created that is the size of, well, a gnat.
“That’s 95-percent faith and 5-percent material,” he says, with a laugh.
There are also certain flies that do not resemble anything in the real world but nevertheless gather the interest of fish. A wooly bugger is a good example of this type of fly, suggests Monahan. Fish find it hard to resist. “For whatever reason it looks alive,” he says.
There’s also the creative lengths to which some fly tiers will go for their material. There are commercial suppliers of fly tying material, but they are by no means the only source. Road kill, whether it’s woodchuck hides or muskrat, is not out of the question. You might think there’s not much use for that flattened squirrel at the side of the road, but a fly tier knows better. That bushy tail is prime material for a fly.
Erskine says he still has feathers collected 50 years ago. “When Gaylord Farm used to raise turkeys I’d get them.”
He displays a feather from the shoulder of a goose that’s been dipped in a solution to “take the buzz off.”
“It gives a life-like effect and a shine that attracts the fish.”
The challenge is in taking such materials, “all of them quite simple,” he says, and fashioning them into something “that is done quite well, that is a work of art actually, whether the fish like them or not.”
There’s probably no need explaining that Erskine is not a member of the high-tech generation. He writes in long hand, which his daughter, Roxanne Erskine, transcribes to computer file. He also has the help of his wife, Madeline. He says he wanted to write a book, as opposed to making a video, because he wanted something someone could take anywhere, to a lake or stream, for example.
“I’m just enough of a dinosaur to feel that books played a tremendously important part of my life and I wanted to do it as a book instead of a video,” he says.
“The ideal way to tie flies is in a group operation, a group of three or four, you learn from each other’s mistakes,” says Erskine. “If you have to go it alone the book should be able to take you by the hand and lead you.”
Part of what promises to make Erskine’s book such a good companion is the step-by-step approach to each fly, the sort of story board approach you encounter in knot-tying instruction. Erskine, with help from Monahan and Gouin, has created each stage of each fly creation. If you average about five steps per fly, in a book of 165 flies, it adds up to a lot of work. The 500-page book, Erskine says, will also include 50 line drawings and 500 color photographs. The idea is to be so precise and detailed that even beginners will know exactly what to do, and when.
“We’re hoping to make something that’s going to be useful to people for a number of years,” Erskine says.
“I wish there had been something like it around when I was getting started,” he says. “It would have been terribly helpful.”
As a publisher, Eaton sees Erskine’s advanced age as an advantage. “We plan to use that angle to sell the book and I think we’ll get some mileage out of that,” he said.
“How often do you get a chance to put together a book based on that kind of experience?”