Tactical Fly Fishing: Lessons Learned from Competition for All Anglers
By Devin Olsen. Published by Stackpole Books, 2019. $39.95, hardbound.
The last five years have seen three how-to manuals published that challenge long-accepted notions of how to fly fish. The first two, Yvon Chouinard’s Simple Fly Fishing (2014, revised 2018) and Daniel Galhardo’s tenkara — the book (2017), lead fly fishers back to a more ancient form of our sport in which a thin line is attached to the top of the rod, thereby ditching the reel, and imitative flies become a distant second in preference to strike-inducing presentation.
Echoes of this approach are found in the third iconoclastic how-two manual, Devin Olsen’s recently published Tactical Fly Fishing, in as much as the Euro-nymphing methods that Olsen promotes similarly do away with thick fly lines and long casts, relying instead on weighted patterns fished tautly with monofilament rigs. But Olsen, who has taken part in international fly-fishing competitions for years, isn’t seeking simplicity. He’s seeking to outfish everyone else. World-champ fly fishers are invariably Euro nymphers, and Olsen’s book is without doubt the best published to date for understanding and applying this apparently extremely effective method of angling.
To be clear, Olsen also mentions fishing with dry flies, wet flies, streamers, and even suspension/strike-indicator nymphing rigs, but the thrust of his book is toward Euro nymphing. Its salient elements include a longer than usual rod to enhance the angler’s reach and hide his or her presence, a leader designed to minimize “drift-killing sag” and “turn over a range of nymph weights,” a “sighter” in the leader to assist with strike detection, and flies that will sink fast and, through color and flash, be seen quickly by the fish.
A regular fly line, conversely, is counterproductive because its mass creates sag, and sag reduces the ability to keep tight to the fly and detect strikes. Euro nymphers do use fly lines, but even though these lines have a very narrow diameter to help prevent sag, it seems the preference when possible is to keep them on the spool rather than cast them past the rod tip. Olsen notes that “you have more chances to present your flies to willing trout when fishing a Euro-nymphing leader as compared to a high-stick nymphing presentation with a short leader and fly line.” I’ll leave it to others to decide if this is the final word in the argument of whether Euro nymphing is just tight-line nymphing under a different name.

Olsen does an excellent job of describing the qualities of Euro-nymph tackle and how to set up and fish different leader rigs. This foundational information takes up nearly the first half of the book, an emphasis that indicates how important Olsen considers this material. The second half gets into the tactical aspect promised by the book’s title, focusing on pocket water, riffles, runs, pools, glides, and bankside lies. Each has different characteristics that will influence how it is fished with Euro-nymphing gear, and Olsen goes into great detail with his advice — which, incidentally, will also help fly fishers who might have zero interest in Euro nymphing.
Tactical Fly Fishing ends with a chapter that provides pictures and lists materials for 19 “proven fly patterns”: 5 dries, 10 nymphs, and 4 streamers. Other than three of the dries, to attract fish all of these flies have elements that flash (such as beads or Ice Dubbing) or a dash of bright color, called a “hot spot.”
Thanks to this book, I’ve picked up a Euro-nymphing outfit and am in the initial steps of figuring out how to become proficient with it. Not surprisingly, casting just a monofilament leader that ends with a heavy fly is different from casting a regular fly line that ends with a bit of feather on a hook. I should note that Olsen presents the types of casts, such as the oval cast and the tuck cast, that work best, but his instruction could have been helped with either line drawings or better photographs, because the images he uses are not clear as to what’s going on.
No doubt the awkwardness I’m experiencing with Euro-nymphing gear will vanish over time. In all truthfulness, though, what keeps me fly fishing is the feel of casting a rod loaded with a fly line designed to turn over and present at distance something that weighs nothing. I love it: the rhythm, and the challenge of using arm and body to place line and fly where you want them to go. Although I suspect I’ll catch more fish with a Euro-nymphing setup, in the end, that might not be enough.
— Richard Anderson
Some Stories: Lessons from the Edge of Business and Sport
By Yvon Chouinard. Published by Patagonia Books, 2019; $45.00, hardbound.
