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Flutter, Skitter, and Skim - Using the Living Insect as a Guide to Successful Fly Fishing - A Thinking Angler's Guide to Trout Fishing by Leonard M Wright Jr

Reviewed by Terry Lawton

I enjoyed this book even though it has got one of the longest titles, and sub titles, of any book that I have come across. Using the Living Insect as a Guide to Successful Fly Fishing - A Thinking Angler's Guide to Trout Fishing, is a good summation of what the book is about. The book was published originally in 1972 and is now available in paperback from The Derrydale Press.

Anyone who can write about a "better class of trout" and describe Halford as "a portrait painter, not a newsreel cameraman." has got to be admired. It's a wonderful idea. To put the comment into perspective helps encapsulate what the book is about. Wright describes Halford as being "a firm believer in 'exact imitation' : that he could create out of fur, feather and steel a replica of the natural insect so true to life that a trout couldn't tell the difference between the two." Halford wasn't interested in the caddis and its fluttering behaviour. But for Wright, it is the behaviour patterns of the caddis that really interested him. Hence the title, Flutter, Skitter and Skim. Not only did Wright want his imitations to look like the natural, he wanted it to BEHAVE like the natural insect, not simply floating down stream with the current.

Although the book is about a then-revolutionary technique, there is more to the book than that which is why it is still of interest and worth reading. For example, the chapter The Track of The Trout shows "how rise-forms can often play a key part in helping you select the correct fly and make the appropriate presentation.". Other subjects covered include chapters on Killing Flies and How to Tie Them, When the Dead Drift is Dead Right, Fish - Taking Times and finally, Heads and Tails which is an assemblage of useful ideas which do not fit in with other chapters in the book. This is an idea which is being copied by some of today's auhtors.

To end this review I can do no better than quote the last paragraph of the chapter Fish - Taking Times. "There's an old saying that the best time to go fishing is when you can - and I've never heard of anyone argue with that. The only really bad fishing is no fishing at all. No day during the open season is hopeless. And, if you observe and experiment, it's surprising how much you can enjoy and learn on days when the fishing is, indeed, absolutely rotten."

Flutter, Skitter, and Skim - Using the Living Insect as a Guide to
Successful Fly Fishing - A Thinking Angler's Guide to Trout Fishing, by
Leonard M Wright Jr. 187 pages, paperback published by The Derrydale Press.



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