California Winter Steelhead: Life History and Fly Fishing
By Dennis P. Lee. Published by Gardhull Graphics, 2020; limited edition of 500 numbered and signed copies, $100 hardbound.
For most of this winter, coastal steelhead rivers either have been unfishably high or have fallen quickly to levels that triggered low-flow closures. So what’s there to do when faced with nowhere to fish, and you’re tired of tying f lies and fiddling with tackle? Let me suggest a substantial new book, California Winter Steelheading: Life History and Fly Fishing, by Dennis Lee, a work of considerable breadth and depth. It’s a follow-up of Lee’s earlier The Half-Pounder: A Steelhead Trout from 2015. And as with that book, there’s a lot to like.
An avid angler and retired supervising fisheries biologist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Lee builds his examination of the fish and of the fishery, including its tackle and techniques, from a detailed recounting of the historical and scientific archive. That sets it apart from other important, but anecdotally oriented books such as Trey Combs’s Steelhead Fly Fishing. Collecting data, as opposed to telling fish tales, is Lee’s business, and he writes in a style that Jack Webb’s Dragnet character would have approved: just the facts, ma’am. And there are a lot of them.
Lee starts with the fish, and his first three chapters tell the complex story of the discovery of steelhead, their evolution, and their distribution and life histories as the “salmon trout” of the 1800s were gradually understood to be different from other West Coast salmon and trout species. You’ll probably learn more than you thought you ever wanted to learn, but that’s a plus, right? Along with the history, the takeaway for readers here is that our winter steelhead, Lee’s subject, are anadromous rainbows that become sexually mature in the ocean or shortly after entering fresh water and spawn relatively soon thereafter. That distinguishes them from other anadromous rainbows, which enter in a sexually immature state and spend some months in fresh water before becoming mature and spawning. Generally speaking, those winter fish enter fresh water after October and before May, but it’s their near sexual maturity that distinguishes them from summer-run fish.
From the fish, Lee moves to the history of fishing for them. Drawing frequently on old newspaper articles as well as on official records, Lee follows the growth of recreational fishing and fly fishing for winter steelhead. Along with a summary of tackle development, Lee provides brief notes on the pioneers of California steelheading from the 1920s through the 1950s. Steelhead flies and their development come next, from early f lies that arose out of Atlantic salmon and trout fishing through the development of and relationships between specific steelhead patterns. Useful photos and illustrations accompany the text. For the dedicated steelheader, these histories, and the gear and flies and people who feature in them are and should be as much a part of the sport as the fishing itself. Not to know something of the contributions of Winston and Powell, of Jim Green, Myron Gregory, Harry Hornbrook, C. Jim Pray, Lloyd Silvius, Art Dedini, Grant King, Bill Schaadt, or Ted Linder seems to me akin to knowing how to fish with an indicator without ever learning to cast and fish without one. Lee gets it.
The middle of the book is made up of information-packed chapters on just about every stream in California that hosts or hosted winter steelhead. Want to know what the Winchuk on the Oregon border offers, or about the Navarro or Mattole or Ten Mile? Lee provides excellent descriptions of the fisheries on each river, supported by illustrative photography. Even the now-fishless rivers of Southern California get their due, a reminder of what we’re likely to lose here in the North unless we get a grip on water use and development. These chapters are a terrific resource. There’s nothing new or earthshaking in Lee’s next chapter on rods, reels, and other gear for steelhead, but it’s good information that every steelheader, especially those new to the sport, will profit from reading. The chapter that follows on casting and presentation is meatier and proceeds from the notion that equipment and technique differ for the two main types of steelhead water. Fishing our coastal rivers in slow-moving water in or just above tidewater is a different game from fishing faster-moving inland steelhead rivers, with their riffles, tailouts, and pools. For Lee, as for many anglers, the faster-water fisheries favor a variety of double-handed rod techniques, and he spends most of his time talking about them. Fair enough: double-hand Skagit and Scandi techniques have revolutionized modern steelheading. But California has miles of coastal estuarine water and an important history and literature of fly fishing them. Forty years of chasing coastal steelhead on those rivers has taught me that I still have a lot to learn, and I’d have liked to have seen more than five paragraphs on appropriate casting, tackle, and techniques. Lee does note that double-handed presentations in slow and estuarine water can disrupt holding or schooling fish, and fishing in this manner there will likely antagonize traditional single-handed, shooting-head anglers. The wise steelhead fly fisher, it seems to me, will work to master both styles and fish each where they’re appropriate.
