The Hunt for Giant Trout: 25 Best Places in the United States to Catch a Trophy
By Landon Mayer. Published by Stackpole Books, 2018; $29.95 softbound.
It is a given that the purpose of fishing is to catch fish, and for all of us, I’m sure, hooking a huge, fight-filled fish is an incredibly exciting, heart-in-your-throat experience. In The Hunt for Giant Trout, Landon Mayer considers a “trophy” trout as having a length of at least two feet, although he also reasonably recognizes that a trophy fish is up to the angler to define. Irrespective of where one draws that line, big trout are fish that are long-lived survivors and that have earned, as Mayer puts it, a “trout PhD.” They are wary, experienced, and few in number. They can be hard to find and often very difficult to fool.
Mayer, however, has successfully fooled an inordinate number of large trout, and in the first part of this book, he discusses strategies and techniques that fly fishers can use to improve their chances of hooking a “beast.” There’s a lot of hard-earned experience presented here. For example, Mayer reveals that he used to “believe the main reason trout will move into or around a body of water is to spawn.” During his years of fishing, however, he has come to understand that big trout often migrate to different types of water for reasons in addition to the need to spawn. Understanding these migrations and their timing therefore can be key for finding large fish.
With regard to spawning trout, by the way, it’s worth noting that Mayer urges anglers not to fish for them or to wade spawning grounds. This is ethical advice that is all too rare in the fishing media, but it is critical because of the temptation to target lunkers when they are on their redds. Targeting spawning fish is a lazy approach to trophy hunting that is both unsporting and, more critically, harmful to trout populations and thus to our sport. The second part of The Hunt for Giant Trout consists of 25 chapters that discuss specific giant trout waters. For each chapter, Mayer asks one or more guides to highlight the character of the fishery, tactical considerations, fishing rigs, and a recipe for at least one recommended fly pattern. This information is particularly intriguing because it reflects local wisdom that can be transferred to other waters and situations. These chapters also serve as a bucket list of fisheries that the peripatetic, giant-trout-hunting fly angler will surely want to visit.
A smart aleck might say that a focus on trophy hunting is an example of the continued fracturing of fly fishing from a generalist pastime to one consisting of increasingly specialized pursuits and product lines. But the fact is, the advice that Mayer and his guide friends provide can be applied to a variety of fishing situations irrespective of the size of one’s quarry. The Hunt for Giant Trout is a hugely useful book that deserves the attention not just of trophy seekers, but of any fly fisher interested in improving his or her angling game.
— Richard Anderson
The Fly Tying Artist: Creative Patterns for Common Hatches
By Ron Takahashi. Published by Stackpole Books, 2019; $39.95, hardbound.
As a fly tyer, Ron Takahashi is like a kid in a candy store. He’s a well-behaved kid, to be sure, and doesn’t run amok, grabbing materials and design elements at random, but his eyes light up at the copious variety that he finds on the contemporary fly-tying scene, and he’s gotta have it all, one way or another. The plethora of flies, techniques, and materials he discusses in The Fly Tying Artist are the result of this enthusiasm, moderated by a controlling intelligence.
Some tyers fix on a single fundamental principle and develop a series of patterns with an underlying unity based on it, as tyers from John Atherton, to Vince Marinaro, to Gary LaFontaine have done for flies designed to employ the ways in which different materials affect ambient light and hence the impression that a fly makes on a fish. Takahashi, by contrast, sees and implements lots of different possibilities in lots of different materials and different approaches to fly design, in some cases using materials not thought of for fly tying, generating pages of variations on a number of different possible ways to conceive of a nymph, pupa, emerger, dry fly, streamer, terrestrial, or whatever. An artist and art educator by trade, his goal is “to create an impressionistic replica” of natural insects, but there is a wide gap between impressionism and replication, and Takahashi finds a number of different ways to fill it, even with respect to a single bug. What results are not just patterns, but several “series” of patterns covering Baetis mayflies, warmwater bass flies, caddisflies, leeches, other mayflies, midges for still waters and for streams, stoneflies, streamers, other flies for lakes and ponds, terrestrials, and Takahashi’s “Go2” flies. In the chapters devoted to these, each begins with stepby-step how-tos for a few basic patterns, with extensive explanations of design considerations, the choice of materials, and alternative choices. These are followed by pages and pages stacked with photos and fly recipes for variations based on tweaks made to materials and designs. These compilations offer something likely to catch the eye of any tyer, since the variations embody interesting ideas creatively applied. It’s a buffet. You get to pursue your own tastes and interests.
