In today’s tech-obsessed, new-is-always-better, 3D printed, and yet often shoddily mass produced world, I find myself increasingly drawn to a domain where I alone labor to craft objects not only of profound usefulness but also of great beauty – my fly tying desk.
Tying flies now for north of 25 years has allowed for amassing, in my lovely wife’s eyes, an impossibly odd and still growing collection of furs, feathers, beads, foam, and a stunning array of synthetic goods in shapes, sizes, colors and textures that defy the imagination.
Granted, with a fishing bent tied strongly to the Northern Rockies, a great deal of what ends up tied at my bench fits the oft-quoted gospel that the vast majority of a trout’s diet is composed of buggy critters roughly 3/8” long and some shade of muddy brown, olive or gray.
With a salty coast once again within reach for a time, pulling out the salt water hooks and tying up some bigger critters has been delightful, though I still have a soft spot for classics that still work like a charm, even if, by all rights, they shouldn’t.
The poster child for flies in that category might just be the Royal Wulff, long a family icon and the inspiration in part for Chi Wulff. I learned to tie it sitting alongside my early fishing mentor John W., both of us peering intently at the instructions laid out in Jack Dennis’ Western Trout Fly Tying Manual. Our first attempts were brutal efforts, shoddily tied feather and floss explosions on size 10 Mustad dry fly hooks, yet they caught naive rainbows in Utah’s high country that summer.
The Royal Wulff by all reckoning just shouldn’t work, but it does. (Chalk it up to one of those mysteries of fly fishing and life; we all need a few of those kinds of surprises in our days.)
I’m not the first to note that, and won’t be the last; at least I’m in fair company –
…My friend Mike Price is a master with the Royal Wulff. He ties them beautifully, and he’s been know the catch fish on them, in one size or another, under all kinds of conditions, including little bitty technical hatches on catch-and-release rivers. He has admitted he does this in part just to piss me off.
For years I tried not to like the Royal Wulff. I prefer flies that look something like real bugs, and although some writers have tied themselves in knots trying to prove that the Wulff actually passes as a sparkly caddis emerger or a flying ant, we all know that Lee Wulff himself was right when he said it was “strawberry shortcake”.
But the Royal Wulff probably ties with the Adams as the most popular dry fly of the past fifty years, and you just shouldn’t ignore something like that…
-John Gierach, Good Flies, page 66
A Sorta Related Royal Wulff Story
There’s another thing the Royal Wulff shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t cause anyone to lose a $1000 bet over the name of a fly. And yet I did that a few years back.
Sitting at the dinner table years ago with my wife and two kids, ages 7 and 8, I reached to the counter, pulled off the latest issue of Fly Tyer (with a picture of a beautiful Royal Wulff on the cover) and with the foolish confidence of the ‘sure thing’ gambler proclaimed I’d pay $1000 cash to the person who could name the fly then and there.
Jake, 7 years old at the time, nonchalantly chewing on french fry, glanced up and said “that’s a Royal Wulff”.
Damn. I guess it’s time to pay up.
