I just received my copy of Morgan Lyle’s new book “Simple Flies; 52 Easy-to-Tie Patterns that Catch Fish.” Here is my review: SQUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I can’t imagine a book more perfectly timed and pitched to my personal angling zeitgeist. It’s not wholly focused on tenkara, although the scene and its iconic flies get heavy play. It’s a kind of fly tying manual (though it claims not to be a “full-on” one, it has an introduction to materials and techniques and beautifully clear, step by step instructions with good colour photographs for each of the patterns). But it’s better than that. Although it’s small format, the pages are glossy and everything is in high quality full colour; it’s the closest thing available to a kind of mini-coffee table book for minimalist flies. Each pattern is introduced with a brief essay on its history along with fishing and tying notes where appropriate. There are profiles of some of the people associated with various styles (including American tenkara pioneers Daniel Galhardo and Chris Stewart). The main pattern chapters are “Simple Wet Flies,” “Simple Nymphs,” “Simple Dry Flies,” and “Simple Streamers.”
Even the venerable Woolly Bugger is included, in a new “simpler” twist that is sending me directly to my vise to experiment. Of the Woolly Bugger, Lyle writes “In fact, as a fly tier, it’s always made me a little uneasy; on some level I’ve had to admit to myself that tying and fishing anything else isn’t truly necessary.” That sums up the current state of my experience perfectly. On my return to fly fishing I gravitated to woolly buggers on the third or fourth excursion, then spent a couple of months discovering and having success with killer bugs and classic nymphs. When I’m fishing for trout, though, it’s black and olive woolly buggers that are the backbone. And I sometimes feel vaguely unsettled about it, like deep down it means I’m doing it wrong. I like learning to tie and I like trying other patterns, so I keep trying to expand my fly box. But on the marginal, mostly stocked streams I am in range of, if I have #12 black and olive woolly buggers in my fly box, I know I can catch trout.
This is a book I have to force myself not to devour all at once. I know I’ll be browsing and rereading it endlessly in the next weeks and months. I wish it had been available when I started out back in April, because combined with the TenkaraBum website it’s a perfect introduction to the whole ethos of practical, simple, yet extremely effective flies. A beginning angler/tyer interested in tenkara could buy this book and have an immediate, accessible foundation to work from. Almost all of the patterns that I fish regularly, five months into a tenkara career, are included in the book. But there are also a number of similarly compact patterns I hadn’t come across in the usual tenkara internet haunts. While there are excellent step-by-step guides for some of the patterns available at TenkaraBum, having a different take is always useful, and there is no other book that gathers the essential minimalist patterns with the kind of information on background, materials, and well illustrated tying steps found here.
Whether you buy it as an introduction, as a tying manual, or seize on it as one of the few currently available tenkara-related books, you can’t go wrong. It’s both eye candy and brain candy, and if you fish tenkara and like reading about your hobby (as most fly anglers do), you pretty much have to have this relatively cheap, very high quality book.