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Martyn White | Thursday, 29 August 2024
Yet another week of traditional October Scottish weather in August is keeping me pretty much off the water. I did have a wee foray to a local loch, but could only fish a couple of sheltered bays, and certainly couldn't have gone out on the boat or tube as I'd have been blown about like a crisp packet. I'm hoping for a couple of days the following week though, but we'll see.
I've had plenty of time to read though, and something in an article I read really struck me. The article itself was about spinning for salmon when the water is too high for the fly and the thing that stood out for me was just one sentence; "If Mepps and the flying C don't work, try something radically different, like the Abu Reflex". If you don't spin this might seem fair enough, but if you do you'll maybe realise why it struck me as odd. The Mepps spinner is the classic inline spinner that we all used as kids, the flying C is essentially the same thing but a bit longer with a latex body covering.. can you guess what the reflex is? It's an inline spinner..it does have a fluted blade which will cause a slightly different vibration, but it's an inline spinner with a weighted body and a blade that rotates around a spindle, just like all the other spinners. Hardly "radically" different.
I kept thinking about that. Radically different. I don't know what it is about fishermen, not all of us, but a lot of us anyway who think these tiny differences are much bigger than they are. You can certainly see it a lot in fly tying people "inventing" new patterns by just changing a couple of colours of hackle on the same pattern or whatever other minor changes they can make and saying it's their new fly.. legs on a bumble. I feel like it's less bad in the saltwater and predator fly world, but they're gradually moving in that direction too from what I see. Perhaps it's the influencer culture, that's making it more visible, but that's not what's causing it as it's existed as long I've fished- just look at all the wet flies that are basically bumbles with different names.
I don't know what can be done about it other than drawing attention to it so we can avoid falling into that trap. Yes there can be day's when small margins make a difference, but quite often the difference between 2 people's tying of the same fly can be just as much of a difference as what some people claim is a radical step. The thing I don't like is that it gets in the way of people who are actually doing different things and trying to push things forward.. quality doesn't always rise to the top, especially when established media voices make confident proclamations-even if they're objectively nonsense.