Lee steps up his game again in his chapter on steelhead flies, breaking them down by type and application. Wet flies, shrimps, nymphs, marabous, Intruders, and tube flies are covered, as are the originators and updaters of many patterns, along with some information on materials and on choosing flies in different situations. It’s an informative and well-organized run through the sport’s fly box and its history. Lee concludes with 22 pages of photos of contemporary and historical fly patterns that list materials and in many cases notes the originator of the pattern and when it came into use. The photography is great, and as fly porn, it’s top-notch.
Where I think the book is less than successful is its treatment of conservation. What’s presented is simply a summary of what various government agencies have done or are doing with respect to hatcheries, habitat protection, dams, water quality, and the like. There’s lots of information, but no evaluation.
I’d hoped that Lee, who as both an angler and a fisheries biologist is uniquely positioned to have informed opinions, would have weighed in a bit on the current state of winter steelhead populations and the impediments and opportunities they face. Is UC Davis correct in projecting the disappearance of half the state’s salmonids within fifty years? Where and how can runs of winter steelhead be increased? Do hatcheries still provide a reasonable function, or are they a poison pill? Will removing dams turn things around, and is the cost worth it? What’s being done with North Coast wineries’ increasing use of water that’s crucial to steelhead survival? What about CalTrout’s experiments in growing salmonids in flooded rice fields that connect to valley rivers? Are the current low-flow regulations too draconian or too loose to make a difference? Given what many of us see as a perilous drop in winter steelhead populations and fishing opportunities, I’d argue that it’s not enough simply to note what state agencies have done or are tasked to do.
That criticism aside, this is a highly informative, useful book for the history it presents, for its overview of all our winter steelhead rivers, and for the snapshot it provides of winter steelheading in the early twenty-first century. It’s a pretty piece of work, as well, with heavy cover boards and almost three hundred glossy, substantial pages, illustrated with historical and contemporary photography. The book is pricey at $100, though that includes shipping, but as I noted writing about Lee’s previous book on half-pounder steelhead in a limited edition of 500 copies, once it sells out, copies are likely to cost a lot more.
— Larry Kenney
The Fly Fishing Bible of Nymphing: A Complete Playbook for Fly Fishing with Nymphs
By Dr. Paul Gaskell. Published by Fishing Discoveries; $39.99 softbound.
In a telling anecdote early in The Fly Fishing Bible of Nymphing, an English competition fly fisher discusses a section of stream with a Czech competitor. It’s a friendly conversation, and they each point out where they think trout are likely to hold. The Englishman expects to hook only a portion of those fish, and, curious, he asks the Czech how many he thinks he’ll catch. The Czech looks confused, then realizes it’s a serious question. He answers, “All of them.”
That wasn’t ego speaking. Rather, it was simply an expression of the Czech’s confidence in the tackle and tactics he would use on this water.
Irrespective of whether you approve of competitive fly fishing, one of the values of such contests is that they reveal regional approaches to angling and allow them to be studied and adopted and even evolved by others. The most successful approaches usually revolve around nymphing, because subsurface is where trout mostly feed. And currently, these approaches come mostly from Europe, because that’s where fly-fishing competitions have a long history, and it’s also where trout fisheries have been heavily pressured for recreation and even decimated for table and market. Catching fish on such waters requires not just skill, but insight and a willingness to experiment.
