Joe MacKinnon with a beauty salmon from the Pinware River, Labrador

The name Lee Wulff has been associated with many aspects of fly fishing. He designed one of the most widely worn pieces of fishing apparel - the vest, invented the once-indispensable salmon tailer, originated one of the nicest casting fly lines on the market - the Wulff Triangle Taper, and was a consultant to a number of tackle manufacturers at one time or another on rod, reel and fly line design.

Lee was a pioneer in developing fly fishing for salt water fish species, holds world records for various game fish species caught on light tackle and he promoted the conservation ethic that most fly fisherman abide by today - catch and release.

For all this, he will be most noted for the dry flies he developed and which bear his name. The White, the Royal and the Gray Wulff are synonymous with trout and Atlantic salmon fishing, and they have forever etched his legacy to the annals of the sport.

His relationship with Newfoundland and Labrador - firstly as a tourism consultant to the Provincial Government and then as a lodge operator - gave Lee ample opportunity to fish a variety of waters throughout the Island and Labrador. It was while he was in this province that Lee developed some of his progressive conservation philosophies - oh, if only we had listened back then - but more interestingly, it was here where he honed his salmon angling skills.

From the Little and the Grand Codroy in the south, through to Harry’s, the Serpentine and the Humber on the west coast, up to the Northern Peninsula’s River of Ponds and Portland Creek and across the Straits up on the Eagle and Adlitok of Labrador, our rivers were his laboratory and on them he evolved as an angler.

By the time Lee first arrived here in 1935, he had already had two seasons of Atlantic salmon fishing under his belt. His first salmon was caught with a Bivisible dry fly from Nova Scotia’s Margaree River. That particular fish cemented his soul to the mighty salmon and pursuing them with dry flies became his passion.

Dry fly angling for Atlantic salmon, which began on the rivers of New Brunswick in the early-20s, was still, for all intents and purposes, in its infancy and had not spread to Newfoundland. Even the hair wing wet salmon fly, which was three decades old by then, was unknown to the Newfoundland salmon fishing community.

Lee helped spread the use of hair wing wet flies throughout Newfoundland. He taught Ted Bugden, the eventual originator of the moose hair salmon fly, how to tie flies, discovered the use of the Riffling Hitch at Portland Creek in 1946 and popularized it in magazine articles in the United states. But it is his contributions to dry fly fishing for Atlantic salmon, especially the fly styles he developed, for which he should also be acknowledged.

One of Lee’s dry fly fishing philosophy was that if one were to be extremely successful while fishing dry flies, an angler should have different fly styles, with varying silhouettes which float at various levels on the water surface, or in the surface film. An extension of his viewpoint was that Lee dressed his flies with what he called a “studied carelessness” and that flies with a broken silhouette were better than flies with crisp, clean lines.

When Lee devised and dressed his flies, he was trying to achieve an inherent casual, buggy effect which he felt would better pique the fish’s interest. Like an impressionistic painter, as opposed to an artist working in the realm of realism, his fly tying style was to capture the essence of an insect, not to tie it as an exact imitation.

Lee was also of the mind that flies should be altered to suit existing conditions. He believed that if one used differing material on existing patterns, and if that different material made that fly pattern a better producer, then by all means use it. Always the innovator, he soon began developing flies that would make his fishing - and subsequently ours - more rewarding. This tying philosophy has truly affected myself and others, and what follows are some innovative and effective twists on Lee’s favourite flies.

In 1983, while attending the Wulff Fly-Fishing School in New York, I asked Lee many questions about his time spent in Newfoundland. The conversation turned to flies and one of the queries I made was; of all the flies he had devised for the many fresh and saltwater species he had fished, what was the most important?

I was surprised when he stated, without hesitation, “the White Wulff.” I had figured it would be the Surface Stonefly, his favourite Atlantic salmon dry fly. “No,” he replied, it was the White Wulff because it had turned so many anglers on to dry fly fishing for Atlantic salmon.

The White Wulff, as he tied it, has upright and divided wings of bucktail fibers, with a tail of the same material, a body formed of cream angora yarn and a collar of badger rooster saddle hackles. Although originally designed as a May fly imitation to be used for trout on the streams flowing through the Catskill Mountains in New York, the White Wulff eventually became the preferred salmon dry fly for decades all over rivers of Newfoundland and Labrador, Maritime Canada and Quebec.

Initially, Lee had not tried the better floating calf tail fibers, now favoured as the better material for use on modern Wulffs. Even knowing this, he still liked the more insect-like results he achieved with bucktail.

Rocky Schulstad, a native British Columbian who had settled here in the 1940s, quickly became addicted to salmon fishing. Among the many pastimes the multi- talented Rocky participated in was fly tying. He soon became known among Newfoundland salmon angling circles as one of the better fly tiers; so much so that some of the innovative patterns he devised back then are considered standards on our rivers today.