There still is a design philosophy underlying this variety, however: that of a Japanese aesthetic, shibui, which “values simple, unadorned minimalism and elegant beauty.” It is not reducible to a single dimension, however, and can be realized in many different ways. “The seven key components of shibui are simplicity, modesty, naturalness, implicitness, silence, everydayness, and imperfection.” On the evidence of the flies pictured in The Fly Tying Artist, Takahashi has trouble implementing that last component, and indeed, fly tyers too often tie flies that look right to humans, elegant and perfect, rather than what looks right to fish, distressed and vulnerable. A friend who knew Lee Wulff says that any Wulff dry fly that doesn’t look disheveled and ragged is tied wrong and that Wulff insisted they should look scruffy if they are to be optimally effective.
This is solace to those of us who usually tie flies that look like cat puke, but since imperfection actually is pretty easy to achieve, thinking about fly design in terms of those other six components can lead to some interesting results. Consider Takahashi’s take on the traditional Catskill-style dry fly, a design already characterized by simple minimalism and unadorned beauty. He ties a version that is even more minimalist and unadorned, with a very slim thread body covered with head cement, superglue, or UV resin. His Static Damsel Nymph, which imitates a damselfly nymph at rest, also uses a slim thread body, while the body of his Feather Damsel Adult is just a grizzly rooster feather, stripped and colored with a light blue permanent marker. Many tyers overdress their flies. Takahashi isn’t afraid to create a basic element using a simple gesture toward representation.
This minimalism may result not just from Takahashi’s design philosophy, but from the region where he fishes the flies that he designs — the Denver area and the tailwaters that have produced a literature revolving around tying and fishing small flies, as exemplified by Ed Engel’s books on those topics.
But beyond minimalism, Takahashi’s approach to fly design is eclectic, even opportunistic. In his explanations of how he has gone about solving design problems, he scrupulously credits the tyers from whom he borrowed design elements and ideas for using different materials. His riff on Craig Mathews’s X-Caddis is presented as just that, not appropriated to his own name. Unlike some tyers, he understands the “modesty” part of shibui. The names in the book’s acknowledgments must number close to one hundred.
What’s fun about this eclecticism is his artist’s magpie eye for potential fly-tying materials. He may not have been the first to use tapered polyester paintbrush fibers from the hardware store in a variety of colors as tailing substitutes for Betts Microfibbets, but Takahashi also uses them for ribbing, and I doubt anyone else has thought of using masking tape for the bodies and wing cases of stonefly nymphs. Most tyers keep an eye out for possible materials in out-of-the way places. Seeing what Takahashi has found will encourage you to keep both eyes peeled.
There are also a couple of how-to-fish chapters dealing with tackle and techniques, one for rivers and streams and one for still waters. Lots of tying books have something similar, whether integrated with specific fly patterns or, as is the case here, presented as separate elements. This seems to be a generic requirement, perhaps editorially imposed. Unless there’s a reason to discuss such matters with regard to specific flies (and of course, there can be), I’m not sure they are all that necessary in a fly-tying book. The ones here are fine and even have a couple of interesting quirks, such as the method of attaching a leader to a fly line with a beading needle and Pliobond. But the fly patterns, Takahashi’s way of thing about them, and the multiple versions of the flies are the reasons the book is worthwhile.
