The Art of Fly Fishing: Kiss the Water

There are two kinds of fish tales.

The fish you caught and the one that got away.

The first is about holding something in your hands above the water,

about mastery, possession and resolution.

The other is about the space between your hands, letting go,

about mystery, the questions, the elusive.

I am not a fisherman.

I read the obituaries in the New York Times first thing every day,

not to see who's died but to let my mind wander

into the lives of others.

Perhaps some lives can be immortalised

and others only imagined.

Ten years ago, I found the obituary of Megan Boyd.

"Megan Boyd, whose fabled expertise

"at tying enchantingly delicate fishing flies put her work in museums

"and the hands of collectors around the world

"and prompted Queen Elizabeth II to award her

"the British Empire medal, died November 15 in Golspie, Scotland.

"She was 86.

"From tiny strands of hair, she made magic.

"The classic Scottish flies, like the Jock Scott, Silver Doctor

"and Durham Ranger. And the fly named after her, the Megan Boyd

"a nifty blue and black number famous for attracting salmon

"at the height of summer when the water was low, hot and dead.

"She likes to sell to fishermen she knew."

The more I read the words,

the more it felt like they were being read TO me,

like an invitation to a fairy tale

or whispered in my ear like a riddle.

-"Why does the salmon take a fly?"

-Why does the salmon take a fly?

Why does a salmon take a fly?

Well, nobody knows.

And Megan, when she was tying, her flies caught fish.

I kept asking my parents to take me to see Megan.

And I suppose at that time they couldn't really afford

to pay for me to go up there.

So I sold the air rifle to get my fare to go up and see Megan.

And I remember going from Aberdeen to Inverness

and changing trains at Inverness.

Then it was another three or four hours by train

from Inverness up to Brora.

It took forever.

'This is Brora. This train is for...'

Then when I got to Brora, I got off the train and I stopped

the first person I saw and says, "Can you tell me where Megan Boyd lives?"

And they turned round and said, "Yes, it's about three miles up the road."

And I thought I was never going to get there.

When I arrived at the house,

she was actually around the corner in her fly-tying shed, tying flies

and she said, "I was just wondering when you were going to appear."

At first, she looked like a man.

In a skirt.

She cut her own hair, and the way she'd cut her hair...

And she always wore a tie.

There was no electricity in the house. And it was kind of eerie.

Especially when you went to bed at night.

The first night I was there, I remember lying in the bed

and hearing these noises.

And saying, what the hell is that?

Next morning, I saw Megan and I said,

"Megan, there's funny noises coming from the house."

She said, "Oh, it's the foxes under the house."

We heard about the Boyds,

that they had thought that they might take in paying guests,

that they would look after them,

you know, they would feed them and things.

They used to come up the whole of July, and my father and his staff

stayed in the Marine Hotel.

But the family, myself, my brother, we stayed at the Boyds'.

It was then that I met Megan, in 1934.

We had the house. And they had living quarters above the garage.

And they just came in and cooked and served us the food.

It was just a lovely, carefree childhood, you might say.

An idyllic time.

# Two times one are two

# Two times two are four

# Two times three are six. #

And right on to two times twelve!

I was in school with Megan, yes. Until she left, earlier than I did.

I carried on in school to 18 and she left at 14,

which was the age then when you could leave school.

She didn't play girly games with us.

But, well, we didn't have very many games, did we?

Hopscotch and...

The Farmer's In His Den and Blind Man's Bluff and stuff like that.

She didn't join in with girls. She didn't join in with boys either.

She just, she was Megan and that was it.

Her father, I think he had maybe been a river watcher at some time

but he was a cantankerous old fellow.

And the old boy used to bring other crofters in

every morning at 11 o'clock.

I don't know what the mother's name was,

she would make them coffee. And I remember we would always say to her,

"What on earth did you marry him for?!"

And you know what her reply was?

"Well," she said, "I saved some other poor woman of misery,"

or something like that she said.

I asked Megan one day,

"Why did you learn to tie flies?"

And she said, "Because they're pretty."

And her father gave her a fly, and it was a blue charm.

And she said it was very pretty.

She got a little vice. She was given a book

when she was 15,

and she basically looked at the pictures,

read a bit about the book and taught herself to tie.

It's not a big book. It's quite small,

so thick

and it's everything on building fully-dressed flies.

It tells you how to marry wings, usually on a single hook.

