Dry Fly Strategies
By Paul Weamer. Published by Stackpole Books, 2021; $29.95 hardbound.
Today, the door through which wannabes enter fly fishing is indicator nymphing — often, Euro nymphing. That makes sense: whether enticed by the sport’s aesthetics and closeness to the natural world, by its cultural image and marketing, or by a desire to get back to a loved activity once abandoned for other things, many people get their feet wet, literally, as well as figuratively, by taking advantage of one of the “Introduction to Fly Fishing” offers made to the fly-curious by shops and guides. These instructors expect that what newbies want to do is catch fish, and so they begin by taking them indicator nymphing.
Fish do as much as 90 percent of their feeding subsurface, and the Euro style of indicator nymphing has developed into an incredibly efficient way to exploit this fact, thanks in part to the European fishing competitions from which it emerged. But there’s more to the sport than just catching fish — bait fishing, after all, is even more efficient — and the fundamental concept of angling as a sport, rather than as a method of harvest, is that the fish are granted the respect due to a worthy opponent in the ways in which we seek to catch them. Not all wannabes find nymphing to be fun, either: the pocket water, runs, and riffles that are best fished that way can be tough to wade for folks late in life who are first coming to the sport or back to it, and that constraint, plus the competitive purpose through which Euro nymphing evolved, tends to select as those who continue in the sport younger folks who focus on catching a lot of fish and on competing among themselves while doing it. But sooner or later, even the most gonzo Euro nymphers are going to notice that others are catching fish when they can’t, because there are times when fish are feeding at or near the surface or in waters where Euro-nymphing techniques are not as effective. When they arrive at that realization, Paul Weamer’s Dry Fly Strategies is waiting for them.
Nymphing may be the door through which new fly fishers enter the sport these days, but the house of fly fishing has many rooms. As Weamer writes, addressing those who have come to the sport in this way, “so much of fly fishing’s art, science, tradition, and beauty is lost when you ignore rising trout and continue nymphing, even if you’re catching fish. And there are times, especially during intense aquatic insect hatches, that you might not catch many fish if you ignore the ones surface feeding in front of you.”
Speaking to those who see fly fishing as a competitive sport, Weamer says, “For most anglers, the only fly-fishing competition in which they’ll participate is between themselves and the trout.”
You always know where you rank with rising trout. Were you able to catch it? Did you get a refusal? Did the fish keep rising after the refusal? Or did your poor casting and mending abilities cause the fish to stop rising? If you caught the trout you targeted, you were a great angler for that one fish. But did you catch the next rising fish you found? If you didn’t, you need to improve as an angler. And none of us catches every rising trout. There’s an old saying: if a trout rises twice in the same spot, it should be caught. Every time. And if there’s more magic to be found while fly fishing than watching a wild trout rise to meet your fly at the surface, I’ve never seen it.
He adds: “if you really want to be competitive, I believe that dry-fly fishing is often the only true way to know how good you’ve become. Sure, you may have caught 20 fish nymphing a riffle while your friend only caught 4, but maybe there were 200 in there.” However good an angler you think you might be, “you cannot fully gauge your skill level when fishing subsurface.” As he points out, nymphing achieves its successes at the expense of oversimplification — imitating only the nymphal or larval form of aquatic insects. In order to become a proficient fly fisher, an angler also has to understand and successfully imitate “emergers, subadults, egg layers, and spent insects, sometimes with overlapping hatches occurring simultaneously,” not to mention the terrestrial insects that trout feed on.
