Troutsmith (7 page)

I'd never seen a genuine blue dun hackle cape and couldn't have afforded one anyway, so my Quill Gordon and Catskill-style wet flies sported sky-blue hackles taken from a Herter's dyed rooster neck ($1.87 in 3A Grade, 1976 catalog). Nevertheless, my true blue Quill Gordons filled a number of creels with limits of fat, educated brown trout from flat-water Wisconsin spring creeks near Dodgeville. Those trout should have known better, but I guess they didn't pore over the Herter's catalog every morning at breakfast like I did. A few years later when I finally visited a real fly shop in Wilmette, Illinois, I was rather shocked to see what a real blue dun cape looked like. I immediately forked over just about all of the money I had on hand to buy one. My journals show that the correct Quill Gordons were no more effective in my hands than the Baby-Blue Duns that preceded them, but I felt a lot better about tying the pattern properly. Even then Theodore Gordon was one of my favorite fishing authors, and I wanted to honor his memory by fishing with flies he would have recognized.

From these early experiences I learned one of the great truths about fly tying that some people don't want you to know: a feeding fish that isn't aware of the angler's presence will usually take the first fly that it sees. Bass like a big mouthful, and anything in the strike zone that gives the impression of live food generally results in a take. Ditto for pike and muskies, especially if you trigger their chase response. Brown trout that have a well-deserved reputation for fussiness and selectivity will strike an amazing variety of flies in assorted sizes, shapes, and colors, unless there is such an abundance of one particular food that the fish lock onto that one item exclusively. And even then many successful trout anglers fish a hatch with “cripples,” poorly tied flies that suggest a bug with birth defects that can't get away.

There is great satisfaction in crafting a well-tied fly that is nearly perfect in color and proportion, but such quality is more impressive to other fly tiers than it is to fish. Anglers who are just starting out in fly tying should never throw away a fly just because it doesn't look right; just hide it from the instructor and fish it with confidence tomorrow. I say “hide it from the instructor,” because some fly-tying instructors in my area have been known to take a single-edged razor blade to the hook of any student whose monstrosities veer away from the standard proportions for that pattern, thus destroying the student's efforts and forcing him or her to start over with a bare hook. Thankfully, fish are much more forgiving than fly-tying instructors.

It took many years before I really began to enjoy the craft of fly tying. Modern threads are much stronger for their diameter than what was available twenty years ago, and this has largely removed the frustration of breaking the tying thread at a critical juncture when tying a fly. Invest some serious money in a top-of-the-line vise once you're sure that the fly-fishing and fly-tying virus has taken hold. I've never regretted the heavy chunk of change that I laid on the counter for my beautifully machined DynaKing, and many experienced tiers are just as happy with their Regals and Renzettis. As in any art or craft, quality tools are a joy to use and they make it much easier to tie flies that you're happy with. It's hard to beat tools designed by the late Frank Matarelli, especially his signature whip-finishing tool for making a small, neat head on a fly. A proper whip finish was something I struggled with for a long time, but Matarelli's tool made it easy. It's funny though; after using the tool for a couple of months, I found I no longer needed it. I could do the same thing with my fingers. So a good whip-finishing tool can function like training wheels on a bicycle.

I think you'll find that under the twin influences of your home waters and your local fly-fishing crowd, your finished flies will have a distinctive regional style. Here in Wisconsin many of us specialize in “throw-away flies” that take only a couple of minutes to tie, again keeping in mind the fly-eating trees and shrubs that infest most of our small trout streams. One of our top local trout guides ties a scud pattern that consists of a lead-wrapped hook covered with dubbing. Superglue is applied to the dorsal surface to form the shell-back, and the fly is finished. Much of his time is spent guiding beginners, many of whom have never cast a fly let alone caught a trout on one. If a client burns through a dozen or three superglue scuds over the course of a day's fishing, who cares? And these flies are deadly effective in skilled hands anywhere on spring creeks where scuds abound. I often trail a scud with a small Sawyer Pheasant Tail Nymph. To craft this pattern I need eight barbs from the tail feather of one of last year's roosters and an eight-inch hank of bright orange wire. That's it. In fact, most of the time Frank Sawyer worked trout magic with just two flies, the aforesaid Pheasant Tail Nymph and a Killer Bug. The Killer Bug, one of the deadliest flies ever devised, is a weighted nymph hook wrapped with gray wool. Old Frank Sawyer was perhaps the finest nymph fisherman in England back in the day, and I'll bet you a fistful of the queen's shillings that the Officers' Association water on the River Avon was rife with fly-eating trees.

