HISTORY OF AN OBSESSION: A Short History of Fly Fishing

Ron Evans - 2026-07

Installment 1 -  A Chronological History

If we want to wet a line in the history of fly fishing, we better have more than a world class double haul.  The first mention of winding a feather on a bone hook was around 500AD in a passing reference by a Roman chronicler in Macedonia.  The reference was not very helpful in that it failed to include tying and presentation instructions, however the reference is the first in western literature if not in the world.  (More on this later).

That Macedonian angler must not have exactly stacked them on the bank, because the next mention of fly fishing was 1000 yrs later in 1496.   In that year a Book of St Albans was published in England containing sections on hunting, falconry, trapping, and fly fishing.  The fly fishing section was entitled A Treatise on Fishing with an Angle, and was written by (Fly Girls get ready to gloat) a woman.  Her name was Dame Juliana Berners and she was a nun in a nunnery near England’s chalk streams, the home of English fly fishing.  Dame Juliana’s treatise was extremely thorough.  It included detailed instructions on  making a rod, construction of a line and leader, making hooks from needles and presentation of flies.  It also contained materials and tying instructions for about a dozen flies.  Unfortunately, we have very few details about Dame Juliana’s life, but the Book of St Albans enjoyed reprints and sales for the next 100 yrs.  It was generally agreed that Dame Juliana’s treatise was the best section of the book.  If you’d like to read the Book of St Albans three copies exist in British libraries.  Good luck in getting a library card.

The next publication of interest to fly fishers was written by Leonard Mascall in 1590.  While his book on fishing did not include any mention of fly fishing, he did make an interesting admonition.  He urged that fish be released especially during spawning.  (And we think catch and release is a fairly recent phenomenon,)

By 1600, the epicenter of fly fishing in the western world was the British Isles, specifically the chalk streams in the Hampshire region of England and the salmon rivers in Scotland.  All the streams were privately owned and it was, and still is, very expensive to gain access.  Even today, it costs upwards of $3,000 for a day on the choice stretches of the Test or Itchen Rivers, and $15 - 20,000 to rent a beat for a week on the more famous salmon rivers during prime season.  Therefore, fly fishing became the past time of royalty and the rich, with the stereotype of a tweed wearing, pipe smoking snob hounding the sport even, to a much lesser extent, today.

Like many histories, the history of fly fishing tends to be Eurocentric.  We tend to be ignorant of what is happening in the majority of the world’s geography and population.  In Japan there was a form of flyfishing that goes back at least  600 years, tenkara. Tenkara fishing was initially the purview of the samurai as a form of mental conditioning, and has continued relatively unchanged to the present.  There is a fly shop in Japan that is owned by the same family for 20 generations.  I have fished in Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost island) and I visited a fly shop there that carried over 600 varieties of wet and dry flies for tenkara fishing.

In the 1800’s it is said that the sun never set on the British empire, consequently, the sun never set on brown trout.  Everywhere Brits went, soon after colonization, they stocked suitable streams with brown trout.  I have caught brown trout in Australia and Tasmania.  You can catch brown trout on the slopes of Mount Kilamajaro, and the brown trout fishing in New Zealand is epic.  Brown trout were first stocked in the US in the late 1800’s in the Pere Marquette River in Michigan.  The trout were a mixture of Loch Leven trout from Scotland, and German browns from (duh) Germany.  The only difference is the spots on the Loch Leven strain tend to be larger.  For all intents and purposes they have been cross bred so there is now no difference.  However, the trout I have caught in the Letort Spring Run in south central PA had very large spots.  I don’t think the Letort was ever stocked after the initial stocking which may have been with Loch Leven browns.  (That is as arcane as I will get, I promise).  Rainbow trout were first stocked in the Eastern US about the same time browns were being stocked, and because they are easier to raise, rainbows dominate the fish raised in hatcheries today.

For the first thousand years of fly fishing, the primary quarry was trout and salmon.  Consequently we tend to think of saltwater fly fishing as a fairly recent phenomenon.  Au contraire, Kemosabe.  The first documentation of anyone fly fishing in the salt is a letter written by a local government employee in 1764.  He resided in western Florida, and he wrote of catching “saltwater trout” on a fly.  Through the 1800’s a very small cadre of adventurous anglers practiced saltwater fly fishing primarily in FL.  They were very limited because the only tackle was for trout which meant those early anglers were seriously outgunned.  There is documentation, however, of A W Dimock catching a 140 lb. tarpon around 1890.  (Much more on Mr. Dimock when we get to the installation on the people and personalities contributing to the history of fly fishing.)  Saltwater fly fishing really took off from the late 1920’s to the early 1960’s, fueled, primarily, by advances in tackle and access to prime habitat.  Although, the growth tended to be centered in Florida, especially the Keys, it spread to the Northeast fishing for stripers and the Northwest fishing for Pacific salmon.

In the last 40 years, as we all know all too clearly, fly fishing has boomed.  This growth is a result of advances and availability of tackle, the Book and Movie (A River Runs Through It), and the COVID epidemic’s need to engage in solitary activities.  The number of species pursued by fly fishers has exploded to include what were thought of as trash fish, exotic mahseer in India or peacock bass in the Amazon.  The sport has attracted a more diverse group of participants, and it has increased the focus on public access. Here’s a brief editorial to end this installment.  While we bemoan the crowds and the popularity of our obsession, it means that there are more people who care about the quality of the water and the health of the habitat for fish.  This is a good thing.

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A brief autobiography of Ron Evans

I am a member of the TFF board and have been active in TU since the early 70’s.  I have served as president of two TU chapters in PA and am active in several other environmental organizations.  I am 81yo and I got my first fly rod when I was 12.  Those that have seen me cast will vouch that rather than having 69 yrs of experience, I’ve had 1 year of experience 69 consecutive times