Smallmouth Bass Flies: Top to Bottom
By Jake Villwock. Published by Stackpole Books, 2021; $39.95 hardbound.
There was once a time, not too long ago, when imitation was the holy grail for fly tyers. The more a fly resembled the size, color, and lifelike qualities of something fish ate, the likelier — so went the belief — that a fish would eat the angler’s offering. But we’re now in an era when verisimilitude is only part of the equation for fly design. Popular subsurface trout flies, for example, now sport “hot spots” of jarring color and bulbous tungsten beads, the use of f lash in wet f lies and nymphs is common, and foam made from cross-linked ethylene copolymers has become nearly as ubiquitous at the fly-tying desk as chicken hackle.
Not that there’s anything wrong with this. Experimentation at the vise and on the water is great fun and can lead to flies that, like those tungsten beadhead, hot-spotted Euro nymphs, will sometimes and maybe even often fish more successfully than what we plied two or three decades ago. We’ve learned that tying a fly to closely resemble the appearance of an actual critter is often not as important as mimicking its behavior in or on the water, and including (even overemphasizing) elements likely to draw a reaction from a fish.
Jake Villwock is certainly a fly fisher and tyer who is willing to experiment. The sixteen smallmouth bass f lies that he highlights in Smallmouth Flies: Top to Bottom often rely on new, innovative materials that allow him to achieve his design objectives. Not just foam and Flashabou (which aren’t so modern), but Predator Wire, Sonar Ballzz, commercially available dubbing brushes of various sorts, Fettuccine Foam, Filler Flash, Palmer Chenille, Laser Dub, Articulation Shanks and Articulation Wire, and Fish-Masks. If you’re like me, the flies will initially seem daunting with regard to the need to acquire and learn to use new materials, but exciting for the same reason. Villwock also includes pictures and materials lists for three-hundred plus “proven effective” fly patterns, and pretty much all are quite imaginative — even the Woolly Bugger, a standard pattern for smallmouth bass fly fishers everywhere, is amped up with a variety of chartreuse-colored materials.
But Villwock isn’t simply trying to be innovative for innovation’s sake. He has a rationale based on his experience on the water and his knowledge of smallmouth bass behavior for every design decision that he makes, and he explains these decisions in detail. Here he presents the logic behind several of the materials and their placement in his Roamer, a streamer pattern for the middle of the water column:
The Roamer gets its movement from its light weight and sparseness of material. Stopping this fly after a hard strip allows it to be caught by micro-currents and moved around naturally in the water. Reverse tying the bucktail in the front of the fly adds a little buoyancy to the fly. This is because bucktail is a hollow fiber, and when you pinch it down you capture all the hair inside [the fly], making it super light and always wanting to float. The flared butts of the bucktail also add a bit of extra bulk to the fly. Center tying the Laser Dub in the front creates the final bulk in the fly and the front taper of a baitfish head; this is all after you fold it back and tie it off. This helps push water around the fly, making it glide side to side. The lead wraps on the hook bend add a little weight at a neutral part of the body, allowing it to sink a bit, but not changing the action of the fly at all. This helps drop the fly just a few inches farther in the water column. The Roamer, by the way, is a pattern that has also caught stripers, bluefish, tarpon, trout, salmon, and steelhead. Because Villwock lets you understand the why behind his patterns, you can easily start to think of ways to customize or even overhaul your own favorite flies, as well as to create new ones. The excellent step-by-step photography by Dusty Wissmath will help you to turn your ideas into reality. As well, of course, help you to tie Villwock’s patterns with some degree of competency.
As its title implies, Smallmouth Bass Flies: Top to Bottom presents patterns for fishing the entire water column. After discussions of the smallmouth’s natural history, the fly-fishing tackle needed to fish for this species, and useful fly-tying tools, the book is divided into three parts: surface flies (six primary patterns), midcolumn flies (five primary patterns), and bottom flies (five primary patterns). Each of the three parts begins with a discussion of seasonal strategies for that portion of the water column. Villwock’s tactical advice here is important, because where and how his flies are to be fished affects how they are designed. Each of the three parts also includes dozens of other flies to consider buying or tying for that particular section of the water column.
If you’re a fly tyer and a smallmouth bass angler, Smallmouth Bass Flies: Top to Bottom provides you with patterns that will catch fish and that will surely also spur your own creativity. If you’re a fly tyer who doesn’t fly fish for smallmouths, this book will serve as a continually thought-provoking addition to your fly-tying library, likely cross-pollinating ideas into your patterns for other species.
