The Paper Hatch

Flies for Western Super Hatches

By Jim Schollmeyer and Ted Leeson. Published by Stackpole Books, 2021; $29.95 softbound.

It’s always a pleasure to watch pros at work, and angling writers Jim Schollmeyer and Ted Leeson are pros, for sure. Not only has each published several books individually, but together, they have published the canonical Fly Tier’s Benchside Reference to Techniques and Dressing Styles (1998), The Benchside Introduction to Fly Tying (2006), Trout Flies of the West: Best Contemporary Patterns from the Rockies, West (1998), Trout Flies of the East: Best Contemporary Patterns from East of the Rockies (1999), Tying Emergers: A Complete Guide (2004), and Inshore Flies: Best Contemporary Patterns from the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (2000). This publication, Flies for Western Super Hatches, is a paperback reissue of a book originally published hardbound in 2011, and like the others, it is characterized by the authors’ lucid prose in both the main text and the step-by-step tying instructions, by the exemplary photography in the step-by-steps and fly plates, and by the gold-standard production values of Stackpole Books.

As Schollmeyer and Leeson note, there probably are a zillion flies designed for Western hatches. What they present here are those they’ve found by experience are “worth investing the time and effort, both at the vise and on the water.” Those criteria together would narrow the choices considerably, but they also made selections on the basis of effectiveness, versatility, and the state of contemporary fly design in 2011 — not “some essential ‘Western fly box,’ but rather a reservoir from which an angler can choose a selection for flies tailored to the hatch profile of the waters they fish.” There probably have been another zillion flies designed for Western hatches since then, and with the advent of new materials, more are forthcoming every day, but whether any one fly works better than any other can be decided only by experience, and it’s the extensive experience of these two authors that has allowed them to select fly designs that actually have caught fish in a variety of different kinds of Western streams. Ten years later, they still will.

Schollmeyer and Leeson use the term “hatches” loosely to stand for any kind of food that trout eat in streams and lakes — mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, midges, terrestrials, and “others”: aquatic worms, baitfish, sculpins, fish eggs, leeches, scuds, and sow bugs. They divide these into “major hatches” that are so widespread that every angler needs to be prepared to fish them and “locally important hatches” that don’t occur everywhere, but that are “important in particular locales where the populations are dense” — Hexagenia mayflies, for example. For the major hatches, they provide two patterns for each “fishable stage” of an insect’s life cycle (some mayflies crawl out and hatch on land, and some stages of other bugs aren’t readily available to the fish or to the fly fisher), but just one pattern if fishing opportunities are slim. For the local hatches, there are again two patterns for “the stages of the life cycle that are of greatest consequence to fishermen” and one for the other “fishable phases.” That adds up to 150 patterns and more than a hundred step-by-step sequences.

And there’s one other thing — something that makes the book worth every penny to anyone intent on hatch matching. In addition to the step-by-step photos, there are photos of the natural insects being imitated, and these are not just the side-on photos that you can find on the internet on sites such as troutnut.com. When the top and bottom of a bug are of a different color — and for a whole lot of bugs, that is the case, for duns and spinners, but also for nymphs — they supply photos of both the top and the underside, so a tyer who cares about color matching can actually try to imitate what a trout looking up sees on a dry fly or a nymphing trout sees on a nymph tumbling in the drift. They caution that exact colors vary, but just seeing what the bottom side of a bug actually looks like is a huge help.

The major mayfly hatches, as Schollmeyer and Leeson define them, are BlueWinged Olives, Pale Morning Duns, Western Green Drake and Small Western Green Drake, Tricos, and the Western March Brown. Locally important mayf lies are the Brown Drake, Gray Drake, Callibaetis, Hexagenia, Mahogany Dun, and Pale Evening Dun. The major caddis hatches are the Green Sedge (Rhyacophyla), Mother’s Day Caddis (Brachycentrus), Small Black Caddis (Amiocentrus), and Spotted Sedge (Hydropsyche), while the only local hatch listed is what they call the Fall Caddis — the October Caddis. Major stoneflies are just the Golden Stones and the Salmonfly, but the locally important hatches covered are the Skwala, Summer Stoneflies (Claasseni sabulosa), and Yellow Sallies. For the terrestrials, Ants, Beetles, and Grasshoppers are joined by locally important moth hatches.