Since Roman and Little:feld bought Stackpole, their tying books have had some production gaffes, and this is no exception, but don’t let a few lapses prevent you from experiencing the results of an innovative tyer enthusiastically embracing the variety of the contemporary fly-tying world like a kid in a candy store.
— Bud Bynack
Fly-Fishing Mysteries
By Michael Checchio
For an activity as relaxing as fly fishing, one has to wonder how our trout streams came to be strewn with so many corpses. In crime fiction, the contemplative person’s recreation seems to go hand in hand with murder.
Fly fishing has become an unlikely, but entertaining subgenre of the mystery novel. These crime stories have a strong element of fishing in them, sometimes central to the plot, sometimes only peripheral, but the fish are biting throughout. The protagonists of these novels tend to be trout bums, game wardens, fishing guides, lodge owners, and assorted misfits who, in the best noir tradition, are often nursing psychological wounds or fleeing their haunted pasts while fishing themselves into a state of oblivion. These tales range from hardboiled whodunits, to “cozies,” to everything else downstream of the genre and have both fly fishers and mystery addicts rising to the hatch.
None of this is high literature, but it is immensely entertaining. Crime writers don’t win Booker Prizes or get much in the way of respect, but let’s give them some credit. It’s easier to end a story on an epiphany than it is to write a locked room mystery. In addition to doing things important authors do — holding a mirror up to society, wrestling with life’s big questions, and promoting aesthetic bliss — crime writers have to tell you who killed Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.
In John Galligan’s series of fly-fishing whodunits, Ned “Dog” Oglivie is on the run from his past. A domestic tragedy — his little boy drowned in the bathtub on his watch — has caused him to withdraw from human society. He lives out of a beat-up old RV, subsists on peanut butter and warm Tang spiked with vodka, and has set out on the road to fish America’s trout rivers by day while drinking himself unconscious at night until either his money or his life runs out. In The Nail Knot, the first in the series, Dog journeys to the trout-rich Driftless Area of Wisconsin in order to fish the Yellow Sally stonefly hatch on Black Earth Creek, a dark, spring-fed valley stream well known to fly fishers, but finds a corpse on the bank instead. The deceased is Jake Jacobs, a fellow fly angler and meddler who was agitating to protect the famous creek from harm. Will Dog resurrect his own life by looking into the death of this stranger? Hard to say, but Dog solves the murder by knowing who among the suspects can tie a Nail Knot and by his intimate knowledge of the timing and upstream movement of the Yellow Sally hatch.
More of the same occurs in the second and third entries, The Blood Knot, which takes him to the Amish regions of Wisconsin, and The Clinch Knot, under the Big Sky in Montana, as our trout hound flogs the rivers while wallowing in self-pity and finding more corpses and outdoor intrigue. By the fourth outing, The Wind Knot, Dog cuts short his pilgrimage to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Hemingway country, realizing he will never be able to restore his peace of mind by fishing as Nick Adams tries to do in “Big-Two-Hearted River.” So he builds a bonfire and burns his waders and hundreds of trout flies and heads for home to confront head-on the tragedy that sent him on his fly-:fshing bender. But halfway to Chicago, he discovers a corpse stashed in his RV, so he unwisely returns to Michigan to dump the body, becoming a suspect in the murder. At book’s end, Doc is heading not toward home, but toward even more danger in the limestone country of Pennsylvania, where the trout somehow need his attention. And here the series ends midstream, abruptly and unaccountably, either because the publisher dropped it or because the author ran out of fishing knots for his titles.
