Home-grown mixture aids fly tier Wide variety of feathers contributes to success

loading...

STACYVILLE – Out behind his fly shop, past the llama pen and the Icelandic sheep and the free-ranging, watchdog-wary guinea hens, bright red paint thoughtfully slathered onto a silo bears witness to Alvin Theriault’s true passion.

“ALVIN LOVES CONNIE.”

Women who come to Theriault’s sprawling compound to buy his wife Connie’s perennial flowers love the message, he says. Men shopping for fly-tying gear or materials? They’re another story.

“The guys are like, ‘What the hell did you do that for?'” Theriault said, chuckling.

To understand the reason, you’ve got to look a little bit closer at the family business – Theriault Flies – that sits on this hilltop just south of Patten.

Look at all the birds, raised specifically for their particular genetic makeup, and their ability to produce feathers that will produce the perfect fishing fly.

Look at the various other critters that are raised here, all, Theriault says, to produce fly-tying material.

Look inside the Theriault homestead, where tying materials of all shapes and sizes soak and sit and dry after tanning or dying. Deer tails here. Grouse and goose and duck skins there. Sometimes a foxtail or 20.

“I pretty much take over the house,” Alvin admits.

There was the time, he says, back when he was working as a game warden at Ripogenus Dam, when a local farmer dropped by and asked if he needed some calf hides for his tying business.

Theriault did … and the farmer proceeded to drop off a pickup truck full of them. The problem: They weren’t hides … they were still whole calves, which had succumbed during a nasty winter. And the farmer had been “storing” them on his manure pile.

Theriault couldn’t process and tan the hides frozen, so he did the only thing he could think of: He spread out a couple of sheets of plastic in the kitchen and the living room and let the fragrant thawing process commence.

“So I’m a little hard to live with,” Theriault said in a more-than-minor understatement.

All of a sudden, Alvin Theriault’s silo love letter makes a bit more sense. Doesn’t it?

“When you’re making as many messes as I do in the house, you’ve got to do something,” he said.

Messes, yes. But messes that fly tiers and fishers across the state – and beyond – have come to depend on.

Since Theriault’s retirement from the warden service in 1998, Theriault Flies has grown and is supplying at least 12 different stores with flies, selling other materials (with the help of neighbors Julie and Brian Johnston) via the Internet, and raising, processing, and selling more than 1,000 birds a year, along with eggs to those looking to produce their own fly-tying feathers.

He also finds time to tie 10,000 flies a year, including several thousand of a Maine favorite that he invented, the “maple syrup.”

And Alvin Theriault wouldn’t have it any other way.

Living the dream

Alvin Theriault grew up in Fort Kent and says he fished more as a child than most people will in their entire lives.

He’d leave in the morning, return at dark and spend the entire day on the water.

“My lunch was a bag of potato chips and a quart of soda,” he said. “I loved to fish.”

He also loved to trap – he worked his way through college by selling the pelts – and tie flies.

The family farm was a potato farm, but like many others, the Theriaults generally had a cow or two, some pigs, and a flock of chickens.

Chickens and rabbits were his responsibility.

By the time he was 12, Alvin was tying flies. He began selling them at 13, and by 15, he was raising chickens to use in his tying.

When he turned 24, Theriault joined the Maine Warden Service and says he thoroughly enjoyed his 20-year career.

But becoming a warden wasn’t really his dream. Instead, it was the means to an end.

“Most of the wardens, when they came on, that’s what they always dreamed of was to be a game warden,” Theriault said. “In my case, it was a really nice job, but I always wanted to run a fly shop.”

And to do that, he knew he’d have to first work hard at a job that would allow him to retire early with a good benefits package.

“You can’t make a living in this business,” he said. “So I needed to have medical [insurance] and I needed to have a steady income, which the retirement gave me.”

Connie ran the business when he was in the warden service. Retirement changed that.

“When I retired, my wife says, ‘Well, the business is yours,’ and moved on to [growing] flowers [and working at Baxter State Park],” Theriault said.

And ever since, Theriault has immersed himself in the business. The chickens clearly came first: Their barn was the first building completed on the compound, even before the homestead.

Now, there are more buildings. Lots more. Some house coops. Some are for breeding. Others are for storing processed fly-tying material.

And Theriault built them all.

“When we came here, there was an old house in a field with no driveways or anything,” he said. “And I’ve been building ever since.”

Now, he says, there are 26 buildings in the farm complex … he thinks.

“At last count there were,” he said.

The tying and processing (he can dye materials nearly 100 different colors) are only pieces of the business, though. The part Theriault keeps stressing is a bit more high-tech: He produces what he calls “genetic fly-tying” birds.

Theriault keeps well-documented charts of each breeder bird he keeps, and matches those hens with roosters he thinks will produce the kind of feathers fly-tiers want.

