Noel Jetson – Life & Flies
Warwick Powell digests a timely biography by Glenn Eggleton.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” While this particular phrase probably never passed Noel Jetson’s lips, the sentiment seemed to be at his core—in life and in fishing.
So much is clear from the well re-searched biography on Jetson by Glenn Eggleton. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Jetson was lucky to have survived infancy. Having been born in 1933 on the remote Flinders Island, and suffering from twisted bowel syndrome which had claimed the life of his brother some four years earlier, Jetson was airlifted to the Tasmanian mainland for life-saving treatment.
Did surviving this near-death experience as a baby leave, at least subconsciously, an indelible mark on his psyche? So much so that he grabbed life’s every opportunity and pursued them with un-bridled enthusiasm and determination? Some say fortune favours the brave; in Jetson’s case, his fortune wasn’t necessarily financial but came via abundant life experiences, which revolved around his passion for trout and the fly, and which took him and his wife Lois across all major fly fishing continents. The Jetsons had ‘magic’ experiences and times, enriched no doubt by the camaraderie and friendships they had gained through the global fly fishing fraternity.
Life and Flies is a fishing biography. It chronicles Jetson’s early tentative experimentations with the fly, to his ultimate role as a pioneer professional fishing guide (he was the first full-timer), fly tier and retailer in Cressy. It’s comforting to realise that even the doyens of our sport began their journeys by overcoming seemingly endless frustrations as cast after cast landed in a crumpled heap of fly line not more than a rod’s length away.
The biography is chronological in order, and was easily digested in two evenings on the couch. But each chapter of this 167 page book also stands alone as a vignette, of a place, an experience, a person or a time, which can be read independently.
Those with an abiding connection with Tasmanian fly fisheries will find much of interest in Jetson’s descriptions and recollections of memorable—and not so memorable—days on the water; of places and tactics. Having only visited the Apple Isle twice, the places were less familiar to me, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of Jetson’s life story.
Indeed, his journey parallels the post-war evolution of fly fishing techniques, approaches and sensibilities. In the early days, Jetson’s aim was to land his ‘bag’, mainly on wets. That’s a dozen trout, all ‘donged’ on the head. By the 1970s, Jetson was an advocate of ‘catch and release’ and promoted the idea of ‘limit your kill, not kill your limit’ to his fly fishing students. This was pioneering stuff.
He once participated in a small local trout fishing competition (much to the chagrin of his mentor, David Scholes) and found it to his distaste. Yet by the early 1990s, he saw merit in actively supporting the World Flyfishing Championship in Tasmania initiated by Rob Sloane as a way of ‘getting Tasmania onto the map’ and promoting the fishery. Jetson seemed to come from the ‘use it or lose it’ school of thought, and believed usage and promotion of the fishery were amongst the best ways of ensuring its protection and development.
Jetson’s stream-craft was honed on the back of tutelage from Scholes and Wigram, and evolved through an open-mindedness to approach. He was an experimenter, a keen observer and was never hampered by the shackles of ‘tradition’. Yet, as his trout acumen developed, he increasingly loved the Red Tag, which was so often his ‘go-to’ pattern. And in that sense, he was very much in line with what appears to be a strong Tasmanian tradition of ‘presentation over imitation’, which finds its modern day lineage amongst the likes of Sloane and French.
But just to prove that he wasn’t simply a sucker for a standard, non-descript pattern, Jetson’s Red Tag incorporated a small gold tinsel rib tied in at the turn of the hook. Subtle was this difference, but it clearly bespoke a man driven to innovate and give something new a go.
If the Red Tag was slightly tweaked, Jetson also achieved acclaim for his own creations. Many of his ‘Jet-Fly’ creations were proven fish-catchers, but until now, the recipes were a closely guarded secret. A final bonus of this well researched and compiled biography, then, is a collection of some of Jetson’s secret fly recipes and favourites.
Noel Jetson—Life and Flies $49.95. Order from FlyLife Publishing.