In The Royal Wulff Murders, by Keith McCafferty, washed-up private eye Sean Stranahan isn’t nearly as messed up as Dog, but he, too, has fled a bad marriage (and a lackluster career as a private investigator) for some restorative fly fishing in Montana’s Madison Valley. Trying to transform himself into a landscape and wildlife painter, Stranahan gets sucked back into the whirlpool of his old profession after a colorful fishing guide named Rainbow Sam hauls in a corpse accidentally hooked by his sport during a float trip on the Madison. The corpse has a Royal Wulff stuck prominently in his lower lip, and that fly wasn’t placed there by Sam’s client, who couldn’t cover a rising trout even if Lefty Kreh was there to help him. (The disdain that fishing guides have for their clients is a theme that frequently rises to the surface in these books.) An autopsy shows the dead man’s lungs hold pond scum instead of the Madison, suggesting the victim was murdered elsewhere and his body dumped in the river for contrivance’s sake. Stranahan finds himself matching wits with Sheriff Martha Ettinger, who views this newcomer and unlicensed shamus with deep suspicion. Will their mutual distrust turn into attraction? There are 10 more books in the series, plenty of time for that to play out. This mystery goes down as easily as a Popcorn Caddis.
In Ronald Weber’s Riverwatcher, lottery winner and ex-Detroit newspaperman Donal Fitzgerald is enjoying his new piscatorial lifestyle when his girlfriend, Mercy Virdon, a game warden in the U.P., asks him to put down his f ly rod long enough to help her solve the murder of old Charlie Orr, a local hermit and fly fisherman. Charlie liked spending his summers in a tent in the state campground close by his favorite wild-trout stream, but he was blown away in the dead of a night by an unknown assassin toting a shotgun. Old Charlie had been complaining about poachers, but there are other suspects, too, including the campground hosts and a columnist from the hook-and-bullet press who claims to have been on the scene looking for a scoop. The solution comes with a bookish twist, and for this entry in the series, you better be up on your Frank Forrester.
Max Addams has dropped out of the big-city rat race to run a Vermont fishing lodge near the Canadian border in David Leitz’s Dying to Fly Fish. Whitefork Lodge is a hit with fly fishers, but Addams needs cash, so he agrees to let an L.A. advertising agency make a beer commercial on his pristine grounds. He gets more than he bargained for when filming begins and there’s a murder. Other books in the series have Addams grappling with small-town political intrigue while trying to protect his trout stream from developers, and in one romp, he unwisely agrees to rent his lodge to the mob.
Loon Lake, Wisconsin, is the setting for a series of cozy mysteries by Victoria Houston that feature small-town police chief Lewellyn Ferris and her close friend and fishing companion Doc Osborn, a retired dentist who pitches in as town coroner whenever his services are needed, which is frequently, because despite the bucolic setting, this is the kind of place where you can die violently with a tenkara rod in your hand.
The books in S. W. Hubbard’s Adirondack Mysteries series are a little darker, and her stories featuring Frank Bennett, the newly appointed police chief of Trout Run, N.Y., show the author’s debt to classic British crime writers such as P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, despite her American regional settings. Bennett, a widower, has moved upstate after making a grave mistake in his old cop job, figuring that being chief in a small town would be relatively laid back and uneventful. In Hubbard’s books, the fishing becomes more of a backdrop for darker themes involving troubled teens and missing persons and the like, and the plots have more twists in them than a leader full of wind knots.
The more serious these novels become, the more that angling recedes into the background and the farther we get from the arcana of fly fishing. The late William G. Tapply, author of a thoughtful and intelligent series of legal mysteries featuring Boston attorney Brady Coyne, loved fly fishing and writing about his favorite pastime as much as his father, H. G. Tapply, who wrote “Tap’s Tips” for Field and Stream. But Brady Coyne thinks about fly fishing more than he ever gets to do it in books such as Tight Lines and Cutter’s Run. That’s because his clients are so rich and troubled and always in need of his services that they keep him busier than Spenser, the Boston P.I. created by Robert B. Parker.
