Fit to Be Tied : Blackstone Goes Beyond the Traditional to Recreate Links in Aquatic Food Chain
Should you encounter Bill Blackstone on a fishing stream one day, resist the angler’s urge to ask what he is using for bait, because no doubt he will show you. Simply keep walking.
“I do a little bit of a spoof,” Blackstone said. “I open this thing and I nonchalantly say, ‘Well, I was using one of these.’ They all look like they’re going to crawl out. (The person looks) and says, ‘My God, are those real?’ Or there’s no response. They just turn and walk away.”
Inside Blackstone’s valise is a world of creepy, crawly things in suspended animation. All are fake but so realistic they invite a new dimension for practical jokers with a vaudevillian urge to announce, “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”
Blackstone is a tyer of artificial flies, with a twist. His aren’t meant only to fool fish. They fool people, too.
Artificial flies tied by masters are works of art and are treated as such--suitably framed and displayed in dens and corporate offices. But they look like artificial flies. Blackstone’s flies look like bugs.
“I started fly-fishing and tying flies as a kid,” he said. “I tied conventional flies for years and years. Then later, my tying was waning. I was no longer interested in going at it with the same zeal.
“One day, seven or eight years ago, while tying flies in my normal, conventional manner, there was a plate with a dead bug in it, and I thought, ‘Gee, I can get a lot closer if I look at this bug and (note) the amount of legs he had and the length of the wings and so forth.’ It just opened up a whole new thing for me. This put a new step in my creativity.”
Blackstone works in an upstairs room he calls “Stone’s Castle” at his home in Orange. There is a collection of cane rods dating to 1885, a photo of his father fishing with one 50 years ago and framed displays of other tyers’ work on two walls. With that inspiration, Blackstone ties from real life. Or real death.
“When something dies in the garden it ends up in a bottle up here,” he said, displaying a dragonfly with a black and yellow body.
“This bug I wanted to have a smooth body. I got to thinking as I was doing my walking, ‘How can I get that thing smooth?’ And I thought, ‘OK, for the underbody I’m going to use a white trash bag cut about a quarter-inch. I’ll get the shape I want from yarn and wrap it with this white trash bag and then paint it.’
“The back part is a sucker stick. The wings are plastic Visquine material that is used for weatherproofing lumber. I scratched or scored the (membrane) lines (with a needle).”
Trash bags? Sucker sticks? Plastic? What happened to elk hair and silk thread?
“Since time immemorial, fly tyers have used feathers and furs to imitate whatever the bugs are,” Blackstone says. “I and many other tyers that do the realistic patterns have stepped out of that and foraged. There are a lot of synthetic materials that have come onto the market to replace things like silk. Feathers--you can spend as much as $100 on a chicken neck to make the hackles.
“Seal fur at one time was a very hot item. But fur is not a very handsome subject now. The yarn and sewing business have fed our trade harder than anything else. Silk has been replaced by synthetics. They’re stronger and better. They hold their colors.
“But if you want to create something that is a little out of the ordinary, you have to step out of the ordinary material to do it.”
Blackstone’s biggest challenge might have been the fly he is famous for--the stonefly. Perhaps more than any other of his creations, that won him the Federation of Fly Fishers’ highest award for fly tying, the Buz Buszek, in 1985. But it frustrated him for a long time.
“You can sit down and tie a fly in 10 minutes,” he said. “Even the most complicated fly is 20 minutes. But I’ll sit and wallow in it. My stonefly, the first one took two years, trial and error, to get the materials that I liked that did what I wanted to do, from the underbody all the way to the finished product.”
In studying the larva stage of the stonefly, Blackstone mused, “It kind of looks like rubber. Now what am I going to make that body out of? Then one day, while giving blood. . . .”
Elastic tourniquet material, cut into thin strips, was the answer.
Then, another challenge.
“The stonefly has gills, and the gills are underneath the armpits. And those little gills move. I sat and I thought for a long time, ‘What am I going to use that gives that fuzzy little movement?’
“I was sitting looking at my jacket one day and there was a hole in it and the down was coming out. Holding it in the wind, which is like water, the down was just doing a dance and I thought, that’s it.”
Blackstone smiled. “I have a lot of people walk away from me shaking their heads,” he said.
Close inspection would suggest that sometimes Blackstone cheats and uses real bug parts.
“That would put every fly fisherman into his grave,” he said.
Instead, he simply is a resourceful and a sure-handed craftsman. As an example, he demonstrates how he makes the leg of a dragonfly, with the line of tiny hairs along one side. He pulls a feather from a chicken neck and, with small scissors, trims off the feathers to about 1/32nd of an inch. Then he picks up some needle-nosed pliers.
“The next thing I do is bend it like that for the foot, and bend it like that for the knee--and there’s the leg. You can also use these things for antennas.”
Blackstone, 58, retired three years ago from the construction and air-conditioning business. After having a coronary bypass last September he decided he needed more structure in his life, so he has gone back to working three days a week as a consultant.
While some top fly tyers make good livings selling their work for display, Blackstone donates many of his creations to conservation organizations for fund-raising purposes. One pair brought $300 last year.
“I’m in a sense just entertaining myself,” he said.
He still spends time researching insects that fish eat and how to imitate them. Last weekend he was on the West Fork of the San Gabriel River with the Fly Fishers Club of Orange County, turning over rocks.
“A lot of people who fish don’t realize the amount of aquatic entomology that is a food chain to the trout,” Blackstone said. “While we’re not there with our lures or cheese or whatever, they’ve got to exist.”
Blackstone does not claim to be an entomologist.
“I (studied it) in college. I liked it, (but) it never registered on me that someday I’d be doing this. Sometimes I don’t know what the name of it is, but I know that it’s in that stream and it’s active and that’s what the fish are eating on.
“Trout aren’t stupid. They certainly can see size and shape, if nothing else. Whether they distinguish colors, nobody knows. I’ve had flies as small as 20s that you see coming off the stream, and if you’re throwing him a larger fly than that you’re not having any success.
“So many people will take their favorite fly and get frustrated by not catching anything. ‘Gee, what am I doing wrong?’ Sometimes it’s easier to lay the rod down and go into the stream, pull some rocks out and look underneath ‘em to see what’s actually on ‘em. If it’s little green things about so long, then go tie some little green things and you’ll have a better chance than just throwing your little brown thing that you like so much.
“But I’ve taken it a little far. I’ve gotten crazy. To show you how sick this has been”--Blackstone reaches for a framed display under glass--”this is the life cycle of a crane fly: the larva stage, then the hatch, the adult at rest and the adult in flight.”
Fascinating--but do they catch fish?
“You don’t need to go these lengths,” Blackstone said. “People say, ‘You don’t fish these, do you?’ and I say, ‘Sure, but only because I can tie them.’
“Probably the most important thing is that you get the shape. Once you get that, you can go as crazy as you want.”