Golden Girl

Golden Girl

Roderick Haig-Brown, 1940s

Tip - Gold oval tinsel (fine) 

Tag - Orange silk 

Tail - Golden pheasant crest 

Body - Gold flat tinsel

Hackle: Yellow 

Wing - Orange polar bear hair*, two golden pheasant tippet feathers 

Topping - Golden pheasant crest

*I used orange bucktail

Classic Steelhead Flies - John Shewey

The preeminent British Columbia fly-angling historian, Arthur Lingren, produced two editions of Fly Patterns of British Columbia, one of several titles he has released through Frank Amato Publications. The original edition found a waiting audience in 1996, and then in 2008, Lingren again demonstrated his grasp of historical research methodology in an expanded edition timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Roderick Haig-Brown, the pioneering, British-born angler who fell in love with the waters of British Columbia and penned some of fly angling’s most poignant and powerful words. Lingren’s expanded volume was subtitled The Roderick Haig-Brown Centenary Edition and it is replete with captivating details about Haig-Brown and other prominent fly designers of British Columbia. 

Of the Golden Girl, Lingren informs the reader that Haig-Brown devised this fly chiefly for winter steelhead; he wanted a simple fly dressed in shades of red and orange that would bear some resemblance to the ornate feather wing Atlantic salmon flies he knew so well from his British upbringing. “The pattern Haig-Brown developed,” explains Lingren, “was a combination of the slim-bodied Red Sandy and the golden pheasant tippet-winged Durham Ranger without many of the frills.” 

Lingren notes that the original dressing had a tail made from the small red feather of the Indian fruit crow (a South American bird of the Cotinga family), but that eventually Haig-Brown opted instead for a golden pheasant crest feather (a “topping,” to use the Atlantic salmon parlance) for the tail. Indeed, the topping-tailed version is the familiar pattern, though the fly looks nothing short of riveting when the golden pheasant crest tail is itself topped with a layer of fruit crow feathers or substitutes, such as small, scarlet-dyed hen neck feathers or likewise dyed golden pheasant throat feathers. In later versions, Haig-Brown also included a tag of orange silk, which is made all the more lustrous if underlain and tipped with flat tinsel. As evidence to that variation, Walt Johnson (in the 1990s) supplied me with copies of steelhead fly recipes submitted to the Washington Fly Fishing Club in the 1950s and 60s, including a page of patterns submitted by Haig-Brown. 

For the Golden Girl, Haig-Brown specifies a tag of orange silk, and says of the fly, “This is primarily a winter steelhead fly. Have also taken cutthroats and summer steelhead on it in sizes down to No. 8.” The other flies he included are the Quinsam Hackle, Silver Brown, and Stickle-Back.