A.K. Best, a master illusionist of fly fishing who used bits of feathers, fur, hair and thread to create lifelike beetles, mayflies and other aquatic insects, tying them to hooks and enticing trout to the surface of streams and rivers for deceptively tempting meals, died on Aug. 20 in Boulder, Colo. He was 92.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was an aortic aneurysm, his daughter Suzanne Morgan said.
Mr. Best was renowned for his mastery of the meticulous art of professional fly tying. He produced nearly weightless artificial lures that mimicked the midges, caddisflies and other bugs that fish eat; his specialty was dry flies, which float on the water’s surface.
Ed Engle, a fishing companion and a longtime outdoors columnist for The Boulder Daily Camera, wrote in 2010 that Mr. Best’s peerless designs fooled discerning trout palates “to a degree that verges on the miraculous.”
Mr. Best also wrote books and magazine articles, spoke at seminars and made instructional videos with the professorial tone of a pipe-smoking teacher, which he had been. (Pipe smoke helped keep the mosquitoes away while he fished.) Fly Fisherman magazine said, in a tribute after his death, that he “shaped the soul of modern fly fishing.”
For hours at a time, Mr. Best sat in his basement workshop in Boulder, using a vise, pliers, tweezers, a toothbrush, sprigs of feathers and other tools of the trade. He made the wings and tails of insect replicas by hand, for personal use and at a commercial pace of roughly 40 lures an hour and 36,000 a year for companies like Orvis, Umpqua Feather Merchants and Urban Angler. He was said to have attached a shoulder rest to his phone so he could keep tying while taking a call.
As he worked, he listened to classical music and jazz, accompaniment that dated to his earlier career as a music teacher and high school band director. He considered the precision required for tying flies similar to the exactitude of creating music.
“There’s no such thing as an unimportant detail in music,” Mr. Best told The Denver Gazette in 2024. “The composer put that dot on the paper with an ink pen for a specific reason. Just like when you look at a picture of an insect, every dot is important.”
He kept diaries; caught insects, made slides and used a ruler to measure their body proportions; and squinted through his eyelashes to refract the gray, yellow, cream and green of blue-winged olive mayflies.
When Mr. Best arrived at a trout stream early in the morning, he checked bushes and spider webs, and dipped a net into the water to see what insects had hatched the night before. He took photographs and jotted notes on the weather and the smells, which he could discern like an outdoors sommelier.
His great skill was creating flies of a size and color that appeared natural, rather than store-bought, using the knowledge that no adult aquatic insects have fuzzy bodies; that flies should appear shiny and waxy, not translucent; that hair from a white-tailed deer could be used if elk hair was not available.
“You don’t need a fly so big you’re going to scare the hell out of a fish,” he said in a 2015 interview for the Montana State University Angling Oral History Project. In the same interview, he said, “If it’s the right color and floats, it’ll catch fish.”
He occasionally appeared in The New York Times in the early 1990s in the columns of the writer John Gierach, a fishing buddy who wrote the foreword for Mr. Best’s book “Production Fly Tying” (1989).
That book should be read cover to cover, Mr. Gierach wrote, for shrewd details “like why you should use deer hair for the wings on an Elk Hair Caddis, where on the skin that hair should come from, why the deer should have lived in a field rather than a swamp, and how the venison from each animal is likely to taste.”
Archie Kennedy Best was born on Feb. 26, 1933, in Glidden, Iowa, northwest of Des Moines. His father, Kenneth Best, was a farmer. His mother, Malinda (Borcherding) Best, ran the household. Archie and his father fly-fished for bass and bluegills.
His family was a musical one. At barn dances, Archie played the saxophone while his mother played the piano and his father played the banjo. At Drake University in Des Moines, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1955 and his master’s in 1959 in music education, he joined the marching band and took up the clarinet and the flute, jamming after hours with touring big bands and playing at car dealerships when new models arrived and at more formal venues that staged musicals.
At Drake, he met Janet Gove, a flutist and pianist, whom he married in 1956. In 1962, they moved to Alpena, Mich., on the western shores of Lake Huron, where they taught music at local schools. Mr. Best began fly-fishing for brook trout, which he said in the oral history was the “prettiest, dumbest fish on the planet” and “changed my life.”
Unable to afford sufficient numbers of store-bought flies to catch them, he told The Denver Gazette, he learned to tie his own, which led to his professional career.
In addition to his daughter Suzanne, Mr. Best is survived by two other daughters, Alecia Larson and Elizabeth Christensen, and seven grandchildren. His wife died in 2023.
In 1980, the Bests and their children relocated to Boulder, where Mr. Best began selling his flies — first at gas stations and fly shops, eventually to a mass market. He did not keep the fish he caught, releasing them instead.
“It’s just fun to smell my hand at the end of the day,” he said in a 2013 video, “and say, ‘Well, that could have been a 27-incher.’ Smells alike, whether it’s seven or 27.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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