Most of us know that Yvon Chouinard is the founder of the clothing company Patagonia, and many of us know, too, that he is a fly fisher — his useful, provocative book, Simple Fly Fishing, has been twice discussed in this column. And those who pay attention know that he is a businessman who realizes “business as usual” can end only in disaster for our planet, and that he is someone who has the willingness and wherewithal to chart a wiser course.
Arching over all these qualities is another one: Chouinard is a writer. He observes and reflects, then articulates, and he’s been doing so for much of his adult life, irrespective of station. The 57 chapters in Some Stories, many of which were first published elsewhere, serve as something of a biography in sport, tracing Chouinard’s involvement in rock climbing, ice climbing, kayaking, telemark skiing, surfing, and fly fishing, among other activities. He has engaged deeply in life, sport, and commerce and has done so as an ethical man who gives a shit.
It would be a mistake for fly fishers to come to this book merely for Chouinard’s pieces on fly fishing, fine as they are. There are only a handful. I read them quickly and then started in on the other chapters, most of which revolve around sports to which I’ve never given much thought. But I kept turning the pages because . . . well, because I just enjoyed reading these stories. Maybe that’s the best reason. But besides plain enjoyment, one will find epiphanies, advice, “ultra-penetrating perception,” and wisdom. Chouinard gives us much more than merely a good read.

The broad themes of Some Stories seem to me twofold: the intense appreciation for the natural world that can come from close involvement with it, and the consequential satisfactions that come from the pursuit of competence. With regard to the latter, Chouinard writes, “The purpose of doing passionate sports like fly fishing and mountain climbing should be to learn and grow, and ultimately, to effect some higher personal change Learn all you can from a guide or teacher, but at some point, you need to cut loose from the catered experience and, for better or worse, muddle through on your own.”
By purposefully seeking to “muddle through,“ Chouinard has lived a remarkable, even exemplary life. Some Stories lets its readers understand that it is a life that has had value for them, as well.
— Richard Anderson
Wild and Scenic Rivers: An American Legacy
By Tim Palmer. Published by Oregon State University Press, 2017; $45.00, hardbound. On the topic of wild and scenic rivers, Tim Palmer is the renowned expert and fortunately also a book-writing machine. He has spent some forty years researching wild rivers and producing stunning photographs for his twenty-six books, which include Field Guide to California Rivers, published in 2012, California Glaciers (2012), Rivers of California (2010), Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement (2004), Wild and Scenic Rivers of America (1993), Stanislaus: The Struggle for a River (1982), and more.
With 160 high-quality photographs, this book is an update on the nation’s Wild and Scenic Rivers, including many in California, and the conservation efforts to protect them. “Now, as I
write, the fiftieth anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act is near, and it invites everyone to consider, appreciate, and celebrate our collective determination to save the nation’s finest free-flowing waters so that future generations may know them as well,” Palmer says of the act that was created in 1968 and has protected nearly two thousand miles along 23 rivers in California from dam building and destructive management.

“We need our rivers, and we also enjoy them. Fleeing the stress of our times, people seek these waterways for both relaxation and excitement,” Palmer writes. “Rivers matter to far more than just us. They are lifelines — essential to fish and important to all creatures. Rivers connect headwaters — necessary as spawning habitat for salmon, steelhead, and other fish — with the ocean where anadromous fish spend much of their lives in the sea’s great nutrient pool.” Palmer also notes that “fishing is a favorite American pastime, the source of nourishing food, and an economic backbone of resort economies. Nationwide, twenty-eight million people fished in rivers and streams in 2011, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.”
A chapter titled “Beauty, Life, and Liveliness” begins the book’s discussion of rivers, which continues with chapters on the history of Wild and Scenic River protection efforts and a chapter called “New Opportunities for Protection.” It ends with a chapter titled “The Enduring Wildness of Rivers.”
Perhaps the most spectacular photograph in the book is one of a six-foot wave on the Tuolumne River at the brink of Glen Aulin Falls. Other stunning photos include those from the North Fork of the Smith River, which runs from Oregon into California, and a fly-fishing photo from the Au Sable River in northeastern Michigan.
“Many of these rivers would not remain as natural, living places if it weren’t for people who adopted the streams as their own and committed themselves to the future of their special place,” he writes. “These rivers, and all the others that deserve protection, show the best that’s left in a network of waterways that are vital to all of the life around them.”