This is basically a reference work, something you consult, rather than something you read from start to finish, but paging through it reveals some interesting fly patterns, as well as patterns that run though the choices that Schollmeyer and Leeson make for imitating particular stages of the insect life cycle. They like snowshoe-rabbit-winged spinners, a type of pattern I’ve just recently discovered (the fluffy bunny fur stands out a bit, and you can actually see your fly.) They like a f lymph as a Western Green Drake emerger, and there’s a cool Bat Wing PMD emerger. For imitating the big mayfly duns, the Green Drakes and Brown Drakes, as well as the big stonefly adults, they like extended-body foam-bodied f lies, including a pattern called the Chugger that looks like a cartoon of an insect. Of course, there are also classic patterns such as Comparaduns, Pheasant Tail Nymphs, parachute duns, even a deer-hair Crowe Beetle, in addition today’s usual foam version.

The entry for each hatch, major and local, is introduced by a discussion of the genus and species and the peculiarities of its progress, and following those illuminating bug pictures, there are specifics about the behaviors of the life stages important to anglers and how to fish them. That’s a feature on many tying books, but what sets Flies for Western Super Hatches apart is the long experience that Schollmeyer and Leeson bring to fishing these hatches and tying effective flies for them. It’s information you can use and trust. Also, the inclusion of the local hatches is a real boon. Most fly fishers are prepared to f ish the major hatches, but there’s nothing more frustrating than watching fish feeding with abandon on a bug you’ve never seen, with no imitation close to it in you fly boxes. Flies for Western Super Hatches has them covered. If you go with the pros, you can’t go wrong.

Bud Bynack

Fly Tying for Everyone

By Tim Cammisa. Published by Stackpole Books, 2021; $24.95 hardbound.

“Richard Anderson knows everyone” is the type of sentence that gives a certain species of philosophers fits. It’s accepted in ordinary speech as unproblematically true, yet at the same time, it is clearly impossible and false. “Everyone,” of course, actually is a limited group of someones, and the question for anyone who might be interested in Tim Cammisa’s Fly Tying for Everyone is whether you’re the kind of someone the book is for. All books tell you explicitly or implicitly the kind of reader they want, and fly-tying books usually are quite upfront about it. What’s a little confusing about Fly Tying for Everyone is that the message is mixed, with the explicit and implicit messages at odds with each other.

“Everyone” here, on the one hand, is a pretty explicit demographic: it is people who already are fly tyers with some skills and equipment, but it is more limited than that — to those who also seek to employ new, synthetic materials in flies designed for techniques that go well beyond the old-fashioned upstream dry-fly drift and downstream wet-fly swing and whose primary source of fly-tying information is not books. As Chuck Furimsky states in the book’s foreword, “Tim is part of a new generation of fly tiers,” and many readers will already have known him and his work from his YouTube channel with over twenty-five thousand subscribers and his Trout and Feather website. (The book is in effect an OG supplement to this more modern approach to publication, books still being an obligatory, if quaint element of anyone’s résumé in the fly-fishing business.) As Cammisa puts it, the book is “designed to take your tying skills to the next level and beyond,” offering techniques and ideas that will allow you to “build on your prior connections and experiences in both tying and fly fishing.” Because it was “written to . . . push your tying skills to the next level,” it aims to provide the means to tie “a difficult fly,” one that you may have “favorited . . . on Instagram, seen . . . hanging out of a fish’s mouth in Fly Fisherman magazine,” or encountered “in the ‘Fly Tying with Uncle Cheech’ group on Facebook.”

