Nymphs for Streams and Stillwaters
By Dave Hughes. Published by Stackpole Books, 2020; $29.95 softbound.
Nymphs for Streams and Stillwaters, by Dave Hughes, is one of several books that Stackpole is releasing in paperback editions, titles that were previously available only hardbound. Here’s the thing: it’s a book by Dave Hughes. If you don’t have it in your angling library, buy it.
That’s really all you need to know, but as a diligent reviewer, I will explain the premise behind what I just said and describe the book. The premise is that anything by Dave Hughes is worth owning, reading, and rereading. Over a career that has yielded 26 books, by my count on Amazon, covering every aspect of coldwater fly fishing, he has consistently produced works of simple, but elegant prose characterized by common sense so well expressed that it sometimes rises to the level of wisdom.
That is the case with Nymphs for Streams and Stillwaters, originally published in hardback in 2009 at $59.95. It’s divided into four parts, the final three covering searching nymphs for moving waters, imitative nymphs for moving waters, and nymphs for still waters, but the fundamental outlook is established in the first part and reflected in its title: “The Way Nymphing Shapes Itself.” It shapes itself, as does any aspect of fishing with the long rod, via the experience of the angler. Here, that’s Hughes himself, but on the basis of his experience, a larger process emerges, made concrete throughout this book by the numerous stories that Hughes tells.
Angling shapes itself by a process of expansion and contraction, systole and diastole, beginning and ending and beginning. The story that initiates Nymphs for Streams and Stillwaters turns on the way that flies that don’t work eventually drive out ones that do from anyone’s fly boxes, necessitating a new beginning: “I start each season with a few nymphs in my box that I know will work, a larger scattering of flies that I hope will work,” and a majority of flies “that have failed to work at all, and therefore accumulate because they never get tied to tippets and lost.” So he begins again, buying a new box, partly filling it only with proven patterns in the sizes and colors appropriate for the waters he fishes, but leaving room for the flies from new waters, new materials, new inspirations at the vise, however goofy and ineffective these may prove, because beginning again is beginning to repeat the process, including whatever personal idiosyncrasies will shape the next phase. As you work through the book, he says, you, too, should begin with a new box for each of these three kinds of nymphs.
As seems obligatory in every tying book, there are chapters on basic tools, materials, and techniques, including one you seldom see on putting together a portable kit for on-the-road tying. The meat of the book, however, consists of the many proven patterns presented in each of the three parts, with step-by-step tying directions and discussions of the most effective ways to fish them, written in Hughes’s lucid prose, and step-by-step photographs and other images reproduced to Stackpole’s high standards. Each part also ends with a summary of what an effective new nymph box for that style of fly might contain and conclusions about tying and fishing searching, imitative, and stillwater nymphs. What unites all these particulars thematically are basic commonsense principles that are embodied in the angling stories that Hughes tells and explicitly emphasized from time to time — principles that tend to get lost as we keep looking for the perfect fly to fish in any and every circumstance.
The first is simplicity. We all get caught up in the possibilities of elaborating a fly in the vise, but flies that catch the attention of fish tend to be a lot simpler than flies that catch the fancy of anglers. That means that searching nymphs for the most part are all you need to do the job, and you need imitative nymphs only when the abundance and/or large-scale availability of a particular bug at emergence makes something more imitative necessary.
The other principle is a respect for your own experience, which means tying and fishing the flies best adapted to the waters you fish. Just going with what has always worked is fine, up to a point — it is part of the same human nature that will eventually lead you to accumulate a lot of weird and ineffective flies. However, actually doing stream samples, collecting specimens of the food your trout are eating, and adapting what you tie to what you find expands your experiential base and makes catching fish more likely. It’s the way your nymphing will shape itself.
As I began by saying, such commonsense principles embodied in lucid prose are hallmarks of Dave Hughes’s books. That’s why like his others, Nymphs for Streams and Stillwaters is worth owning.
— Bud Bynack
365 Fly-Fishing Tips for Trout, Bass, and Panfish
By Skip Morris. Published by Stackpole Books, 2019; $24.95 softbound.
