Pacific Coast Flies and Fly Fishing: A Comprehensive Guide to Tying and Fishing Over 60 Patterns
By Scott Sadil. Published by Stackpole Books, 2023; $39.95 softbound
It’s said there are two kinds of people: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. In today’s fly-fishing world, there also are two kinds of books. One is written by guides and fly tyers and social-media influencers. The books are how-tos and where-tos, and they have useful information, often derived from long experience on the water, but they are written by people who probably were dreaming of rising trout while sitting in Mr. Thistlebottom’s English class. They are not written by writers — by people for whom the art of written prose is a calling.
The other, more rare books are written by people who are writers for whom fly fishing simply is part of who they are and what they do — writers such as Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, and John Gierach. Scott Sadil is a writer who is a fly fisher, not a fly fisher who has tried to be a writer. The result is Pacific Coast Flies and Fly Fishing, a book ostensibly about f ly tying and f ly fishing that is much more than that — a nuanced exploration of the sport and its relation to the things we do in life that engage us. I review a lot of fly-tying books. This is the first one I ever have recommended as literature. Unless you are a new subscriber to this magazine, you know Scott Sadil as the author of the “At the Vise” column in California Fly Fisher for the past decade. He also is the author of the short-story collections Goodnews River: Wild Fish, Wild Waters, and the Stories We Find There (2020), Fly Tales: Lessons in Fly Fishing Like the Real Guys (2010), and Lost in Wyoming: Stories (2009), the novel Cast from the Edge: Tales of an Uncommon Fly Fisher (1999), and Angling Baja: One Man’s Fly Fishing Journey Through the Surf (1996), one of the early books on fly fishing the surf zone and the beaches of Mexico. If you’ve read “At the Vise” for a while, you’ll recognize a number of the essays included in Pacific Coast Flies and Fly Fishing, tweaked and updated where necessary. At the bare minimum, for readers of the magazine, it’s worth having all these pieces together in one place without having to root through your stash of old issues.
Reading them together, however, is a different experience than reading one every other month. I called them “essays,” and I meant the word as a verb, as well as a noun — an attempt to get at something. We do that when things don’t quite make sense, even seem paradoxical, a compound, as happens sometimes in life, of two things that can’t both be true, but are. Living with contradictions — actually embracing them — is something fly fishers do all the time.
Fishing for steelhead is an extreme example of this — a “spiritual paradox,” Sadil calls it, upon realizing that “the more I knew, the less the knowledge seemed to matter”: however great your experience and skill, you cast and cast and cast and either catch a fish or don’t.
With steelhead, you usually don’t, and you don’t ever know why. Yet steelheaders still do everything they can to improve their odds, learning all they can about the sport and the fish and the latest gear and techniques. So do the rest of us, whatever we fish for, whether it’s indulging in the magical thinking involved in the notion that a thousand-dollar fly rod just has to improve our casting or actually taking casting lessons to do so. It’s why we read magazines such as this one.
The paradox that Sadil uses to frame Pacific Coast Flies and Fly Fishing is established by setting the book in the Tyer’s Roost, a fictional fly shop where fly tyers congregate under a sign that says, “Your flies don’t matter.” Like most accomplished fly fishers, Sadil firmly believes it is how a fly is presented, not the fly itself, that determines whether a fish takes it or not. The fly doesn’t matter, but “still, you have to knot something to your tippet,” as Sadil puts it. And while we know that some flies work better than others, we don’t really know why. As he says while pondering why the Zug Bug works so well, even though it resembles nothing particular in nature, “you forego certainty, accepting outcomes you can’t legitimately explain. From a personal standpoint, I’ve long believed that’s one of the appeals of the sport: Things happen for mysterious reasons.”
That sense that there are mysteries to be explored is one way to describe the entrance to the rabbit hole down which fly fishers who become committed to the sport, and fly tyers, in particular, inevitably end up falling. As he writes, again about steelheading, It’s hard to say . . . what we’re really after. That may be part of the appeal of a genuine steelheading career: if you’re unclear what you’re looking for, chances are you’ll never claim to have found anything that leaves you with a sense of having arrived, of completing some finite goal, the sort of popular bucket list mentality that prompts so many of us to wipe our hands of one thing and move on to the next, as though what we were doing, in the past, was somehow not good enough, too shallow or, worse, not really what we wanted to do in the first place.
