Early Sunday morning I got a text from one of the Orvis fly-fishing girls (there are a grand total of four of us here at the home office. We’ve formed the habit of gathering every week for a night of wine, cheese and shuffleboard, which most often ends with us crashed on the floor with the hunting dogs talking about where we want to go fish).
Said text linked to a Vimeo trailer and said the show was playing at 10 AM, sponsored by Manchester’s own American Museum of Fly Fishing. I blearily clicked over to the trailer and was immediately met with images of the Scottish highlands and salmon, and the sound of lyrical accents.
Hell yeah, I was in.
We met at the little movie theatre in town (in a repurposed store front next to a grocery store… half the floor tilts downward like in a normal theatre, and half upward. It offers a bit of an odd perspective). A small crew of fisher-folk and assorted significant others had gathered to watch the film; I ran into the Orvis outdoor art director and a few other familiar faces.
We tucked in for seventy-odd minutes of BBC-produced salmon magic. Produced by Eric Steel, the film centers around Scottish fly tier Megan Boyd. Now deceased, Megan tied flies of world renown from her little cottage perched over the North Sea. She was bit of a loner, forgoing electricity and modern conveniences for her quiet solo life on the highlands. Megan was eventually awarded the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth for her artistry, but declined going to London for the ceremony, saying she could find no one to watch her dog.
For her, the world consisted of feathers and silk, colored floss and hooks. Folk traveled from around the globe to her little lonely cottage to commission flies, and while her tying began as crafting pieces for local ghillies and guides, eventually folk such as the Prince of Wales came to seek her creations.
The movie itself was beautiful – well-shot sequences interspersed with incredible hand-painted animation. It captured the imagination and is well unlike any fly fishing movie I’ve seen. Certainly an excellent break from “fish porn” and the frat-boy mentality we tend to see these days. It made the mind wonder… what makes us chase fish? What drives us to waters?
And what, indeed, makes a salmon take a fly?
Kiss the Water Trailer from Virgil Films on Vimeo.
