At first blush, it is a bit sacrilegious. Nestled in between spoons and spinners in a brightly colored blister pack, it can’t be a fly. And it has propellers for goodness’ sake. Propellers! Rubber legs we can deal with. Gummy-bodied saltwater patterns produce fish. Mop flies have grown on us. But propellers? Are we not civilized? If you cut us, do we not bleed tweed?
Hi-Country Flies’ “Pistol Pete” forces fly fishers to contend with some of the arbitrariness of what separates a fly from a lure. And asking this question introduces a whole host of other queries regarding what is in and out of orthodoxy. But for most devotees of catching fish, pragmatism is a defining characteristic of their angling worldview.
Case in point: The first time I fished a fly it was behind a clear plastic float.
The guy at the Arkansas bait and tackle store was adamant that the trout were eating teeny tiny little bugs. He was more than willing to sell me, eager to fish and months away from being a teenager, jerkbaits and corn flavored trout putty. But the transparent bobber was his recommendation. A couple of sparsely tied nymphs were part of the sales pitch, too. After catching a lot of nothing on the Little Red River, I decided to mess with the plastic torpedo and the ridiculously small hooks wrapped with brown thread. Fish weren’t caught. But I could see fish respond to what I could only assume was my fly. They didn’t eat Powerbait. They didn’t flinch at the aptly-named Devil’s Horse. They looked at the fly that I cast out with my spinning rod, suspended under a bobber.
I wasn’t fly fishing. But I was kind of fishing with a fly.
Months later I was told that I could fish whatever I wanted as long as it was gold. And the hooks had to be dressed with red bucktail.
As long as my lure met those qualifications, the choice was up to me. Smallmouth were locked in that quarry. He had the key. The camp store proprietor held up one inline spinner and gave me a crash course in lure selection that would have otherwise taken a dozen Saturday mornings in front of the fishing shows. The blade is there just to imitate movement. The fur is what they bite. The dyed deer hair is what the fish think is a baitfish. Basically a fancy fly that is heavy enough to cast, he said.
I still wasn’t fly fishing. But I suppose I was sort of fishing with a fly.
The latter two examples are certainly not fly fishing. But what if you have a Pistol Pete on the end of your 5X tippet, cast with a nine-foot five-weight? I don’t know if can say definitively that it isn’t fly fishing. Certain state jurisdictions might prohibit them under their “fly fishing only” regulations. But is it that different than felt cut to look like a fish tail? If a propellor is X many degrees away from a Catskill dry, is an epoxy-coated, wire-bodied nymph on a jig hook X minus one? And squirmy wormies? Right place, right time I suppose.
I have quite a bit of respect for fanatic devotees to the strict dogma of fly fishing. But I was also once a kid who just wanted to feel the miraculous tug of something aquatic. And a confession: sometimes I still do. That is when the neon bead heads, crystal flash, and iridescent UV finished patterns come out of the metal clips in the Wheatley box. It is only light heresy.