Newbie nymphers in fact have taken only the first step in a process that, as the adage goes, leads from wanting to catch a fish, to wanting to catch a lot of fish, then wanting to catch big fish, then wanting to catch difficult fish, then cutting the point off a dry fly and just enjoying fooling fish, culminating in taking pleasure in helping others begin and progress through that process. Weamer, originally an East Coast fly-fishing guide and fly-shop manager who now lives, guides, and writes in Montana, is at that ultimate stage. He’s also the author of The Bug Book: A Fly Fisher’s Guide to Trout Stream Insects (Stackpole/Headwater Books, 2016), along with Fly-Fishing Guide to the Upper Delaware River (Stackpole, 201l), Pocketguide to New York Hatches (Stackpole/Headwater Books, 2013), Pocketguide to Pennsylvania Hatches (Stackpole/Headwater Books, 2009), and a major contributor to Jay Nichols’s Tying Dry Flies: How to Tie and Fish Must-Have Trout Patterns (Stackpole 2008; reissued in paperback, 2021), a pretty good companion to Dry Fly Strategies for emerging dry-fly anglers who tie. In Dry Fly Strategies, he greets newbies who have entered the sport through the door of nymphing and helps them take the next steps into fly fishing’s wonders.
As he says, “It’s written mostly for dry-fly beginners and intermediates,” and he starts them out from square one. Dry-fly fishing, as he defines it, occurs “when you can see a fish taking something from the water’s surface” and so includes fishing “damp” patterns such as emergers. There’s a survey of dry-fly fishing opportunities in each season of the year, the weather conditions propitious for it, and the times of the day when it is best to fish on top. There’s an explanation of the mayfly life cycle, then an exhaustive explanation of the styles of dry fly developed to imitate mayfly forms found on or in the surface (the Catskill style, parachutes, Comparaduns, and so on), likewise for caddisflies (the X Caddis, Parachute Caddis, etc.), stoneflies (Stimulators, stacked foam styles, Trudes, and more), plus, briefly, midges, and terrestrials. This is followed by a chapter, “Choosing the Best Fly,” that explains how to put all this potentially confusing information into practice, matching fly style to the type of water being fished, complete with a two-page chart that ranks the suitability of each style of mayfly, caddis, and stonefly for imitating large or small naturals, for flat water or riffles and braids, for daylight and night fishing, for targeting sipping, bulging, and splashing/ gulping rises, and for fishing in tandem in dry-and-dropper rigs.
It’s a masterful summing up, and it takes up the first half of the book, leavened with good photos of bugs, f lies, and people fishing in lovely settings. In the second half, there are lots of further specifics that newbies definitely need to know about: casting, mending, and fishing floating lines; tactics for large and difficult trout; rods to supplement the Euro nympher’s noodley 11-foot 3-weight; choosing a floating fly line that actually gets cast; floatants, and more. But it is all really basic stuff, and Weamer also says, “I hope that even experienced dry-fly enthusiasts can find some value in these pages. No two fly fishers do everything the same way, and perhaps my methods and experiences will encourage you to think differently about how you fish dry flies as you pursue your own path.” As a confirmed dry-fly purist (or actually, a damp-fly purist, but that sounds like an oxymoron), I wanted to put this claim to the test, and in the second half of the book, I did indeed find things to learn from and to work on, as well as things that confirmed my own prejudi . . . my own ways of doing things. Even if you’re not a newbie, you may, too.
One eye-opener was his chapter on pace and posture, something that more fly-fishing books could profitably emphasize. Pace is a matter of knowing when to persevere and when to move on when prospecting likely lies or targeting rising fish, when to fish all the water and when to target only high-percentage places. Weamer stresses that the pace at which you f ish should be a function of your goals. As he notes, “Most fishermen decide they’re going fishing without any real thought as to what they want to achieve that day. This is a fine approach if you truly have no expectations, and you’ll be happy with whatever the day brings: the stereotypical response is, ‘It was just good to be out there. The fish are just a bonus.’” But if you have a goal — if you “want to catch only big fish, a lot of fish, difficult fish, or any other specific type of fish” — it determines the pace at which you fish, skipping a lot of holding water in search of big risers, for example. More mundanely, he also insists that when moving from place to place along a pool or run, you should reel up and place the fly in your hook keeper, rather than letting it dangle in the water or holding the fly in you hand and letting the leader and line dangle, because “the sagging line invariably catches something, and now you’ve got to spend time untangling the mess you created.” OMG yes.
