To my eyes anyway...
(and this may be an oversimplification of the ideas behind them, but to someone who only dabbles occasionally in "Fly" fishing it works for me....)
It's a fly if it imitates a winged creature.... it's a nymph if it imitates a sunken emerger/pupae.... and a lure if it imitates fish/fry...
it helps if I stay with this definition
Just one more cast love, and I'll be on me way home
Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures and memories
I try to imitate the natural food of a trout because it introduces another dimension to my day by the river. I could use an Appetiser and drag it through the deep pools, that would probably catch a few fish. Observing the aquatic and terrestrial insects, choosing a pattern and presenting it nicely is rewarding and I tend to drive home smiling if that happens. It rarely does.
My most enjoyable day last season involved a fussy trout, lots of observation, an upstream dry fly and a hooked fish which escaped. I didn't catch anything although an evening at the weir pool with a Sweeney Todd would have guaranteed a trout.
I've often thought about flies and floats. I've got hundreds of both, boxes full of floats that I have made, found or bought. Even more boxes of flies. I have flies that were tied 45 years ago and have never been used. They never will be, they are pretty, flashy things.
Having watched feeding trout rise to a fly, examine it closely and turn away with a scornful flick of their tail I am determined to present something more realistic.
In some cases, it depends how it's tied. The "Peter Ross" is a good example.
Tied skinny, on a small hook, with a "wing" of a few fibres of teal suggesting segmented legs, a tiny pinch of scarlet for a thorax and as pale a tippet as you can find for a shuck, it's a decent midge pupa.
Tied fat, on a big, long-shanked hook, with a long, swept-back teal wing tied David Collyer-style to suggest a dark back, a big puff of scarlet gills and a bold tippet tail, it's an out-and-out lure. It's all a matter of intent.
Most commercially tied ones lack any fixity of purpose so fall between two stools, which may account for the pattern's mediocre reputation.
"Write drunk, edit sober" - Hemingway.
Hemingway didn't have to worry about accidentally hitting "submit" before he edited.
Watermole+ wrote: ↑Thu Jan 24, 2019 2:06 pm
The word 'house' covers everything from a habitable shed to a palace, 'bait' is anything at all which you put on your hook so whether we want to call flies just that, lures, streamers or any other name, it matters not one jot and no-one really cares..
Like so many other things, 'flies' are all things to all anglers and there is no difference of any consequence.