In 1979, a proposal to build a dam on the Stanislaus River led Palmer to resign his job as a county land-use planner to become a full-time writer and conservation advocate. “I prepared the first citizen-sponsored Wild and Scenic River Study as part of Friends of the River’s campaign seeking to spare California’s Stanislaus River from the New Melones Dam,” he writes. “I drafted a wild and scenic study for the Committee to Save the Kings River and led media efforts in the campaign leading to its protection, and I drafted a similar study for the South Yuba River Citizens League, helping win passage for the California state designation there.”
He conducted research for many of his books the old-fashioned way — by floating on rivers in a canoe or kayak, living out of his van for 11 years, some of that time with his wife, author/photographer, Ann Vileisis. They now reside in Oregon.
For the photography enthusiasts, Palmer says he took the photos for the book with Canon cameras — an A-1 camera with a 17-200–millimeter lens in the early days and later with a 5D digital camera with 17-200–millimeter and 500-millimeter L series lenses. He used a Canon underwater Powershot for backpacking. The photos were minimally processed in Apple’s iPhoto program.
For his writing and photography work, Palmer has received the National Outdoor Book Award, the Communicator of the Year Award from the National Wildlife Federation, the Lifetime Achievement Award from American Rivers, and other honors. You can see more on his work and accomplishments at http://www.timpalmer.org.
The book has gained rave reviews. “With his book about our Wild and Scenic Rivers, Tim Palmer has made a great contribution to America. Having been directly involved in this program, I’m grateful that the legacy of all who have worked to protect these rivers will be known and appreciated,” writes former president Jimmy Carter.
— Tom Martens
Ah, Wilderness!
By Michael Checchio
We love wilderness because we no longer have to live there. After a week fishing and camping, it feels good to get back to civilization. It’s true you can’t have one without the other, as cranks such as Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau pointed out. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau famously said, but you’re well advised to get a flu shot.
Fishing has always been a way back into the kind of wildness that Thoreau was talking about. Thoreau liked to fish, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. But the solitary author, who loved nature and famously chose to live for two years by himself in a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, was always in walking distance of the town of Concord, where he could drop his laundry off at his mother’s house and dine with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family almost nightly.
When you want to get back to nature, you can go fishing. And when you can’t go fishing, you can read about it. One of my favorite ways to fish is with a glass of wine, Mozart on the stereo, and a book in my hand. Another advantage of civilization is that you can read about wilderness, which is something that the people who originally lived there never got to do.
“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense,” wrote Jim Harrison, in his novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent. The trick is finding a balance between civilization and that place in the wild where the mind of man evolved. We taught ourselves to read and write in the cultural capitals of the ancient world, but we learned how to give voice to our thoughts and needs in the wilderness. Nature taught us the language we learned to speak.
“Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves,” wrote Gary Snyder, in The Practice of the Wild. “It would be a mistake to think that human beings got ‘smarter’ at some point and invented first language and then society.” Small children, he noted, master grammar intuitively before ever seeing the inside of a classroom, and the grammar taught in school is only a minor refinement of it.
“We cannot as individuals or even as a species take credit for this power,” Snyder said. “It came from someplace else: from the way clouds divide and mingle . . . from the way the many f lowerlets of a composite blossom divide and redivide . . . from the wind in the pine needles, from the chuckles of grouse.” Language and culture, he reminded us, emerged from nature’s primal processes.
To keep a foot in civilization and another in the stream, I have never fallen out of the habit of either books or rivers. It has occurred to me that much of the trout fishing I started out on in New Jersey was in rivers that flowed partly through suburban sprawl. But the wild was still in those rivers. The world that we are constantly working on and changing through human activity is always working on us, as well, even that part of it that we have changed. Neither the world nor humankind can escape the powerful influence each has on the other. And the work is never finished. That is the heart of the discourse in Gary Snyder’s great poem Mountains and Rivers without End.
When I first took up the fly rod, I was mad to read everything about fishing, not only for instruction and vicarious thrills, but also for greater insights into the mysteries and complexity of the natural world. It seemed to me from my study of trout streams, both on site and in books, that nature is constantly revealing itself in ways that keep us in synch with a larger evolutionary, biological, and cosmic picture. When the world comes to us like mayflies borne on a current, we feel we might be open to the secret of living things.
