By Walt Young

For the Mirror

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few hours talking about fly-fishing with some young friends. These guys are in their mid to late twenties and are quite knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their favorite sport.

Having started fly-fishing and fly tying back in 1964, I enjoy talking shop with the younger generation about their perspective on the state of the art. When I was their age, fly-fishing was as much a religion as it was recreation for me. Driven to be the best I could be with a fly rod, I began collecting and studying the best books on fly-fishing and fly tying.

That effort currently represents an angling library of several hundred titles, representing every significant book on fly-fishing and fly tying published in the past 75 years. Whenever possible, I made It doesn’t take long to realize an effort to meet and discuss fishing with many of those authors whose written words inspired and instructed me in my quest to learn all I could and apply those lessons on the stream.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the current generation of fly fishers aren’t devoted to reading about the sport, or at least not the traditional literature related to fly-fishing. The mention of influential writers such as Ray Bergman, Ernie Schwiebert, Vince Marinaro, Doug Swisher, Carl Richards and others who defined the sport to my generation mostly evokes puzzled looks or an unemotional “Who?” from the twenty-somethings.

They are, after all, the “Internet Generation” and seek their information online in the form of You Tube videos, podcasts, websites and other cybernetic venues. I certainly appreciate the enormous value of the information available on the Internet and spend much time online doing research myself. The problem with so much of the Internet, however, is a lack of quality control. Anybody can post about anything online. And so many do.

To find something meaningful and worthwhile, it is often necessary to wade through a sea of garbage in the form of badly produced videos or poorly written articles. Most of the time. I’m simply unwilling to do that and revert to my well-stocked bookshelves.

Many groundbreaking refinements and upgrades to fly tackle occurred right after World War II. And because I happen to be a member of the post-WWII “Baby Boom Generation,” I benefited from most of that new technology when I began my fishing career. Probably the most significant new piece of tackle back then was the fiberglass rod. Strands of fiberglass were first mass produced in the 1930s.

Arthur Howald built the first crude fiberglass fishing rod in 1944. The Shakespeare company introduced the first commercial fiberglass rods in 1946, and these new rods soon replaced split bamboo, tubular steel and other materials for rod making. Fiberglass rods were light and strong and didn’t require any special maintenance. Like most new technology, fiberglass rods were relatively expensive at first, but once they were embraced in the marketplace, they became quite affordable.

Fiberglass rods were the standard until the late 1970s when rods made from a revolutionary material known as carbon graphite were introduced. Graphite rods were much lighter and stiffer than fiberglass. Many of those first models were pricey compared to fiberglass, and some experienced high breakage rates.

But the manufacturers worked out the problems, and by the early 1980s, graphite had emerged as the top rod material and still sits there today. I like to remind my younger friends that the graphite fly rods we have now are phenomenal casting tools capable of casting distance that was impossible with fiberglass.

Fly lines and leaders have experienced remarkable improvements as well. Advancements with polyvinyl chloride coating for fly lines started in 1949. The ability to imbed microscopic air bubbles into the coating produced lines that floated better. Most important was the capability to control the line taper with the thickness of the line coating.

This has resulted in sophisticated line tapers specific to any fresh or saltwater application. Leader materials now have breaking strength as much as three times as strong as material of similar diameter thirty or forty years ago, making it feasible to fool and land large fish on ultrafine leaders.

Even fly tying has experienced amazing changes since I first clamped a hook in a vise decades ago. Back in the day, natural materials like fur, hair and fathers dominated the materials offered for tying flies. Nowadays, most fly-tying catalogs are full of amazing synthetic materials, some of which have been developed specifically for fly tying.

Many of those were adapted for tying large flies for bass, muskie or saltwater applications. Good quality hooks are now available in a complete range of styles and sizes.

Maybe the most amazing transformation in fly-tying materials has been the development of dry-fly hackle. Traditionally, the feathers used to tie dry flies were the neck hackles of common rooster chickens but feathers small enough to tie size 16 flies and smaller were not plentiful, and two feathers were often needed for a single fly.

In the mid-1970s, chicken grower Buck Metz of Belleville, Pennsylvania, began breeding chickens for long, narrow neck hackles specifically for fly tying. His experiments were successful, and genetic dry-fly hackle became the standard for fly tiers.

All the refinements and improvements to fly tackle over the past half century have contributed to the overwhelming popularity of fly-fishing by making the sport more enjoyable and productive for anglers of all levels of experience. There never has been a better time to become a fly angler.