Books get used in a lot of different ways. Large tomes can also be doorstops, and thin pamphlets can also serve as table levelers, but even when they are used in more conventional ways — by actually reading them — the variety of uses is as large as the variety of readers. Anything that’s written needs to be interpreted, of course, but there are also several different ways to use any book, ways that may or may not accord with its intended employments.
Most of us use dictionaries (when we use them at all) to check the spelling or meaning of words, but Jerry Garcia claimed that when his band was “in utter desperation” looking for a name, he found “a huge dictionary, big monolithic thing, and I just opened it up. There in huge black letters was ‘The Grateful Dead.’” Medieval books of hours, based on the eight times a day when devout Catholics were to recite the appropriate liturgy, also were status symbols and were sometimes simply used to teach children how to read. And the Bible presents itself as a path to salvation, but some people use it as a means of meditation, opening it at random, daily, to discover a verse that may help them focus the day.
From its title, 365 Fly-Fishing Tips for Trout, Bass, and Panfish sounds like it’s intended to be used as a kind of secular book of days or Bible in that same way, supplying a tip a day the whole year round. You certainly can use it that way. The tips themselves are all one-line zingers: “Fish where guides don’t take their clients” (Tip 93); Consider tenkara” (Tip 114); “Fish where fish are” (Tip 163), though each is then followed by a few paragraphs unpacking what that means when applied. Actually, though, the book is intended as a comprehensive introduction to fly fishing for newbies and as a compendium of potential “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas for more experienced anglers — one, moreover, not limited to trout fishing but, as the title says, extending to all the major freshwater fishes that flyrodders may target. “If you’re new to fly fishing and you read through this book — just one time through — you’ll turn the last page a much better fly fisher than you were when you turned the front cover,” Skip Morris promises in the Introduction. “Imagine how much you’ll improve if you read through it twice.” Likewise, he says, “Even if you’ve fly-fished for decades, I believe you’ll still pick up a heap of fresh, practical information and ideas here.”

Indeed, though it consists of 365 simple declarative sentences, followed by texts explicating and elaborating on them, the book is organized as a systematic exploration of freshwater fly fishing, beginning with a chapter titled “Meet Your Fishes” and progressing thorough “Strategies and Tactics,” “Techniques That Catch Fish,” “Casting — Delivering Your Fly to Fish,” “Figuring Out Where the Fish Are,” “Hooking, Playing, Landing, Handling, and Releasing Fish,” “All About Artificial Flies,” “What Fish Eat and (Most) of Our Flies Imitate,” “Rigs, Rigging, and Tackle,” “Staying Safe Out There,” “The Practical Fly Fisher and Philosopher . . . and Whatever,” and a glossary, “Learn the Lingo: 140 Fly-Fishing Terms.”
In addition, Morris says, “When the book was finished, and all 365 tips researched, written, and polished, I had some left over” and “I couldn’t let any of them go.” So there are “Bonus Tips” sprinkled throughout the book.
Both the specific tips and the way they’re put in context make a lot of sense. “Fish Where Fish Are,” for example, by itself is both a “Well duh!” statement of the obvious and a home truth: newbies often don’t do that, and how often do veterans think through how the conditions when we’re on the stream determine where fish will be found, instead of just always fishing a favorite spot or where we caught something last time? The tip certainly requires elaboration, though, and receives it both in the explanatory text that follows and in the larger topical context in which Morris locates it. The book has a well-thought-out expository structure, from tip to tip and beginning to end.
Reading it straight through therefore would certainly immerse a newbie in both the basic elements and the nuances of the sport. Morris’s writing is familiar in tone and at the same time authoritative, and it should serve his declared purpose admirably. As he points out, this is his nineteenth book, and as the author of over three hundred articles, as well, he has arrived at an easy, confidential, accessible style.
