Charlie Craven’s Thoughts on Simple vs Complicated Flies
You’ve heard this before: Presentation matters more than pattern. It’s fly fishing dogma, and it’s true. A naturally drifting cigarette butt (or vape cartridge) will get munched before a hatch-matching mayfly that’s dragging like a wakeboard. But pattern does matter, and sometimes the right fly separates skunked from satisfied. The question isn’t just ‘what type and size of insect are the fish eating?’ It’s also, ‘which fly will look like a reasonable body-double today?’ More specifically, if you think they’re eating caddis nymphs, can you get away with a Hare’s Ear, or do you need to fish a Super Pupa in exactly the right shade of olive?
Charlie Craven knows what does and does not work in fly patterns. He owns Charlie’s Fly Box, the iconic fly shop in Arvada, Colorado, and has been tying flies for nearly 50 years—as an angler, a guide, a commercial tyer, and a fly designer. Charlie’s patterns range from dead-simple, two material fish catchers (like the Mole Fly) to multi-step, extended body masterpieces (like the Morningwood Special).
Charlie’s not going to give you a dumbed-down answer or a simplified list of “Ten Flies to Catch Trout.” (You can find plenty of those elsewhere.) Instead, he'll help you think through simplicity and complexity in fly selection, tying, and design.
The case for simple
Anybody with a Tenkara rod will tell you how unnecessarily overcomplicated modern fly fishing has become (and they’ll keep telling you, over and over again, whether you want to hear it or not). We use overpriced space-age materials to fool creatures with brains smaller than the camera lenses on our phones. Sometimes, simple is better.
Fish are kind of dumb
“You don’t need fancy, complicated flies to catch fish. Fish eat a lot of dumb stuff,” says Craven. Simple patterns—RS2s, Griffith’s Gnats, Zebra Midges, Pheasant Tails—tied with proper proportions will catch fish anywhere those flies make sense, almost indefinitely. “The simple stuff doesn’t wear out,” he says. “It doesn’t become less effective over time.”
size matters
When you’re imitating small insects, simple patterns often work best. “For small dry fly hatches, simple flies work better because they’re not overdone,” Craven says. “You’ve got to keep them simple to keep them accurate—tricos, midges, most mayfly emergers. You can’t effectively overcomplicate something that’s going to be small. You get crystal flash wing cases and legs on a size 20 and it loses scale. It’s too much on that little hook.” Small flies should default to simplicity not out of philosophy but out of physics. More materials means bulkier profiles, which often means less effective flies. So, at least in some patterns, complexity can be self-defeating.
Guide Flies
If you tie your own flies, simple patterns fill boxes faster. So-called “guide flies” prioritize effectiveness and speed over aesthetics. “Back when I was guiding, we'd fish RS2s every day and lose a bunch of them, and I'd have to tie every night. One day I came home late, and I just dubbed muskrat fur on a hook—no tail, no wing. It worked just as well.”
If you want maximum production for minimal time, pick a handful of patterns that imitate what you think the fish will be eating, and tie a bunch of them as simply as possible with perfect proportions. “If I was going fishing in a half an hour and had to knock some out, I'd tie simple little thread Perdigons or midges and I'd have flies for the day.”
When things get complicated
Sure, trout are dumb … except when they’re not. Your Tenkara friend who only fishes Spiders and Sawyer Nymphs chases blue lines for a reason, and it’s not just because no one wants to hang out with him anymore. Like his diatribes on composting, his fly boxes are boring. Complexity is part of what makes fly fishing (and fly tying) endlessly interesting, and having a variety of patterns offers practical benefits in certain situations.
High-pressure fisheries
“The simple fly is not always going to be the best fly, especially on waters that are super pressured,” says Craven. “I never want to be the 10th boat in line throwing the same thing as everybody else. [In that situation] having something different matters.”
Don’t throw midges when fish are on stoneflies. But if you’re fishing a popular tailwater or spring creek, try a variation that looks both slightly different from standard patterns and a little closer to the insect you’re trying to imitate. “If somebody threw [a stonefly nymph] across your windshield while you were driving 60 miles an hour, it’s a cylinder with legs. A Pat’s Rubber Legs is a pretty good representation of that. But if you were going a little slower you might notice a few other details. You might notice a wingcase or that the top and bottom are different colors.” On pressured water, a slight variation like adding a two-tone belly, adjusting the profile, or incorporating a single element that makes the fly more accurate without overcomplicating it can be the difference.
Sexy = Confident
Success follows confidence, in life and fly fishing. Sometimes choosing a fly with a little something extra gives you swagger. “It’s a sexier thing to have the more complex fly,” says Craven. “It looks cooler in your box, looks cooler in your hand, builds a little bit more confidence, which I think is a huge part of [success].” If you believe a second wingcase on your stonefly will make the difference, it might—not because trout can count (they can’t) but because you can.
Tying is about more than catching fish
“The fish are not the final judge of our flies,” says Craven. Of course you want your flies to catch fish, but you also want them to look good, to feel satisfying. The process of learning to tie flies is a lot like the journey of fly fishing itself.
“As a fly tyer, you progress to more complicated stuff just to keep yourself entertained. I can bang out a whole box of Perdigons, but there's zero reward. It's not like you finish one and you're like, ‘Man, that one came out really good.’ There's just not much challenge to it. As you get better, you progress to more complicated stuff because it's more interesting.”
The practical middle
We know simple flies catch fish, but we also know that part of the fun of fishing and tying is cracking the code, figuring out something a little different that might provide both practical success and aesthetic satisfaction. Functional fly tying, however, is not model building. Hyper-realistic flies may look cool, but they’re not practical, and usually don’t catch very many fish. Craven suggests anglers and tyers approach fly selection in single steps.
“Look at it with the broad view—the cylinder with legs—and then ask what’s the next big thing that sticks out that I could include. In some cases it might be a single strand of flash, or a longer wing on an emerger, or something to change the profile.” Most so-called new patterns, as he notes, are really just classic patterns with something tweaked.
The same logic works in reverse. If a more complex pattern isn’t performing, start eliminating. Strip it back. “What can I take away from that and still have a fly that works? Take a complicated fly and pare it down to just the essentials.”
Fly anglers often face a paralysis of choice. The next time you’re struck dumb by the glittering cornucopia of bins in your local shop, the endless possibility of empty vise jaws, or the rows of options in your box, remember that a stonefly, glimpsed at 60 miles an hour, is a cylinder with legs. Start there. Take one step closer. That's usually enough.