All Fishermen Are Liars Page 6
I’ll never get over the feeling of approaching a stream for the first time. I like it best when I can walk up on it from a distance, say five hundred yards through sage and prairie grass scattered with summer wildflowers. I can’t see or hear water yet, but up ahead the brush thickens into willows and a broken tree line of juniper, pine and cottonwood where the stream has to be. I’ll saunter along acting nonchalant, but the anticipation is palpable.
Maybe I’ll flush grasshoppers ahead of me and think hard about that, but I try never to tie on a fly before I have a close look at the water. Chances are I know what I’m doing and what will work, but tying on a fly too soon indicates the kind of false confidence that could cost me later. I remind myself that every day of fishing plays out like a movie. I may be hoping for something like My Dinner with Andre, but it could always turn out to be Dude, Where’s My Car?
My friend and I came on the stream at a shallow riffle with a bend pool upstream and the glassy tail of a bigger pool just visible above that. At first it seemed bigger than I expected it to be this high up on the drainage. Then, after only a few seconds, it seemed to be exactly the right size. We split up there and I forced myself to ritually watch the water for five whole minutes on general principles. The best fishermen I know are all cool customers who take their own sweet time, and even on days like this when I don’t feel the requisite stillness, I try my best to fake it.
This was a high-altitude-meadow stream at a perfect clear, late summer flow, running mostly in the open between the exposed gravel of its own high water line, but shouldering up against dark, root-bound cut banks on the outsides of bends. It was morning on a day that would reach into the low eighties with a deep blue sky and cumulonimbus clouds the shape and color of cotton balls. This was an entirely recognizable medium-sized trout stream, but it would have a few peculiarities of its own that I didn’t want to overlook by being in a hurry. I also wanted to take a moment to wonder how I’d managed to drive right past this lovely little thing so many times over so many years on my way to something I thought would be better.
There were a few odd mayflies and caddis in the air, but nothing you could call a hatch and no trout rising. So it came down to what I was in the mood for. On an out-of-the-way freestone stream like this, any number of things can work, but did I want to bank on the mysterious, unseen pluck to a nymph, the bulge to an emerger, the considered sip to a dry fly or the splashy lunge to a hopper? With nothing much to go on, I picked two old standards: a medium-sized, drably colored parachute dry fly and an equally nondescript nymph pattern on a dropper. The open secret to stream fishing is that your affection for your favorite fly patterns can be contagious.
I started casting methodically to cover the bend pool, first the slower current on the inside, then the faster main current, then a nice cast tight to the far bank in the deeper slack where I got a fish on. I’d been staring intently, but still somehow missed seeing if the fish took the dry or the dropper. All I knew was that something happened and I set on instinct.
This felt like a heavy trout, but it also didn’t feel quite right. And then it was in the deep, fast current feeling weirdly logy as if it had me around a stick, and then it was coming up on the inside of the bend and I could see a good-sized fish being chased by a much bigger one. But then no, it was a big one on the dry fly and a slightly smaller fish on the nymph pulling in opposite directions. The big one was a nice big trout that I really wanted, but I had a light tippet and a 4-weight rod and two good fish on and this couldn’t possibly end well. But then the smaller fish somehow got slack and threw the hook, and at that point the big one was just a rod’s length away, so I slid it over to me and cradled it in my hand. It was a good seventeen inches long and it all happened just that fast, before either one of us had a chance to think it over.
I rolled the trout on its back to immobilize it, plucked out the barbless hook and then righted him in the current. He was sleek and firm: a muted greenish, grayish gold with the fine black pepper spots and orange chin slashes of a Snake River cutthroat. He rested just long enough to give me a good look before he squirted out of my loose grip. The fight couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds and the fish wasn’t even tired, just a little confused.