About the time I first took up the sport, the fly-fishing world was still in the grip of Selective Trout, a book that made a big splash nearly a half century ago. That volume brought to a close an older angling era and helped usher in another, one we might call “scientific angling.” It was written by Carl Richards, a dentist, and Doug Swisher, a salesman, and I cannot overstate how influential it was back then. As Edward Gibbon said of his own masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “My book was on every table and almost every toilet.”
Selective Trout reignited a debate that will never die: imitation versus presentation. The authors, arguing for imitation, said that fly fishers needed to be more observant, because trout had become smarter. They had become selective due to increasing pressure from fly fishers. These educated trout had become indifferent to standard fly patterns. Having been taken to school, these wised-up trout were feeding in a manner that was much more cautious and nuanced. To catch them, anglers would have to design more naturalistic flies and start thinking more like entomologists.
Here was the cosmic dance in Gary Snyder’s poem. As anglers were changing the behavior of trout, trout were changing the goofy behavior of anglers. Fly fishers began tying “no-hackle” flies, as advised by Richards and Swisher. By removing the hackles from traditional patterns, anglers could sink the body of a fly flush in the film, the way a real mayfly rides on the current. Theoretically, this presents a better profile to trout and makes the wings more visible. The authors designed an entirely new series of sparsely dressed flies for this purpose. They based their patterns on their meticulous field notes, having surveyed the major mayfly hatches in our country’s prime trout-producing regions. They collected insects, filled aquariums, kept emergence charts, and urged anglers to do likewise: to observe, gather evidence, and form conclusions, as if they were writing On the Origin of Species. And thus scientific angling was born. As the ultimate form of tribute, the words “selective trout” entered fishing’s lexicon, much as did “matching-the-hatch” and “Call me Ishmael.”
All of this is to say that nature acts upon us constantly, sometimes changing us into more expansive human beings. Or as the Roman poet Ovid said two thousand years ago: “Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.” Selective Trout was angling’s Metamorphoses. It was both a revolution and a marvelous inquiry into the transformative nature of things. And naturally, as Sonny and Cher would have it, the beat goes on. Fly anglers continue to come up with ever new strategies to fool trout. The more we inquire, the more we discover what is hidden to us, because nature is infinite in design and detail. “The glory of God is to hide a thing,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “and the glory of man is to find it.”
But can an “educated” trout be truly wild? Does a “no-kill” restriction erase any semblance of wildness from “wild and scenic?” Does it matter if the “wild” trout in a stream are not native to it? I can’t believe I once worried about such crap. As much as I have always been drawn to wilderness and charismatic animals, I can also fish in water that has been strained through the kidneys of a Southern California housing development.
One of the most transcendent works of nonfiction in our time has been Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. In that book, an unnamed narrator contemplates life and nature on daily excursions along a small creek that drains a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Structuring her book around the four seasons and with clear parallels to Thoreau’s Walden, the author reflects deeply on life and nature, not only acutely self-aware, but alert to every detail of the flora and fauna. Many readers might be surprised to learn that her book was not some mediation on wilderness, but that Tinker Creek wends its way through a drab suburban neighborhood.
The author defies the stereotype. And doing so, she shows us the horrors as well as the beauty in nature. (Believe me, she’s no fan of mayflies or any other insect. “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly . . . insects it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.”) By raising our consciousness, Dillard invites us to see the living world as an ongoing act of creation.
The wild is where you find it. It’s in our DNA, literally, not figuratively. We have always been a part of nature’s green network. We are what we are because of what nature has allowed us to be. But we humans have also evolved to be self-conscious, and this has separated us from the animals and plants and even from the earth itself. Our self-regard has led us to see ourselves as somehow above and apart from the natural world. And our growing estrangement from the earth is leading us toward a catastrophe from which we may not recover. We are not “superior” to other living things, only unique. You might say we are unique in our uniqueness. Animals and plants cooperate in ways that suggest we are all in this together. It is important to remember this and act accordingly.
Fishing is one way to bring us back to earth. It’s a way for us to live in the present moment in a heightened state of awareness and to see the world as it truly is. Thoreau said: “Live in each season as it passes, drink the drink, taste the fruit, resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” Maybe what we call wilderness is really life burgeoning forth out of a generative void like consciousness itself.