A Rod, a Line, and a North Country Spider
Partridge & Orange
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Chris Stewart
The path that lead me to tenkara was circuitous, and it started with a North Country Spider. The term "North Country Spider" generally refers to a style of fly that was developed primarily in the north of England, particularly in Yorkshire. The North Country Spider is a sparsely dressed, soft hackled, wingless wet fly whose hackle looks for all the world like the ribs of an umbrella. They don’t angle forward like a sakasa kebari, but they certainly don’t angle sharply backwards either. The fly bodies are also sparse, often consisting of just the silk trying thread. The flies that are dubbed mostly have just a wisp of dubbing that allows the silk thread to show through. The first photo I ever saw of a North Country Spider was striking. It had an austere beauty that I found captivating. The saying, "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away," describes North Country Spiders perfectly. I don’t remember what pattern it was that I saw – it could have been a Partridge and Orange – but it could have been a Snipe and Purple or a Waterhen Bloa or really, just about any North Country Spider. All I know is that as soon as I saw it I wanted to learn not only about the flies but also
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about how such a little nothing of a fly could catch fish. For much of their early history, North Country Spiders were fished with loop rods. If you Google "loop rod" you will get pages and pages of hits about some unfortunately named Swedish fly rod company. If you dig deeply enough you may eventually get a hit that describes a long wooden rod with a loop of horsehair at the rod tip, to which a horsehair line was attached. That knowledge set me on two tracks, one researching loop rods and one researching horsehair lines. As suggested by the Google results above, researching loop rods was an exercise in frustration. One day, though, going deep into Google