As he says repeatedly, “We catch fish with the flies we fish with. Beyond that, who’s to say where the truth lies?” And yet, we don’t just tie “something” to our tippets. It’s a maxim that we fish better and catch more fish with flies we believe in. Your fly doesn’t matter, but you still care deeply about the flies you fish, because a kind of magic happens over the course of a fly-fishing life: “There’s nearly always a story, if not many stories, behind our likes and dislikes, the flies we choose to tie and use and those we reject or refuse to give even a fair chance. Rarely are we offered such an opportunity to see, if we pay attention, how our beliefs can create the reality we experience.”
Pacific Coast Flies and Fly Fishing consists of such stories. The typical fly-fishing magazine article with a new fly pattern to present to the world, the latest thing since the previous latest thing, commonly begins with what I think of as a “There I was” scene: the day, the river, the fly, the drift—fish on! Sadil’s stories aren’t like that. In the spirit of the exploration of paradoxes, they’re springboards for reflections on why, given that we don’t really know why a fly works, a fly works. The answers have more to do with “simulation,” not imitation, especially the attitude and action of the fly in the water. Rather than mimicking any particular food item that a fish could care about, successful f lies, Sadil believes, elicit a “could be food” response from a fish eager to eat and curious about what might be edible. This amounts to acknowledging that “the heart of the game” is simply fooling fish, and more radically, as happens especially in steelheading, doing so with flies “that make little or no pretense of replicating anything that inhabits the real world as we know it, but that are somehow intended to fool fish by power of an alchemy we can, at best, only intuit.” A classic Catskill dry fly, after all, is more like an abstract sculpture than a mayfly. In the end, Sadil claims, if indeed your fly doesn’t matter, and if it’s confidence in a fly that brings success, all other things being equal, you might just as well choose to tie and fish flies that are beautiful.
The stories also lead to ref lections on what we can do to catch more fish, even if in the end, we’re not sure why we catch the fish we catch — ref lections on the gear appropriate to particular situations and the approaches that seem to work when a particular fly is fished. Just as his preference is for flies that are beautiful, though, he favors techniques that bring pleasure in their own right — swinging wet flies and nymphs for trout and steelhead and tight-line nymphing without an indicator, staying in touch with your fly. He’s no fan of indicator nymphing, especially for steelhead, when these more enjoyable methods are so much more engaging and bring so much pleasure.
Sometimes, also, as I’ve suggested, the stories lead to reflections on the meaning of the sport as he sees it. In the course of them, we get personal vignettes that add up to a kind of pointillist autobiography, from his adolescent surfer and surf-fishing days in Southern California and Baja through moves to Oregon and a return to Baja, through work as a carpenter and school teacher and boat builder, through divorce and skin cancer and fishing with one’s kids. One of the most affecting of these comes near the end of the book and also near the end of that larger story thus far:
Say what I might — and I’ve said plenty — about all the wisdom and wonder available through fly fishing, I’ve reached some strange new territory in my life where I’m about to concede what so many have learned before me. That is, the best reason to indulge one’s passions in this all-consuming silly game is the people one meets along the way, the friends one makes, the characters one discovers, the stories lived, told, and shared.
Sometimes, too, the stories — about a hatch of Little Black Caddis on a famous river with big trout, say, or about the creation of a friend’s bizarre egglike steelhead fly — are just good stories, told by a writer who knows his art.
“Wait a minute,” you say. “This a book about fly tying — right?” Yes, that, too, but again, it’s about fly tying as Scott Sadil sees it. If not a paradox, there’s at least a creative tension in his approach to tying flies, or rather, to thinking about how to go about it.
On the one hand, the history of the sport provides an ample number of patterns that have been proven for decades and, in the case of the soft hackles he especially likes, even centuries. On the other, because we don’t really know why anything works, we’re always trying to invent the new latest thing — what he calls the Miracle Fly.
What that means here is that a lot of the patterns in the book are classics that he or one of his friends has tweaked in some way, either to meet some specific angling situation or just because the tweak rectified something that bothered them in the original and made the fly look right.
These run the gamut from a Pheasant Tail Nymph with starling hackle legs and a version of the Woolly Bugger tied to imitate a baitfish to waking versions of Muddlers for steelhead and from Clouser Minnows to generic baitfish flies. As that range suggests, the patterns in the book cover the spectrum of Sadil’s experience: trout flies, steelhead flies, and saltwater flies.