On the other hand, in terms of the book’s basic structure, “everyone” here is, well, everyone — or at least everyone interested in learning to tie flies, including newbies. Perhaps it’s simply a generic requirement of fly-tying book publishing, but Fly Tying for Everyone begins, like almost every other tying book you’ve ever seen, with basic information about tools and materials. It’s titled “Welcome to the 21st Century of Fly Tying,” but it’s mostly a survey of such things as how to choose a vise and other tools, complete with product placements. The section on materials, however, does focus on synthetics and resins, as well as on modern hook designs and on substituting synthetic for natural materials.

But anyone thinking that Fly Tying for Everyone is fly tying for everyone will be disappointed. The intended audience is that guy in the backward trucker cap and the Euro nymphing rig fishing the pocket water I can no longer wade as I wait on the bank for fish to rise in the pool below. It’s a book for bros. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The list of fly patterns tells the story. There are only two dry flies, Lance Egan’s Corn-Fed Caddis and Curtis Fry’s foam Moodah Poodah, and two emergers, a Condor Emerger (which uses Veniard Condor Substitute) and a simple CDCwinged Pliva Shuttlecock, attributed to Fly Fishing Team USA member Devin Olsen. There are six nymph patterns: the Frenchie, a CDC Quill Body Jig Nymph, the Mop Fly (yes, the Mop Fly), the Sexy Walt’s Worm, the Perdigon, and the Beach Body Stone. Three streamers complete to lineup: an Articulated Streamer, an Extreme String Baitfish, and a Mini Jig Bugger. I tied the Corn-Fed Caddis and can attest that coming to terms with its CDC hackle in a dubbing loop is not for beginners. And obviously, the list is designed for Euro nymphers.

But why a Mop Fly? After all, it scarcely can be said to be a fly that’s “tied,” and this is not a book for beginners. Cammisa records getting a polite “WTF?” from his editor, Jay Nichols, and in response claims he’s actually teaching techniques here — shaggy dubbing in a loop for a thorax and supergluing the mop to the hook shank — but the principal reason seems to be that it is one of “the top five videos I’ve ever created” and “a more recent version” is presented here “to show ways to increase durability for patterns.” Maybe. Still, again, it mixes the messages.

There’s also a lot going on at once, and because the other generic features of most tying books are absent here — building from simpler to more complicated patterns and techniques, for instance, or presenting a wide variety of patterns of a certain type, or organizing the text by the bugs being imitated — it’s sometimes hard to focus on what the topic of a chapter actually is in terms of techniques being taught. Each chapter, after a discussion of the fly and some of the issues involved in tying it, is followed by a “Tying Tip,” “Featured Technique,” “Materials to Consider” for substitutions, and “Fishing Suggestions” prior to the actual step-by-step tying photos, and most patterns actually involve multiple techniques and materials, most of which get commented on, so the approach to each pattern involves a lot of different things.

But Tim Cammisa is an experienced fly tyer and there are plenty of tips that any tyer with some experience can pick up from Fly Tying for Everyone. Keeping a small ruler or set of dividers handy makes sense if you struggle with getting the proportions of your flies to be consistent. Trimming CDC irregularly by picking bits off with your f ingers, not cutting the tips even with scissors, to achieve a buggier appearance is a neat tip. It never occurred to me that if UV-cure resin remains sticky after being hit with the light, it can be because the batteries in the light need to be changed. Things like that. Your results certainly will vary. I even appreciated being told that the Frenchie is “the modern-day equivalent of the Frank Sawyer Pheasant Tail Nymph” and that the Sexy Walt’s Worm is “our modern-day replacement for the Hare’s Ear.” Even if you might not fit the book’s target demographic, you’ll surely find something useful in Fly Fishing for Everyone.

Bud Bynack

Fly Fishing West Yellowstone: A History and Guide

By Bruce Staples and Bob Jacklin. Published by Stackpole Books; $29.95 softbound.