And his take on posture is balm to my sore joints. Weamer insists that when targeting surface-feeding fish, hunching over to lower your profile, dropping to a knee, hiding behind structure, or crawling on your belly like a reptile isn’t as important as it’s cracked up to be. In fact, “most of the time, anglers can’t cast well when they contort themselves into these positions. So instead of potentially scaring the fish by standing too upright, they definitely scare the fish when they make a lousy cast because they’re contorted like a yoga instructor. I’ve found that many of the things we think will scare fish won’t, if they’re done slowly, incrementally.” He advocates sneaking up on a fish when wading by taking a step every time it rises, when it’s preoccupied. He also stresses that your posture affects the accuracy of your casts, because where your hips point, your cast will go.
Dry Fly Strategies is the first volume in Stackpole’s Fly Fishing Essentials series. Publishing it is a timely move, and because Weamer knows his stuff and can explain what and how we do what we do, even damp-fly purists like me can learn from returning to the basics.
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa
By Jack Hemingway. Published by McGrawHill, 1986.
To the world at large, Jack Hemingway was known as the son of “Papa” Ernest Hemingway and the father of Mariel and Margaux. “I spent the first 50 years of my life being the son of a famous father and am now spending the last 50 years as the father of famous daughters,” as he put it in his autobiography, Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman. But to the fly-fishing fraternity, he was known as a world-class angler, conservationist, and a man who led quite an enviable life despite hardships and tragedies. In their eyes, Jack was a much a better fly fisher than Ernest ever was.
Jack was born in Toronto on October 10, 1923. Christened John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, he had been named in honor of his mother, Hadley Richardson, and a Spanish matador his father particularly admired. Ernest had started a job as a reporter at the Toronto Star, but four months after Jack was born, the family slipped quietly past the landlord, running out on the lease, and boarded a Cunard passenger liner bound for France.
Jack would spend his first five years growing up in Paris, speaking French before he ever learned English and playing in the Austrian Alps on family vacations while his father wrote the fiction that would change world literature. Ernest was earning money as a freelance journalist, but mainly living off his wife’s small inheritance. Jack’s first memory of fishing was watching anglers dangling lines in the Seine in the middle of Paris. His godparents were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He waddled at the feet of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and John
Dos Passos. He was nicknamed Bumby for his plump, teddy-bear features and happy personality. His nickname stuck with him through life, but Ernest always addressed him as Schatz, German for “treasure.”
Jack was five when his parents divorced. Hadley had learned of Ernest’s affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a Midwest heiress who would soon become the author’s second wife. Shortly after the divorce, Hadley would marry Paul Mowrer, a foreign correspondent she knew in Paris. Jack always bore a strong resemblance to Ernest, but in temperament was far more like Hadley. More easy-going and less driven than his old man, he had a sunny disposition that helped him overcome trauma and later live a life that in some ways was more exemplary than that of his highly competitive and distant father. But what they always had between them was a love of fishing and the outdoors.
Sent to boarding schools, Jack saw his father only on summer vacations. As he grew up, they hunted and fished together, and Papa taught Jack how to box. When Ernest was too busy to spend time with the boy, he packed the kid off to dude ranches. In Spain, father and son attended bullfights together, and in Jack’s teenage years, the two drank daiquiris in bars in Key West and Havana. In Sun Valley, Idaho, Jack shared the ski slopes with Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Ingrid Bergman, all friends of his father. “He was my hero,” Jack told the New York Times, in a 1999 interview. “When he was with you, you were the total center of attention. But when I left to go back to school, I was out of his mind.” Jack picked up his father’s love of fly fishing, but got precious little in the way of instruction from him. Ernest made the little boy watch most of the time. Jack’s first fish was a minnow he caught on a French chalkstream as a toddler, without Papa being present. Ernest introduced him to trout out West, but wouldn’t let him fish until the final days of his vacation. Jack thought this was rather savvy of his old man and credits him for a lifelong passion for the sport.