One of the flies he “tweaked” was that of his friend Lee’s White Wulff. Rocky formed the wings and tail of his White Wulff with the more translucent guard hairs from a polar bear hide. Of the few who know of this pattern, it is considered a real “killer.”

Since both these gentlemen have had a profound influence on my fly tying career, I took Lee’s and Rocky’s lead and further transformed the pattern. Whereas the above versions of the White Wulff featured a cream angora wool yarn body, I spun mine with the underfur of polar bear, making a buggier-looking adaptation that floats better than the others. From the relatively placid rivers of southwestern Newfoundland to the raging rivers of Labrador, this is one dry fly that I consider an essential floater to have in my arsenal when stalking Atlantic salmon.

In the first decade after his arrival, Lee could go to almost any river and count on the fact that the salmon had not seen a dry fly. The White Wulff, and to a slightly lesser degree, the Gray version of his fly, were his stock in trade. For more than a decade these two flies and palmer-hackled patterns, tied in different sizes, were all he needed to catch vast quantities of salmon.

In 1950, while running his fishing camp at Portland Creek, Lee had realized that to be a truly successful dry fly fisherman, one should fish flies with varying silhouettes. Because there were a limited number of salmon dry fly styles in existence, everyone was fishing similar flies. If he were to sustain his catches, Lee felt he had to devise other fly styles. One of the styles that intrigued him was the half sunk dry fly. His first efforts saw him dress Wulffs in a slim, spent-winged style. These worked somewhat, but out of this thinking evolved his innovative and extremely effective Surface Stonefly.

This new fly featured an injection molded plastic body with a bucktail wing and feather hackle fibers wrapped parachute-style, both imbedded into the plastic with solvent. The fly sat low in the water, resting on the hackle and the hair wing fibers, while the watertight plastic body of neutral density rested in the surface film. This down-winged style fly quickly became his favourite dry fly, especially when fishing large salmon.

Lee gave me some Surface Stoneflies in late 1970s and they proved to be just as effective at that time as they were for him back in the 1950s. In fact, during the 1980 salmon season, I landed 25 salmon on various patterns and sizes of the Surface Stonefly.

Since the Surface Stonefly was a patented pattern and required a machine to form the body, I started to devise copies of the fly using seal fur or with synthetics. Although the synthetic bodied versions looked closer to the real thing, the seal fur fly worked better. It didn’t look much like Lee’s fly and I stopped thinking of ways to adjust the pattern; that was until I devised a new style of hackling flies called the Parasolo style in 2005.

I had worked out a method of spinning deer hair and applying it, parachute-style, to a hook. After I adapted my tying techniques, had developed a suitable plastic substitute for the body and dressed my version of the Surface Stonefly, called the Salar Solostone, I knew I had devised a deer hair hackled dandy that would float better than the original.

At first glance, though, one would think the fly came directly from Lee’s own hands. That the fly would work for me was a given. I have since taken salmon with it on all the rivers I have fished, including the Lower Humber. When the sulky salmon of that river “endorse” your fly, you know you have devised a winner.

Two of the preferred early style dry flies Lee relied upon were Spiders and Skaters. Both these trout styles of flies were dressed with oversized feather hackles wrapped on a tiny hook. The spider has no tails and is most often fished without drag, or dead drift, over fish. The tailed skater is pranced over the water surface using a series of jerking motions imparted by the angler’s rod. Both are used on stubborn trout and salmon.

To enhance the Skater’s floating and skipping abilities, Lee employed a vane of bucktail fibers at the front of his fly. The Wulff Skater, tied with white bucktail and grizzly hackle, has proven to be a valuable fly, rising jaded salmon in low water when no other fly will. It quickly became one of Lee’s favourites.

While participating at the Wulff Fishing School, I met Dr. Mike Arseneau, then from Niagara Fall, Ontario. Mike came to visit me the following year and I introduced him to Newfoundland’s salmon fishing. In return, he introduced me to his newly developed version of the Wulff Skater. Mike had replaced the front portion of white bucktail with fibers of white calftail. The calftail version of the Wulff Skater was a much better floater and skipped more readily than the original.

Over the intervening years, I have tied up and fished many different colour combinations of the calftail Skater and have settled on three patterns that have been the most effective on our waters. The first fly is comprised of white calftail and badger hackle, the next pattern has brown calftail and dyed blue-gray hackle, and the last - my first choice - features dyed olive calftail with dyed light olive grizzly hackles. A well-armed dry fly angler should have at least one of these versions of the fun-to-fish Wulff Skaters in his or her fly box.

The various deer hair, and caribou-bodied bugs and bombers, are now considered to be the standard Atlantic salmon dry flies. The three aforementioned flies, of differing profiles and surface drift levels, can give the angler who wishes to experiment a real advantage when fishing hard to rise fish.