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History of the Buzzer

Jonathan — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:53:08 +0000

Buzzers (chironomidae) made their first appearance on the flyfishing scene in the 1920s. The first pattern I can find recorded was the Blagdon Buzzer devised by a Dr. Bell. It was devised for fishing Blagdon Reservoir. It featured many of the elements which are similar to modern dressings in use today. It was tied on a small hook and had a black wool body with a flat silver rib with a tuft of white wool behind the eye of the hook.
Little more was recorded about buzzers, possibly because little Stillwater flyfishing was available in England at the time. However the fly fishers on the rivers have been using wet fly spider patterns for a very long time and in all probability these were taken by the trout for the river versions of chironomidae.
In the 1960s there was a revival of interest in buzzers, probably due to the upsurge in availability of trout fishing on reservoirs and some commercial fisheries. C.F. Walker with his passion for exact imitations was one of the first to write a book of imitative patterns in his book, LAKE FLIES AND THEIR IMITATIONS, published in the 1960s. About the same time Geoffrey Bucknall devised his Footballer buzzer which was an imitative pattern, using black and white horse hair and tied on hook sizes 14and 16 John Goddard devised some quite elaborate buzzer patterns in the same era. His patterns incorporated many of the features used in the modern patterns.
Since the early days of the 1960s there has been an incredible availability of reservoir and Stillwater trout fisheries throughout the UK. In the early days the emphasis was on lure fishing with long shank patterns, up to size 6, with names like Baby Doll, Geronimo, Matukas and many, many more. The traditionalists fished with the seatrout patterns they had successfully used in the rivers.In the course of time nymphs became popular and proved to be just as effective without the hard work of thrashing the water endlessly with lures, It was just a question of time before the thinking flyfishers rediscovered the buzzer .
The buzzer can be fished individually or in a team of two or three with a floating line. There is no hard and fast method of fishing your chosen buzzers. You can retrieve your line in long slow pulls, or figure of eight retrieve, short intermittent pulls or best of all let the wind do the work for you and just wait for the line to bow and wait for the line to tighten. You can speed up the drift by either taking one or two steps back or slow it down by stepping forward along the bank. All the fishing magazines regularly have articles by experts who extol the virtues of their preferences.
Before we go down the avenue of tying buzzers I would like to emphasize that there is no chance of inventing a ‘new pattern’. At some stage someone will have tied something exactly the same or embellished the dressing with something exotic, given it a fancy name and one of the magazines will have given it a two page spread. Within two months no one will remember it. If you do come up with a ‘new’ pattern that works for you keep it to yourself, or share it with friends, but be aware that it is just a question of time before it loses its charm.

Dave Cammiss
Author

Introduction to Buzzers

Jonathan — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:42:20 +0000

Buzzer is a common name given to the larval stage of the midge which spends the greatest part of its life in the water. To a great extent this stage was ignored by the early fly fishers. They tended to concentrate their efforts on fishing the dry fly, probably unaware of the existence of the larval stage of the flies they were fishing.
Frank Sawyer, the renowned river keeper on the River Itchen was one of the first to break with tradition. His Sawyer Nymph tied with copper wire and wool was the first to be deliberately fished sub surface to stalk trout and grayling. This practice was frowned upon by the traditionalists of the day and was banned, and still is, on some waters.
Oliver Kite became famous for his upstream nymphing with the weighted Pheasant Tail Nymph with a copper wire rib and was probably responsible for the practice being generally accepted in the south country rivers.
I can remember the opening season at Chew Valley Reservoir in the early 1960s. Prior to that I had only fly fished rivers and streams with wet flies. In my first two days there I had stumbled on buzzer fishing, without realising it, and did not appreciate it until several years later.
My first visit to Chew was a blank and the locals were having a field day. After trying to match their casting distance with my 10ft. Hardy Palakona split cane rod and a badly cracked level fly line I was absolutely shattered and demoralised. The following day I tried again and initially had no success. One of the locals took pity on me and asked to have a look at my tackle and flies. He had a look in my fly box and picked out a size 10 Teal and Red wet fly. He took out his scissors and cut off the teal wing. He handed me my mutilated fly and told me to give it a try on the point.
It was with little confidence that I cast that fly into the wind, but after a couple of takes that nearly took the rod out of my hand, I did eventually net a brown trout well over 2lbs. It was the biggest brownie I had ever caught. When I got home I checked the stomach contents. It was full of reddish wriggling larvae up to half an inch long plus an odd earthworm.
I was hooked on Stillwater trout fishing and it was time for a tackle change. I went into Bristol and bought a ‘state of the art’ glass fibre rod and a Cortland double taper fly line. The flies were a different issue. I had already decided that I would try to copy some of the larvae. I took a size 8 wet fly hook and wound claret wool well round the bend with about a quarter of an inch hanging over as the tail and ribbed it with silver wire.
After years of tying traditional wet flies I felt guilty for using this monstrosity. I dread to think what my old mentor, Wilf. Proud, would have said. In the following weeks I caught a fair few fish but never dared show anyone the ’fly’ in case I got banned. Compared to the lures and other ‘flies’, which suddenly appeared with the opening of the Midland Reservoirs, my ‘Claret Buzzer’ was positively mundane.

