Fountains of Youth – Classic trout flies that have withstood the test of time … flies that remain “forever young”

by Rusty Dunn

Eleven months of planning have led to this moment.  You’ve driven over a thousand miles and arrived in mid-July at a cold clear Montana river.  The tent is pitched, the campsite set up, and it’s now time to go fish­ing.  The weather is perfect … warm, cloudy, and little wind.  As you step into the river, you notice pale yel­low mayflies about size #16-#18 on the wing.  You see several por­pois­ing rise forms in and downstream of a riffle.  You hit the jackpot  on day one!  With great excite­ment, you reach confidently for your Pale Morning Dun fly box.  You are thinking, “This is what I live for” as you pre­pare to cast.  Your dream-come-true situa­tion, how­ever, is about to turn decidedly nightmar­ish.

Working upstream, you cast to rising trout for over two hours using every PMD pat­tern in the box.  You vary fly size, profile, color, and presentation, but receive noth­ing but in­difference and re­fusals in return.  You are now frus­trated, impatient, and out of ideas.  Before walking away disheartened, you remem­ber some­thing an an­gler once ad­vised: “When all else fails, try a big Royal Wulff“.  You dig around the vest, find a #12 Royal Wulff, and make a cast.  Bang!  A trout explodes on your fly.

What’s the lesson here?  The realities of trout selectiv­ity can baffle even experts.  The Royal Wulff is an attractor dry fly, but it is so fright­fully conspicu­ous and so freak­ishly unlike any stream insects that it seemingly should scare fish away.  Yet, the fly has proved itself effective for over 90 years.  Any time, any place, any conditions, it can take trout that seem uncatchable.  Some things in fly fishing simply defy explanation.  The­odore Gordon perhaps said it best.  “There is no use talking about it – trout do not see things just as we do.”  Preston Jen­nings, an acknowledged mid-century expert on fly tying and insect imitation, refused to include the Royal Wulff in his influential A Book of Trout Flies (1935), because he could not understand what trout perceive it to be or why fish love it so.  Jennings de­scribed the Royal Wulff as “one of the unreason­able things about trout fishing“.  Trout, it appears, pay little attention to human percep­tion or logic.

Lee Wulff designed Wulff-style dry flies in the winter of 1929-30 to fish New York’s Ausable River.  Wulff was dissatisfied with the prevailing Catskill-style dry flies, which were delicate, slim-bodied, and sparsely hack­led.  Such flies floated poorly on the Ausable’s swift waters.  Wulff struggled to keep them afloat, and he resolved to develop a bug­gier high-float­ing dry fly that would imi­tate the Ausable’s prolific hatches of gray drakes.  He also wanted a fly that would catch a trout’s atten­tion if for no other rea­son than its formi­dable size.  Wulff hack­led his fly extra heavily and used stiff bucktail hairs for the tail and wing.  The result­ing Gray Wulff was the founding member of his name­sake series of Wulff dry flies.  All are durable, float like a cork, and are highly visible to both trout and angler.  Wulff flies became very popular nationwide, due in part to national publicity by Wulff’s good friend Dan Bailey, owner of an influ­ential fly shop in Liv­ing­ston, MT.  The most popu­lar of the Wulff series was the Royal Wulff, which was – and still is – fished through­out the West.

The Royal Wulff also enjoyed a second, seem­ingly in­depend­ent, origin in New York.  Reuben Cross, a founding father of the Catskill fly-tying tradi­tion, tied a fly in 1930 that is es­sentially identical to the Royal Wulff.  Cross tied the fly for one of his cus­tom­ers, Mr. L.C. Quack­enbush, who re­quested a fly simi­lar to the Fanwing Royal Coach­man but tied with hair wings to be more durable.  Cross’s design was popular through­out the Cat­skills as the ‘Quack Coach­man’.  Were Wulff’s Royal Wulff and Cross’s Quack Coach­man truly of inde­pendent origin?  They arose almost simul­tane­ously about 200 miles apart in upstate New York, but neither designer mentions having received inspira­tion from the other.  ‘Tis a royal coincidence!  The name ‘Quack Coachman’ eventually faded from use, thus leav­ing ‘Royal Wulff’ as the accepted name today.

You would be wise to carry a few Royal Wulffs in vari­ous sizes for times when trout are inactive or defy logic.  Royal Wulffs probably will not eliminate all of your onstream frustrations, but they have an uncanny ability to provoke trout to action.

Copyright 2022, Rusty Dunn

Royal Wulff

Lee Wulff tied his Royal Wulffs with a single, upright, undi­vided wing, but an upright and divided pair of wings are today’s standard.