But on the other hand, there are also flies created by Sadil and his friends in response to specific angling problems. In fact, he encourages tying flies when you have just arrived home from a trip so you’ll have flies ready when the situation you encountered then occurs again. That’s how it’s possible to believe your fly doesn’t matter and still end up carrying boxes and boxes and boxes of different f lies. Many of the flies created in this way, like most of the flies in the book, are pretty simple ties. There’s nothing particularly challenging in the way of tying technique in the book. A couple of Intruder-style steelhead f lies, included to scratch the itch of curiosity, more than anything else, are about as complicated as any pattern gets. That brings us to one final paradox: this is a book about fly tying, but a book you’re likely to spend at least as much time with in an easy chair with a drink by your side as you do with it propped up next to your vise. If you don’t tie, this may pitch you into that rabbit hole or at least give you plenty to think about on the stream. If you do tie, you’ll find plenty to think about, as well. If it is a book about flies and fly tying, it’s because these have been part of a writer’s engagement with the paradoxes, contradictions, and rewards of an angling life.
— Bud Bynack
All the Time in the World
By John Gierach, Published by Simon and Schuster, 2023; $27.99 softbound.
A lot of fly fishers of a certain age started reading John Gierach pretty religiously in 1986, when Trout Bum was published. Back then, before The Movie, A River Runs Through It, we were the youngish, new generation of fly anglers who mostly taught ourselves the game by reading the classics of the post–World War II f ly-fishing gods. We read Vincent Marinaro, Ernest Schwiebert, Doug Swisher and Carl Richards, Lefty Kreh, Ray Bergman, A. J. McClane, Leonard Wright, Jr., and Theodore Gordon. We fell in love with Robert Traver, and a lot of us still call night crawlers “pork chops” to this day, often to confused looks and raised eyebrows. Gierach was one of us. He was a baby boomer who had long hair and drove Volkswagens and became passionate about fly fishing before it was uber trendy. He read the same books we had read, and he fished a lot of similar (if not the same) places we fished. But when he started writing about fly fishing, he gravitated away from the how-to, where-to stuff that was filling the magazines and new fly fishing books. He wrote about the soul of our sport. That’s not to say that his books don’t have exceptional teaching moments or give solid hints about good places to fish, but the gems are the sentences, the paragraphs, the stories that sum up the essence of experiences we’ve all had on or because of the water. It was like he was there with us and heard our laughter, shared our tales, saw us smiling quietly to ourselves while watching a dung beetle at its job and finding too many comparisons to acquaintances or politicians.
His most recent book, published in March this year, All the Time in the World, is the latest of the twenty-odd books he has published so far. It is vintage Gierach that will make you smile big and smile small.
“A good trout stream is like a good paragraph; linear and recognizable, but with a little surprise around every corner,” Gierach writes at one point. This book is like a good trout stream, with a steady flow of wonderful riffles and pools that keep our attention because of what they hold. For example: “fishing has always seemed like less of a learned skill and more of a preexisting condition.” Those of us who can’t remember the first time we caught a fish because we had elders who dragged us along, perhaps still in diapers, identify with that statement. Or “There are plenty of trout and if fishing teaches you anything, it’s how to shrug off failure and cast again.” Gierach is talking about briefly hooking a big trout and losing it, although he points out that you really can’t lose something you never had. Chapters later, he rationalizes another lost trout — after running through a gamut of emotions we all know — with maybe disingenuous praise for the fish: “well good for you.” You been there?
He muses about the kind of f ishing day when you were the Pied Piper of trout, but alone and without witnesses. Even though no one will believe how good it was, you go through some mental gymnastics with yourself about how actually to tell friends about the day. “Maybe you say you had a good day and leave it at that, or maybe you play it for laughs like a crazy uncle, claiming the fishing was so good you had to hide behind a tree to tie on a new fly.”
He offers tactic and gear tips without really offering tactic and gear tips, simply describing something that worked in a certain situation. Gierach is a fan of two-fly rigs: a dry and dropper, a pair of nymphs, or pair of soft hackles are mentioned a lot, with brief rationales about the two flies used. Most fly fishers I know don’t use two-fly rigs. Pay attention.
This is classic Gierach stuff that has been his calling card since Trout Bum. But this book has more, because it addresses mortality, change, and the end of things in many of the chapters in ways previous books didn’t touch as frequently or as poignantly. Waters have changed, as they always do. Places are more popular and crowded. Hikes and wading are a little more difficult, but taken in stride, including the tumbles into a favorite river.
The title chapter, “All the Time in the World,” takes you on a fishing trip with a friend to a familiar place. It eventually ambles down the path to the death of another friend a few years earlier and where to scatter the contents of a small Tupperware container holding a few of his ashes. It doesn’t get done on that trip, but they know the day will come when they think of their departed friend, a smile will come to their lips, and they will say, “‘I know just the spot.’ Like most fishermen, Paul always acted like he had all the time in the world, and now he does.” The day is coming for all of us, but this book doesn’t seem like a swan song, a last book. It is just Gierach aging and solidifying his position as our preeminent fly-fishing writer.
