“Well, it’s all a bit much”, I thought, and purposefully stiffened the pour on what felt unlikely to be the sole whisky of the evening.

All a bit much, firstly, in terms of just the physics.
The contents of the two crates currently occupying appreciable floorspace on my living room tiles could, to fly tyers at least, be most diplomatically described as… comprehensive. 
Three flights of stairs meant that my lower back had already formulated an opinion on this prior to my eyes.

Physics would probably also dictate, in its most austere phrasing, that I’d simply been “given some fly tying stuff to pass on to the club” – a scenario not entirely uncommon in my position as Chair of the Cape Piscatorial Society. Folks often gift, donate or otherwise bequeath old tackle and other accoutrements to our organisation, and I’ve ferried more than a few packages from their old homes to our clubhouse in the city.  
Some boxes, however, don’t give a flying fuck fish about the inanities of something as dull as physics, and can certainly hold more weight than their material contents might belie.
Quite a lot more.
So much so that the opening of such boxes, these boxes, has also opened some kind of weird and rather large philosophical black hole in my rather tiny flat and my rather tiny heart, and the rapidly expanding gravity of the whole situation could, coincidentally, also be most diplomatically described as… comprehensive.

You see, this is Tom’s stuff.

His, famously so, was a long shadow, and much, both pre- and posthumously, has been noted on the Doctor’s staggering impact on South African fly fishing and its tribe. 
His works line shelves and adorn walls the world over. His fly patterns have changed whole destinies.
His kindnesses and philosophies affect on a generational level. 
Trout will forever fear his name.

It was as a lad in Charles Norman’s African Angler where I first read the name “Sutcliffe”. 
Even then it seemed to hold some form of mystical authoritative substance, not dissimilarly to something like “Fitzgerald” or “Hemingway”. It sounded adventurous and wise, like a library of books about old trees and small streams and big mountains, walls awash with trophy mounts and topographical maps. Reading Tom’s works years later proved my suspicions true. 
The man embodied lore.

And now, well, now his (HIS!) vise and tying materials are sitting in my (MY?!) house and I’m feeling a little bit rattled about it all to be completely honest and I can’t immediately discern whether the whisky is helping or harming. 
I’ve already forgotten about my back. 

Shelving for a second visions of the philosophical event horizon passing me swiftly by, I consider the obvious: It would be insane to not tie at least one fly, surely? Just one.
The feeling of opening the jaws on the J-Vise (#1175, if you care) is something akin to what I imagine a mountaineer might feel judging the swing-weight on George H. Mallory’s ice axe, or a hunter closing the bolt on Peter H. Capstick’s rifle: “This device has been many places and seen many things.”

What a vise.
How many DDDs have fallen off this storied piece of Damascus? How many Zak’s were fussed over on chilly evenings somewhere in the Midlands or Maclear? How many Red-Eyed Damsels in just the right colour olive saw their conception here? It bends the mind, thinking of the flies and the fish and the people and the places that colour the deep history of this vise.
“It’s all a bit much”, I thought.

Largely because I’m irreparably inept at tying DDDs, it seemed that the next most apt pattern to attempt spinning during my little window of temporary ownership between donation and destination would be a RAB. A biggish one. Although not Tom’s pattern, he was certainly an early adopter and proponent and demonstrably fond of them, and I’m also surprisingly good at justifying half measures to myself when they concern my own commitment, so here we are.
Red-Arsed Bastard is it, and Rough and Buoyant it shall be, Inshallah.
I’m not great at tying these either but to me they’re less intimidating than the KZN-stillwater-floating-snail-turned-Cape-Streams-daysaver. They’re ridiculous. It’s nuts that they work as well as they do.
I’ve also never gotten a bloody Zak even close to right so no dice there either, sorry. 
It was difficult to shake a sensation of deep unworthiness whilst adjusting the stem height.