By the way, if you want to get into fly fishing for smallmouth bass, three excellent how-tos were published in the past fifteen years: Fly-Fishing for Smallmouth in Rivers and Streams, by Bob Clouser (2006), Fly-Fishing for Western Smallmouth Bass, by David Paul Williams (2014), and Smallmouth: Modern Fly-Fishing Methods, Tactics, and Techniques, by Dave Kareczynski and Tim Landwehr (2017). Although each of these books has a somewhat different emphasis, they all will help you advance up the learning curve. And if you haven’t thought about angling for smallmouth bass, here’s why you should consider putting this fish on your to-do list this summer. Trout, the preferred quarry for many fly fishers, begin to suffer when the temperature of their waters reaches around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The metabolism of smallmouth bass, however, is still ramping up at 65, and fly fishers can expect smallmouth feeding activity to increase as the water temperature rises into the 80s. This makes smallmouths an appropriate species to pursue when California’s trout populations are under duress from high summertime water temperatures. They’re also feisty as heck.
As for where to fish, smallmouth bass, a nonnative species, are not as widely distributed in California as trout or the smallmouth’s cousin, largemouth bass. But unlike the latter, smallmouths like stream environments, and they also like lakes, particularly lakes with rocky areas. There’s probably a smallmouth stream or lake within a reasonable drive of where you live. Southern California smallmouth waters include the Santa Ynez River, the San Gabriel River, Pyramid Lake, Lake Hemet, Cachuma Lake, Big Bear Lake, and Lake Arrowhead. Northern California waters include lower Cottonwood Creek, the lower Feather River, lower Yuba River, Cache Creek, Putah Creek, the Russian River, the Cosumnes River, the Merced River, the Kings River, and most Central Valley foothill reservoirs, plus others such as Del Valle, Nacimiento, San Antonio, Mendocino, Trinity, and Shasta. And there are waters higher in the Sierra that hold smallmouth bass. This is hardly an exhaustive or precise list, by the way, particularly because smallmouths might be found on only limited sections of the waters just noted.
So fire up your search engine, and get out there and explore.
— Richard Anderson
Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate
By Mark Kurlansky. Published by Patagonia, 2020; $30 hardbound.
Mark Kurlansky can see the world in a grain of sodium chloride. His book Salt: A World History was a bestseller. The author is known for his deep dives into quotidian subjects like Paper: Paging Through History and Milk: A Ten Thousand Year Food Fracas. He is probably best known for Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. His books are exhaustively researched and nimbly written and quite fun to read. Salmon might be his most serious yet. It’s fun and lively and as tragic as King Lear.
The author’s modus operandi is to weave history, science, sociology, commerce, art, anecdotes, and even recipes into a fascinating narrative. To write the definitive book on salmon would be impossible, but nobody told the author that. He never met a fact he didn’t like. The trivia he cites is wonderful. Did you know that the Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco was a fly fisherman?
But Salmon, lively as it is, is a more somber read than his previous books, and as much focused on the future as on the historical past. He calls his book “the most important environmental writing” of his career. Salmon are anadromous — migrating up rivers from the sea to spawn — and that means that most of the bad things we do to the earth hurt salmon. And if salmon can’t survive maybe we can’t either. “The principal point of this book,” the author says in his prologue, “is not that the salmon is a magnificent animal that holds its own compared to anything on the Serengeti — beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; moving in its strength, determination, and courage; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story — and it would be sad if it were to disappear. All that is true, but a more important point is that if the salmon does not survive, there is little hope for the survival of the planet.”
The problems facing salmon are legion: dams, deforestation, industrial fishing and aquafarming, industrial agriculture, pollution and pesticides, suburban sprawl, government and fisheries mismanagement, and our overreliance on hatcheries to replace diminishing stocks of wild fish — all these are threats to their survival. But the biggest threat of all comes from climate change and a warming planet.
Climate change does two things: it raises the temperature of the cold water salmon need to reproduce and survive in and — even more destructively — releases carbon dioxide — some of which will be absorbed by the ocean, making it more acidic and less biologically productive. Zooplankton and small fish like capelin no longer grow to full size. That means there is less food for sea animals to eat. The oceans, particularly the Atlantic, are losing their holding capacity. And this could spell disaster not just for salmon but for all sea-life.
The author covers all the bases, from the salmon’s lifecycle and epic journeys in river and ocean, to its place in our economy as a source of food and recreation. Indigenous fishermen did a fine job of sustaining salmon runs going all the way back to prehistoric times. The problems started with the Agricultural Revolution that began in the eighteenth century and worsened during the Industrial Age, with the human drive to facilitate commerce by dominating nature. It is painful to remember that at one time “Europe had the greatest concentration of salmon rivers on any continent.” Today only a remnant sport fishery remains in the British Isles and in Norway and Iceland. Colonial Americans oversaw the utter ruination of New England’s rivers. The Connecticut River once hosted the largest run of Atlantic salmon on the North American continent. Today New Englanders must travel north to the Maritime Provinces in Canada if they hope to land an Atlantic salmon on a fly rod.