And Megan perfected her craft

with just tying and tying flies for years.

'Pattern one, blue charm,

'tag, silver thread

'and golden yellow floss.

'Tail, a topping.

'Body of black floss...

'times one,

'two,

'three,

'four...

It was more than a year before I was able, was allowed to tie

a completed fly.

'..six...'

She'd have you a couple of months on one part of the fly,

a couple of months on the other part of the fly, a couple of months

on another part of the fly.

Then it all came together and she says,

"Right, you're ready to tie a basic, simple fly."

Nothing fancy.

Then she used to have a look at the fly and say,

"That's OK. This is OK. That's wrong. This is wrong."

Then you used take the fly all to pieces again

and use the same hook again.

'Once, twice...

'..three times, four...'

When you went to bed at night-time,

Megan always made a hot-water bottle for you, to keep you warm.

The next morning, you emptied out the hot-water bottle.

The water from the hot-water bottle,

you used to wash your hands and face in the morning.

So water was never wasted at Megan's.

There was always water in the house that came off the hill but she

would never use it in case a sheep or something had fallen in and died.

So every morning, she went down to Brora, every second day.

She used to come in and fill big canisters, buckets,

what have you, for her water.

They didn't have electricity. It was all paraffin lamps.

'15, 16...

'Drips of oval, silver tinsel,

'turned once, twice, three times.

'No, start again.

'Once, twice, three times.

'Throat, a deep blue hackle.'

We used to stay there for a couple of weeks at a time.

Then go back home.

Megan would give me material and say, "I want you to do this part

"of the fly or this part of the fly,

"then post them back up to Brora."

Then maybe a month, or two months later, a letter would come

saying, "This fly was OK. This fly, you did this wrong.

"That fly, you did this wrong. Improve on that part."

And that's the way it went for a couple of years.

'..12, 13, 14,

'15, 16...

'Wings of mottled brown,

'turkey-tail strips, set upright.

'And narrow strips of teal, along the upper edge.

'A topping over.'

Megan never tried trout flies at all.

She may have done it at the very, very beginning

but she was straight into salmon fly tying because the people

our father knew, and our friends, were all salmon fishers.

I mean, anywhere they've got Atlantic salmon, you'll find Megan's name.

Part of the excitement of salmon fishing

is this very romantic

lifestyle of the fish, the angler's quarry.

They spend two or three years in the rivers before they get

this urge, where they want to go to sea, to stuff themselves, to eat.

Somehow, it's in their genes to go out of the rivers.

Something is calling them.

They go all over the Atlantic, mostly through the Faroe Islands,

into the Norwegian Sea, up to Greenland and Iceland.

The huge journey that is undertaken from its native headwaters,

right out to feed under the ice cap

and to come back to propagate the species.

Once that fish goes out to sea, I don't think we have

any control over it at all.

This is a very special love story, going all over the world

and then coming back home to spawn with his girlfriend.

Our first commission

for fly tying,

she had to convert an angler's fly box from old gut-eye flies

to the new irons, you know, single irons.

And her commission for doing that was £5.

With that money, she was able to buy a four-piece suit

for her father from Army And Navy stores in London

and still have enough money left over

to buy raw materials to start her business.

A lot of the feathers that were used

in Megan's day were

a spin-off from the millinery trade,

brought in specifically to make ladies' hats.

These birds were brought in by the English gentry, you know,

from India and Africa.

There were actually thousands of different high Victorian

and Edwardian patterns, each vying with the other to incorporate

more and more high imperial exotic materials.

There was Indian crow from South America.

There was blue chatterer from South America.

Toucan feathers.

Ibis.

Various parrot feathers.

Jungle cock.

Bustard from Africa and India.

My father was a ghillie on the River Helmsdale for about 40 years

and he used to pick up flies for his clients and, of course,

I would be in there, rummaging around on the floor beneath our table

and just watching her create these amazing patterns.

That's it, finished.

It's one of Megan's patterns. It's a land over.

Megan always said to me, "Put life in your fly."

There are 197 pools on the river.

I've caught fish on every pool in the Helmsdale River.

If a stone moves during the winter time, I know that stone moved

because I know all the lies.

To read a river, read the pools, this all takes experience,

years and years of experience.

That's why people come to the river and they have a ghillie.

I was Michael Wigan's grandmother's ghillie.

She didn't have any other ghillie but me.

