Megan Boyd, 86; Renowned Crafter of Fishing Flies

Megan Boyd, a tireless artist whose fishing flies were pursued with equal enthusiasm by anglers and Atlantic salmon alike, died Nov. 15 in Golspie, Scotland. She was 86.

Although Boyd said she never in her life caught a fish, she created tens of thousands of the tiny flies, often spending 14-plus hours a day, seven days a week honing her craft. After working nonstop for 60 years, she finally stopped making the flies in 1988 when her eyesight began to deteriorate.

Boyd’s flies were renowned for their workmanship, beauty and uncanny ability to lure fish even when conditions were terrible. Her work was so cherished by British anglers that Queen Elizabeth II tried to give Boyd the British Empire Medal--an honor Boyd almost missed because she refused to go to London when she couldn’t find a sitter for her beloved dog.

Prince Charles, an avid outdoorsman, later gave Boyd the medal at a fishing lodge close to her Scottish home.

The anecdote is telling because, by all accounts, Boyd was as eccentric as she was skilled.

Born in England in 1915, she moved to Scotland in 1918, where as a young girl she learned to tie flies from a friend of her father’s. In the mid-1930s, she moved into a small cottage near the village of Brora, where she did the bulk of her work for the next five decades.

The cottage had no running water and was without electricity until the 1980s. Boyd tied flies in a shabby garage that overlooked the North Sea, her primary source of light a gas lamp, which was also her only source of heat. She dressed in men’s clothes, cut her own hair and rarely strayed from the Scottish Highlands. She never married.

Judith Dunham of Berkeley visited Boyd in 1991 while researching her book “The Atlantic Salmon Fly: The Tyers and Their Art.” Because of her vision problems, Boyd had moved back into Brora. “As we went, the road got narrower, the villages smaller,” Dunham said. “It felt like being in a very different place in a very different time.”

Over the years, anglers increasingly made the pilgrimage to her home to buy Boyd’s flies, mostly intended to lure large Atlantic salmon. When she did retire in 1988, she still had orders pending from 1973. And she was still charging only an American dollar per fly, even though wealthy anglers were begging to pay much more.

“She had done some fly-fishing but was more interested in the artistic aspect of creating these beautiful patterned flies,” said Neal Taylor, a fly-fishing instructor and seven-time U.S. national casting champion who lives in Santa Barbara. “She was an innovator as far as techniques were concerned and the variety of materials she used--which were all local, things she would find in and around her village.”

Boyd’s specialty was attracter flies. Unlike imitator flies--meant to mimic insects--attracters don’t represent any one particular thing, but still arouse a fish’s curiosity. Her most famous fly, by far, was dubbed by anglers the Megan Boyd fly, also known as the fly of last resort when the fish weren’t biting.

It was often said by anglers that no one knew the ways of a river more than Boyd. An avid student of stream ecosystems, she frequently auctioned her flies to raise money for the North Atlantic Salmon Fund.

Boyd was one of many women whose fly-tying skills have been the backbone of the sport since the 1800s, said Lyla Foggia of Santa Clarita, who chronicled Boyd’s accomplishments in her 1995 book “Reel Women: The World of Women Who Fish.”

Of this art, Foggia wrote: “The great fly-tiers will always be regarded as artists more than artisans. Their canvas is what might seem like an unremarkable hook to the casual observer. But every wind of thread represents another brush stroke. And every adornment--whether fur, feathers, tinsel, or other ordinary and exotic materials--is studiously applied much like a sculptor adds and shapes her clay.”