Bob Cheatham is an artist of feathers and thread. Taken in the abstract, his creations could hang on gallery walls in New York or stand in sculpture gardens in San Francisco. But don’t be fooled. Despite their fine lines and lurid colors, despite the skill and creativity it takes to craft them, these creations are tools to be used for—of all things—catching fish.
In Arkansas, as in the rest of the world, flies are a means to an end. But for Cheatham and many of the state’s fly fishermen, crafting them is a calling unto itself, one that combines a passion for creative expression with a long-held desire to catch the “The Big One.”
For Cheatham, that desire stretches back decades. Though he’s now 72, as we bounce around his Jacksonville home, it’s easy to see the boy who grew up wading across the east Arkansas Delta with a fly rod, hunting for bream. We stop to look at everything—from his antique bamboo fly rods to a contraption he built for making his own fishing lines. One moment he has me standing on his front lawn during a light June rain learning how to cast a monstrous 13-foot-long, two-handed fly rod, and the next, we’re back inside gathered around one of his two fly-tying stations as he whips up this-or-that fly like it’s nothing.
I am quietly amazed by how nimble his fingers are, despite his age, as he ties a Red Ass Kelso, one of the most famous flies ever to come out of Arkansas. With the sharp end of a small hook held securely in a vice, he begins by wrapping its shaft in scarlet thread from the eyelet to just past where the hook begins to bend. Next he wraps green peacock feather and gold tinsel around the base layer, making sure to leave just enough red exposed so the fly is worthy of its bawdy name. Then he twists a black-and-white partridge feather around the hook just behind the eyelet so the individual strands angle out and back to form a cone around the main body of the fly like the ribs of an umbrella. He then secures the fly with more string. The last step involves using what’s known as a “whip finisher” to tie the final knot.
“Why’s it called a whip finisher?” I ask of the oddly shaped tool made of a thin, freely rotating metal shaft that has been bent back and forth multiple times.
“Because you go whip, whip, whip, finish,” Cheatham answers with a laugh as he uses the tool to wrap a few more lengths of red string around the head of the fly (the “whipping”) before deftly pulling its scarlet length taut with his left hand and letting it slip off the bends of the tool to complete the knot (the “finish”).
It may have only taken him two minutes, but that fly is actually the result of a 2,000-year-old arms race between man and fish. Wall paintings from around 200 B.C. depict fishermen using flies, and the first fly pattern—the “recipe” for what goes where on a fly—was recorded in Macedonia some 500 years later. Today, there are some 16,000 distinct patterns listed in Perrault’s Standard Dictionary of Fishing Flies, and that doesn’t even include the countless custom creations and regional variations like those originating here in The Natural State and being passed around from tackle box to tackle box by tyers like Cheatham.
Patterns come in two basic types: realistic and impressionistic. While realistic flies are meant to mimic specific bugs, fish, or other aquatic food sources as closely as possible, impressionistic flies may either resemble several different potential morsels at once, or nothing at all. From there, the patterns can be further broken down by how they are fished and what style of food source they resemble.
The Red Ass Kelso is a typical, if relatively unknown, impressionistic “wet fly,” a style fished under the water’s surface as opposed to a “dry fly,” which simulates floating winged insects. Although it may not imitate a certain species, the Red Ass has a general aura of “bugginess” that is attractive to trout.
While some patterns are created to fill a gap in a fisherman’s tackle box (the locally loved Sowbug fly, for example, mimics a type of small aquatic crustacean that is prolific in Arkansas trout streams but virtually nonexistent out west), others are the result of pure curiosity.
“I play around a lot,” says tyer Drew Kelso (no relation to the fly that shares his name) outside a meeting of the Arkansas Fly Fishers club a few days before Cheatham has me out casting in the rain. Kelso is not only one of the area’s best tyers; he is also a bit of an amateur fly-fishing academic and historian. “I would say one out of every four—or two out of every four— flies I tie has some innovation. Sometimes it is just experimenting. … Sometimes innovation comes because you don’t have the right material.”
As an example, he cites a bream fly he created. The traditional recipe calls for squirrel tail, but he couldn’t tie off that material as uniformly as he would like, so he switched to brown Swiss straw—a thin, straw-like water-absorbent thread. All of a sudden, the fly took on the look of a grass cricket, a favorite food of bream. Now his friends (or at least those who like bream fishing) swear by the fly.
Though Kelso enjoys tying complicated patterns for the sheer pleasure of it and sometimes takes experimentation to the extreme (he ties a beautiful hummingbird), he freely admits that most exotic patterns are no good for catching fish.
“OK, this is a wonderfully tied fly, and it took a lot of creativity and everything,” he says of a hypothetical fly, “but it is a piece of junk if you try to catch a fish with it. When you go fishing, you probably only need about six to 10 [types of] flies that you can count on.”
Cheatham is of much the same mindset. He fishes with every fly he ties except for those he gives away to friends (and the occasional journalist). But before he sends me home with a small tin full of flies, he gives me one piece of advice for anyone looking to take up the hobby.
“Slack. That is the world’s worst enemy,” he says. “You have to have at least the weight of the bobbin on the string at all times.”
I’m struck by how different it is from the advice—or perhaps it was a warning—Kelso gave me just few day before.
“The biggest mistake people make about fly-tying is they think that they are going to do it to save money,” he says with a laugh. “You’ll go buy some tools, then you’ll buy some more supplies, and you will like this color and that color, and the next thing you know, you have hundreds and hundreds of dollars in materials.”
FIT TO BE TIED
When we asked Drew Kelso which flies were best for catching trout on the state’s many fantastic rivers, little did we know he had the answer ready to go in PowerPoint form—thanks to a survey he conducted last year. So without further ado, here’s the essential Arkansas fly box as voted on by Arkansas Fly Fishers club members.
Sowbug
This fly is a regional favorite because the food source it mimics, a small aquatic crustacean prolific in Arkansas’ trout streams, is not found out west.
Olive Woolly Bugger
Cheatham’s pick for best beginner fly, the Woolly Bugger, also comes in second on the club’s list—perhaps because it will catch everything from trout and salmon to bream and bass.
Red Ass Kelso
The Red Ass Kelso may not be known outside Arkansas, but as a soft-hackle fly, it could be effective anywhere. Just cast upstream at an angle over the water, and let it swing down in the current.
Zebra/Ruby Midge
The black-and-white Zebra Midge and its Arkansas cousin, the Ruby Midge, are effective year-round, especially in the colder months when dry-fly activity is nonexistent.
Pheasant Tail
The Pheasant Tail is a classic that edges out another equally famous fly—the Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear—as Arkansas’ favorite nymph.
San Juan Worm
This simple fly was developed on New Mexico’s San Juan River and has become one of the top flies in the world. It comes in many different shades, but Kelso prefers to use deep or fluorescent red.
Parachute Adams
“If you are going to fish a dry fly in Arkansas, that’s the ticket,” Kelso says.