Living life on the fly
Peter Carty lands a rainbow trout to go with the ONZM he landed last month.
Adding ONZM on the end of Peter Hardy Ballantyne Carty’s already lengthy name has earned a fair amount of ribbing from friends and acquaintances.
The master fly-tier was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to fly-fishing in June’s King’s Birthday Honours.
“You think I haven't had a heap of … about that over the last week, everyone's on to it, trust me, they’ve had a lot of fun.
“I've been ‘Sir’ I've been ‘Your Majesty’, people bowing, curtsying and for a working glass boy from Thompson Terrace in Nelson it’s a bit hard to get used to.”
Carty joked that even his wife, Sherrie Feickert-Carty, was practising getting a toffee name with his title, before admitting she’d long been hyphenated.
Though a positive amongst all the joshing had been “hearing from a lot of people I haven't heard from in a very, very long time.”
Carty’s flies are used in New Zealand, and internationally and he has been named among the top five fly-tiers worldwide, though his humility is plain when discussing this and his former role as a professional fishing guide who helped New Zealand become established as a popular international fly-fishing destination in the 1990s.
Now retired, and living in Tūrangi to be closer to Sherrie’s mother, he also deflects praise for his role in Casting for Recovery which helps women recovering from breast cancer by teaching them the rudiments of fly-casting and fly fishing.
While he tied flies for the participants, he said his wife, who brought the programme to New Zealand, should be getting the gong not him – conceding he just got hooked and reeled in.
“I didn't stand a chance. Trust me it's a great programme.”
Carty laughed that the day he started fishing was the day he started fly tying.
“Because I lost all my flies. It was the contents of a feather pillow where I was staying with my cousin because we both started at the same time, and the contents of his mum’s sewing box with herring hooks and anything else we could find. It's evolved a wee bit since then.”
Different people would interpret differently how to emulate an insect or other organism when tying a fly, he says.
“If you tie something and you really like the look of it, you will fish it with confidence. The one that you screwed up when you were tying it, it's got a big dag of varnish hanging off the front of it, it will sit in your box while all the others get used.”
And while the first thing he told people when teaching them was ‘there are no rules’, he admitted he was still enough of a traditionalist to love seeing the old flies tied properly.
“And they still work, even with all the modern materials. Do they work any better? Probably not.
“There are no rules. If you want to put some flashy stuff in a traditional Parson’s Glory for example and there are people that do but… just because you use red thread on the head of it when it traditionally has black, it doesn't make it a whole new fly. But it might be a little hot spot attractor that made a difference on that day.”
A fisherman would never know what the trout was thinking or seeing. “But it’s more likely because you went out there and fished it with confidence.”
While fly tying was still a major passion, Carty admits he probably needed to slow down, having tied a marathon six dozen to send overseas the night before we spoke – though Sherrie might disagree.
“The wife says I’m a far better human being when I'm tying flies.”
And he has cut back elsewhere – to a degree.
“But I just love helping people… I might not be guiding these days, but I do a lot of casting instruction, just helping people.”