It seems each successive generation of far-gone fly anglers discovers Gierach at some point and recognizes what the old, decrepit anglers of my generation discovered nearly forty years ago before the onset of decrepitiness: if fly fishers had a prose laureate, it would be Gierach. That is still true today, maybe even more so than forty years ago.
Gierach easily becomes like an old fishing buddy who has taken us along on all his trips for those forty years. The books take us all over the world for all kinds of fish, but trout on dry flies are clearly his life’s love. If you fall into that category, raise your hand.
For you younger fly anglers, I would suggest that you grab at least one or two of Gierach’s earlier books to read first. (Or maybe read them all in chronological order, about one or two years apart.) Fish with a bamboo fly rod at least a day or two at some point. Tie your own flies — at home, around a campfire, and in cabins and cabs of trucks streamside. And for crying out loud, learn to play cribbage.
“Every cabin I’ve been in between Wisconsin and the Arctic Circle has contained a cribbage board anddogeared deck of cards, but I refuse to learn the game as a matter of principle,” Gierach writes. What principle?
Like most of us, Gierach and I would have a lot in common and a lot to talk about if we bumped into each other on a trout steam somewhere, but the first thing I would ask would be, “How in God’s name can a Midwesterner by birth and of our age not play cribbage?”
— Jim Matthews
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Bitch Creek
By William G. Tapply. Published by Lyons Press, 2004.
Gray Ghost
By William G. Tapply. Published by Minotaur Books, 2007.
Dark Tiger
By William G. Tapply. Published by Minotaur Books, 2009.
The only thing better than a good fishing book is a good mystery novel, and what could be better than a mystery that revolves around fly fishing, where the sleuth gets to match the hatch while matching wits with the villain?
Catch a fish, catch a killer — they’re both about solving problems, right? Fly fishing’s methods are conducive to both. In Bitch Creek, the author explains how the Zen of fishing and the science of deduction go hand in hand: “Tying f lies, like fishing with them, served a double purpose. Both fishing and fly tying gave him something to focus on at one level, while at the same time clearing his mind and allowing it to roam freely, to ponder problems on a different level.”
William G. Tapply wrote 23 mysteries featuring Brady Coyne, a Boston lawyer who loved fly fishing, but was so busy solving crimes that he rarely had time to wet a line. So the fly fishing in that series stayed mainly in the background. Which must have left the author with a bad case of cabin fever, because Tapply decided to create a new mystery series late in his career, one where the fly fishing moved to the foreground and where the hero, Stonewall Jackson Calhoun, better known as “Stoney,” a part-time fishing guide and co-owner of a bait-and-tackle shop in Maine, gets to show off his skill with both a fly rod and a firearm, in his case, a Colt Woodsman semiautomatic pistol that even Izaak Walton might have admired.
Naturally, Stoney has a mysterious past, as befits any character in a crime novel. For starters, he doesn’t know who he is. A lightning bolt, if that’s what really knocked him unconscious, left him deaf in one ear, unable to tolerate alcohol, and pretty much wiped his memory clean. All he gets are “memory flickers,” like acid flashbacks, from his past. He is told he was born in Beaumont, South Carolina, and named after a Confederate general, but the movie flickering around in his head is filled with clam chowder and lobster pots. So after he is discharged from a VA hospital in Virginia following a long convalescence, he drives north to Maine, where for some reason he feels right at home. He is happy to reinvent himself in a fisherman’s playground and discovers, among other things, that he can cast a fly rod like Lefty Kreh. With the insurance payout from his “accident,” Stoney buys acreage on the banks of Bitch Creek, a tiny stream filled with native brookies, and he builds himself a cabin on abandoned farmland that long ago reverted back to mature forest.
Pretty soon he meets Kate Balaban, the owner of a bait-and-tackle shop near Casco Bay at the edge of Portland, who persuades Stoney to come work for her. She urges him to adopt a “Down East” accent to fool the tourists so they’ll spend more in her shop. “Say ‘ayuh’ more, Stoney. Go for taciturn. If you have the chance, tell ’em they can’t get there from here.”
In time, the two begin a most discreet love affair. Her husband, Walt, crippled from multiple sclerosis, gives his blessing to this arrangement. But there’s trouble in paradise. It seems that “a man in a gray suit” from an unnamed government agency keeps showing up at irregular times to ask Stoney what he remembers since his “accident.” It’s clear this government spook knows more about Stoney’s past than Stoney does, but the man in gray is not forthcoming with any useful information. Stoney doesn’t trust him any more than he would the shooter on the grassy knoll.