So the conversation with this new water had begun and we’d hit it off nicely, like a first date that began with a clumsy exchange that we both thought was funny. I can’t help but think of trout streams as feminine, but that’s not some kind of left-handed gender politics. It’s just that this kind of graceful and surprising sweetness calls to mind many of the women I know, but none of the men. Of course, strictly speaking, a trout stream is an inanimate object, but no fisherman really believes that.
I worked up the rest of that bend pool—another twenty yards or so—casting carefully and fully expecting another big cutthroat, but it didn’t happen. Then I walked upstream to leapfrog my partner. He’d already fished the next long pool, worked up fifty yards of cut bank and was starting at the tail of the plunge pool above that. His normal fishing pace is faster than mine, but he’s usually considerate enough not to rush too far ahead and has even been known to stop and wait if I fall too far behind. By way of holding up my end, I try to stifle my tendency to dawdle. We’ve fished together for years. It almost always works out.
I spent the next few hours in the state of mild surprise that always comes on a new stream—jumping between moments of rapt contentment and the eagerness to see what comes next. There are many more similarities between trout streams than there are differences, but the differences are endlessly novel. A riffle is just a riffle, but the precise place where current speed, depth, bottom structure and drift lines conspire to make a good place for a trout to hold is always unique. The same goes for the cast that will send a fly down that slot without drag, while leaving the caster far enough away to keep from spooking the fish. Each new throw demands a moment of consideration. Hydrology is an open book, but it’s a dense text that you don’t always comprehend on the first reading.
As the morning warmed up, there were more insects around and the fish became more active. I began to spot the occasional trout suspended in the smooth tails of pools and saw the odd, unhurried rise. I switched out my dry and dropper rig, sticking with the same patterns, but in smaller, more realistic sizes. If a coherent hatch developed, I’d try my best to copy it out of my small stream box, but this didn’t seem like that kind of water. This seemed like the kind that would grind out a sparse mixed bag of insects and where the trout would stay more or less open to a reasonable suggestion.
I’ve never quite come to terms with precision in fly fishing, which I suppose is why I’m such an avid small-stream fisherman. A spring creek filled with clockwork hatches, quarter-inch-wide feeding lanes and highly selective trout is like a Swiss watch: a mechanism with such fine tolerances that you can’t find a gap anywhere wide enough to slip in a single extra hackle fiber. A freestone stream seems like a clunkier device with gears that sometimes just barely mesh. A few turns of hackle or a hook size more or less usually won’t matter, and if a trout decides he likes your fly, he’ll swim a foot out of his way to eat it. This is the ideal place for the guy who thinks of himself simply as a fisherman rather than a “fish-catching machine,” which in some circles is the ultimate compliment.
The fishing that day was never fast and furious, but it never slowed to what you could call a lull. The trout weren’t exactly easy to catch, but for the most part they were right where you’d expect them to be and only a few presented the kind of puzzle that an adequate fly caster who’s on his game couldn’t solve. I never hooked another fish as big as that first one, but a few were in that same over-fifteen-inch class that can seem so big on small water.
There were no surprises, but somehow everything was a surprise: how the trout fit the water the way birds fit the air and how they’re so hard to spot in the stream, but so ornately beautiful in the hand. I know their coloration is
a practical matter of camouflage with a seasonal nod to mating, but there seems to be something else in operation here: something frisky that has made these fish prettier than they’d have to be just to get by. It’s fishing new water that lets me see all this again as if for the first time.
7
RODS
I got a rambling letter from a friend the other day talking about fly rods. His fly rods, that is, past and present: what they were, where they came from, where some of them eventually went (in recent years he’s given some away to guides) and what he liked or didn’t like about them. It was the kind of letter you write to a friend who shares your interest and who you don’t have to impress—basically a two-page, stream-of-consciousness postscript.
There were surprisingly few rods considering that this man is a retired doctor in his late eighties and a lifelong fly fisher, but then not all of us are tackle freaks. I am a tackle freak, although after years of accumulating rods I’ve come to envy those who fish comfortably with what they have instead of always looking for something better. Marksmen like to say, “Beware of the man with only one gun because he knows how to use it.”