When Europeans arrived in the Pacific Northwest they found an indigenous population who had no word for “famine” in their Salish language. The Indians had established a thriving salmon culture not just along the coast but deep into the interior West, where surplus salmon was being traded among the tribes. The Indians were not only skilled fishermen but wise stewards of their resource. They managed their rivers for sustainability. That all ended when Anglo Americans decided to repeat the same mistakes they made in New England and in Europe, all in the name of progress. The Columbia and Snake Rivers once formed the greatest natural passageway on the continent for the migration of Pacific salmon. Today those salmon make a last stand on a river engineered almost to death and blocked by 27 dams.
We have conned ourselves into believing that fish hatcheries can restore depleted runs of wild salmon and compensate us for degraded habitat. They are managed mainly for commercial not restorative reasons, and hatchery f ish can starve out wild salmon stocks and sap them of their genetic strength. Fish farming, another technological solution, might not save salmon either. Penstocks used for raising salmon in estuaries will concentrate waste, pathogens and sea lice, and when these farmed fish escape their pens and swim up into rivers to mix with wild fish, as happens from time to time, they bring disease and mix their maladaptive genes in with the wild fish when they interbreed.
The author proposes a shift to a watershed-based fisheries management more focused on habitat protection, designed to individual spawning streams, and with no interbreeding between hatchery and wild fish. Fish farming could be made more efficient and safer by eliminating open penstocks for closed systems. Efforts to remove dams could allow salmon to spawn in rivers that have been blocked for generations. We could restore our forests and apex predators like bears and eagles and end the use of pesticides. But the biggest challenge will be a warming planet.
Salmon is a gorgeous book, filled with splendid color photographs of heroic fish and lovely rivers, its narrative enlivened with intriguing facts and entertaining anecdotes. There is also plenty of onsite research, in-depth interviewing, and reflections by the author, who as a fly fisherman has a particular love for his subject. (He has just come out with The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing, his 34th book.) We even get two dozen recipes for salmon, some dating back to medieval times. But the message in his book is clear and somber.
We have to change our notion of economic development if salmon are to survive. We need to find a new way to create prosperity, and a better way to use our natural resources, so that we don’t inflict further destruction on our biosphere. If we can’t control our behavior in such a way as to prevent salmon and other creatures from going extinct, how in the world can we control events to prevent our own extinction? To repeat Kurlansky’s warning, if the salmon do not survive, there is little hope for our planet.
— Michael Checchio
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Dan Callaghan’s North Umpqua
Published by Wild Rivers Press, 2008.
Fishing Yellowstone Waters
By Charles E. Brooks; photographs by Dan Callaghan. Published by Nick Lyons Books, 1984.
I don’t take pictures. I’d sooner write a thousand words. I appreciate them, though, and the fishing photographer I am most in awe of is the late Dan Callaghan, whose photos of the North Umpqua are the best river portraits I know.
No doubt much of my affection for his work comes down to his choice of subject matter. The North Umpqua in Oregon, famous for its summer steelhead, happens to be my favorite river. It’s so beautiful, I imagine it’s almost impossible to take a bad photograph of it, but Dan Callaghan seemed to do it better than anyone else. He made his living as a lawyer, but his fame rests primarily on his photographic art and conservation legacy, to say nothing of his love of fly fishing and the natural world. He also designed the Green Butt Skunk, the Mona Lisa of steelhead flies, one recognized everywhere.
I first saw the North Umpqua in August 1988, the summer of the historic wildfires in Yellowstone Park. I had decided to give up on the park’s trout fishing and drive over from West Yellowstone to Oregon to fish for steelhead for the first time. I fell in love with the Umpqua the moment I laid eyes on it. It had the most beautiful and refreshing tonal palette imaginable. The sight and sound of the rushing river making its way through volcanic bedrock under a dense old-growth forest of Douglas firs, cedars, Western hemlocks, and towering sugar pines was just what I needed after the wildfires in Yellowstone Park. After a morning spent fishing, I stopped for lunch at the Steamboat Inn, a fisherman’s lodge perched on a ledge above the famous “camp water,” and noticed a stack of enlarged photographic prints for sale. I began leafing through the unframed photographs. They were mainly color portraits of the North Umpqua taken by someone named Dan Callaghan. I couldn’t believe the richly filtered light and deep color saturation.
It was as if the photographer had opened his f-stops at the aperture of the river’s soul. This, I thought, was exactly how the river looked and felt. Dan Callaghan had captured its essence. How did he do it?