If you’ve Googled “Euro nymphing,” you’ve likely come across posts from two Englishmen, Dr. Paul Gaskell and John Pearson, who have the website FishingDiscoveries.com. Both are thoughtful, curious, enthusiastic anglers, and both are biologists, which means they understand not just fish and their environs, but also the importance of objective analysis. The information Gaskell and Pearson have been providing online is of very high quality, and a number of those posts find their way into The Fly Fishing Bible of Nymphing, where they have been organized in a logical progression and supplemented with new material prepared specifically for the book. The focus is on a “family” of techniques, as Gaskell calls it, that mostly involve the angler having direct contact with the nymph, rather than relying on an inherently less sensitive “buoyant suspension device,” such as a bobber or other floating indicator, from which the nymph or nymphs hang.
This direct connection allows the angler to better control drift, manipulate fly behavior, and detect strikes and serves as an essential concept throughout the book. A seeming exception to the rule is Gaskell’s inclusion of “hopper/ dropper”-type rigs that place a dry fly as a prey item and strike indicator above one or two nymphs. He calls use of such rigs the “duo” (one dry, one nymph) and “trio” (one dry, two nymphs) methods, but Gaskell usually has them fished with all line, leader, and tippet down to the dry fly held off the water, thereby enhancing direct contact. Gaskell’s family of nymphing techniques includes Czech nymphing (short line and long line), Polish nymphing, Slovakian nymphing, duo and trio nymphing, French nymphing, Spanish nymphing, and the French/Spanish-nymphing variant known as Peche a la Sempé. In the first of The Fly Fishing Bible of Nymphing’s three sections, “Meet the Family,” Gaskell describes the characteristics and principles of each technique and how these techniques help anglers catch more fish or meet the challenges presented by specific types of water or fish behavior. The general trend in tactical evolution is from fishing nymphs with floating fly lines paired with floating indicators, which Gaskell pretty much dismisses for its unimpressive effectiveness (except for one situation, which he discusses near the end of the book), to the more successful direct-contact techniques, initially with short lines, such as applied in Czech and Polish nymphing, then later with long monofilament lines, such as used in French and Spanish nymphing, which reduce the likelihood an angler will be seen by the fish and also enhance the angler’s ability to detect a strike. This isn’t to say short-line techniques have become outmoded, but rather that the menu of direct-contact techniques has expanded to improve stealth and exploit hard-to-fish situations.
By the end of “Meet the Family,” Gaskell’s intention is that you will understand the basic concepts of how, when, and why to fish each of these techniques. Part II of The Fly Fishing Bible of Nymphing, “Trying & Testing,” goes into the specifics of rod and leader characteristics, rigging, hooks, knots, casting, presentations (including drift length), and strike indicators and “sighters,” the latter defined by Gaskell as being “something that simply makes part of the existing leader setup more visible” and that are commonly used by Euro nymphers for strike detection. This section gets you geared up and fishing, and you’ll find a wealth of often competition-derived ideas that should improve your angling success — leader formulas, for example, and even directions for boiling monofilament in acidic water to create extrasupple French leaders. Not that you have to do this, but it’s an intriguing option. Part III, “Evolving & Adapting,” has Gaskell “continuing to layer more information and more reinforcement on what we’ve covered so far,” allowing the angler to improve success by hybridizing different approaches, becoming stealthier on the water, and tweaking gear, tactics, and flies. Gaskell introduces the “Ladder Leader,” which is easy to build and allows the angler to change positions and types of droppers quickly. He also discusses fly design and weighting (tungsten beads are not always the best approach) and includes patterns for flies that meet the needs of specific tactical situations.
This section culminates with a straightforward method that can help fly fishers determine, in a systematic manner, the likely optimal techniques and flies to use in relation to water temperature, current speed, stream depth, stream character, and season of the year.
