Fly anglers will point out that any bozo can stick a hook into live bait, chuck it into the water and attract a fish. Fooling a fish on a fly—an unscented, lightweight lure made mostly of fur, feathers and other natural materials—is more challenging and thus more rewarding.
Fly-fishing has always had a certain snob appeal. It’s the method favored by an elite minority, most famously for trout but also striped bass, a popular game fish that travels in schools up and down the East Coast most of the year. (Northern New England’s summer season is already in full swing; stripers will return en masse to the New York City area this fall.) Given the troubling recent decline of these aggressive feeders in some regions, catch-and-release fly-fishing is also looking more and more like the only ethical way to target them.
Despite being ingeniously designed and hand-tied, the flies themselves typically max out at a few bucks a pop, making it no big deal if one gets shredded by a sharp-toothed bluefish or breaks off after a misplaced cast.
But fishing guide and tyer Ben Whalley has upended that paradigm. His flies go for as much as $100 each, a price that’s virtually unheard of. Fans don’t seem to mind; his latest monthly drop of 70 flies sold out in less than four minutes.
Whalley, who lives outside Portland, Maine, and leads clients around Casco Bay from May to October, has spent years carefully studying the baitfish that Atlantic stripers feast on. He takes a fish-eye view when tying flies. How deep will the prey be swimming? From which angle are the predators likely to see them? (Both these considerations affect the coloring.) Has the fly been crafted so that its movement, or “action,” looks natural depending on how fast it’s being pulled in?
“My favorite part is the tying and testing, that process of continuous improvement through iterative design,” says Whalley, who quit his job as a process engineer at a biotech company in April 2022 to tie flies and guide full time.
His wispy, elegantly tapered creations imitate various baitfish such as mackerel and menhaden (also known as bunker or pogies). In the water, they undulate with convincing fluidity; out of the water, they tend to resemble a candle flame turned sideways—and are beautiful enough to be put on display. Most end up knotted to the end of a fishing line, though, because they’re so wickedly effective. And not only on the East Coast: Whalley’s customers have used them to hook leaping game fish everywhere from the Indian Ocean to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.
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Whalley, who has a degree in biochemistry, started tying flies at 9 years old in South Florida. He spent much of his childhood in Brazil, where his American parents ran an orphanage, and discovered striped bass after moving to Maine in 2003. As a white-collar worker, he specialized in “structured troubleshooting.” He does a more fun version of that now: He tests every new style of fly exhaustively, sometimes off the dock while waiting to meet a client for a 5 a.m. boat launch, which he admits is “a little crazy.”
The key to his craft is the “hollow fleye” method that was developed 20 years ago by his mentor, saltwater tyer Bob Popovics, who lives on the New Jersey Shore. In this genius technique, natural fibers are threaded onto a metal hook shank toward its eye, rather than toward the hook as is usual, and then pressed back into shape. The result is that they flare out voluminously and thus create bulky flies that are still light enough to be cast on a fly rod.
Whalley’s riffs on this style have found a devoted audience on Instagram ( @benwhalleyfishing), where a photo of his mackerel imitation next to the real thing has garnered about 18,000 likes. The only place to buy his small-batch flies is his website. He notifies subscribers by email of the date and time of the next product drop a month in advance. The flies sell out in less time than it takes to reel in a nice striper.
The business model is lifted from handmade-knife makers such as Utah-based Grizzly Forge LLC, and Whalley says it fosters better quality and better margins. Fulfilling custom orders, as he used to do, makes it hard for a sought-after tyer (many of whom can’t afford to craft flies full time) to keep up with demand.
“I’d get eight-month backlogs. There’s no way to increase volume without sacrificing quality,” he says. This way, he can spend more time refining the “realistic flair” of his flies, and more buyers, albeit deeper-pocketed ones, have a shot at buying them.
“It’s functional art,” he says.
BREAKING DOWN THE BIG MAC HOLLOW FLEYE
- Peacock herl (the iridescent greenish-blue strands from the plumage) “looks very fishy,” Whalley notes; 12-inch lengths like the ones that spill back from the hook eye can be hard to come by.
- The striped feathers are grizzly hackle (which, confusingly, comes from a rooster, not a bear), picked because it resembles vermiculation, the worm-track pattern found on mackerel. Whalley dyes the white feathers chartreuse and teal himself.
- The belly is made from a mix of natural and dyed bucktail—that is, a deer’s rearmost fur. “For taper and compressible, hollow fibers, there’s nothing that matches it,” Whalley says. “Skunk behaves similarly but smells terrible.”
- The tab eyes that Whalley uses are made of Mylar. They’re flat, but the bulging materials underneath push them out slightly.
- Extra-sharp, rust-resistant Danish hooks are made of hardened steel. Because the hooks are extra-heavy, Whalley can avoid wrapping them with lead wire, which can cause a fast-moving fly to keel improperly.
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