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Back in the mid-fifties I had a fishin' buddy who could almost always catch fish.
Marty was a couple of years older than I was and he tolerated me tagging along with him
on fishin' trips to far off places. Some of the waters we fished were 40 - 50 miles away
and in those days the cars we drove were anything but reliable. Every trip was an adventure.
We fished wet flies mostly, back then. Three flies at a time; we fished them across and down. At the end of their swing they were left to swim in the currents below. The flies were sometimes manipulated or sometimes fished on a dead drift. The same way wet flies have been fished for the last 500 years, or so it is written.
A few years ago I watched an instructional tape teaching how to fish an "Emergent Caddis Pupa." The instructor was using the old wet fly technique and he was catching fish. Between fish there was shown a close-up of the fly he was using.
Seeing the pattern jolted my memory back to those days when the world was young and everyone fished wet flies. That evening I was at my bench eagerly tying ... guess what ?... Wet flies. But not just any wet fly - I was there to tie an old pattern that the caddis imitation in the tape reminded me of.
As I tied, my thoughts drifted back to a scene from the fifties ... My buddy Marty was standing in the middle of a riffle on The Catskill's Esopus Creek. The crisp morning air was heavy with the earthy smell of spring.
And Marty was pulling in fish with almost every cast. Just like the "expert" in the video tape.
Back then we didn't know a caddis pupa from a hedgehog. Most all of our tying materials were from game that we had shot, trapped or traded. There were no fly fishing magazines or video tapes and Schwiebert's classic "Matching the Hatch" had not yet been published. But it really didn't matter, we were dumb and happy and caught plenty of fish.
The old pattern I tied was the one that Marty was fishing that day on the Esopus, a pattern that he tied and fished often.
I can't remember if we even had a name for it, so I'll just call it Marty's caddis pupa. It is as killing a pattern today as it was back in those simpler times.
The pattern - A basic shell-back design... it may even suggest a scud. Tied in a color that works on your water; olive, tan and gray are all effective. Mallard is sometimes used in place of wood duck.
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