The overview above only hints at the amount of information and advice that Gaskell provides (he also includes a QR code that accesses helpful videos and other instructional material). As a fly fisher who has often complacently relied on floating lines, bobbers, and split shot to fish nymphs, I found The Fly-Fishing Bible of Nymphing an enlightening work, certainly thought provoking, and clearly useful for the waters I fish.
This was true, as well, for two previous books, likewise authoritative works, that focus on modern nymphing techniques: George Daniel’s Dynamic Nymphing (Headwater Books, 2012), and Devin Olsen’s Tactical Fly Fishing (Stackpole Books, 2019). Both authors are American competition fly fishers, and in contrast to Gaskell, they include material on the use of floating indicators, still appropriate for a number of North American waters and fishing situations, so I consider their books more comprehensive in that regard than The Fly Fishing Bible of Nymphing. The advice in those two books is also easier to grasp, with information on a topic usually presented at one time, as a whole, rather than scattered in pieces throughout the book, which, with Gaskell, I assume is a result of his material’s origin as web posts. All three books present the meat of what I seek as an active, curious angler — descriptions of gear, drawings of leader setups, discussions of presentation, delineation of tactics, and suggestions for flies. The hows and the whys. But what Gaskell conveys, aside from ideas and advice that differ from or progress beyond that of Daniels and Olsen, is a sense of discovery and excitement. I immediately want to try what he recommends, to experience the same experiences. I want to get out and fish.
Gaskell’s book, being self-published, can at times be clunky in prose, structure, and graphic design, but the illustrations are absolutely top-notch, and very little is difficult to understand or visualize. The hard part will be in keeping important elements of the material in mind when on the water. It’s a challenge I look forward to meeting.
— Richard Anderson
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
A Full Creel: A Nick Lyons Reader
By Nick Lyons. Published by Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
Nick Lyons has been writing about fly fishing for decades without ever making the sport seem glamorous. He didn’t pick up a fly rod until he was 21, and he was in his midthirties when he wrote his first fishing tale, a story that awakened in him his true writerly voice. This college professor with a passion for literature would go on to become one of our preeminent angling authors and America’s most important publisher of fishing books.
Lyons started fishing at age three at Laurel House, his grandfather’s hotel in the Catskills. But he was a city boy, a child of the Great Depression, and he grew up with his mother, Rose, his grandparents, and a pair of bachelor uncles in a Yiddish-speaking household in the Bronx. He was quite happy until his widowed mother shunted him off to boarding school at age five and soon after married an emotionally distant and bossy insurance agent named Arthur Lyons. The boy fished whenever he could — which was never enough — with worms and shiners on a cane pole on a small, lily-padded lake and on a tiny creek winding through the woods behind his family’s hotel next to Kaaterskill Falls.
Lyons took a degree in economics at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, spent a lot of time on the basketball courts, and would occasionally trot over to the Palestra, the University of Pennsylvania sports arena, to practice casting a cheap fiberglass fly rod that he had yet to christen on any trout stream. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the army, where he discovered the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and fell hard for literature. Determined to become a writer, he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan, met his future wife, Mari, got a doctoral degree in English, and finally broke in his fly rod on the Au Sable, although he didn’t catch anything.
He taught English literature at Hunter College in New York City for a good many years, writing academic papers and ghostwriting four books, one of which became a bestseller. He was mad for fly fishing, but had little time for it, being married with kids and working too hard. He couldn’t cast well, lacked instruction, but kept at it, and an old army buddy helped him out directionally on some club water in New Jersey. He would f lee the gray pavements of Manhattan whenever he could find a little time to fish. One day in his midthirties, Lyons decided to write a story about a trip he took to the Beaverkill in the Catskills.