He’s also attuned to where a newbie will be coming from in getting into the sport. I was initially taken aback by Tip 203, “Consider Catch-and-Release,” Consider? Most introductions to fly fishing don’t begin by assuming it’s optional. But what follows is a nondogmatic argument in favor of the practice that concludes by taking one objection head-on: “There’s a philosophy out there that says catching and releasing fish is torture and that killing every fish caught is kinder. I respect others’ rights to their opinions. If I were a fish in a net, though, and that barbless fly hook was already backed out of my jaw, I’d just want to swim off home.” The one-liner tips coupled with explanations that unpack them, listed one after another, also make it possible to present the nuances of the sport as nuances, not as puzzles. It’s simultaneously true that big fish like big flies (Tip 6) and that big fish eat small flies (Tip 7), that low light means good fishing (Tips 12– 14) and that fishing can be good in bright sunlight (Tip 15), that you should pick a body of water and learn it (Tip 94) and explore waters you haven’t fished (Tip 95).
As one of his intended readers who has fly-fished for decades, I did indeed find some cool tips, too: bugs look bigger on the water than they actually are, so go smaller, or better yet, capture a natural (Tip 262), and when fiddling with things you may drop while rigging on the bank, do so over your upside-down hat (Tip 289). But that was me. Your experience will vary.
Having read the book through, though, I now expect to use it by randomly opening it and seeing what pops out. It worked for Jerry, and you never know. . . .
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Dry Line Steelhead and Other Subjects
By Bill McMillan. Published by Frank Amato Publications, 1987
One of the most satisfying expressions of joy I know is to fly fish for salmon and steelhead in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, a region I define as extending from the Eel River Canyon in Northern California, where the Cascadia Fault begins, all the way up into British Columbia. When I first moved here from the East Coast many years ago, eager to become a California steelhead fisherman, I read everything about these sea-run creatures that I could get my hands on. One of the books I chanced upon was Dry Line Steelhead and Other Subjects, by Bill McMillan, put out by Frank Amato Publications in Portland, Oregon, a publisher producing a long line of sport-fishing books, journals, and magazines. At first glance, it didn’t appear promising. The softbound book seemed to have been laid out like a dog’s breakfast and printed on recycled paper with an inkjet cartridge. But while the focus was on tactics and methods, it blended the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and its seasonal changes like few other technical works I knew. The author wasn’t just a fisherman, but a poet, a first-rate scientist, and a deep seeker in the tradition of Roderick Haig-Brown.
Bill McMillan’s monkish devotion to steelhead was evident on every page. He lived in a cabin on the Washougal River that could have served as an anchorite’s dwelling. But the monk hadn’t taken a vow of silence. His book was crammed with his words and photographs and seemed to contain everything that could possibly be said on the subject. It was essentially a reprint of fourteen years’ worth of his earlier articles appearing in a half dozen angling magazines, as well as some of his private correspondence, one or two scientific symposium papers, and even his testimony in support of Indian tribal fishing rights at a Senate committee hearing. A majority of those articles and features had appeared in Salmon Trout Steelheader, a magazine published by Amato that partly served as a kind of forum for West Coast steelhead fly fishers who were starved for information, weren’t getting it from any East Coast publications, and were experimenting with innovative techniques in order to meet the various challenges of their sport. The chapters in McMillan’s book were his original articles, faithfully reprinted, with numerous updates flagged as “author’s notes” and highlighted in italics. Remarkably, it all coheres as a book.
Rereading it today, I can see that long before anyone was bandying words such as “holistic” and “bioregion,” McMillan was writing about watersheds, keystone fauna, and ecosystems, always with an eye on the big picture.
His book’s primary focus was on fly fishing for steelhead using a floating line for both dry-fly and wet-fly presentations. Hence its title — Dry Line Steelhead. McMillan had come of age in an era when most steelhead fly fishers were using sinking lines. California steelhead anglers had little use for floaters, because theirs was primarily a winter fishery, and in very cold water, steelhead aren’t inclined to rise far off the bottom to chase a fly. It has something to do with the fish’s metabolism. But Oregon and Washington hosted both summer and winter runs of anadromous fish, and fly anglers north of the Golden State were becoming very interested in taking steelhead closer to the surface, when seasonal changes and warmer river temperatures allowed the fish to become more active.