The search for the perfect rod begins early in a life of fly fishing and often for the wrong reason. As a beginner, you’re a poor caster and you naturally want to get better. In a commercial culture like ours, that suggests a better rod, which you are led to believe is a rod that costs more than the one you have. I mean, if one rod sells for $129.95 and another of the same material, length and line weight sets you back $700, why the difference in price if the expensive one isn’t better? This is one of the burning philosophical questions of our time.
In fact, what you probably need are casting lessons, regular practice and, most of all, lots of fishing, since casting on water with fish in it is different from casting on a lawn, for reasons having to do with both physics and psychology. Also, there are things you’ll learn on your own through constant exposure that no one could ever teach you.
But then in some rare cases, the rod you start with really is a clunker that holds you back. Maybe, as in my case, you bought it at a yard sale for a few dollars because that was all you could afford at the time. Before you handed over the money, you put the rod together and wiggled it as you’d seen others do, but that was just for show. You didn’t know the first thing about fly rods, but you had the itch and had to start somewhere.
My first fly rod was a 7½-foot, four-piece fiberglass fly-spin combo with a reversible reel seat. Two rods for the price of one: What a deal! I wasn’t much more than a kid at the time, but I still should have known that a tool that’s supposed to do two separate jobs wouldn’t do either of them very well. I did manage to catch some fish on this thing, but a kindly stranger who stopped one day to give me some much-needed casting tips ended the brief session by saying, “And when you get a few bucks running uphill, you really oughta get yourself a better rod.” He was just trying to be helpful and he was right, but the idea that a new rod could improve my casting took root and ruined me for life. The obvious danger is that a fly rod—especially an expensive one—can be seen as a talisman with some inherent power of its own, while in practice it’s more likely to be like a Stradivarius violin in the hands of someone who doesn’t play well: a flawless instrument that nonetheless squawks like a chicken.
I did eventually get a rod that was better (almost anything would have been) and it proved to be the first of many. At that time I could have done virtually all my trout fishing with the 8-foot 5-weight Granger Victory I picked up for $50, but many of the fishing writers I was reading left the impression that doing all your fishing with one all-around rod was like performing brain surgery with a can opener. So I came to think I needed shorter 4- and 5-weights, longer 5- and 6-weights, 7-weight streamer rods, 8-weight bass rods, 9-weight salmon rods and so on, not to mention the reels and lines to go with them. Later, when I started traveling a lot, I backed up my two-piece rods with three-piece models that I could carry on airplanes. Then I gradually accumulated spares in case I broke one.
I developed the usual nit-picking preferences. I think a rod should be as long as possible for leverage and line mending and as short as it has to be for convenience. On my small home water, an 8½- or 9-foot rod is best for line control, but it’s too long to cast in tight quarters or even to carry from pool to pool through thick woods. A 6½- or 7-foot rod is about the right length for casting but doesn’t give you enough reach and leaves too much line on the water. Obviously the ideal rod for mountain creeks is 7 feet, 9 inches. That must be why I have four rods of that odd length: three 5-weights and a 4-weight.
My first good rods were all used split bamboo by defunct makers, but don’t ask me why all these years later. It must have had something to do with my ideas about tradition, craftsmanship, romance and the dubious value of practicality in sport, not to mention the sense that we’re too quick to leave the best we have behind us and call it progress. It was also a sign of the times when graphite was new, fiberglass was fading and bamboo was still a viable choice rather than a social statement.
Martin Keane hadn’t yet published Classic Rods and Rodmakers, which started a price war on old bamboo that continued unevenly until the crash of 2008. It also helped that the Granger and Phillipson companies had been headquartered just down the road in Denver, and half the attics and garages in Colorado contained old bamboo rods that regularly turned up at yard sales with price tags in the $30-to-$50 range. That meant a working stiff could get his hands on them and still pay the rent, although sometimes just barely.
