It's said that
Denver is now the capital of American fly fishing. Helping to prove it, two of
us over-seas members of the venerable and premier London Flyfishers’ Club, are
hosting the first formal Flyfishers’ Club dinner ever held on this side of the
Atlantic. This historic event is
taking place this week at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.
G.William Fowler of Odessa,
Texas, and I are in charge. My lawyer friend Bill Fowler has written a
definitive account of this gentleman’s social club in London and himself
frequents the club’s rooms in Brook Street. Some will recall that I once wrote and produced at the
Library a play imagining a furious debate between the two most famous members
of the club, Frederick M. Halford who gave us the dry fly as we know it and
G.E.M. Skues. He shook the trout fishing world by introducing the wet fly and
nymph to the hallowed chalk streams south of London in the 1890s.
Continuing the club’s
tradition at such formal dinners (this one afar from London at the splendid
Brown Palace) Boulder’s Anders Halverson, amid some little ceremony, will
address the company. Halverson is today’s most provocative and fascinating writer on trout and their geographies. His
book, “An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and
Overran the World” changes minds everywhere it is read and predicts deep change
in managing and angling for trout. It is as critical an issue as the virulent
Halford/Skues stand-off at the club in London over a century ago. Harry
Briscoe, President of “Hexagraph
Fly Rods” of Houston, will respond to Halverson’s remarks.
Both Queen Elizabeth and the
Prince of Wales, the club’s patron, have sent us their warm greetings.
Fowler has said that there is
nothing quite as satisfying as researching the great Halford in the elegant
club rooms in Brook Street, in the finest of all fly fishing libraries,
surrounded with artifacts of four centuries of angling. As for me, you can imagine
the pleasure of sitting at dinner “over there” and looking up to see my own
books on the shelves of that library.
Next morning some of the
diners will be going out after Front Range trout, helping to prove that Denver
is indeed the exact center of American fly fishing, whether with Halford’s high
floating dry flies or Skues’
deep-sunk nymphs-- still a matter of controversy even in Colorado. And all of it redounding to The
Flyfishers’ Club of London and its contribution to American fly fishing.
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