The waters of Yellowstone National Park may not be a destination in California, but they are a destination for many California fly fishers, and anyone who is drawn to that magical world will find plenty that’s of interest in Fly Fishing West Yellowstone. It’s really two books in one, as the subtitle says. A good half of it is a history of fly fishing in the park, told from the perspective of the people who were involved in the sport’s evolution there, when the West Yellowstone area “became perhaps the most hallowed fly-fishing destination of today,” told by connecting previously “unconnected pieces” from the past and from the memories of the people who are part of that history. Longtime fly-shop owner and guide Bob Jacklin is himself part of that history, and Bruce Staples is the author of several books on the Yellowstone area. Between them, they also have deep knowledge of the area’s major rivers, streams, and lakes, and the other half of the book is a guide to fishing these waters. In this time of drought and increased crowds in the park (By July, it was already a million visitors ahead of pre-Covid levels), knowing where to fish — and where others don’t know to fish — can be a trip saver. Plus, the historical photos are priceless, and the photos of park waters are both an incentive to go and a delight for the homebound angler.

Bud Bynack


Classics Revisited

With Michael Checchio

Mountain in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon

By Bruce Brown. Originally published in 1982, available as a reprint of the first American illustrated edition from the University of Washington Press, 1995; $25.00 softbound.

Mountain in the Clouds is the Silent Spring of salmon fishing. Published almost forty years ago, Bruce Brown’s Mountain in the Clouds was the first book to paint the full portrait of the systematic collapse of wild Pacific salmon and point fingers at the perps.

Focusing on environmental mismanagement, the book examines the history and politics of salmon fishing in Washington State, revealing how greed, indifference, the shocking mistreatment of Indian tribes, and the terrible choices made by government officials and environmental watchdogs alike led to the near extermination of native Pacific salmon. But it is far more than just an investigative exposé. It is also an exploration of the region’s ecology and people, and the author’s personal experiences and feeling for the land and water give the book much of its poetry and grace.

Like Cadillac Desert, the landmark exposé of water mismanagement in the arid West, Brown’s book documents the players and policy makers responsible for ecological and cultural devastation. His was the first book to give us the whole picture about what went wrong and why in the rainy Pacific Northwest.

Leaving his Seattle newspaper job, he retreated to his family’s property in Sumas, near the Canadian border, and spent the next three years wading streams, doing research, and writing his book. He found the usual suspects contributing to the demise of wild salmon: logging, dams, pollution, commercial fishing, and suburban sprawl. But he went further than most in sounding the alarms and proving that hatcheries pose perhaps the gravest threat to healthy salmon runs.

Mountain in the Clouds opens as dramatically as John McPhee’s Coming into the Country. It is a hot Indian summer day in the Olympic range. Smoke from slash fires can be spotted up and down the coast. The author is being helicoptered to a gravel bar on the upper Queets River for a rendezvous with a fisheries biologist for the Quinault Indian Nation. Below him are old-growth forests and purling streams, as well as a patchwork of clear-cuts just outside Olympic National Park. The author joins a survey crew of Native Americans counting spawning salmon, hoping to find a few wild fish too stubborn to go extinct.

Brown puts us in the stream with the surveyors for an eye-level view of the spawning. We spot a few chum salmon changing colors like an octopus and find a few king salmon holding in a pool. Some spawned-out carcasses litter the stream bank. The salmon seem few and far between. The run appears enfeebled. Brown speaks of the physiology of salmon, their homing instinct and incredible sense of smell. He marvels at how salmon bring marine nutrients to the rain forest to feed eagles and bears. The view is beautiful, but the outlook is pessimistic.

One of the uglier aspects of the “salmon wars” that raged throughout the Pacific Northwest at the time the book was written were the racist policies enacted by Washington State officials aligned with commercial and sport fishermen who tried to foist blame for the collapsing fishery onto Indian gillnetters. The charge was preposterous, as Brown proved. “The one group of salmon fishermen on the Washington coast that did not participate in the plunder was the Indians,” he wrote. Denied their treaty rights and a voice in managing the salmon runs, the Indians sued in federal court, and the upshot was the famous Boldt Decision that restored their historical fishing rights. White fishermen were livid, and the state authorities at first refused to enforce the ruling until compelled to do so by the courts.