McMillan disliked sinking lines because he couldn’t mend his line and control his fly as well as he wanted as it moved through the water column on the swing. Through close observation of river conditions and the behavior of anadromous fish and by constant experimentation, McMillan worked out a variety of ways to fish successfully with a floating line throughout all four seasons.
A lot of his inspiration came from a British angler of the Golden Age named A. H. E. Wood. Arthur Wood was an obsessive salmon angler and an Englishman straight out of Downton Abbey. A successful engineer and financially well off, Wood leased the Cairnton beat on the River Dee in Scotland. He always fished in a jacket, waistcoat, and necktie.
His noonday meals were served to him on his beat in luncheon huts that he had designed. And he became famous for devising the so-called “greased-line” method of fly fishing for Atlantic salmon.
Wood lived back in the days when fly anglers fished with silk lines that sank when they became waterlogged. Taking the fly deep down to the salmon was the preferred method at the time. But Wood observed that as water temperatures rose, salmon became more inclined to rise from their resting places to take flies on or very near the surface, so Wood began dressing his silk lines with lanolin to get them to float.
Wood devised a presentation that allowed the salmon to view the fly broadside. Being a large and strong man, he fished a single-handed 12-foot bamboo fly rod and could cast his Kingfisher line and heavy fly an impressive distance. He would cast slightly quartering upstream and let the fly drift in a drag-free manner, allowing the currents to play upon the material to make it look alive as it drifted downstream. He would prolong the dragfree part of his drift by making a few upstream mends in his line, which let the salmon get a side view of the fly’s bulky silhouette. And then as the fly came into the swing-down position on the drift, Wood would fish it on the drag in the same way as a traditional wet-fly swing.
The great angler died in 1934. A year later, a book called Greased Line Fishing for Salmon was published, and it caused a bit of a stir in angling circles. It was written by “Jock Scott,” the pen name of the popular angling author Donald G. Ferris Rudd. He based his book on the extensive (and sometimes confusing) notes kept by Wood in his stream diaries and fishing papers, which Rudd had permission to use.
McMillan read this book, and while like many readers he found it semantically challenging, he became convinced that Wood’s variations on the greased-line technique could be applied to his West Coast steelhead rivers. (When Frank Amato published Jock Scott’s classic in America under the revised title Greased Line Fishing for Salmon and Steelhead, he had McMillan write the introduction.)
McMillan recognized that there were clear behavioral similarities between steelhead and Atlantic salmon, especially in how they responded to an artificial fly as water temperatures rose and steelhead became more active. But the River Dee in Scotland has long stretches of flat gradient, while many Northwest rivers flow out of canyons and have steeper gradients and swifter flows. And Wood tended to fish in low water-conditions, so his specific greased-line technique wasn’t always suitable as a blanket method for Pacific Northwest streams. Reinterpretation and experimentation were often called for, and other dry-line techniques had to be developed and adjusted for seasonal changes. These differing techniques included skating flies, twitch retrieves, and even dead drifts. McMillan showed that the floating line was versatile enough to be used in wintertime on clement days when water temperatures and stream conditions allowed for it.
The first nine chapters in his book deal with the versatility of those “dry line” techniques, and the fourteen chapters that follow are about the “other subjects” in his book’s title. These include such topics as conservation, stream management, hatchery production, natural history, habitat, and the legacy of angling. The question of why we fish is probably best explored in his chapter “To the Olympics: In Search of the Spirit of Angling,” but the writing throughout is limpid and beautiful, and McMillan brings a painter’s palette to the glories of the Pacific Northwest. He is channeling not only A. H. E. Wood, but his hero Roderick Haig-Brown. Whether he is casting to a steelhead or meditating upon the song of a hermit thrush, McMillan gives a reader a larger bioregional viewpoint, showing the plant and animal communities, watersheds, rainfall, seasonal changes, and geological forces in play. Today, technology does a lot of the work for us. Sink-tip lines descend at varying speeds to wherever the fish are holding in the water column, depending on gradient and current speed. There seems to be a synthetic fly line designed for every situation. But McMillan shows there’s more to this than cast, swing, and repeat. There’s as much art as science in steelhead fishing, and as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once said, “Art is like a wilderness area or a little national park surviving in modern consciousness.”