One day, a blowhard comes into the bait shop and introduces himself as Fred Green, from Key Largo, Florida. He tells Stoney he is looking to arrange a day’s guided fishing for brook trout — “natives, not stockers” — and Stoney palms him off on his young friend, Lyle McMahan, a part-time fishing guide and college grad student who knows the woods and back roads intimately. The young guide and his sport mysteriously disappear and remain missing for days, until Stoney finds Lyle’s corpse floating face down in a cedar pond, trapped in his deflated float tube. It’s no accidental drowning — there’s a bullet hole in the kid’s stomach. And no sign of Fred Green anywhere.
Stoney is racked with guilt and suspects he might have been the real target because of something that had to do with his former life. Over Kate’s protests, he insists on aiding Sheriff Marshall Dickman in his slow-moving investigation, thus putting himself and everyone he cares for in danger, in the best tradition of crime fiction.
Stoney combs remote villages, farms, and woodlands for clues while unearthing more memories of his own mysterious past. He discovers he has the skills of a trained investigator and the chops to disable a much larger opponent. He wonders if he might have been some kind of a lawman in his former life, or even a special op. Meanwhile, back at the bait shop, there are clients to be booked, sales reps to dicker with, and trout flies to be inventoried. The poor guy doesn’t know if he’s Jason Bourne or Ernest Schwiebert.
The solution to the mystery does indeed hinge on the past, but it has less to do with the deep state than with secrets Down East. While the plot is a little creaky and the wrap-up a bit of a disappointment, the real pleasure comes from the author’s depictions of Maine’s wilderness and its rural haunts. It might be more for readers of Fly Fisherman than fans of Lee Child, but it’s intriguing, nonetheless.
Tapply was the son of H. G. Tapply, who wrote the “Tap’s Tips” column for Field & Stream. The younger Tapply worked variously as a high-school history teacher, housemaster, editorial associate, writing instructor, contributing editor to Field & Stream, and special correspondent for American Angler. He published more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction in 25 years, and he is best known for his Brady Coyne series. He died at age 69, after a two-year battle with leukemia. He was an advocate of unobtrusive writing, the kind that doesn’t call attention to itself, but instead focuses on storytelling and a clear narrative.
Tapply always said his writing was a means of financing his true avocation, which was f ly fishing. He wrote about the subject often, working it deftly into his books. His nonfiction angling titles include Trout Eyes, Gone Fishin’, Pocket Water, A Fly-Fishing Life, and Home Water — all are worth reading. He also wrote a primer on crime writing called The Elements of Mystery Fiction.
Two more Stoney Calhoun mysteries followed in the series, each more ambitious and better plotted than the first. The titles — Bitch Creek, Gray Ghost, and Dark Tiger — all refer to trout flies. That last piece of iron and feathers is a streamer tied to resemble a smelt, a Down East specialty f ly favored by Maine anglers looking to catch landlocked salmon.
In Gray Ghost, Stoney takes historian Paul Vecchio to Casco Bay for a day of striper fishing, and when the pair stop at Quarantine Island, they stumble upon the burned corpse of a man who had been tortured and castrated. Turns out the man might have deserved his fate. He was a convicted child molester, and the father of the kid he abused had threatened in open court to dismember him. The Maine State Police think they have their man, but Stoney has his doubts. Initially, Stoney turns down Sheriff Dickman’s request to help with the investigation, but changes his mind after Kate starts making noises about breaking up with him and the historian is shot to death in front of Stoney’s house.
In Dark Tiger, the government “man in the gray suit” dragoons Stoney into traveling to the farthest corner of Maine to sign on as a guide at a high-end fishing lodge buried so deep in the woods it is accessible only by logging roads or float plane. It seems that a government “operative” who was staying at the lodge was found shot to death in a staged murder-suicide pact involving a local 16-yearold girl. The man in gray wants Stoney to find out what the “operative” was up to at the lodge. (Apparently these elite agents have no handlers and don’t have to check in with their bosses — nice work if you can get it.) Stoney wants none of it, but the man in gray has made him an offer he can’t refuse. Take the job, or he and Kate lose their lease on the bait-and-tackle shop and her husband Walt gets kicked out of the rehab center. Yes, the government can do that. So Stoney heads north to Loon Lake Lodge do some wet work for his country.
The premise is a tad ridiculous, but the pitch and rhythm of the story are perfect, and the author has an easy country manner that goes well with the sights and sounds of rural America. In Tapply’s capable hands, we are always happy to follow Stoney to wherever it is the fish are biting. It turns out you really can get there from here.
BTW: Occasional contributor Steven Bird has launched Soft-Hackle Journal, a new mag. See soft-hacklejournal.blogspot.com.