Dave Cammiss
Author

Days Before Monofilament

Dave Cammiss — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:33:02 +0000

Today few anglers can even imagine fishing without monofilament, be it floating, sinking, fluorocarbon or any of the many derivatives available to us today. Sea anglers, coarse anglers, specimen hunters or game anglers all take it for granted to be able to buy the brand they want in a wide range of breaking strains in spool sizes from 50 metres to 500 metres. All this off the shelf from most tackle dealers at a reasonable price and quality.

All this makes it hard to come to terms with what our forefathers had to use. Right up to the end of World War 2 all that was available to them was cat gut and most of that came in lengths of less than 60cms. There was no measure such as breaking strain but a rule of thumb gauging ,of the diameter of the gut, rated as 1X, 2X, 3X or 4X. I know this gives away my age but as an eleven year old I can remember using cat gut. Before I go any further just to put any animal lover’s mind at rest it was not made from cats entrails.

The gut had to be soaked well before you tied on droppers or flies otherwise it would break. I used to make up the gut cast with 2 droppers before I went fishing and tied on the flies at the river. Many is the time when I was fishing the Tees, at Gainford, that I was not able to find my precious cast which I had put in the margins to soak.

Recently I was privileged to borrow a book by Geo. M. Kelson, a very distinguished salmon angler of the day who was a legend in his lifetime. This book was published at the end of the 19th. Century when our rivers were full of salmon and the men who fished for them with the fly were not only privileged but had to be very strong. They wielded salmon fly rods of unbelievable length and weight which in this era of carbon rods defies belief.

The author devotes a chapter of this book describing the manufacture of ’silkworm gut’ which illustrates a part of our angling history which I had never come across before.

Forget for a moment the modern processes, churning out thousands of metres of flawless mono, all neatly spooled on to convenient 100 metre pocket size spools. All of this, in an assortment of breaking strains, to suit every branch of the sport. Try to imagine how the silkworm gut, which the Chinese had been using to make silk for an indeterminate time, was transformed to make gut for salmon fishing. It was a gentleman by the name of William Hay who was responsible for the introduction of silkworm gut for fishing in this country. It was a major step forward at the time, but one which history has chosen to forget.

There were two essential ingredients in the manufacture of the silk worm gut, the silkworm moth which laid the eggs, and the mulberry bush. The leaves from the all important mulberry bush were the essential ingredient in the process.

At that time silk was produced in China, Japan, Sicily, U.S.A. and Spain. It was a province in Spain called Murcia which had established a reputation for providing the eggs best suited to cultivate the salmon gut known as Sericulture. This silk producing moth was known as ‘Bombus Mori’. It was considered to be of paramount importance to select the right eggs for the process.

There were eight stages in the actual production of the gut sac to make the silk worm gut.

Each female moth lays approximately 200 eggs.
The tiny grubs were fed daily with freshly sliced mulberry leaves which were scattered over the grubs for three days, after which the grubs became dormant.
After a further four days the grubs came to life and were now called ‘worms’. Once again the worms were fed abundantly on the sliced mulberry leaves, before becoming dormant again.
At fourteen days old they emerged again and were fed whole mulberry leaves which they devoured voraciously before becoming dormant again.
After twenty one days they took their fourth and final sleep, following a final voracious period of eating after which they shed their skin and sought shelter for the purpose of spinning.
At the exact time of being ready to spin the worms were picked out and thrown into a tub containing a strong mixture of vinegar and water. They died instantly and were left to pickle for twelve hours.
After the twelve hours the worms were removed and the two gut sacs removed.
The gut was then ‘pulled out’ simple by taking hold of each end and stretching as far as it would go. It was than thrown on the floor to dry. This was basically the end of the ‘manufacturing process’.

After a few days the dried gut strands were collected from the floor and washed in pure water, before being hung in a well ventilated area to dry. When they were thoroughly dry the strands were tied in bundles of 5,000 to 10,000 to be sold to the merchants by weight.

At this stage each of the strands had a thin coating of carn which had to be removed before it could be used for fishing gut. This process must have been a trade secret as the information on it can at best be described as scant. After the ‘carn’ had been eliminated the bundles were sorted again and graded on the basis of roundness and thickness. At this stage the bundles were graded again into hanks of hundreds depending on the basis of roundness and thickness. The quality of the crop could vary from year to year and consistency was impossible. A 30cm. Length of gut was considered very good. Quality was determined by its freshness, colour and roundness. Before knotting the strands of gut had to be immersed in soft water for eight to ten hours.

Next time you break your nylon, when tying a knot, just think how our predecessors had to manage. We have much to be thankful for some of the by-products of WW2. and nylon monofilament was one of them.

Dave Cammiss

Author