He called his story “Mecca,” and Field & Stream published it. Writing it gave Lyons a new authorial voice. Before this, his scholarly prose had been dull and heavy in the academic manner. Now his tone was conversational and intimate and leavened with self-deprecating humor. His new style could even be considered confessional. Soon, this revelatory new voice of his became his signature style as he wrote more and more about angling in juxtaposition with family life and scenes of domestic intimacy. “Writing about fishing promptly magnified the pleasure I’d always taken from fishing,” he says. “I now had the thing itself and the thing I had made on paper.”
With four kids, Lyons took a second job, editing and acquiring books for Crown Publishers by day while teaching classes at Hunter College at night. But he was looking for something more suited to his own interests than the commercial fodder Crown was publishing, so he brought Art Flick’s Streamside Guide back into print at Crown and would soon do the same with Vincent Marinaro’s A Modern Dry Fly Code. He was also collecting the stories for Fisherman’s Bounty, one of the most successful f ishing anthologies ever published. This put him in touch with many fine angling authors worldwide, and he would use these contacts and his skills to strike out on his own as a small independent publisher. With Nick Lyons Books, he developed a niche market for angling titles, reprinting both British and American fishing classics while publishing fresh work by many of the best contemporary fishing authors and authorities around. In time, the company he founded, rebranded over the years as Nick Lyons Books, Lyons & Burford, and Lyons Press, gradually expanded into a much broader market that dealt with a greater variety of outdoor-related sports and activities.
“I never glamorize fly fishing,” Lyons once told the New York Times in an interview. In his own stories, he makes himself out to be a far worse angler than he really is. Angling puts a strain on his marriage. His “fishing widow” casts a gimlet eye on his hobby. He tries to reconcile his life as a workaholic and a trout dreamer, a father and a family man. It doesn’t always go well. Somehow, fishing and marriage both endure. (It helps that Mari, a splendid painter, falls in love with Montana, where Lyons makes his annual pilgrimages, and that her drawings illustrate his later books.)
Full Creel: A Nick Lyons Reader contains the author’s favorite stories, compiled from his previous collections. These stories appeared originally as essays and columns for fishing magazines, where for many years Lyons wrote the “Seasonable Angler” column in Fly Fisherman. He writes knowledgeably and lovingly about rivers, fish, flies, tackle, books, paraphernalia, and people. But a fully rounded life is in these pages, as well. Cumulatively, what we have here is the autobiography of a fly fisher. And it reminds us once again of the truism that sometimes the best fishing is in print.
“Westward,” a story about a much needed trip to Montana to fish, opens with Lyons witnessing a pitched battle between a Manhattan cabbie and a Cadillac owner, who take a hammer and a baseball bat to each other’s cars. “Au Sable Apocalypse” has Lyons trying to catch his first-ever trout under a rainy sky as his weeping wife and howling children wait in the car. (“Watching Lyons try to fish on a Father’s Day trip to Vermont and upstate New York is like watching someone practice the violin in a soccer riot,” writes Thomas McGuane, in the foreword to Full Creel.)
If I had to select just one Nick Lyons story as a favorite, it would probably be “A Catskill Diary.” It is a long essay that recounts a working vacation Lyons took with his family that gave him an entire summer to fish a few Catskill streams close by Woodstock. Much had changed since he last saw it, but there was still a great deal of natural beauty in the mountains. “I have found pockets and patches of the serenity I expected in the Catskills a pool on the Esopus, the headwaters of a few feeder creeks, a run on the Schoharie — but year by year they too are encroached upon.” Lyons takes his family to the grounds of the old Laurel House by the waterfall, eager to show his youngest son the place where he had spent his own childhood summers. His grandfather’s hotel is gone — not even the foundation remains.
“Only the falls were still there — the flow less than I remembered, but the same crystalline creek flowing out of the heavy pine and hemlock forest, down over slate-bottomed pools, over the great cleft and down into the awesome clove.” And then Nick and his son walk up the tiny creek toward the spot where Nick gigged his first trout when he was a little boy. “We could not reach it. The forest had claimed its own.”