My granny was four months fishing every year for 20 years.

So I came up every summer, since I was a kiddie.

In Scotland, the fishing right is not attached to a land right.

So you have the right as the fishing owner

to all the animals in that water.

The only thing Megan wanted to do was tie flies.

She was sometimes out in the summertime,

maybe at four or five o'clock in the morning -

wi' starting to tie flies.

She used to sit in windows in front of her

and she wasn't looking at what she was doing. It was just automatic.

It got to the point where she would look out the window

and still make the fly, while she was looking out the window.

RADIO: 'The shipping forecast for the next 12 hours.

'A disturbance near the Hebrides...

'The coast of Ireland, Wales and England, winds south-westerly,

'moderate or fresh locally, visibility good.

'The coast of Scotland, winds south, moderate. Visibility, good.'

I don't think I was ever out at her house

because then the war came and I got married and I had children

and Megan was out there and I was in the village.

Megan used to ride a motorbike.

It had handlebars like a Highland cow.

They went along the way and turned out the way, you know?

As young bairns, we used to run up the road

and cheer her as she went past.

And that was when she used to wear the khaki and the trousers.

And I believe she got in the snow. She went in the ditch.

There was another chap with a motorbike and he didn't offer...

He stopped but he didn't offer to help her.

And eventually, when she got it out, he discovered that she was a lady.

Megan was a special... what do you call them?

Looks out to sea and watches for aircraft. What you call them again?

She was a warden.

This stretch was the stretch you can see outside her house,

the beach area, in case they got invaded.

It was a listening post, I think, out there,

to see what was going on, watching the seas and the sky.

RADIO: 'Shetlands, Orkneys and Faeroes.

'Winds, southeast, moderate or fresh, extensive fog.

'Further outlook, similar.

'It will be cooler than of late, ground frost locally at night.

'Outlook for Saturday, continuing unsettled.'

They were works of art - every one.

So even the local lads, rather than tie their own,

were buying from Megan.

And Megan would charge them then something like half a crown a fly.

And then people on the river, some of the gentry, the toffs,

got to know about her flies and, of course, they would offer her more

to try and get them done quickly.

I think people realised that there was something really

rather rare and special about her work.

And she must have known that she was very,

very good because people beat at her door from all over the world.

Megan must've made hundreds of thousands of flies.

Thousands and thousands of flies.

Because everybody that came to Helmsdale put an order in

for flies and collected them on the way up.

They... Some people flew up, others came by car,

but they all stopped at Megan's wee house and got their flies.

She liked to hear the stories of flies catching big fish.

Countess of Seafield,

Caithness Choice,

Cairngorm, Clydesdale,

Deffenbecker,

Dunrobin,

Lady Wyfold,

Lady Margaret...

All the flies that Megan tied are designed herself.

My father has a copy of it.

Megan's Fancy.

Meg Bill.

Monsain.

Monset.

There was one that was named The White Lady.

'The White Lady.

'Threads of ivory and gold and pale blue silk.

'And feathers of white and blue swan.

'Tail of white silk - turned once, twice, three times.'

Everyone is always looking for the perfect fly, if you like,

to use the pattern they think that's going to lure the most fish.

'Body - one third gold,

'one third silver and one third blue floss.'

I believe people came with bits of their eyebrows that they

wanted incorporated into a special pattern, bits of the family parrot.

And she had pretty much seen it all.

'Ribs of oval gold tinsel -

'turned once, twice, three times.'

She remarked on the colour of my hair,

and she and asked me for a piece of it.

I'd have been about 18, 19.

But it wasn't a lock of my hair at the time,

it was a lock of my first hair.

'Wings - a pair of titbits and morning dove.'

I still have a packet with two feathers that she gave me,

and I have never dared use them. And they were like talismans for me.

'And married strips of white and blue swan.

Megan always said to me,

"Remember, Colin, you're tying flies for fishermen, not for fish."

Many times you will fish for a week and you'll not catch anything.

And you actually, you start to wander. Your mind wanders.

And that is what fishing is really about, it's not just catching fish.

It's escaping into something, which I think anglers feel is

the real world and not the one that they have left behind for the day.

They like to see their fly work beautifully

and turn over a beautiful long line, you know, running across the river,

with a lovely presentation of the fly to a certain fish.

It's almost like calligraphy.

And there is a magic, even a bit of black magic, to fishing.

