History of fly fishing on display
The latest temporary exhibit at the Bella Vista History Museum features a hobby that goes back hundreds of years. Carol Phillips has a family connection to fly fishing and a collection of fly fishing equipment that is currently filling two display cases at the museum.
Much of her collection came from her family. All four of her grandparents were anglers and she inherited equipment that they had collected or inherited from their parents. One of her rods was used by Brad Pitt in the movie “A River Runs Through It.” The movie is set in Montana in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Phillips just happened to have a rod from that era that she loaned out.
Fly fishing can be done anywhere, she explained. She uses her fly fishing equipment in the lakes around Bella Vista, often casting from her canoe. She has also used it in salt water.
“You can catch any kind of fish with fly fishing equipment,” she said.
Her oldest rods are made of bamboo. Fiberglass rods were available after the World War II and graphite rods came along in the 1970’s. Every rod is tapered, she explained. Even the earliest fly fishing rods were green branches cut from trees with a natural tapered shape.
The lines are also tapered. The weight of line is what sends the fly out away from the rod, she said. Flys are very light and attached to the line with a leader that is virtually transparent. Many flies float and sometimes when people are “false casting,” repeatedly moving the rod overhead, they are actually drying off their flies so they will continue to float.
Historically lines where made out of horse hair and then silk, before the modern nylon lines. She has a silk line on a large open reel that was actually used to dry the line after a fishing expedition. Bamboo rods had to be carefully dried as well.
She has been fishing her whole life and teaching fly fishing and fly tying since the 1980’s. She gave her presentation about fly fishing to the Fly Tyers not long after she joined the club, but she has given it to groups in several states and the United Kingdom.
Phillips has fly fished on five continents. Some of her favorite places are Scotland and Alaska.
When she was traveling in the Middle East a few years ago, she went to see a floor mosaic featuring fly fishing in Mount Nebo in Jordan that was dated 300 A.D. She also saw a painting in an Egyptian tomb that’s 2,000 years old.
Fly fishing was popular in England in the middle ages. It came to North America with the colonists although native Americans were already using some of the same techniques. Lewis and Clark brought fly fishing equipment along on their exploration of the American west.
Xyta Lucas, co-president of the Bella Vista Historical Society, said the exhibit will be up until sometime in June. Most of the temporary exhibits in the museum belong to residents of Bella Vista, she said. Phillips volunteered her exhibit after her husband, Dale Phillips, the other co-president, asked her to bring it in.