In cataloging all the horrors perpetrated on salmon — horrors that must include Grand Coulee Dam — “the single most destructive human act toward salmon of all time” — which closed off more than a thousand miles of spawning rivers and streams in the upper Columbia, Brown revealed how politics trumped science every time. To understand why so many disastrous policy decisions were made in Washington State, one just had to follow the money. Almost every aspect of modern human society in the Northwest has played some part in the liquidation of the wild salmon,” Brown wrote,

but the most prominent players are relatively few. An approximate roster of the groups that have most heavily profited from, and served to bring about, the ongoing salmon crisis in Washington can be obtained from the campaign contributors to almost any state legislator active in the natural resources arena. Running for reelection as the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee in 1976, for instance, Representative John Martinis received the bulk of his money from utilities (Puget Power, Washington Water Power, Washington Natural Gas); timber companies (Boise Cascade, Georgia Pacific, Simpson, Weyerhaeuser); oil companies (Arco, Shell, Standard of California); banks (Seafirst, Rainier, Pacificbank); non-Indian f ishermen (Puget Sound Gillnetters, Association of Pacific Fisheries); and labor organizations ( Washington State Labor Council, Washington Education Association.)

Brown took on hatchery production, showing it to be more bane than boon. The Elwha River once hosted the largest run of Chinook salmon on the Olympic Peninsula. A 108-foot-high concrete dam was erected on the main stem without any of the fish ladders that the law required; the thinking was they could substitute a hatchery, instead. “Initially, the state was able to collect as many as two million eggs annually from fish that were born before the dam was built, but within a few years the pool below the dam was nearly empty of fish.”

Hatcheries are a big business, but hardly a substitute for healthy runs of wild fish. Hatchery fish are maladaptive and compete with wild salmon. And they diminish, rather than enhance runs. “Not once has the Department of Fisheries been able to replicate the number, variety or quality of the wild salmon runs killed by major developments such as dams.” Yet the State of Washington, Brown noted, persisted in its policy of relying on hatcheries while not enforcing environmental laws.

“During the course of my three years wandering around the Olympic Peninsula,” Brown wrote, “I saw wild salmon of every species, as well as two anadromous trout, the steelhead and sea-run cutthroat. Many were beautiful fish, and occasionally the massed display was stunning . . . but nowhere did I find the old glory, or the life it supported.”

Mountain in the Clouds is an absorbing, revealing, frustrating, and deeply alarming report, a must-read for any civic-minded and historically minded angler. It initiated conservation reforms, prompted Olympic National Park to reintroduce wild salmon into remote areas of the park where they had been exterminated, and added to a chorus of voices clamoring for the removal of two dams blocking the salmon on the Elwha River. Those dams finally came down — Elwha Dam in 2011 and Glines Canyon Dam in 2016 — the largest dam removal in US history. For the first time in a century, salmon and steelhead once again ascended the full length of the Elwha and its tributaries.

Brown “struck the first match in the dark dungeon of Pacific salmon management,” wrote the Seattle Times in appreciation. His book has never been out of print. He wrote a few more lesser-known titles, but his writing career didn’t pan out — a huge disappointment. So when Windows 95 was introduced and he needed money, Brown launched an online clearinghouse for software glitches called BugNet. In 1999, he sold the company just four months before the dot-com bust and walked away a millionaire. He got deeply into mountain biking, but didn’t lose his passion for conservation. Interviewed by the Seattle Times for the thirtieth anniversary of his iconic book, he called for stopping subdivisions cold, eliminating fish farms, and a corporate death penalty for polluters. And the dismantling of the Elwha dams? “I can’t say I thought I’d live to see the day,” he said.

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