A story about a small black fly, and a hobby within! (long)

In the summer of -94 I was invited by a friend of mine to go fishing in the upper parts of River Juktan, Vasterbotten county, northern Sweden. It sounded a good idea, so after some planning I went along for the trip.

River Juktan in its upper reaches is a 20 metre wide (in average) river not to deep except for the calmer parts in between streams. It is a river with water clearer than gin, actually its extremely clear even for a river in these parts. Its only equal, in my mind, being River Laisan further north. I’ve come to the knowledge that this clarity is due to the fact that these waters are very poor in nutrition.

Juktan runs through a landscape that’s not the mountains, but close by. There’s a road that follows the river on the south side and my first view of the river was from this road, it looked very promising with mountains looming in the background.

We ( three of us ) were to stay in a small cabin owned by a fishing club of which my friend was a member, the stay at the cabin wasn’t going to be one of the more pleasant experiences I’ve had and I remember longing for my tent, but I’ll get back to that later.

On arrival it started raining, but after countless fishing trips it’s considered part of the game.

Fishing started out poorly, it wasn’t that fish weren’t rising and not that we didn’t get any, but they were all so small. We had reports telling us that there were quite many catches made in the lb 1 to lb 4 range earlier weeks so we hung in there keeping our hope and good moods up.

Three days later it had not stopped raining for one minute, and the missing cabin chimney damper, something that we discovered on the first day, was proving to be a bigger problem than we first thought. All the mosquitoes from the surrounding forest seemed drawn to the chimney as if it was a magnet, with the obvious lack of sleep as a direct consequence. Once the fire burnt out, the bloodsucking bastards dived in for a meal.  

In the morning of the fourth day I found myself praising God and Gore-Tex. God, as he had the grace of putting the sun on a clear blue sky, Gore-Tex, for me still keeping my sanity ( 72 hours of constant rain does strange things to your mind when indulging in outdoor activities ).

The fishing however had gotten no better, although we started to see what we guessed were larger fish feeding in the lower parts of the calm water.

Throughout that day I was desperately digging through my fly boxes. We had now proof of larger fish, as we could watch them whilst we were crouching behind waist high shrubs.

They weren’t really scared just being selective, taking some small mayflies that we couldn’t identify. Sessions at the field fly tying vice, trying to imitate the mayflies, gave absolutely nothing. Large fish would rise to a fly within inches of our imitations but discard any attempts made by us.

Later that evening we noticed that some of the trout were feeding just below the surface. An opportunity had presented itself, or so we thought, but of no avail.

The discussions we had were getting desperate when my friend caught the first descent trout on a black gnat. It was a sorry looking fly that had seen its best days and it proved, for the rest of us, to be impossible to catch anything more with black gnats.

Now then, the hobby within. I’ve always seen the fly tying and rod building as an extension of my fly fishing hobby ( i.e. way of life ), so it’s sort of a unity to it. There is however a closely related hobby that seems to have a life of its own. I collect books, old, rare and new alike as long as they’re about fly fishing. From these books I’ve learnt that many new ideas usually aren’t that new, more to the point would be to call them new techniques ( or materials ) applied to old ideas. This fact probably comes from the fly fishing business being several hundred years old. The collecting of books has been going on for some years now and other books ( not about fly fishing ) have firmly been dislocated from the bookshelf’s at the rate of new findings of the “correct” sort.

One of my favourites is a book by W.C Stewart’s “The Practical Angler” first published in 1857, another T. E. Pritt's “North Country Flies” first published in 1886.

North Country flies, also known as Yorkshire flies, have their origin in the north of England. These flies are tied on small, light wire hooks with very slim bodies and a sparse hackle of for example hen feathers. Normally fished upstream with a long rod and short line. Stewart is known for his sparsely dressed spiders, among other things. It was his spiders that showed the way to success on that rainy trip to Juktan.

Looking again deep into my fly box, this time for flymphs or unweighted nymphs, I saw an experimental version of Stewart’s black spider tied on a size 14 hook. It was a, not to intelligent, experiment with a weighted soft hackled black spider, but it was as black as the gnat and inspired me to once again return to my field vice. In the absence of available black hen feathers, or starling for that matter, I used black Cul de Canard for hackle. Using only the tying silk to build up a thin black body that reached 2/3 down the shank I tied the hackle down after turning it twice.

What I got was a fly that floated in the surface rather than on it, also a fly with high mobility that gave a lively impression when floating with the stream.

What happened next was something I’m not too proud of. Returning to the stream I found my way down to the neck just where the faster flowing water began. This is the sort of place where I usually go looking for fish late in the evening. On arrival to this spot I saw upstream that fish were feeding on the outside of a small island that I just had past, the island was covered with thick vegetation that made it impossible to fish from. I needed to get to the other side, and down on the neck it wasn’t deep at all, so I could easily wade over. Sneaking in and out of bushes I tried to find a suitable place to cast from and finally found one about four metres downstream and five metres to the side of the feeding fish. On my first cast everything went wrong, desperate after three days of fish the size of sardines, I saw a huge trout rise to my fly.

Remember, this is water where you can see the bottom clearly and in detail at four to five metres depth. Still, the trout seemed to materialise out of nowhere, and when I finally saw it, it was only 1 ½ metre off. In this calm and clear water I saw the trout for something like an eternity before it was close to my spider imitation. I flinched as it closed in, my strike was way to early and I saw “my” trout swim away with awesome speed. I’ve never since had a moment so filled with anticipation and so gruesomely disappointing.

The last two days of our trip the fly performed admirably and surrendered fish of larger measure to us all, although none as big as the one that got away. The largest fish that week was a brown trout of lb 3, but there was several above lb 2, so when we left for home the days of rain and mosquitoes were all forgotten. Nowadays I don’t go anywhere without this imitation, and I have expanded the recipe to an olive and a brown variant. Ignorant as to whether someone already have invented this version of an old fly, I named it Spider Juktan.

Yours/ Roger