A net is a tangible connection to a time before history and before written language, a time when fishing and hunting
were
life in a direct visceral way. Thirty thousand years ago, when our ancestors began drawing images of the Pleistocene world and the great beasts that lived in it on the walls of caves, they fished with nets. Net making is an ancient craft practiced by many people even today. Once while attending a conclave of fly fishers in northern Wisconsin, I saw net maker Karen Passmore quietly take a seat in the back row just before the feature presentation. As the presentation about fishing for trout in spring ponds began, Karen brought out her simple tools and cotton cord and began weaving a net. She never said a word, but by the end of the presentation there was a ring of people gathered around Karen, watching as she worked her magic.

The first nets I used belonged to my grandfather. Somehow the Pleistocene gene skipped a generation in our family. Granddad hunted and fished every chance he got, but Dad hunted only occasionally when I was small and never after I was about ten years old. My dad was one of those poor devils who never should have fished either. He had a lethal combination of cerebral gunpowder coupled with an abiding impatience connected to an embarrassingly short fuse. After being stuck in the same boat with Dad during a couple of blowups, it occurred to me that I needed to do three things: (1) fish in a way that he didn't, thus minimizing our time together on the water; (2) when fishing, fish as far away from him as possible; and (3) not go anywhere near his gear and tackle when he was around. Granddad knew perfectly well what was going on and quietly made it possible for me to do all three things.

My grandfather was a big, kind man whose piercing blue eyes were lined with crow's feet from smiling too much. He lived in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, within easy biking distance of the Bushkill, a typical eastern freestone trout stream. He encouraged me to go fishing as often as I liked, and he let me borrow whatever fishing gear I needed. When he had time, we would drive to some great trout streams in the Pocono Mountains or to the Delaware River for smallmouth bass. The summers I was able to spend with my grandparents were golden.

Granddad had two nets that hung from a nail on the wall of his garage. The first was a rusty, spring-steel, collapsible frame model that I never actually saw him use. The second had a white ash frame weathered to a golden patina after many years of hard use and a cord-wrapped handle. This net captured a four-pound Delaware River smallmouth for me when I was eleven years old, and it was the one I took trout fishing with me during my teenage years.

The summer that Granddad died, Grandma gave away almost all of his fishing gear and sold his garage full of woodworking tools as scrap. I remember how my heart sank when I drove out to see her that August and opened the garage door to emptiness. The only piece of fishing tackle left in the garage was the ugly duckling steel net that Granddad almost never used and nobody else wanted. That net now hangs from a nail in my garage. I never use it either, but whenever I take it down from its place of honor to look at it, happy memories of long ago fishing days come back to me as fresh as this morning's rain.

During my years as a journeyman fly fisher in southern Wisconsin I went through a series of production model nets sold through the two major sporting supply houses, Gander Mountain and Cabela's. It took me quite awhile to realize that the device, more properly called a release, that attaches the net to the wading angler is just as important as the net itself. A loop of elastic slung over the shoulder sufficed for Granddad's nets. The problem with that system was graphically illustrated one day when I was fishing a small, brushy tributary of the Bushkill. The net snagged on some blackberry canes as I walked along the bank. I was scanning the water ahead for fish when the net broke free of the blackberries and catapulted into my back with so much force that I was afraid I'd lacerated a kidney. After that episode I cut off the elastic and attached an elegant piece of metal called a French clip instead. The French clip was an improvement, but the contortions required to release the net from the back of my fly vest made me wish I was an octopus. Now all of my nets have a Rose Creek release affixed to them, and this system of Delrin snap clips seems to be the last word in net releases.

In any event, I didn't carry a net very often during my first years as a fly fisher. It was worth the hassle only on days when there was a fair chance of catching an exceptionally large fish. Because I didn't carry a net every time I went out, there were several occasions where I lost my net in happy ignorance, not remembering that I'd taken it with me until hours, even days later when I couldn't find the darned thing.