The thing that really subsumes the anglers' interest is

what is going on under the water where he can't see.

And you need to swim your fly and swim your bait in your mind,

in your imagination,

right into the fish's mouth.

When we spay cast, we use the term kiss the water.

And we lift and turn and let the line just kiss

the water for a second before we cast it forward.

The biggest salmon ever caught was caught by a woman.

The best fly-fish-caught salmon was by a woman.

And the best one-day catch by any person was by a woman.

I was seen to climb out of a bedroom window,

leaving two very young children, and go down to the loch with his rod.

Like most women, I think we fish in a much gentler way.

Be as quiet as possible and not thump the water.

And also watch the water all the time.

I started fishing when I was about 50.

And I had had a few casts

in a river before and I always thought it was rather boring.

But then after my husband and sister died,

some very kind friends invited me up to Scotland to fish.

They were really experienced salmon fishers,

and I almost wished I hadn't come

because they all had lots of fly boxes and I only had one fly.

And they all went to places

where they'd caught fish the previous year,

so I wandered further up the river where nobody was,

and I suddenly saw a fish very near the bank, head and tailing.

So I said to the head gillie, "Can I go up there and fish?"

And he said, "Of course you can, nobody catches anything up there."

So I had about three casts just where I had seen the fish

and suddenly I felt this tug.

I called out to the gillie and my cousin replied,

"Oh, you're probably hooked on a branch or something."

So I just went on, it must've been about a half an hour,

and suddenly my fish surfaced a bit.

Then the gillie came with the net and there was an enormous silence

and I said in this sort of pathetic voice,

"What are you doing with my fish?"

And they answered back, "Bloody hell, we can't get it in the net."

And I dropped my rod and walked down and I saw this absolute monster.

And I thought, "My God, I didn't even..."

I thought actually it wasn't a salmon.

I put my hands up to my face and I thought, "What have I done?"

And it was this huge fish.

And it turned out it weighed 45 pounds 6 ounces.

And it was a sort of record.

And there it is in my hall, hanging up on the wall.

And I sometimes look at it and I just can't believe it.

It was like a gift from heaven.

But she never worked on a Sunday.

You wouldn't go up there on a Sunday and find her.

She used to get into her car on a Sunday and just disappear.

If she stayed at home on a Sunday, she knew somebody would come

to the house and say, "Megan, I'm short of flies, can you tie me this?

"Can you make me this?" And to stop that, she just disappeared.

There is a place that I remember...

Glen of the Fairies sticks in my mind.

Glen of the Fairies.

SHOUTING

DRUMS

DRUMS AND BAGPIPES

This is the wonderful thing about salmon -

they come down the coast in shoals, they know their own river,

and a lot of these fish will go within 50 yards

of where they were born.

A lot of people that came to fish the river were

people of influence, you know.

She was a name on everyone's lips

because they all used her devastating flies.

I know she got one or two letters from an agency that used to

look after Prince Charles's affairs, that wrote to her and said,

"could you tie summer flies for Prince Charles?

"But don't tell anybody."

'The White Lady.

'A tag of oval silver and blue silk.

'A train of blue and white swan.

'Bodice of white ostrich.'

They used to come very quietly to the house.

Nobody knew they had been and gone, you know?

'Ribs of oval gold tinsel.

'Hackle - yellow and blue swan.'

We know that Prince Charles went to visit her and I bet she would have

made him sit down on the rickety old chair just the same as anybody else.

Class was nothing to Megan. She used to call him Charlie. Prince Charlie.

The number of times that she would say,

"You've just missed HRH," which, of course, was Prince Charles.

'Dear Charlie.

'Best wishes to you and Lady Diana.

'May you enjoy a lifetime of peace and happiness.

'I have made a special fly for the occasion that

'I would like you to give to your new wife.

'Tell her, "You now have the best catch you will ever have." '

You know, she had the British Empire medal awarded to her.

And she wrote to the Queen and told the Queen,

"Dear Elizabeth, I can't come because I am playing bridge

"on Saturday night."

I said to Megan, I says, "Are you going down to collect it

"from the Queen?" She says, "No, I'm not going down." I said, "Why not?"

She says, "Who's going to look after my dog?"

A dog called Patch.

And Megan got a nice letter back from the Queen, stating,

"Well, sorry you couldn't come, this is why you were awarded

"the Empire medal. And PS - how did your evening go?"