Naturally, I wanted to know more about this fellow who had taken such glorious photographs. It turns out Callaghan was a lawyer over in Salem, the state capital, who had once served on Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Commission. He counted as close friends Jack Hemingway, Ernest Schwiebert, and Frank Moore, the former owner of the lodge. Callaghan’s customized fishing and photography van, with its vanity plate “Cabin 1,” a reference to the Steamboat Inn, was a familiar sight on a river he had chosen to make his home stream.
John Daniel Callaghan was born in 1931 in Salem and lived and worked in that city by the Willamette River all his life. He got his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Oregon and his law degree from Willamette University College of Law. He opened a law practice in 1958, got married two years later to Mary Kay (Brown) Callaghan, and spent forty years practicing civil law in the state capital until retiring in 1999. But his passion was for rivers and fly fishing, and he devoted his life to loving and protecting them. He fished on three continents, but declared the North Umpqua to be the most beautiful river he had ever seen. His freelance photos appeared in magazines ranging from Rod & Reel and Fly Fisherman to Outside and Newsweek. He was a founding member of The Steamboaters, a fly-fishing club that began at the Steamboat Inn, and of the North Umpqua Foundation, a conservation organization originally established to protect his beloved river from a proposed hydroelectric project. He served as a director for both of those organizations, as well as for the Museum of American Fly Fishing, the Federation of Fly Fishers, and the Salem Arts Council.
He was appointed to a term on the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission, another on the Willamette River Greenway Commission, and served as house counsel for a number of fly-fishing organizations. In all, he belonged to nineteen angling clubs and conservation organizations in the United States and Canada, and he was a member of the International Association of Panoramic Photographers.
He seemed always ready to put his fly rod and camera to use in support of a good cause.
The North Umpqua, while known primarily as a summer steelhead stream, has other seasons, as well, and Callaghan photographed and fished the river throughout the chill of winter, springtime’s renewal, summer’s glory, and autumn’s radiance. I don’t know what kind of rod he used, but all his 35-millimeter cameras were Nikons. His favorite was a waterproof Nikonos IV-A that he wore around his neck whenever he fished. If he had time to set up a medium-format shot from a tripod, he used his Hasselblad. As a streamside photographer, he was fully loaded for bear, armed with motor drives and autowinders, zoom and telephoto lenses, automatic exposure systems, various color filters to bring out different effects, viewing screens, film backs, and every other type of accessory. He used backpacks, rather than camera bags, to tote it all around. When shooting color film, he almost always used a polarizer “to get more color saturation and to bring out the clouds.” He liked orange filters for contrast in black and white, yellow filters to darken a blue sky naturally and bring out the clouds, green filters to lighten foliage and render good skin tones, and a red filter for the most dramatic skies.
He went into all this in considerable detail in Fishing Yellowstone Waters, a guidebook authored by Charles E. Brooks and illustrated with 75 black-and-white photos taken by Callaghan. In the end chapter, “Photographer’s Notes,” written by Callaghan, he talks about how taking up photography can add a new dimension to an angler’s life. He is free with advice on equipment and photographic techniques and encourages photographers to develop their own film by setting up a darkroom. Today, the digital age has turned all anglers into instant streamside shutterbugs. Callaghan’s notes could come as a revelation to a new generation of anglers who might be under the impression that Ansel Adams took those photos with his smartphone.
One of the things I like best about Callaghan’s North Umpqua work is that anglers rarely feature prominently in the shots. They are often off to the side or around a bend, distant figures in a landscape. In many photos, no one is there at all; there is only the forest and the river running.
Wild Rivers Press brought out Dan Callaghan’s North Umpqua, a book featuring 156 of his best photos, taken over a half century of fishing the river. It is a posthumous collection. Callaghan died of heart disease in Portland, Oregon, in 2006, but his fishing van is still seen cruising along the North Umpqua. His widow gave the vehicle to Lee Spencer, the “fish watcher” and volunteer steelhead guardian for the North Umpqua Foundation. Spencer wrote A Temporary Refuge, a distillation of 14 seasons he spent observing and guarding migrating steelhead in Big Bend Pool on Steamboat Creek, the Umpqua’s major tributary. He retired this season, and another “fish watcher” has taken his place streamside to keep the fish safe from poachers.
Last September, a wildfire near Archie Creek, another tributary, raged out of control and burned 131,542 acres along Highway 138, just outside of Glide. The conflagration destroyed 109 homes, including Frank and Jeanne Moore’s log cabin, and did considerable damage to the Steamboat Inn. (It has since reopened.) The Archie Creek blaze was one of just several horrific wildfires that raged throughout California and Oregon last summer. I haven’t had the heart to go up and look at the North Umpqua since the fire. For the time being, I think I’ll just look at the pictures in Dan Callaghan’s book.