I recall a perfect June day on the west fork of the Kickapoo River above Avalanche. Puffy cumulus clouds drifted across a wide blue sky, temperatures settled somewhere in the mid-seventies with a light breeze out of the northwest, and trout, even big trout, were on the prowl. I got to the Volkswagen hole (named for a junked VW Beetle parked in its final resting place beside the river), unhooked my nymphs from the keeper, and began sending long casts toward the fast water at the head of the pool. During one of the drifts, my indicator took a little hop and I struck the solid, thumping weight of a good trout. 'Round and 'round the pool we went, but I finally breathed a sigh of relief when the thick-bodied seventeen-inch brown trout sank into the fine mesh of my custom-made cherry-wood trout net. For a few minutes I sat on the bank and admired the beautiful trout as it lay inside the net, now sunk in the clear water of the west fork. Then I gently lifted it out of the net and back into the river. Its black-spotted form glided smoothly across the pool on a wide arc into deeper water.

It was only when I got back to the car at lunchtime that I realized I no longer had my net with me. The Volkswagen hole was a full mile downstream through the broad pastures of Amish farms that border that part of the west fork, but downstream I hiked, looking carefully at every fence-crossing but knowing I'd probably left the net on the bank of the pool where I'd taken the big brown. When I got to the Volkswagen hole there were two local kids fishing it with worms. In reply to the age-old angler's greeting, “Any luck?” they replied with a decided negative. “But look; we found this great net just laying on the bank.” The kids were really happy and excited about their find, which was likely to be their only catch of the day. For a moment I thought about reclaiming my net, but then I thought, “Oh, hell . . . ,” and let them have it without letting on that it was mine. This has become a recurring theme in my experiences with nets. Those bought with pieces of silver are eventually lost or given away, but the nets that have come to me on their own, unexpectedly, have stayed with me down the years.

My set of Stoney Creek nets is a case in point. I have three of them. Each frame was handcrafted from richly grained walnut and maple by Dan Passmore of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and each bag was handwoven by Karen Passmore, Dan's spouse. Stoney Creek nets are the only nets I know of that are completely handmade. Each of my Stoney Creek nets is the first example of its kind and is labeled #001 in India ink at the end of the handle.

They fit neatly inside one another, just like the nested set of cooking pots I use when I'm camping. The largest, the Steelhead model, measures thirty inches from end to end with a twenty-one-inch bow. Next comes the Trout model, twenty inches long with a thirteen-inch bow, and finally the Gimp model, a mere thirteen inches long with an eight-inch bow. The first two of these nets I won in bucket raffles held to raise money for various Trout Unlimited projects in the Badger State. Since I'm one of those people who almost never win anything at raffles, in each case a helpful bystander had to tap me on the shoulder to tell me that I'd won. The tiny Gimp model is a one-and-only that Dan Passmore built at the request of Jon Kort. Every time I see it I think of crook-backed Jon in his pontoon boat, drifting quietly around some spruce-girt malarial bog in Wisconsin's North Country in search of big native squaretails. Jon Kort is the most talented still-water trout fisher I have ever seen and he's widely acknowledged as the authority on fishing spring ponds in Wisconsin.

The greatest net in my collection was forged of steel and aluminum and brass by Hardy Brothers of Alnwick, England, many years ago, and it came to me in a most unexpected way. Teresa and I made a pilgrimage to England and Scotland in the summer of 2004. Along with visits to historic and literary sites, we wanted to fish the rivers where fly fishing as we know and practice it today was born, centuries ago. The weedy River Test where it purls through the village of Stockbridge in Hampshire remains the center of the fly-fishing universe in the hearts and minds of many anglers. The sunny paths along the water meadows beside the Test have been walked by generations of patient fly fishers for at least five hundred years. Trout are relatively easy to see in the broad, smooth currents of the Test; their behavior and reaction to the fly can be observed and studied on long midsummer afternoons. This is the river where Frederic M. Halford and George Selwyn Marryat developed the modern upwinged dry fly and began casting imitations of specific insects to rising trout. This is where G. E. M. Skues began sight-fishing nymph imitations to visible trout that were not rising. The Grosvenor Hotel in Stockbridge is where anglers came together at the end of the day and told their stories. The friction caused by these chance meetings and informal discussions over a pint of ale started a firestorm of ideas about fly-fishing practices that has continued down the years to our own time.