During that same period I just managed to afford a few longer Paynes (the shorter, lighter rods were already out of my reach), and as prices for the big-name makers went through the roof, I rightly guessed that F. E. Thomas rods would soon be sucked into the vacuum. I picked up two of them for a song: an 8-foot 4-weight and a 7½-foot 5-weight. Some of those rods would turn out to be the only good investments I ever made, and also hinted at the dark side of bamboo: Even those of us who claim not to care what they’re worth can’t help but be aware of their value and in weak moments can come off sounding like stockbrokers with hot tips.
At one point I even published a monograph on bamboo rods without realizing that this little book would mark me for life as a true believer. Some years later on a river in northern Canada, I met a man who said he was shocked to see me fishing a graphite rod. Shocked!
We’re all children of our times. Bamboo spoke to me then and still does now, but if I took up fly fishing today, there’s a good chance I’d put these rods in the same category with cherry 1957 Chevys driven by older guys for reasons that aren’t immediately evident. It boils down to this: If you’re young now and your fly-fishing career lasts as long as you hope it will, eventually someone will point at your graphite rod and say, “You still fishin’ that old thing?”
But I was never really a purist and so I cautiously tumbled for graphite when it first came out. Through a fly shop where I worked, I got a screaming deal on some J. Kennedy Fisher graphite blanks and built myself a 9-foot 5-weight and a 10-foot 6-weight. I fished the 9-footer off and on for years. I liked it, but I didn’t love it and finally gave it to an old friend who was moving to Alaska and needed a grayling rod. The 10-footer never quite worked out. Like most of the 10-foot rods I’ve cast, it had no real reason to be longer than 9 feet, and it was a two-piece blank, so the 5-foot-long case was unwieldy. I still have it. I’ve tried to trade it off a few times, but no one wants it.
Through the same shop I got one of the first Sage graphite rods at cost. I think it was an 8-foot 6-weight. I remember it as having a softer, more elegant action than most graphites, which at the time were all about “speed” and “power” as if they were fly fishing’s answer to muscle cars. Like most graphite rods, it was soon made obsolete by newer models, although I’m told that in certain circles those original Sage graphites are now considered modern classics. I traded that rod, but I wou
ldn’t mind having it back now. I can’t remember what I got for it, but I’d learned by then that once you put money into tackle it was best to leave it in tackle. That way you’d always have something new to play with, while cash would just slip through your fingers and be gone forever.
More recently I was given a sublime graphite rod by a filmmaker I did a small favor for. It’s a 9-foot 5/6-weight that’s smooth, powerful, effortless and elegant. When I asked him what it was, he said it was just something he put together with blanks and hardware he had lying around the shop. This is one of the best graphite rods I’ve ever cast and I have no idea what it is. Better not break it.
To this day most of the rods I like and use are bamboo and only a few are graphite, although the graphites are gradually accumulating. Of those, most are longer rods for heavier lines—including spey rods—where I think the lighter material really shines. But that’s because I came to graphite after I already had a stack of favorite bamboo rods that, for reasons of habit, sentiment or stubbornness, I wasn’t about to give up. In any event, I came to understand that it doesn’t matter what a fly rod is made of. What matters is how it works. It also doesn’t matter if your hammer has an old-timey wood or newfangled fiberglass handle; what matters is balance and weight, which is a matter of personal preference informed by the job at hand. A light hammer is easier to swing all day, but a heavy hammer takes fewer swings and less muscle to drive a nail.
As for rod materials, I once asked the great fly caster Lefty Kreh if the then-new boron rods really cast better than graphite, as their makers claimed. He said that the best of them did, but added that the improvement was maybe 3 or 4 percent at the top end of their performance, while there probably weren’t a hundred casters in the country who could get more than 50 percent of the potential out of a fly rod. So there you have it.