Simple lure may be a breakthrough

Taupo Times, Volume 23, Issue 52, 2 July 1974, Page 9

Simple lure may be a breakthrough

If you can't find George Gatchell of Waitahanui at home before breakfast, the best place to look for him most mornings is down the road a bit, in the Groyne Pool. It's nice and handy, it's a favourite pool of George's, and if you were the owner of Crystal Brook Lodge and as keen a fisherman as George, that's probably where you would be found most mornings, too. George is feeling rather pleased with himself. For the past 10 days he has been fishing some new trout flies which have excellent possibilities. Don't think he has been catching his limit with them every morning — or anything even remotely resembling a limit. Far from it. ■Like many fishermen this year he is disappointed with the Waitahanui. The fishing tapered off last year, he says, and hasn't come right yet. However, good fishing in most places runs in cycles, and he is confident that the Waitahanui situation will improve. So his new creations of furs and feathers really haven't had a chance to prove themselves consistently yet. Down at the Groyne earlier this week he showed me how well a lure tied in the new manner moves through the water. Although he had been fishing it for 2Vi hours that morning no fish had succumbed to its lifelike action. As he reeled up to go home for breakfast, though, a fish took, but all too fleetingly. George is the last person to want to take credit for a new method of tieing lures. But he just might have to. . On checking with Keith Draper I find that, as far

as is known, George Gatchell's method is indeed new. If, as George protests, some professional or amateur is bound to have hit on the idea before, we must place the credit for the innovation elsewhere. But where? As Keith Draper says, if it's not a new idea then someone would have talked about it before now. Trout flies are not things you can patent, and new dressings and methods soon become common knowledge. So unless the Gatchell tie has already been developed by a fly-tieing angler who keeps himself very much to himself, it looks as though George will have to take credit for the innovation, whether he likes it or not. Like most really, successful advances in any field, the method is so simple that you wonder why it hasn't been thought of before — hence George's reluctance to be known as the originator. Basically, it is a twostage or three-stage system of applying fur of any kind to the shank of a hook to represent the body of a small fish. Traditionally, rabbit, for instance, has always been applied in a strip — that is, fur on a strip of skin. Sometimes a 'wing' of fur is tied above. Sometimes a strip is wound round the shank to form a body. In the latter case, as for the Bug's Bunny, the strips have to be cut on the cross from the pelt, thus restricting the number of lures that can be dressed from a single skin. After three years of tieing his own flies — two of them wondering how he could extend the lively upper action of a fly, 'winged' with rabbit, to the

body of the lure itself — George sat himself down ten days ago in the caravan in which he ties his flies, and idly tried an experiment or two. He likes experimenting with materials and methods, and has often come up with new patterns that have brought him success. As he says, the angler who can tie a fly and catch a fish on it enjoys his fishing thoroughly. He put a hook in the vice and tied in two honey-grizzle feathers back to back to form a tail. He cut a tu.ft.of fur from a rabbit pelt, bunched it round the shank about half-way down, and tied it on, skirt-fashion. Why not try another tuft a bit further up? So he did. The second tuft overlapped the first one all the way round. What about a third? He tied that on. Hey presto! He had ,/

made a Killer type of lure skirted with fur instead of feathers. And it looked good. It looked more than good in the water. It swam with a far more lively action than any feathered Killer. And it caught fish for him from the start. And that's it. A new alternative to traditional Killer, Mallard, Rabbit, and Setter ties. If you like to see a little colour in your lures, suggests George, tie colour between the tufts, or mix it in with the tail. But he is inclined to think that the entirely pale grey fur 'Mallards' that Keith Draper is tieing experimentally are likely to prove more deadly at present than more colourful types. Besides being almost certainly a genuine innovation, the Gatchell tie confers two decided benefits on the fly-tier.

It dramatically simplifies the traditional method oi tieing such a pattern as the Bug's Bunny — and il allows the tier to use up every scrap of fur from every' pelt.