'Popham.

'Tag.

'Silver tinsel.

'Tail.

'A topping and Indian crow.'

They were tied for fishing, not for putting in frames.

'One third orange floss,

'one third yellow floss.'

They're all for use, to catch fish, they never were for framing.

'Wings of married strands of bustard.

'Florican.

'Peacock wing.

'Scarlet... No, orange and yellow swan.'

To take a fish out of water and kill it...

Oh, no, I couldn't do that.

In fact, that is only thing she said to me about her business -

that she's making things that killed fish.

She hated the thought that a fly, a fishing fly killed a fish.

And that's why she never went fishing.

I've often said that you can teach a man to fish

and you will show him how to wish the rest of his life away.

The classic salmon fly itself, unfortunately,

as good as it is to look at, once you have fished with it,

you know, it really does mess up the feathers.

A lot of these feathers were available then

and are no longer available now

because some of the birds have gone out of existence.

Trends changed and everybody wanted hairwing flies because,

A - they were cheaper,

and the feather wings went out of fashion.

Hairwing fly - you can tie one in ten minutes.

There is no married wing.

There's not the same amount of material going into the fly.

We started using squirrel tail, deer hair, buck tail.

We could dye them all and they were stronger than feathers.

And I remember her tying me a Hairy Mary and she said,

"The wing must be from a roe deer in its summer coat."

Now, I was told that the original wing for the Hairy Mary

came from the pubic hair of a barmaid in Inverness in 1961.

Nowadays, a lot of the people use superglue

and stick the stuff onto a hook.

Now it's like a...

Fishing with a shaving brush.

She probably thought that the hairwing flies

were an insult to her ability.

She had to keep tying flies.

Cos she had to, it was in her blood.

I fished for about 20 years, and every year I saw there were fewer

and fewer fish coming back.

There's lots of talk about global warming

and how it is affecting the migratory routes.

I'm aware, you know, the numbers that they have produced

about collapsing salmon runs, but we haven't seen that.

And in fact, in the North Highlands, we have a counter,

an electronic means of counting fish going over an electric beam...

And our counter says that the runs are steady.

Everywhere, not just in Iceland -

we looked up what is happening in Norway and Scotland -

the stocks are going down and I said, "Oh, my God,

"they're going to disappear."

Pattern two... This is Megan's.

"Tag - silver oval.

"Tail - topping and teal green parrot.

"Body - 1/5 yellow seal, 1/5 orange seal,

"1/5 red seal and 2/5 blue seal.

"Wing - two strands of bustard,

"blue and yellow swan with broad strip of red swan on top.

"Finish off with a head of..."

I went wrong.

It didn't happen overnight.

I mean, it just came on and it just got worse and worse.

In fact, my mum knew she was losing her eyesight long before I...

before I did.

It was heartbreaking, really, because she had got such a talent.

And to have her eyesight being taken away because of her talent...

She didn't have electricity in the house. You know,

she's a fly tier and she needs all the light in the world, you see.

No wonder she went blind.

She did tie flies. She did tie a few.

You know, you can tie a fly in the dark,

even now, as long as you have the materials at hand.

You know, your fingertips are incredibly sensitive,

fly tiers' especially. You know, it's like a great pianist.

She could only make out shadows.

Then shortly after that, she went into a home.

She went into the village,

but I don't think she really enjoyed it there.

It wasn't her environment.

She used to hold my hand all the time when we were talking and so on.

And I remember she told me about the Prince of Wales.

His favourite fly was called the Popham.

I came to see her one day and she was sleeping on the chair.

And I said, "I'll come back." And her neighbour said,

"No, no, she has been waiting all morning for you."

There was a little frame of flies on top of the television,

and in the middle was a Popham.

And I asked her what the flies were for

and she said they were for a toff.

He wanted to take her to London to try and save her sight.

And she went, but only on one condition,

that he personally would meet her at the other end.

And, of course, Megan went down, he did meet her.

And obviously took her to hospital,

and they couldn't save her sight.

She kept shouting, "Die, die, die!"

That's all I can tell you about that.

If you ask a fish, the fish would say,

"Please, I would like to be released rather than killed."

There you go.

I'd like to return him.

Thank you.

The water in Scotland doesn't actually belong to anyone at all.

I hope we never discover actually

what it is that makes a salmon take a fly -

a bunch of feathers on a piece of metal.