G.E.M. Skues
(Ago. 13, 1858 - Ago. 9, 1949)

En 1910, a la edad de 58 años, G.E.M. Skues hizo una cautelosa salida en la controversia sobre los ríos. En su momento escribió que la pesca río arriba con mosca seca estaba en su zenith, y sus palabras fueron ciertamente valientes:

"Contra las rejas que protegen el agujero del cascaró Against the grating which protected the hatch-hole was generally a large pile of weed, and to-day was no exception. Against it collected a film of scum, alive with black gnats, and among them I saw a single dark olive dun lying spent. I had seen no others of his kind, but I knotted on a Dark Olive Quill on a single cipher hook, and laid siege to a trout which was smutting steadily in the next little bay. The fly was a shop-tied one, beautiful to look at when new, but as a floater it was no success. The hackle was a hen’s, and the dye only accentuated its natural inclination to sop up water. The oil-tip had not yet arrived, and so it came about that , after the wetting it got in the first recovery, it no sooner lit on the water on the second cast than it went under. A moment later I became aware of a sort of crinkling little swirl in the water, ascending from the place where I conceived my fly to be..."

At the time, bulging fish were widely thought to be uncatchable. A fisherman writing under the nom-de-plume of "Ballygunge" summed up the general feeling by stating that when trout were bulging, "you might as well chuck your hat at them" as try a fly. Ballygunge's view is easier to understand if you remember that ttraditional winged wet flies were tied to represent the surface-borne natural dun, but fished sunk. Numerous dry-fly men (including Halford) had observed that traditional wet flies represented no known underwater insect. Skues was the first fisherman to take notice of a phenomenon that was common knowledge: the bulging that marked the first stage of the rise was fish taking nymphs. He pointed out that it was only later that fish began to take duns, and that on occasion the fish were so surfeited with nymphs that the rise was insignificant. Skues ‘third stage’ was the mopping up of stragglers by fish taking a mixture of duns, damaged or drowned flies and nymphs. He made the point that fishing wet to first and third stage fish didn’t spoil dry fly fishing in the second stage. An innocuous remark, to our eyes, but it was heresy then, and opinion was solidly against him:

In dealing with this subject, I am conscious that I start with a weight of opinion against me among the fishermen of the chalk streams. I have known some of them say in a shocked tone, "But that is wet-fly!" as if it were some high crime and misdemeanour to use a wet fly upon a chalk stream.

To begin with, Skues fished with variants of Scottish patterns, but he subsequently switched to a wet Tup’s Indispensible (he knew Austin, so he had the complete dressing, but he doesn’t mention how he dealt with the Tup). Skues was successful with a wet fly where others were not, because he learned to strike at any sign of movement from the fish, even the subtle flash as the trout turned. He pointed out repeatedly that the nymph fisher should not expect to see or feel the take.

There are those who wax indignant at the use of the wet fly on dry-fly waters. Yet it has a special fascination. The indications which tell your dry-fly angler when to strike are clear and unmistakable, but those which bid a wet-fly man raise his rod-point and draw in the steel are frequently so subtle, so evanescent and impalpable to the senses, that, when the ending rod assures him that he has divined aright, he feels an ecstasy as though he had performed a miracle each time.

The essential difference between Halford and Skues was that Skues fished the nymph in a different way to a traditional wet fly. Halford expected fish to hook themselves on the nymph, and abandoned the technique because only the small fish did so. Skues realised that trout had to be struck, and that the timing of the strike depended on very subtle observation.

To begin with, Skues used winged wet flies, on the grounds that trout took them reasonably uncritically, rather than on the basis of any conviction that he was imitating a nymph. He gave seven patterns in Minor Tactics, ranging from a Greenwell’s Glory to the Black Gnat. The breakthrough came in July 1908:

I caught an Itchen fish one afternoon, and on examining his mouth I found a dark olive nymph. My fly-dressing materials were with me, and I found I had a seal’s fur which, with a small admixture of bear’s hair, dark brown and wooly, from close to the skin, enabled me to reproduce exactly the colours of the natural insect. I dressed the imitation with short, soft, dark blue whisks, body of the mixed dubbing tied with well-waxed bright yellow silk, and bunched at the shoulder to suggest wing-cases, the lower part of the body being ribbed with fine gold wire. Two turns of a very short, dark rusty dun hackle completed the imitation, much to my satisfaction.

Apparently it was no less agreeable to the trout, for, beginning to fish next morning at ten o’clock, I found six fish rising in a shallow. I began with a small Red Sedge, as no dun was yet on the water, and missed several of them. Then, putting up a Pope’s Green Nondescript, I again missed three fish in succession. I then bethought myself of my nymph, and, knotting it on, in a few minutes I had five of the six fish, and had lost the other.

Skues’ discovery of how to control the depth at which the upstream nymph was fished was an important milestone in the development of nymph fishing. He took notice of a discovery by his brother, C.A.M. Skues, that if the leader was soaked in paraffin down to within a few inches of the nymph, the fly could be fished very shallow, with deadly effect. He also spotted that the reason for the success of Halford’s series of spinners was the way they floated in the surface film, a fact which seemed to have escaped Halford, who was so bewitched by the problems of matching colour exactly that he had failed to realise the great strength of his patterns.

Las ideas demoledoras de Skues lo expusieron una una criticismo enorme, que supo tolerar con mucha gracia. Se salvó de serios ataques personales, en parte porque era un abogado con un carácter agresivo y en parte porque podía pescar bajo circunstancias que derrotaban a cualesquiera otros.

Pero el 10 de Febrero de 1938, ocurrió un evento extraordinario. En los años previos al resurgimiento del puritanismo de la mosca seca, Skues y sus paridarios estuvieron bajo fuerte y sostenido ataque.

En un típico gesto británico, el comité del "Fly Fisher’s Club" convocó a in debate con el tema de la ética de la pesca con ninfas en los ríos de yeso. El debato atrajo a numerosa audiencia que tomó un papel de honor en la pesca con mosca británica. A pesar de la apoyo arreglado ("porra" como diríamos en méxico) del lado de la mosca seca, la única oposición seria que tuvo Skues fue sostenida por Sir Joseph Hall, con un cuidadosamente razonado argumento en el cual cuestionaba a los partidarios de Skues con algo más que citas de los dicho por Halford. Finalmente, se dejó campo abierto a Skues, quien tenía ya 80 años, Ultimately, the field was left to Skues, then aged 80, quien tuvo que reflexionar que todo esto era un asunto extraño a pesar de toda ira que se ventilaba sobre la ética de pescar con una pequeña mosca bajo el agua, cuando toe el mundo estuvo en la puerta del mismísimo Armagedón. La posición del la nifa quedó asegurad, aunque las ondas del debate siguen propagándose y muchos rios ingleses aún tienen regulaciones especiales para la pesca con ninfa.

who must have reflected that it was an odd thing for all this anger to be vented on the ethics of fishing a tiny fly under water, when the world stood at the gates of Armageddon itself. The position of the nymph was assured, although the ripples of the debate are still spreading, y muchos ríos Ingleses aú tienen regulaciones especiales para la pesca con ninfa.