In the serious books sweepstakes, the best and most expertly written are the Woods Cop Mysteries by Joseph Heywood. These superb crime novels are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (the “Yoop” seems to be a favorite setting for many of these writers) and revolve around real-life conservation issues, game regulations, and matters involving the exploitation of natural resources. His protagonist, Grady Service, is a driven and highly independent conservation officer with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The crimes he and his fellow conservation officers confront — they are no longer called game wardens — are fully grounded in the realities of rural life in the U.P., and Heywood is probably the best writer on Yooper culture since Robert Traver. For research purposes, Heywood spends a full month each year on patrol with the DNR in all weather and in all regions of the U.P. And because he is faithful to facts, his books give readers a highly realistic view of the daily routines and challenges faced by Michigan’s conservation officers as they deal with poachers and other game violators while also backing up state and rural police departments in routine law-enforcement matters. Because of his fidelity to the way things really are in the U.P., Heywood’s plots avoid the kind of preposterous Rambo-like exploits and ratcheting-up of violent action that mar C. J. Box’s otherwise engaging crime novels featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. Like every fisherman in the Yoop, Heywood’s hero has a soft spot for brookies and is not above keeping an occasional brown trout for the frying pan.
While books such as Heywood’s are fully serious in intent, most in the trout subgenre are meant to be just plain fun. And the on-stream antics aren’t just for adult readers who can afford the price of a guide fee. Kids are getting in on the action, too. Carl Hiaasen is back with Squirm, another of his kiddy thrillers, fifth in the line of Florida capers where wholesome schoolchildren become ecoterrorists. I approve. If the manatees are lost, smash the state. Billy Audubon Dickens is the only snake wrangler in his middle school. He puts a live Eastern diamondback rattler in his locker to keep his classmates from rooting around in it. (He tapes the mouth shut. Don’t ask how to do this.) Using his mom’s credit card, he surreptitiously books a flight from his home in the Sunshine State to Montana to track down his long-lost father. There he meets his dad’s new wife and his stepsister, both members of the Crow Nation. His stepmom has a way cool job as a fishing guide on the Yellowstone, and she takes Billy on a float trip for his first-ever fly-fishing experience. (In a later scene, Billy moseys into Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston, a nice bit of local color.) His Crow family gives him a new name — “Billy Big Stick.” (A “big stick” is what guides call a client who is a mean hand with a fly rod.) Billy finally hooks up with his missing and highly eccentric dad to help the old man thwart the schemes of a big-game hunter hell bent on illegally shooting grizzly bears in the Big Sky and Florida panthers back in Billy’s home state. Like all kid heroes in juvenile fiction, Billy steps in to save the day. But he remains too much of a Goody Two-Shoes. Billy reimburses his mom for the credit card. And he spends the entire adventure tethered to the adult world through the dog leash of his smart phone. One wishes Billy was as subversive as that kid in Hiaasen’s first middle-grade thriller, Napoleon Bridger “Mullet Fingers” Leep, a juvenile delinquent who could very well grow up to fill the shoes of the late Travis McGee.
The great paradox of the mystery novel is that while it is entirely plot dependent, nobody ever remembers the plots. That’s why the best mysteries are endlessly rereadable. We turn to them for the characters, the atmospherics, and the fun. For fly fishers, the added bonus here is all the inside-baseball material. In one way or another, all these books wade deeply into the culture of fly fishing. Here are on-stream rivalries galore, conservation wars, and monkey-wrenching, disputes over stream access and the use of natural resources, the economics of running lodges and guide services, the uneasy truce between locals and visitors, conflicts between game wardens and sportsmen, and the tensions that arise in rural communities wholly reliant on seasonal tourism. And then there is the almost universal contempt everyone has for the idle rich who put up bankside vacation homes and post No Trespassing signs.
What bind these stories are the joys of fishing, the miracle of rising trout, and the awesome beauty of our rivers. Proof enough — at least in crime fiction — that there’s more to life than getting your ass shot off in a drug deal.
Back in our May/June 2014 issue, Ralph Cutter gave a glowing review to Simple Fly Fishing: Techniques for Tenkara and Rod & Reel, by Yvon Chouinard, Craig Mathews, and Mauro Mazzo. The book is now out in a revised and beautifully redesigned second edition. Although the content remains much as before, among the changes is the inclusion of more fly recipes, plus more stories (under the subhead “The Fishing Life”) that reinforce this guiding principle: “The more you know, the less you need.”
— Richard Anderson