When Jack was still a teenager, Ernest arranged for his son’s sexual initiation with a Havana prostitute, unaware that the youth had been sporting with her gratis the night before. Ernest asked her for a report on his son’s prowess, and she was only too happy to comply: “Si, senor. Si, como un toro!”
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Jack left Dartmouth without taking a degree and enlisted in the US Army, where he was assigned to Military Police, a posting that didn’t suit him. His family pulled strings and got him into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Assigned to aid the French Resistance, he parachuted into Nazi-occupied France with a fly rod, reel, and a box of trout flies. Immediately after completing his first mission, he went fishing, nearly getting caught by a German patrol. During a later mission, he was strafed in the arm and shoulder by a machine gun and almost had his casting arm surgically amputated by his German captors. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war.
When the war ended, he continued his military career as a security officer in Berlin and then as a liaison officer with the Third French Army Corps in Freiburg, Germany. He married Byra “Puck” Whittlesey in Paris in 1949 in a kind of fairytale wedding. The matron of honor was Julia Child, a former OSS officer and a budding French chef. The transition to civilian life was not easy for him. For a time, he worked as a fishing supply salesman and later as a stockbroker in San Francisco. But his career was lackluster, and he felt like a fish out of water in the financial world.
His life changed dramatically with his father’s suicide in 1961. Jack was fishing for steelhead on the North Umpqua when he received word that Ernest Hemingway had taken his own life with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. To make matters worse, Ernest left his estate entirely to Mary Welsh, his fourth wife, a woman Jack never liked. However, a dispute over the literary estate was settled to Jack’s advantage, and he and his younger half brothers, Patrick and Gregory Hemingway, the sons of Ernest and Pauline Pfeiffer, began receiving book royalties on foreign sales. This allowed Jack to retire in 1966 and buy a house in Ketchum, the last place his father lived and where the author’s grave is kept.
Jack became the family emissary, attending conferences, sitting on the board of the Hemingway Foundation, and graciously welcoming visitors to the author’s home in Ketchum. He seemed to be the family member most at ease with the public’s interest in his father’s literary legacy and in their continued fascination over his adventurous life. He also taught foreign-language classes in Ketchum. But mostly, he spent his time fishing and hunting and pursuing an outdoor life. He equipped a van especially for angling and loaded it with his fishing tackle and favorite classical music tapes. He was able to fish pretty much wherever and whenever he pleased, and he wet a line in most of the great trout rivers in the United States and on many of the premier salmon and steelhead rivers in Europe and Canada.
His achievements as a fly fisher and a conservationist became something of a legend in their own right. He worked with the Nature Conservancy to preserve Silver Creek in Sun Valley, just outside of Ketchum. He served on Idaho’s Fish and Game Commission from 1971 to 1977, where he got the state to adopt a catchand-release fishing law that enabled Idaho’s trout stocks to increase. But he noted with good humor that his life would always be overshadowed by his famous father and his famous daughters, Mariel and Margaux, both actresses and models. But don’t expect any deep insights into Ernest Hemingway’s complex and mercurial nature or his art in Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman. For that, readers should search out some of the better biographies or watch the Ken Burns documentary, Ernest Hemingway, that aired recently on PBS. Nor is there any mention in Jack’s book of his rocky marriage to Puck or his strained relationship with his troubled daughters. Margaux died of a drug overdose, and Mariel spoke out in a documentary about her parents’ constant fighting and their excessive drinking.
Rather, Jack seemed fine with the life he led: a series of marvelous adventures filled with interesting people and lots of fishing. He died at 77 from complications following heart surgery. It is anglers who will benefit the most from this autobiography — and a second, A Life Worth Living, completed shortly before his death — for here is our opportunity to fish with a Hemingway, if only vicariously.
