The Fly Dresser - Will Bush
The Following is an excerpt from Flies For Atlantic Salmon & Steelhead which can be purchased from Amazon HERE
If you’ve read the chapter that covers the golden age of salmon flies in Flies For Atlantic Salmon & Steelhead then you know we have Will Bush to thank for the gallery of spectacular Victorian-era Atlantic salmon flies showcased throughout this chapter. He is one of the finest in the world—one of the finest who ever lived. And that’s saying something.
Will, a Canadian from Penticton, British Columbia, wears his passion for fly tying and steelhead fishing on his arm, literally. “Big Willie”— part of his email handle—has a foot-long tattoo of a Spey fly on his forearm. The tattoo is pattern specific, the Carron, named for the Carron Beat on the River Spey, Scotland’s most storied salmon river.
Will’s other arm bears a smaller tattoo, the Dallas, the rare Scottish Spey fly tied with strip wings of cinnamon turkey, a dressing fashion more commonly associated with River Dee flies. John Dallas, likely a ghillie, first tied the 19thcentury fly. One Mr. Little Brown is said to have christened the fly with the man’s name. George Kelson, in his epic work, The Salmon Fly (1895), the ultimate arbiter on all things related to salmon flies, said of the Dallas, “the capital fly on the Spey.”
Will is an extremely knowledgeable student of 19th-century Atlantic salmon flies, a subject almost entirely the province of the United Kingdom and Scotland, long the most salmon-rich country in the monarchy. Not only has he nearly memorized every classic work on the subject, he has tied many of the flies described in Kelson’s work. In this regard, Bush compares favorably to Mikael Frödin who tied all the salmon flies photographed for his prodigious work Classic Salmon Flies (1991).
Will ties salmon flies, from the simple to the most complex, with breathtaking perfection. He typically spends between eight and 10 hours on a single fly.
The classic-fly dresser has a long list of clients waiting for their flies, which they’ll have professionally mounted and framed. He charges a handsome price for his art, yet his waiting list grows longer. I know he onced tied conventional steelhead flies for April Vokey. She had clients who wanted to cast the very best when she guided them on the Bulkley; Will takes care of that. When publisher Tom Pero made plans to construct a deluxe edition of this book, and wanted a classic Victorianera salmon fly for the centerpiece of a framed assortment of the finest steelhead and Atlantic salmon flies tied by the most talented tiers in the world, he asked Will Bush to tie the showcase fly.
Will grew up in Causton, a small community in south-central, British Columbia. His parents were farmers and though they didn’t fish, Will did, and he can’t recall when he didn’t anxiously complete chores so that he could to fish the Similkameen River. When out of elementary school he was fly fishing, tying his own wet and dry flies for the river’s native cutthroat and rainbow trout. As he started high school, he began tying commercially, selling his flies to Cathedral Lake Lodge in Cathedral Lake Provincial Park. When his father died, Will helped support the family by driving heavy equipment—an easy transition for a farm kid who’d grown up driving tractors. And then, he says, “I did some cowboying.” But these activities were never far from his fishing and fly tying.
After high school, Will signed up with Michael & Young, Dave O’Brien’s two famous fly shops in Vancouver and Surrey, for a class in tying complex 19th-century Victorian Era salmon flies. The learning curve was life changing. Will devoted years to mastering the dressings’ technical challenges, while discovering how and where rare plumages could be obtained.
Gillies tied their Spey flies on “blind-eye” hooks that ended with tapered shanks without loop eyes. A loop of twisted silk was tightly wrapped down on the shank, a connection that simply did not fail in the course of many salmon. In historical hindsight, twisted silk seems archaic. Will first substituted white Dacron, a modern lookalike that when waxed behaves in a similar manner. To Will’s surprise, he discovered that the expensive braided silk was not only an authentic addition to the dressing, but it was stronger and more resistant to wear. “Those silk loops landed a lot of salmon at a time when salmon were larger,” he said in a reference to Scotland.
Will’s tattoos illustrate the salmon flies he fishes for steelhead. These dressings may be art, but they’re his working flies, too. He does not fish them with a heart heavy and nostalgia, a spiritual effort to breathe life into the dead traditions from a bygone era, but rather he swings the Carron (pictured below) and the Dallas because they’re effective on steelhead in the rivers he fishes.
Fly Dressing Pictured In This Blog Post
Carron - Hook: Partridge blind eye 2/0, Body: Orange Berlin wool. Rib: Flat and oval silver tinsel, Reverse rib: Fine oval silver tinsel. Body hackle: Black heron, Front hackle: Teal (or widgeon). Wing: Bronze mallard, Head: Black.
Pictured Below (click to enlarge): (1) A peek into Will Bush’s working fly box filled with his gorgeous creations that tells the story of this book—on the right are feather-wing Atlantic salmon flies that ruled the sport for two centuries; on the left elegant, modern steelhead patterns drawing on ancient Spey and Dee designs, with color and pizazz. (2) Top two flies: Carron from Autumns on the Spey by A. E. Knox (1872). The bottom fly is Spey No. 1 from Scottish poet Thomas Tod Stoddart’s The Angler’s Companion (1853).
