The genesis of this experiment was my rediscovery of my love of fishing just before the covid 19 pandemic. Growing up next to the ocean on the Pacific Coast, I’d always had an interest in the water and in fishing from an early age. When I mentioned it in an SCA group, I was sent a copy of “A Treatise on Fishing with the angle” (sic) 1496, attributed to Dame Juliana Barnes, translated by Dam Kinehild le Librari (Claire Knudsen-Latta), 2018.

Based on the text, it’s clear the author knew a fair bit about fishing and the techniques used. Fish are considered a healthy part of a moderate diet and the sport of fishing is considered a worthy pursuit which the author extolls in the first 9 paragraphs.

From there, the author goes over how to make the equipment, including the rod, the line, the hooks and the lures. These instructions show that they understood at a basic level the concept of line shyness, that is fish moving away from lines they can see. It didn’t stop there. They saw the entire system from lure to line as a lure in and of itself to get the fish to bite. The author even goes into the art of fighting a fish on light tackle among many other topics that would be very familiar to fishermen today.

While the flies mentioned at the end of the treatise are intended for targeting trout and grayling in freshwater, I saw that the designs could be adapted for saltwater, where I primarily fish. Therefore I got the idea to tie a few versions for saltwater, fish them, and see what happened.

The two flies chosen were the Stone fly and Dun Cut.

“April: The stone fly. Make this with a body of black wool and some yellow wool under the wing. Make the wings from feathers from under the tail and under the wing of the drake.”

“June: The dun cut. This fly has a body of black wool with a yellow stripe on each side and wings made of buzzard feathers, bound on with a fuzzy hemp cord.”

The differences were as follows:

1. Modern Chenille fly material was used for the black and yellow wool.

2. Turkey feathers were used instead of drake (male duck) since I happened to have them from a turkey slaughter.

3. I did not make the hooks. They were 5/0 carbon steel octopus hooks.

4. Superglue was also used to further secure the thread holding the different elements of the flies together.

The rig used for the experiment is what is called a high/low rig. A high/low rig consists of a sinker on the bottom with 2 loops each about 12 inches apart. The flies/lures are placed on each loop. The idea is to make it look like a school of fish the target species would eat, causing them to strike.

The flies were taken offshore and tried in the following locations and configurations*:

1. Canton of Caer Darth (Santa Cruz, CA)

   1. Configurations: High low rig with a modern shrimp fly on the lower loop and first the stone fly, then dun cut on the top loop.

   2. Results: 2 rockfish landed by each fly. 1 Vermillion, the other a black. Modern shrimp fly took a brown.

2. Northern Marches (Ft. Bragg, CA)

   1. Configurations:

      1. High low rig with modern shrimp fly on the lower loop and the stone fly and then dun cut in upper position.

      2. Dun Cut on lower position, Stone fly remained on the upper position. This was done because I was in a bit of a fishing competition with Viscount Raven of Drachenheim and felt the need to handicap myself.

   2. Results: For the first 5 fish, the Stone fly was used in the upper position. All fish landed were high quality, large rockfish. While the modern shrimp fly did catch a LingCod, The Stone fly landed a 7 lb vermillion rockfish. As I approached my limit of 10 rockfish, I swapped the modern shrimp fly for the dun cut. As stated above, I was in a bit of a friendly fishing competition with Viscount Raven of Drachenheim and he was well behind. The swap to the dun cut in the lower position was intended to handicap myself. It backfired because I then promptly limited out with 10 fish.

3. Barony of the Westermark (Half Moon Bay, CA)

   1. Configuration:

      1. High Low rig with dun cut in the lower loop and stone fly in the upper loop.

   2. Results: This area was fished twice using the same configuration.

a. 2 rockfish landed in about 3 hours

b. 9 rockfish landed in about 4 hours -- 1 short of a limit.

*In each configuration, the shrimp flies were tipped with cut up squid to provide some scent, as is common modern practice.

The main conclusion of all of this is that a modern saltwater adaptation of the Stone fly and Dun Cut fly from the Treatise on fishing with the angle are VERY effective in taking fish in the ocean. They landed high quality rockfish and even got a halibut to hit, which was sadly lost at the boat due to a dull gaff not being able to penetrate the fish to get it into the boat. On the whole, both the stone fly and DunCut seemed to do better than the modern shrimp fly. They seemed to get hit much faster and harder than the modern flies, my go to for rockfish before this experiment, did. It affirms at the basic level that while fish traps and weirs were more common until very recently, in the SCA period, they knew how to make effective lures which they could use to feed themselves and get some recreation as well, which the author of the treatise stated early on.