“We raise birds strictly for feathers. They are sorted for feathers,” he said. “You’re looking for long feathers. You’re looking for stiff feathers for dry-fly fishing. And that’s where the primary demand is.”

Theriault’s job: Supply that demand by rearing birds that give the tiers and anglers what they want and by improving every year.

“We’re always trying to upgrade,” he said. “That’s what you’re trying to do every year. You try to improve what you’ve got.”

With a 61-page catalog and shipments heading across the U.S. and Canada (and to tiers he buys from in Kenya), it seems he has succeeded on a grand scale.

The only problem: Keeping track of inventory can be a bit of a chore.

“The biggest problem is trying to find it,” he said. “I have people call and say, ‘You got that?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yeah. I’ve got it. I’m just not sure where it is.'”

The famous maple syrup

Two things Theriault always keeps on hand – and knows where to find – are the materials he uses to tie his signature fly.

In some circles of fishing buddies, the words “maple syrup” are whispered reverently, and only when no infiltrators are present.

The secret, however, is out: Most Maine anglers recognize the maple syrup as an essential part of their fly-fishing arsenal, and many others feel that on days when they’re fishing still water with sinking line, no other fly is necessary.

How widespread is the fly? Consider this: Theriault says he sells about 500 gray ghost flies a year, in a variety of styles. The gray ghost is another popular traditional Maine fly, and many fly fishers carry it.

But the demand for the maple syrup is off the chart.

“I sell over 3,000 maple syrups [a year],” Theriault said. “And everybody’s tying them. So that gives you an idea of how many are out there.”

The fly’s simplicity is one reason for its popularity with tiers and was a big reason Theriault began tying it.

“I was looking for something for my daughter to tie,” Theriault said.

He met a man who was supplying a few local campgrounds with simple chenille-based flies, with no tails, and found that people were catching fish with them.

He tinkered with the fly, and spoke with Jack McPhee, a warden pilot and guide who was tying his own chenille fly. McPhee’s creation was cream-colored, with a mallard tail.

Theriault branched out from that and created a fly consisting of yellow calf tail and beige – maple syrup-hued – chenille … and the legend was born.

Now he ties them weighted, cone-headed, bead-headed, and even flavored. And demand keeps on growing.

The fly is simple enough that Holly Theriault (now a senior in college) mastered it quickly and became a “commercial” tier specializing in the pattern.

She was 4 years old at the time.

The secret, according to Theriault, isn’t really the pattern, nor the colors involved. It’s the double-thick chenille and the size.

“We designed it to look like a worm, but at the same [time], size is really important to me, more than the color,” he said. “It’s the same size as the hellgrammite, the same size as the dragon fly nymph, it’s the same size as the stone fly nymph, and it’s the same size as the big green drake nymph.”

The clincher, he maintains, may actually be the texture.

“A brook trout lives for what? Five years? So what type of entomology did they study?” he asked. “They didn’t. They just grab [a fly] and spit it out. The thing with the maple syrup is, they probably don’t grab it any more than any other pattern. They just don’t release it because it feels good.”

If that sounds a bit like fish-whispering to you, that’s fine with Theriault. He, after all, invented the fly … and he and his devoted customers are the only ones who have to believe.

Theriault definitely believes.

“I teach a fly-tying class in the winter. The very first fly we tie is the maple syrup,” he said. “So, of course in the first five minutes everybody’s tied their first fly, whether they’ve ever tied or not.”

Then Theriault invariably asks a question.

“I say, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do for the next eight weeks, because you’ve already tied the best fly,'” he said with yet another laugh.

Plans for the future

Theriault’s plans for a fly shop didn’t really turn out as he’d originally thought.

At first, he thought he’d like to put his shop at the beginning of his long driveway, right next to Route 11.

But a little matter of a thousand chickens (and other assorted material-in-progress) got in the way of that.

“I’d have to give up on the farm,” Theriault said, explaining that he has an alarm system built in that alerts him when somebody drives into the yard, and he then stops tending the birds or beasts and heads back to the shop to unlock and service the customers.

If he had to walk 200 or 300 yards every time a customer called … well … the birds might never get fed.

“You can hire someone to run [the shop], but it’s not the same thing,” he said. “Part of the fun of having my own fly shop is being able to be there.”

Thus, the shop is the hub of his activity, not far from any of the barns or pens.

As it is, tending the animals is already pretty time consuming … and potentially confusing.

“When I start feeding in the morning, so that I don’t forget anybody, I start from one end and go around,” he said, describing the circuit he takes. “It’s easy to forget somebody.”

And even though there are 26 (at last count) buildings already on the site, Theriault’s got plenty more built … if only in his imagination.

“I have piles of lumber everywhere. I mean, I’ve got 10,000 board-feet of just boards over there,” he said, gesturing to a nearby stack. “And I’ve got framing lumber everywhere.

“So I’ve got plans. But I can’t seem to make the time to [build] any faster.”