Sifting through the comically expansive treasure trove of materials, looking for some squirrel tail and some 8/0 in a suitably standard shade of red (“…not pillar-box red, or maroon, or scarlet – just basic red” T. S.), it became clear that the Dargle namesake would’ve probably been more practical, considering the relative volumes of individual materials in his collection. As expected, the man owned a lot of Klipspringer. The CDC collection, also, is very admirable, and the peacock swords somehow more iridescent than any I’ve personally seen. Whisky vision, perhaps. Stunning soft hackles. Generous patches from multiple deer species. A lovely hare’s mask, the good stuff showing only slight evidence of fine-tipped scissor interference ahead of likely cooption into something GRHE-adjacent. There is a rainbow of chenilles and flashes. Pheasant tails in rusty burgundys and forest greens. Tools and wires and hooks and beads aplenty. Tungsten aficionados need not apply. Brass and glass were more Tom’s game. Rightfully so. Bugs don’t sink that fast. Many of the packets bear indicators that they were gifts rather than purchases, in the way that many of the best materials seem to be. A big bag of guinea fowl, from a farmer or hunter maybe. An heirloom cape in a Dun Cree stapled to some faded cardboard bearing a note from the giver: “Dear Tom…” 
Oh the myriad of staggeringly fascinating stories and plans and lives that must intersect through this stack of materials, built on and swapped out and topped up over decades. 
God. 
Imagine.

Sitting down, I figured a size 14 would see the most use on an average Stream day for me. 16s are becoming small for my eyes both on the river and at the bench, let alone 18s, and 12s will catch you fish but will also have people talking shit about you behind your back. 
I still have a public image to uphold. “Nice guy, but he fishes huge dries.” No thanks.
I put down what’s left of my whisky and lock the Hanak H100BL in place. Thin wire gauge. Appropriate shank length. A straight point and marginally smaller gape seems somehow more timeless than that newfangled curvy stuff. Save your talk of hookup rates, heretic. The dimensions for the tail fibres are easy enough to get right, but the subsequent bizarre little dance between stripped herl, hackles and thread is even more unintuitive and confusing than I remember it. After all, as per Tom in Hunting Trout: 
“This may feel a bit strange, because we don’t normally hackle dry flies this way.” 
No kidding.
I think of Tom and whether he’d be laughing at me.
I swap out the rooster for some scragglier, cheaper-looking stuff and it starts to look slightly more like something that’ll hold up to inspection, from both risers and back-seat tyers alike, hopefully. Perfect is the enemy of good, certainly so for a fly that owes its by-now-apocryphal origin story to the fate of some prettier pattern getting mangled by a fish on the Smalblaar, no?

With final hitches of presumably-the-correct-red thread mostly in place, I find my nerves somewhat more settled.
How many of these did you cock up before you got them right, Tom?
Was he a perfectionist? Does this thing pass the metaphysical Sutcliffe/Biggs et al analysis? Would he rather strip it and start from scratch, or would he be accepting of a fly at least somewhat likely enough to function, despite its mistakes and blemishes? Maybe a bit of both. My hope is that he’d say something like “don’t worry about it and just go fishing. The trout will decide.”
It’s that kind of wisened, calm confrontation of the universe around him that I extracted most from his books, and what informs the character traits I bestow on his spirit during our imaginary conversations. Tom’s ghost thinks my shitty RAB is just fine.

Despite the whirlwind of philosophising on heavy things like time and physics and legacy brought on by my task as unworthy keeper and courier, getting to sit with Tom and his vise for a little bit over a whisky and a few feathers is a uniquely therapeutic experience. He was, after all, a doctor. His memory enriches the practice of wrapping hooks, perfectly or otherwise, and has me thinking about fishing and writing and drawing and creating for the joy of creation’s sake, about the things that are actually important in the long run, picturing scenes of quiet streams and perfect pocket water, glides and willows, rising fish – the things Tom wrote about.

I think I might just tie another.

Myburgh van Zijl
Chairperson
Cape Piscatorial Society
2024


Postscript:
The Sutcliffe family very generously passed on the vise and materials to the Society for continued use and enjoyment by its members. We invite you all to come tie a fly or two at our clubhouse and to share a few quiet words with Tom. He’ll be happy to hear from you.